Little Women / Good Wives - do you think Laurie still loved Jo, or Jo loved Laurie, when they married other people?

[silverbay]

I'm just not convenced by the whole 'Oh, I'll just marry her sister' approach, especially as Amy was so different to Jo.

and I wonder if Jo 'settled' on Professor Bhaer ?

I agree that Amy was a rebound job for Laurie. I think that Laurie did still love Jo and I HATED Jo for ages as a child for saying 'No' to him - but the Prof is so lovely too.

I think she should have married the Prof and kept Laurie for a bit on the side. That whole thing of Laurie and Amy as lord and lady of the March universe just doesn't sit right with me - Amy is such a cold fish that she couldn't possibly make Laurie happy.

Oh and talk of the films has reminded me of that horrible, horrible casting of Clare Danes as Beth. Big faced lumbering looking Clare D as fragile little Beth? Sooooooo wrong.

Even as a child, I felt subconsciously sad that Jo had thrown away her chance of a good sex life. The Professor! Blee!

"and on the breast where she had taken her first breath, Beth quietly took her last, with no farewell but a little sigh, and a loving look"

You meanie seeker.

i totally agree with Remus about bad casting for Beth in the latest Little Women.
Jo should have been with Laurie of course

evil

I know all the words to Puff the Magic Dragon too............

La la la

Claire Danes was lovely you horrid pair. And in no way has a large face.

I am sure Jo and her Prof were good together. I have a sneaking suspicion I married Dh as a result of reading about them.

I think Laurie married Amy because, really, one woman is pretty much as good as another, and you get married more or less on a whim because after all, what else would you do if you had 'talent' but not 'genius'.

Frankly I don't think Alcott liked Amy very much, what with all the snipey comments about her being not quite artistic enough to succeed, and I think she wrote her off with a boring conventional ending.

Btw, charity, I reckon the Prof was a bit of alright in bed. Laurie OTOH would have been over very quickly, if you know what I mean.

Duh, the prof was gabriel byrne. He would have been a viking.

When you read the biography of Alcott, I think I am right in thinking she married neither of them so really....she was ending up with second best in the book, because it wasn't as if her real life had produced a Professor who had made her happy. The Winona film made the relationship with the Professor much more romantic than it is in the book. I think Laurie isn't even a love interest, he's just a part of her youth that she renounces when she writes that bit of the book. The happy, wild, carefree part. A sort of second self allegory. When she marries she is just being dutiful and happily dutiful.
I read the Pilgrim's Progress for the first time recently and was bowled over to realise the entire book was based on it all those chapter headings.

The wind blowing the window open when Beth dies! Wow, and the music. I could listen to the music of film over and over again. And I love the way the sisters really quarrel.

Louisa was poisoned by mercury in RL. The calomel Beth takes in the book was a remedy based on mercury.

The prof was awful.

Of course Jo should have married Laurie.

Amy, who cares?

But Beth (sobs) ....

I think CD was perfect too, - gawky and endearing.
I thought Amy and Laurie in Europe very very romantic - I despise you, what a great chat up line...

chub - brilliant!

swan, who's her biography by? I'd like to get a good one, she must have been an interesting woman.

I read somewhere that LMA never intended Laurie to be the Big Love Interest he became once the first volume was published.

She was pissed off that readers (the early shippers!) were determined for Jo and Laurie to marry, so she deliberately set out to thwart people's expectations. Hence the frankly off relationship with the Prof and the all too convenient pairing of Amy and Laurie which -short of death - was a really quick way to say, "fucking forget Jo and Laurie, ain't never gonna hapoen, not whilst I am in charge!"

Hmm. It's a bit Middlemarchy, isn't it (bear with me, I am only just working this out) in reverse. And in MM the main woman marries the pretty young bloke and lots of critics have said 'oh how unsatisfying' and then the late great Angela Carter points out (I am not sure where, it may be in a fabulous collection of essays called, get this, 'The Left and the Erotic' published at some point in the 1980 when I was young) that, well, she wants to shag him and frankly lots of strong-minded women want to shag pretty blokes

Obviously Bhaer is not Casaubon, and I quite like him, but then I suspect I would find him a bit young for me now

Yeah but the Prof wasn't really Gabriel Byrne. A young Gabriel Byrne (swoon) would have been Laurie.

Jo and Laurie were destined for each other but they would have clashed because they both had a temper. Well, so friggin what. In Alcott's era this could never make for a happy marriage (where, whatever she wrote, the husband had to be In Charge). And I believe it's widely thought as well that as she was Jo, she 'punished' herself for not being womanly enough by denying 'herself' her soul mate (will go and look for some slightly more academic reference to this than my hazy memory of same).

It's clearly bollocks that, having loved Jo for c. 10 years, Laurie can just 'get over himself' and truly fall in love with Amy - although she is a more suitable wife for him. It would have been more honest of Alcott to have married them in a way similar to Marianne Dashwood (who gets extra-swoony Alan Rickman) who forms a marriage based on "no sentiment superior to strong esteem and lively friendship" and then grows to love him over time.

It would take me precisely five seconds to have been ripping that particular Colonel's trousers off...

I don't think Jo does want to shag Laurie, though. She obviously does like young, pretty blokes because Meg tells her off for chatting to them instead of making decorous small-talk on house visits. I think she just found Laurie wet.

(Not that I'm over-invested here, oh no.)

True, but for that willoughby I could and would have switched off my very acute and accurate fuckwit radar. I suppose a three way would have played hell with the film's U certificate.

tribpot
i absolutely agree.

What does not sit well is not so much that Laurie and Amy marry (tonnes of marriages were based on families knowing each other, suitability determined by others, making the best of it, no-one left, settling for sister when prime love interest dies etc etc). It is that LMA presents Laurie and Amy as a lovematch. Which is ridiculous. And she makes out that Jo is fine with it. Which is equally ridiculous.

The book does not specify whether or not she fancied the arse off him (though clearly she must have done - whilst one might have a hard time choosing between Greg Wise and Rickers, one would have absolutely no trouble whatsoever selecting the yummy Colonel over the dastardly Willoughby. And personally I would vote Rickers.)

And frankly the Prof ain't no Colonel. He's a well-meaning chap but definitely second prize.

MI That Angela Carter essay sounds fantastic!

Someone mentioned Alan Rickman??? Awwwwwww....

I am sorry but CD's face was too big for Beth

Oh yes, it's a great essay (at least I think it's that one, not sure where it is at the moment); it's called 'Alison's Giggle' and it ranges from Chaucer to what Carter calls the 'twanging sexuality' underpinning Jane Austen's writing.