The Integrity and Responsibility of a Period Piece

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In Other Words, Why Historical Film Costuming Actually Is Important (And I'm Not Just Saying That Because
I Am a Victorian Fashion Geek.)

I had a lot of thoughts and feelings about the 2019 Little Women.

For starters, I enjoyed many aspects of the movie - let's establish that right from the start. It was two hours well spent in a movie theater and I did not regret the price of my ticket. The acting was for the most part very good (Saoirse Ronan in particular was a brilliant Jo) and I appreciated the inclusion of some little vignettes from the book that do not often make it into film adaptations. The cinematography was beautiful, and I found myself enjoying the unconventional style of flashing backward and forward in the girls' lives (particularly in view of Amy and Laurie's romance, as it helped to avoid any Jo-and-Laurie-shipping since they were clearly always just friends). Emma Watson was not nearly as Emma-Watson-y as I had feared she might be, Timothee Chalamet looked the part of Laurie (albeit perhaps Laurie as a seventh-grader) and captured the melodrama of his personality to perfection, and though Meryl Streep as Aunt March was a big fat disappointment, she did have some funny lines.

But I'm not really here to review the movie. I'm here to talk about that doggone Oscar for costume design.

Because, friends, that's the bone I have to pick.

Come on, what did you really expect? This is the Bluestocking DRESSMAKER, after all.

What Went Wrong? 

For many, the costumes in Little Women do vaguely represent the 1860s. There are long skirts (most of the time), corseted waists, and wide silhouettes. That's all you really need, right?

Well, uh, no.

I'm actually planning a blog post in the future that will break down some of the movie's costuming choices and compare them to actual clothing of the Civil War era, but I don't have time to do that today. Suffice it to say that though I was happy to see supportive undergarments (yes, you CAN tell when an actress is not wearing a corset - looking at you, every historical Hallmark movie ever), I was not really thrilled at the free-spirited, artsy-fartsy, pseudo-romantic style layering all the girls at various moments. We will not even speak of the dresses Laura Dern wore that seemed to have come from a high school theatre's 2006 double feature of Annie Get Your Gun and Oklahoma!.

This is a very personal reaction, which I wholeheartedly admit. And yes, already I know some of you are shaking your heads because your personal reaction was that you did like the costumes, and clearly I'm just nitpicking. Perhaps I am. Feel free to tell me why you don't agree in the comments! Likes and dislikes are often purely subjective and based on our own personal biases, and my goal with this post is not to make you loathe and abominate the costumes in this movie. My goal, however, is to explain why I feel this could have been done so much better. 

I have a lot of respect for the creative talent that went into making this movie, and indeed the talent that goes into every period film (even the films I really don't like on their own like Pride and Prejudice 2005 or Phantom of the Opera). I know the decisions made for these movies are not made in a vacuum, and that there is discussion and reason behind each choice. (I can't help thinking, though, that a lot of the conferences must look something like this. Heh.)

Ultimately, though, I believe the problem that I and many other costume enthusiasts saw in this film stems from using the clothing the characters wore purely as an artistic expression with an intent to appeal to a modern sense of style, rather than a reflection of what the author intended. And for me, this is a big deal.

I should warn you that this post is going to  be long, and photo-heavy. You've been advised. Proceed with caution.

The General Look (Hint: Not 1860's)

As briefly mentioned above, the problem that I see in the costumes for Little Women can be summed up with one giant generalization: bohemian hippie aesthetic. This includes but is not limited to loose-fitting, haphazard clothing, random layering of... weird layers... lots of loose flowing hair, lots of MESSY hair, menswear trying to look chic on feminine figures, short-ish skirts, complete disregard for conventional accessories such as period appropriate hats and gloves, and did I mention random layering? Also, trousers under dresses and Meg's 1970's flower child wedding gown.

And though I've heard some claim that "this is just the director/producer/designer's vision of what the Marches could have looked like since we don't KNOW for SURE!", I have to point out that Little Women actually is full of information about what the Marches wore, in point of fact, and this will hopefully be the specific subject of a later post where I will talk about what their clothing could have actually looked like. In the meantime, it's worth noting that (while full of story flaws) the 1994 adaptation *actually does a halfway decent job with the costumes. Particularly with pretty much anything Meg wears, so if you're curious about what I'm referring to, that movie could stand a re-watch. The 2017 PBS series* did a rather nice job too, though again not perfect.

For now, suffice it to say that the costumes in this film do not accurately represent the 1860's in the northeastern United States. If you don't feel comfortable taking my word for it, rest assured I will be backing up this statement in that promised future post that minutely dissects the costumes and offers period correct substitutes!

With that said, let's dive into some of the wherefores.

The Ugly Bonnet Quandary

Costume dramas often catch flack from viewers who like to proclaim, "Well, I just don't LIKE bonnets."

Um, okay. You don't ...have to like bonnets? No one is forcing you to like bonnets. No one, for that matter, unless you have been kidnapped into a Civil War reenacting unit, is forcing you to WEAR a bonnet (and frankly, many Civil War reenacting units don't seem to even know what a bonnet IS, ahem, another story for another day).

Here's the thing: I don't like slavery or women not being able to vote, but I do watch movies that include these things, because spoiler alert, that is what actually happened in The Past. And guess what else happened in the past? People wore bonnets.

There are no bonnets to be seen in Little Women.

There are no bonnets to be seen in Terminator 38: Rise of the Planet of the Machines, either, but interestingly enough, no one expects to see any bonnets in THAT movie (regardless of the fact that I may or may not have just made it up right now) because it isn't about girls in the Victorian era.

And girls in the Victorian era wore bonnets. Poor girls. Rich girls. Scullery maids. Serving girls. Hospital nurses. Socialites. Queen Victoria's daughters.  Women wore bonnets in the 1860's in much the same way that normal people wear shoes when they're out and about today - those who don't are usually either babies, hippies, or so desperately poor that not having them is probably the least of their problems.

Believe it or not, the Marches were not hippies.

The Biopic Quandary

Actually, speaking of hippies, let's back up just a tad and consider one of the biggest arguments in favor of bohemian dress on the March sisters.

"The Alcotts were revolutionaries," people have told me indignantly. "They were free-spirited and didn't bind themselves to tradition like the rest of those stuffy Victorians! They were transcendentalists! They hobnobbed with Thoreau and lived in a vegan group home paradise! And since Little Women is a no-holds-barred, completely accurate autobiography of Louisa May Alcott's childhood..."

Hold up.

That's where we veer off the tracks. (All of the above is true, by the way, except that last sentence.)

Little Women is not a biopic about the Alcotts. In many ways the novel was inspired by the author's childhood (most notably in the characters and personalities of the four sisters and the mother who is the stronghold that keeps the family together despite the father's notable but sugarcoated absence), but the real Alcott dynasty was far less wholesome and homelike than the March family's. In reality, Bronson Alcott was an idealist ne'er-do-well who had lofty plans for creating utopia on earth but used his own family for experimentation, neglected his daughters' physical needs while claiming to nurture them spiritually, ran with a crowd that believed women should be seen and not heard, and though he pioneered some admirable movements such as the education of freedmen's children, his own home life and family were far from ideal. The History Chicks have a really great podcast on the real life of Louisa May Alcott and have curated a good list of sources about her on their website.  If you want to maintain a mental picture of the Alcotts as the Marches, I don't recommend proceeding any further, but if you want to know more about the childhood and adolescence (and adulthood!) that shaped Alcott into the writer and thinker that she was, please check out the podcast. It's excellent.

Jo's temperament is admittedly based off of Alcott's own experiences and worldview, and I don't mean to push that under the rug - much of the appeal we see in Little Women is found in its cozy realism about the emotions and thought processes of growing up. But Little Women is not an autobiography. It's fiction, first and foremost - churned out in six weeks at the behest of a publisher who wanted a bestseller for girls, and followed by three semi-reluctant sequels which Alcott later ruefully dismissed as "moral pap for the young." In real life, Alcott's career spanned hard work and drudgery as a housemaid, a governess, a nurse during the Civil War in gruesome Washington army hospitals, a writer of what we would probably now call "bodice-ripper" novels, dedicated singleness (no Professor Bhaer or horde of small boys to look after), and endless nursing of invalid family members. It was not glamorous overall, but neither was it in any way boring. And neither was it, really, Jo March's life.

I would happily go to see a movie about Louisa May Alcott. In fact, I think she's long overdue for a good strong rip-snorting biopic that doesn't shy away from the harsh realities of her life but also doesn't try to Hollywood-ize what really happened.

But Little Women is not Alcott's Story of My Life.  It is a work of creativity that she came up with out of her own head. She poured her own blood, sweat and tears into the writing of it, and those characters and their story are her own.  We are doing her art a disservice by trying to shoehorn her biography into what she created from her imagination.

That being said, there is still the question of a reasonable portrayal of the (very fictional) March family. Were the Marches unconventional in some ways? Yes indeed, but this unconventionality as described in the book limited itself to teetotaling, indulging in significantly more "charity work" than what typically behooved society matrons of the day, being outspoken about the evils of slavery, and decidedly not marrying for money. Were they perhaps considered a little bit oddball by the society matrons of Concord? Sure. (Concord, by the way, was actually a hotbed for transcendentalist thought and "free thinkers" of the age - so the Marches really weren't so out of place there as they might have been in a snootier and more staid neighborhood.) Were they social pariahs who lived in a commune, flouted all conventional methods of dress, acted like hooligans and generally had no interest and no place in the polite and respectable world of their neighbors? NOPE.  One has to only look at the dozens upon dozens of references to Victorian behavior that, you know, actually appear in the novel to figure that out.

This video (long, but worth a watch, as long as you aren't prone to seizures, because some of the editing and flashy "special effects" are... interesting...) mentions the discrepancies in a lot of the costumes, and I'm not going into all of that today so that this doesn't turn into a BOOK in and of itself, but one thing that really caught my attention was the mention of the March girls wearing cotton dress after cotton dress after cotton dress. If showcasing the Marches' social awareness and not-always-fashionable abolitionism was truly important to the filmmakers, using dress material as a vehicle for a little expository dialogue would have been easy.

"Why can't we get some of the pretty new printed cottons?" Amy could lament, and Jo could fire up with,
"Because cotton is picked by slaves, which you ought to know, and purchasing cotton supports the slave trade, and if our boys are fighting in a war to free the slaves the least you can do is wear a twice-turned gown!"

Although since that exchange doesn't contain any glaringly modern turns of phrase, it probably wouldn't have made it into the script.

Ahem.

Moving on.

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Respecting the Author's Choices

Getting back to Louisa May Alcott, let's talk about some of the deliberate decisions she made in framing her story.

Alcott was born in 1832, and her formative years (the childhood that she remembered) spanned roughly 1835-1850. She wrote Little Women and published it in 1868, as a "contemporary" story set during the American Civil War (which spanned 1861-1865). During the actual Civil War, Alcott was a full grown working woman (you can read her Hospital Sketches for an account of her wartime experiences).  She did not grow up during the Civil War, and yet she chose this as the setting for her novel.

I think it's important to consider why an author chooses a particular time and place. Deliberately, Alcott did not write about what is now defined as the Romantic era in literature. She wrote about a time in which her country was divided in war, perhaps as a greater appeal to modern readers, perhaps because she felt that peculiar time in their collective history suited her story best (I incline to the latter).

But whatever her reason for choosing the Civil War years, she had one, and I do not think it is appropriate for a film producer to play fast and loose with this time. To be fair, Greta Gerwig doesn't try to pretend the Civil War is not happening during Little Women. (One scene in particular, not covered by many other adaptations, but mentioned with indirect references throughout the novel, features Marmee - in a particularly cringe-y state of deshabille - handing out supplies to war veterans and the families of soldiers.) The war is constantly present, though we don't see B-storyline glimpses of Father March serving as a chaplain or John Brooke joining up with the Union Army.

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(What is that, a bathrobe? Sure, wrappers were a thing in the 1860's but a) they didn't look like something Sherlock Holmes would wear to smoke a hookah, and b) they were most definitely not worn out in public by a lady of Mrs. March's status.)

Why, then, do the Marches not dress as if the Civil War were going on?

I know, I know. I'm biased. As an amateur historical costumer, my area of focus is the American Civil War era. I might not do this stuff for a living, but I do an awful lot of it for fun. I'm not the greatest movie-watching companion where this time period is concerned because I will spend half the film whispering indignantly that big floppy lace collars were NOT A THING THEN and lamenting in severe mental anguish about WHY CAN'T THEY JUST PUT ON A CORSET ALREADY.

I'm not expecting meticulous historical accuracy here (even the 2017 PBS series, which I really enjoyed, did not perfectly portray the time period through the costumes) but it would be nice if the clothing the characters wore reflected the time and place in which they live. The 1860's in America were a very fashionable time despite the war, and the styles are unmistakable once you learn to spot the defining characteristics (once again, more on that in the future - and that's the last plug I'll make for that other post). If you are going to tell the story in a specific time and place, you need to be diligent about portraying that actual time and place. 

I should note here that I have nothing against modern retellings or adaptations that completely mix up the setting and revisit the story from a wholly different perspective. Modern-day adaptations of classic literature can be done really well (see: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries), and adaptations that seek to shake up our perception of an age-old story can do this really effectively (see: West Side Story as a reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet) but that's not what this adaptation is trying to be. It is presented as a portrait of Victorian America, but it doesn't deliver on that promise. Or premise. Or whatever you want to call it.

The Consistency of Human Nature

One of the reasons we keep coming back to Little Women again and again (there were four major film adaptations in the 20th century, and now we've had two already in the 21st) is that it tugs on our heartstrings no matter when and where we've grown up. Audiences wept over Beth's death when she was played by Jean Parker in 1933, and I definitely still choked up when we lost Eliza Scanlen on the big screen this time around. The themes of this story are universal: the strength of family ties (whether by birth, blood, or choice), the different paths we all take in life and how these fulfill us in different ways (admittedly, this film articulated that BEAUTIFULLY and I really appreciated that Meg's story wasn't written off as "boring"), the way we can all find courage to do hard things when it's most needed, and the thrill that comes with seeing your work validated at last. Little Women is a story about family, about loyalty, about building character, and so it resonates with almost everyone. (Yes. I know there are some naysayers who just don't like the story at all. This is okay. That's part of the whole "different paths for all of us" thing.)

One of the things I really love about classic character-driven stories like Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, or Anne of Green Gables is that they remain true for their own times and for our times as well. Culture may change and society's expectations of us may change and our lifestyles may change, but human nature remains the same. This is the common thread that we catch and cling to in the classics: we see ourselves reflected, however faintly or distorted, in Jo March and Elizabeth Bennet and Anne Shirley and Marilla Cuthbert (hello. hi there. yes, I've embraced this identity and I am fine with it).

When we read books and watch movies that take place in another era, we're really not doing it to learn about what life was like in the olden times. That's a by-product, a side effect. We watch movies and read books to better understand ourselves - and if that happens to take place in a story from a world very different from our own, so much the better.

And this is why I just can't get behind decisions to "appeal to a modern audience" when film producers prattle on about that in interviews. Little Women ALREADY appeals to a modern audience. Why do you think fifty million people (give or take a few) bought tickets to see this movie and pirated it online (don't do that, kids) and rented it on demand now that it's available for quarantine entertainment? Because they wanted their modern sensibilities appealed to in a distinctly modern way? Nope. Because they see themselves in the March family, and the March family is timeless.

Subtle choices like free-flowing hair ("people find this more attractive nowadays, never mind the fact that it was usually only done by prostitutes in this time period"), 21st-century speech patterns ("they definitely need to sprinkle the word 'okay' throughout their dialogue, never mind the fact that it didn't come into popular use until the later years of the nineteenth century"), modern mannerisms and physical movement ("what if we took those parts of the novel that mention Jo running around like a horse and applied that to everybody in the whole family, including the mom and prim eldest sister Meg, who are both supposed to be the epitome of ladylike grace as defined by their social sphere") abound in today's period films. Ostensibly, these provide subconscious cues to the viewer that you're supposed to like these characters and identify with them. But recreating 2019 in various incarnations in 1860 doesn't reinforce the constancy of human nature; it assumes the viewer is too dumb to see the similarities between Those Days and These Days without material aspects like loose hair and modern-looking clothing.

In short, it insults our collective intelligence.

To Sum Up, Mr. Pickwick...

(see what I did there)

You guys, it takes a TON of effort and research to accurately recreate the past.  I'm not denying that. I've been researching the 1860's through clothing and material culture for the last five years of my life, and I still have a long way to go before becoming anything like an expert. I realize that creating a truthful representation of the past is much easier said than done.

But I still believe that effort is worth making, and that the end result is important. It is only by truthfully showing what life was like "back then" that we can fully develop the point that human nature doesn't change even when outside circumstances do. Seeing ourselves reflected in the 1860's drives home the realization that the human experience is timeless.

And quite frankly, as stated before, the Marches ARE timeless. Movie adaptations will come and go but the heart and soul of this book has endured for a hundred and fifty years. That's pretty impressive, from where I stand.

If you came away from this post feeling that I hated this movie and that I think no one should watch it, then I clearly haven't done a good job of writing it. In fact, I definitely think you should watch it! It's available on Amazon* as of yesterday, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts and opinions if you decide to view it.

In the meantime, I'll get cracking on that post about legit 1860's fashion, since I promised it about half a dozen times throughout THIS post, and if there's anything that will motivate me to Actually Write, it's the threat of embarrassment over public revelation of my own procrastination.

*A link designated by an asterisk is an Amazon Affiliate link, which means that if you make a purchase through Amazon after clicking on one of my links, I am eligible to receive a small commission. This incurs NO additional cost to you and you are under no obligation to purchase anything! However, it's required that I add this disclaimer in any post that includes Amazon Affiliate links.