The movie "Little Women", adapted from the novel of the same name, is about to be released on Tanabata.
This movie has a full "world masterpiece" treatment -
From four-time Oscar-nominated Silsa Ronan, to "Sweet Tea" Timothy Challemet, "Hermione" Emma Watson, "Aunt May" Meryl Streep, Oscar Best Supporting Actress Laura Dunn...
The cast can be said to be very gorgeous.
Even if you are not a fan of these Hollywood movie stars, there are 80% of you who have liked this novel. Looking through Douban, "Little Women" was marked by netizens in 72 versions.
Even in a number of "world masterpieces", the "top stream" position of this novel has not run.
More than 80 years ago, Mr. Yang Dai and Mr. Jin Yong, who were still teenagers, read this novel. Encouraged by this novel, J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter, which swept the world...
Little Women is a semi-autobiographical novel, and it is essential to have some basic knowledge of the author's life if you want to read the novel and understand the film.
Stills from the Little Women movie
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right">
Can't help but talk about the "little woman" father
</h1>
Little Women is a novel by the American writer Louisa May Olcott, first published in 1868.
In 2008, a biography of Olcott, "Eden Eviction: The Story of Olcott and His Father," won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
This is a biography of Olcott and her father, from which we can tell that the author of Little Women cannot but talk about her father.
Olcott father and daughter
Her father, Bronson Olcott, was a transcendentalist, and was good friends with Thoreau, who wrote Walden, Hawthorne, who wrote The Scarlet Letter, and the philosopher Emerson.
What is Transcendentalism? In simple terms, it advocates that man can directly know the truth beyond feeling and reason, emphasizes man's subjective initiative, and has a utopian ideal color.
Emerson and Thoreau
They all lived in a small town in Concord. The famous wooded hut in Sologue, the axe was borrowed from the Olcott family.
Alcott's living environment, summed up in a poem, is: there is a great deal of laughter, and there is no white ding.
At the same time, these people belong to the transcendentalists, and transcendentalism has also deeply influenced the writing of "Little Women".
Olcott's father had a unique educational philosophy and founded a church school, while Olcott grew up under his father's education and did not receive an orthodox schooling.
Her father encouraged her to read more, and Alcott once recalled that the time spent in her father's study was left in her earliest childhood memories.
Louisa May Olcott
Before becoming a writer, he worked as a tailor, nurse, and maid
However, unlike Thoreau and Emerson, the Olcott family was poorer. The family was able to move to Concord, which Emerson funded.
Emerson was a wealthy man who had sponsored the writer's father to start a school, a study tour of England, and her father to start a utopian community: orchard farms.
Still, these efforts by the elder Alcott failed.
Taking orchard farms as an example, the elder Olcott stipulated that all farm members should be equal, distributed according to needs, and a combination of productive labor and education.
However, during the sowing season, they missed the time of farming because they explored philosophical questions; at the time of harvest, they preferred to attend philosophical lectures and missed the harvest of ripe grain; they believed that man and animal were equal, and that it was not appropriate for farms to use "animal power"...
This left the Alcott family in debt and dependent on the meager income of the writer's mother, while the elder Olcott indulged in fantasies and was a bit unrealistic.
Once, when the elder Olcott was out for months and brought back only a dollar, he said to his four daughters: "Although the money is small, I have a good time." ”
In order to support his family, Alcott went to school to teach, worked as a tailor, a nurse, and at the age of 19, even went out to work as a maid and a playmate of a rich lady.
So Alcott's feelings for his father are mixed, with both reverence and disappointment. Because of the influence of this experience, we can see that in "Little Women", the image of "father" is rarely inked and dispensable.
And Olcott worshipped Emerson not only because of her help to their family, but also because of her spiritual influence. She wrote many letters to Emerson, but in the end she did not send a single one.
We know that Joe's prototype in Little Women is the author himself. According to literary researchers, in "Little Women", the author's choice of partner for Joe, the uncle-level German professor, has Emerson's shadow.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > "Now you're the most famous female writer in the nation."</h1>
In the beginning, Olcote wrote novels to support his family. She wrote many romantic thriller novels under many pseudonyms, most of which were stories like this:
A rich girl, living in a rich grandfather's house, happened to have a handsome and mighty captain come to visit her grandfather, the smart and beautiful girl fell in love with him at first sight, the captain also saved the girl's life, and finally invited her to go to Italy together...
The novels were not discovered to have been written by the author of Little Women many years after Alcott's death.
In fact, it goes without saying that the origin of the novel "Little Women" is also Alcott's efforts to earn money to subsidize the family. The editor asked her to write a story about girls, and Louisa reluctantly began to write Little Women.
"Little Women" was written on this table
After she wrote the first part of "Little Women" and sent it out, she didn't hear from her for months. She decided to go to the publishing house herself to retrieve the manuscript.
However, a dramatic scene appeared, and when the editor saw Alcott, he jumped up and told her that the work was successful: "Now you are the most famous female writer in the United States." ”
When Americans met at that time, they would ask, "Have you watched Little Women?" ”
To what extent Alcott is hot, it should be a fight with our Mo Yan winning the Nobel Prize:
Journalists flock to Concord, so strong that Alcott has to hide in the woods; enthusiastic readers surround her house like turnips in her old mansion, and readers catch all the grasshoppers on the grass of her house as a souvenir...
Alcott's former home
Until the writer's death, the book brought her nearly $200,000 in revenue, you know, in 19th-century America.
Other great writers at the time, such as Henry James, who made only twenty-five thousand dollars in his lifetime, and Melville, who wrote Moby Dick, made ten thousand dollars...
As a result, the writer finally got rid of the poverty that haunted her for most of her life.
"I'm tired of people saying that women are only suitable for romance and love"
Olcott lived in a time when the husband ruled American society. At that time, women were imprisoned in family life and could only play the role of a good wife and mother.
In 1862, at the age of 30, Alcott worked as a nurse during the Civil War, when women could not travel alone, but she often went on the road alone, and she resisted society's prejudice against women with her actions.
After the End of the American Civil War, 60 soldiers came to her house to pay tribute to the former field nurse.
To advance women's rights, she wrote for feminist magazines and went door-to-door to encourage women to vote. She was the first woman in Concord to register to vote, and after casting her vote, she said:
"The sky did not fall on our bold heads, and the earthquake did not shake the town."
Because of the influence of this feminist ideology, and of course, because she witnessed the marriage of her parents, Olcott never married.
She said she'd rather be a free old girl paddling her own canoe.
When she was writing her second Little Women, readers urged Joe to marry neighbor Laurie, but Olcott wrote in his diary:
The girls wrote to ask who the little woman had married, as if that was the only goal and end of a woman's life. I'm not going to marry Joe to Laurie to please anyone. ”
Joe and Laurie in the movie Little Women
In the new version of "Little Women", which will be released tomorrow, there is a similar sentence, and Joe in the film says: "I am tired of others saying that women are only suitable for love and love..."
For more than a hundred years, generations of people have been remaking Little Women. Today, we are still anxious to go to the cinema for the new film "Little Women".
For more than a hundred years, generation after generation of people are still reading "Little Women", Yang Dai has read it, Jin Yong has read it, the famous female philosopher De Beauvoir has read it, Orwell has read it, Susan Sontag has read it...
Writing about this place, ShiMa Jun also wanted to pick up "Little Women" and re-read it.
As the Italian writer Calvino said: Classics are books that, the more hearsay we hear and think we understand, the more we actually read them, the more we find them unique, unexpected, and novel.
There is no doubt that "Little Women" is such a classic.