Summary Greta Gerwig's Fatphobic Comments On Little Women
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English Literature
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Little Women
Some of the criticism towards the 2019 Little Women, is the fact that a lot of the promotion of the film included several fatphobic comments from Gerwig regarding Friedrich's character. Obviously this is not ethical or morally correct. There is a problem within Little Women researh, because there a...
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Greta Gerwig's Fatphobic Comments On Little Women
Little Women Podcast Transcript:
Summary:
Some of the criticism towards the 2019 Little Women, is the fact that a lot of the
promotion of the film included several fatphobic comments from Gerwig regarding
Friedrich's character. Obviously this is not ethical or morally correct. There is a
problem within Little Women researh, because there are Alcott's scholars who
dismiss Friedrich as a love interst for Jo because of fatphobia. Based on her diaries
Louisa May Alcott seemed to have liked more stout and stacked men, and she even
critices the looks of the skinny men who inspired Laurie's character. So the
statements from Gerwig and these scholars are in contradict with Alcott herself.
Louisa May Alcott also suffered from body dystrophia. She became ill after her
service in the Civil War and she was treated with mercury. The mercury treatment
caused some major damage in her body and created mood swings, increased her
weight and hightened up testosterone levels in her body making her look more
masculine than she was and causing her constant pains. When her fans saw her they
went away dissappointed because she wasn't pretty. In Little Women, there is an
idea that love beautifies a person. Jo and Friedrich are beautified by their love, in
each others eyes.
Hello everybody and welcome to the Little Women podcast. I am going to cut
straight to the point.
Did you know that there is an open secret about Louisa May Alcott and it has been
going on for about good 150+ years?
Yes, Louisa May Alcott, was a huge fan of dad bods, dad bods made her go wild.
I got you there, didn't I?
In all seriousness, there is a huge amount of Little Women critics, who are all
fatphobic may they admit it or not and that is what we are going to talk about in
today's episode.
This episode got started when I received this comment about one of my earlier q and
videos.
, "This is less a question than an observation. A huge part of what's disappointing
about a lot of these adaptations, including the Gerwig one, is that it's 2020 now and
nobody doesn't want to talk about the fact that a huge part of the Bhaer hate stems
from fat phobia and honestly that brilliant, goofy, nerdy people don't make romantic
leads and I'm pretty sure Louisa May Alcott would agree. I always imagine someone
with maybe Sean Astin's body type playing the part.
The next thing that I'm going to say, it's legitimate. You can find most Louisa May
Alcott novels in the public domain, so you can check this out. In every single Alcott
novel where the Louisa type of protagonist falls in love or marries the romantic
partner, they always look the same.
They all have the same body type. They're all tall and heavily built. One of Friedrich's
models was the German poet Goethe, and if you look at pictures of Goethe, he's this
middle-aged man with broad shoulders and very tall and, heavily built and all Louisa
May Alcott's romantic heroes look like that. Some of them have beards, and some of
them don't and surprisingly many of them speak with German accents. John Suhre
was a German soldier that Louisa nursed in the war, he was tall and a bit stout with
a brown beard. Louisa wrote in her diary that she found him handsome, and Adam in
"Moods" and David in work look like that as well. The female protagonist is always
fixated on their looks at their quote "manliness".
This is Jo's exact quote on Friedrich when she first meets him. What is to be noticed
is that this is the first time in the novel when Jo feels physically attracted to a man,
and Jo and Laurie were friends, but Jo was never attracted to him also in the book
when Jo left for New York, she went there because she felt uncomfortable about the
way Laurie was harrasing her, so she has no obligations to feel guilty about ...well
experiencing her sexual awakening with this, in her eyes, a very sexy and handsome
German man, and maybe we should remind to the critics that what is sexy and
handsome to Jo, is not sexy and handsome to everyone.
The first time Jo sees Friedrich in the novel is when Friedrich is helping a little
servant girl to carry a heavy hold of coal. Let's think about Little Women 2019.
Friedrich is staring at Jo, who doesn't pay any attention to him, the girls who Jo is
supposed to be looking after play around her and I don't know have you noticed this,
Saoirse Ronan's Jo, doesn't seem to like children at all. So there isn't any kind of
connection between Jo and Friedrich. In the book when Jo is in New York, her entire
time in New York is building the connection between her and Friedrich, Greta Gerwig
erases these scenes.
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