What Does ‘Little Women’ Say That the Kardashians Haven’t?
Kris Jenner has done more for women than Greta Gerwig ever will
I’ve never understood the enduring power of Little Women. I have never read the book, nor have I seen any of the previous adaptations. The idea of a bunch of frumpy Civil War–era girls circling around a boy named Laurie just doesn’t appeal to me. But I love director Greta Gerwig, and I trusted her of all people to revamp this text.
But as they say: Trust no bitch.
We’re in a weird cultural moment where every single piece of media featuring women is hailed as a feminist masterpiece. Take last year’s box office hit Hustlers, a film that was treated as revelatory for showing that strippers can have brains. Hustlers was beyond cheesy, thematically heavy-handed, and emotionally underdeveloped, yet critics heralded it as a “profound” and “deeply feminist film.”
It mimics the vacuous tote-bag feminism so in vogue these past few years, a feminism that hails Emma Watson as its leader.
The same goes for Little Women, a meandering film about a bunch of sisters who want to be richer. Like Hustlers, the reviews are hysterically inflated. The New Republic called it “radical” and “organic in its feminist convictions.” The Wall Street Journal gushed that the film was “provocative” and “ablaze with ferocious purpose” and “urgent passion.” The New Yorker wrote that “it may just be the best film yet made by an American woman.”
Were we watching the same movie?
Several critics said the film felt modern or contemporary, which is only true in that it mimics the vacuous tote-bag feminism so in vogue these past few years, a feminism that hails Emma Watson (who plays Meg March in Gerwig’s version) as its leader. A feminism that is more gesture than substance. We watch Jo running through the snow and on the beach, at a party in New York City, cutting off her hair. But in the end, she gets married to stay afloat, just like the rest of her sisters. As Georgie Carr wrote for Another Gaze, “Meg stays dull, Amy irritating, and Beth dead… The film enacts few interpretive and material shifts for women.” When the girls’ mother makes them take their Christmas breakfast to their poorer neighbors, they’re rewarded with an even better breakfast when they return — from Laurie, the man who always steps in to save the girls from any real struggle.
It’s frustrating that movies like Hustlers and Little Women are propped up as the torchbearers of progressive feminist ideals, when the Kardashians, a legitimately revolutionary matriarchy, are dismissed. As writer Zan Romanoff put it to NPR, the Kardashian family is treated as if they’re the “apocalyptic harbingers of the end of our culture.”
As many have noted over the years, there’s a lot linking the New England sisters of the 1800s to the contemporary Armenian American immigrant family. The rich family dynamics for each provide perennial online fodder in articles matching March sisters to their Kardashian kounterparts. (My favorite was when Garage compared Beth to Rob.) And in both families, femininity is visibly prioritized.
The Kardashians comprise a very public matriarchy, with Kris Jenner and her five daughters at the center. Boyfriends and husbands come and go, and brothers and fathers are cast to the side as bothersome or insignificant. As Vanity Fair put it in 2016, “Kris Jenner sits comfortably in her seat of power at the helm.”
While both ‘Little Women’ and ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians’ are female-centered tales of sisterhood, the latter goes much further in terms of depth and authenticity.
Likewise, Little Women centers on the lives of four sisters and focuses on traditionally female issues — clothes, dating, domestic duties. Their mother raises them while their father is at war. The only consistent man in their lives is Laurie, the boy with whom three of the women at some point have a romantic entanglement. I think Gerwig’s most interesting decision was to cast Timothee Chalamet, who is pointedly neither masculine or virile. His slim figure and delicate features are more enviable than fuckable. As Victoria Alexander wrote for Film Festival Today, Chalamet is “like the fifth sister hugging his knees and prancing around. He’s prettier and thinner than his co-stars.”
While both Little Women and Keeping Up With the Kardashians are female-centered tales of sisterhood, the latter goes much further in terms of depth, authenticity, and progressiveness. Let’s start with sisterhood.
Sisterhood is something I understand well; my sister is my best friend in the world. But Little Women’s sororal depictions still strike me as cartoonish and twee. (I’m not surprised that Gerwig doesn’t have sisters.) Gerwig’s March girls create cuddle puddles and effusively praise each other. When Jo criticizes her own writing, her sisters demand they love her writing — it’s all they ever want to read! This is not how sisters act. I love my sister, but she is my harshest critic. She once told me that I always write “the same thing over and over.” She’s not wrong!
Likewise, the Kardashians critique each other ruthlessly and are often physically violent. Let’s not forget when Kim called Khloe an “evil, ugly little troll” or when Kourtney called Kim a “very distraught, evil human being.” My own sister used to drag me across the floor by my hair and once braided gum into it. She still likes to pick me up and throw me around. But when I needed to find a new apartment after a breakup, she flew to Los Angeles from Colorado to help me find one.
When Kendall received vicious backlash from her tone-deaf Pepsi commercial, and when Kylie received the same after being declared a “self-made billionaire,” Kim was quick to have their back to the press. And the Kardashian sisters are known for defending each other vehemently on social media. Compare that to the March sisters’ fights. While Amy at one point burns Jo’s manuscript in an effort to get back at her for not inviting her to a ball (you know, girl things), she’s so apologetic afterward that it feels artificial.
The supposed feminist message of Little Women is that through grit and determination, women can tell their own stories on their own terms. We see this through Jo, who has to fight editors who are uninterested in publishing a story focused on female narratives that don’t end in marriage (or death). As Richard Brody wrote for the New Yorker, Little Women is about “the rejection of the settled domestic life and its morality” and how “emotional development” is inseparable from “devotion to family.”
The March sisters are agreeable, fair-skinned, and conventionally pretty. And instead of finding a way for their art to thrive on their own terms, they shut up and marry.
These themes are precisely what has kept Keeping Up With the Kardashians on air for 15 seasons. Before KUWTK, Kris Jenner was broke. Her split with Robert Kardashian left her nothing. “I couldn’t even buy a tomato,” she once told Newsweek. And while her new husband, Bruce Jenner, had several endorsements at the time and provided her social cachet, Kris had six kids to feed. Rather than find another rich husband — the March girl solution — Kris saw another possibility. When she met Ryan Seacrest in 2007, she finally saw an opportunity to end up back on top.
Thirteen years later, the family contains several of the richest women in the world.
Jo and Amy March dream of notoriety: Jo wants to be a writer and Amy a painter. The Kardashians have often been dismissed for their lack of “talent” in artistic arenas. Unlike the March sisters, however, they found a way to monetize their personas outside traditional structures. In contravention of earlier socialites like Paris Hilton, whose name was built on a white man’s business empire, Kim Kardashian, the offspring of Armenian immigrants, used her own body and exotic appearance and turned it into a commodity.
And the Kardashian body as a commodity is an integral component of contemporary feminism. Rather than mediate their appearances through the traditional arbiters of media — men — the Kardashians reach their audiences directly by posting selfies on their own social media pages. “In order to discover its own identity as distinct from that of the oppressor, it has to become visible to itself,” feminist theorist Sheila Rowbotham wrote in 1973. “All revolutionary movements create their own ways of seeing.”
The Kardashians did just that.
And despite our historical tendency to “teach women to teach themselves,” the Kardashians represent a highly public anthesis. They are curvy, loud, and proud to take up as much physical and metaphorical space as possible. Meanwhile, the March sisters are agreeable, fair-skinned, and conventionally pretty. And instead of finding a way for their art to thrive on their own terms, they shut up and marry.
Of course, Little Women was written more than a century before the Kardashians came to prominence. The question is: What does this text have to offer us in 2020?
I’m still looking for an answer.
