Jo made the right decision.
One way I can tell whether I’ll get along with someone is by asking if they've seen or read Little Women. If they haven’t, I’ll tell them to watch it; if they have, I’ll ask if they think Jo was right to reject Laurie. If we disagree too much, then it gives me a tiny hint about how our values differ, and I know we won’t be compatible. For this week’s blog, I want to talk about my reasons for why Jo made the right decision in rejecting Laurie.
Jo never wanted to get married.
All throughout the story, Jo makes it very clear that she doesn’t want to get married. She valued her independence, and marriage would not have allowed her to be independent. I do think that her denial of marriage came from not wanting childhood to end, an end to the innocent and whimsical era of life, but as she grew older, her need for independence grew as well. I don’t think that Laurie understood how important it was to her. He is a man; he was granted his independence the moment he was born, so he couldn’t understand why Jo needed her independence. He couldn’t understand why love couldn’t be enough for her; he didn’t understand that Jo marrying him meant losing the small independence she had as a single woman. I know in the story Jo ends up marrying someone, but I choose to believe that Jo never got married. Alcott (the author) originally intended for Jo to remain unmarried, like herself, but was pressured by her publisher to end Jo’s story as a wife.
"If the main character's a girl, make sure she's married by the end. Or dead, either way." – Little Women (2019)
Career over marriage.
Jo so greatly valued a career as a writer. Having a husband meant that her career would be owned by her husband; her work wouldn’t be hers. I think people forget that during those times women had little to nothing. When Laurie asked her to marry him, he was basically asking Jo to pick him over herself. To give him the thing she most valued, writing. Writing is everything for Jo; it is what she loves the most, cares for the most, and values the most. It’s also what gave her money, her own money. Writing was a way for Jo to have her independence and also be able to care for her family with the money she earned with her stories. If she married Laurie, all of her money would go to him, and yeah, Laurie was rich and kind, and I’m sure he would have taken good care of Jo and her family, but nothing would be hers. I think choosing her career over marriage was the right choice for her and her values.
Jo and Laurie would have gotten along.
Little Women (2019) has lots of popular speeches; I think the most popular one is the “Jo, we got to have it out” speech Laurie gives to Jo when he’s asking her to marry him. It’s a beautiful speech with lots of feelings, but I think most people miss a pretty important point. During this conversation, Jo tells him, “...I’d hate elegant society, and you’d hate my scribbling, and we would be unhappy…” This is such an important reason as to why they wouldn’t have been good for each other. Laurie is a part of elegant society, and writing is everything to Jo, and they hated such big pieces of each other. They would have ended up resenting each other, and it would ruin the amazing friendship they had. Jo and Laurie were better off as friends; marriage between them would have been a sad life.
A lot of my values could be seen through the reasons I listed, and that's how I know that if someone greatly disagrees with me on this topic, our values differ too much. I don’t think a good friendship could be built between me and someone with different values than I do.
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