Fred Vaughn is the classic Prince Charming character who happens to have found himself outside of a Disney movie. Despite being introduced in the first ten minutes of the 2019 Little Women movie as a seemingly genuine love interest for Amy March, his characterization never grows beyond the initial impressions we get of him from the way Amy, Laurie, and Aunt March talk about him during the fragments of the narrative he is present in. Fred is the perfect suitor for Amy March on paper, and yet it is that perfection that she is unable to find a way to love. Even his proposal, despite not hearing a word of it as the audience, looks like something right out of a storybook. Still, in spite of the literal Cinderella story he is offering, it is not enough. Fred represents to Amy the “ideal” world outside of the fantasy that she grew up in with her sisters, yet neither is able to bridge the gap between those worlds in a satisfying or sustainable way. As Woloch observes in The One vs The Many Fred can be summed up simply and neatly as “The character [who] is smoothly absorbed as a gear in the narrative machine.” (25) His rejection by Amy serves as a parallel for the same rejection between Jo and Laurie earlier in the narrative timeline. We see early just how differently Fred is treated as a character compared to John Brooke, Laurie, or even Fredrich Bhare. He is simply a hurdle standing between Amy and Laurie, there to serve a purpose in furthering their story and summarily dismissed when that purpose has been fulfilled. The first thing Amy says of Fred to defend him to Laurie is that he is rich, and throughout the threads of the story he is present in, his character never develops beyond that. A rich man standing in the background waiting to be given the chance to become more. Or, as Straw puts it in the “Small Parts, Small Players” dossier of Screen “a decadent manifestation of the ornamental” (79) Nothing more is needed of him though, because the story already has a lively, passionate, wealthy young man. He serves as a temporary stand in. Nothing more. The most life we ever see from him is the briefest flicker of embarrassment when Laurie drunkenly shouts his name at the New Year’s Eve Ball. Fred is kind, handsome, and wealthy. But we never learn anything more about him because he is framed entirely through the eyes of other characters. Amy, who does not love him. Laurie, who is openly, deeply jealous of him. And Aunt March, who could not care less about him personally, beyond his being a good match for Amy. The March sisters are hopeless romantics, and every one of them marries for love. Fred is respectable and practical, but he is not the spontaneous romantic that a woman with the heart of an artist chooses. Fred Vaughn is Prince Charming in the wrong story.
Gerwig, Greta, director. Little Women, Columbia Pictures, 2019.
Straw, Will. Introduction, Screen, Volume 52, Issue 1, Spring 2011a, Pages 78–81, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjq057
Woloch, Alex. The One Vs. The Many : Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton University Press, 2003.
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