Mr. Dashwood is the only character in the story of Little Women that does not want to be there. In the way this iteration of the film was directed, he is a character who is not actually in the story for all intents and purposes. He, like the audience, is observing from the outside as he reads the chapters Jo gives him after the fact. His scenes pull the audience from the fantasy of the March sisters and shows us the story through the eyes of not only Jo March trying to sell it, but of Louisa May Alcott herself trying to write it in the first place. As explored by Will Straw in the “Small Parts, Small Players” dossier, Mr. Dashwood is the “device through which attention is redistributed” (80) the cuts out of the story to his letters or interactions with his own family are jarring, often we as the audience forget all about them during the long stretches into the years of the story without them, but they remind us that this is a story we are watching play out. Yet rather than destroying the fantasy, it fills in some of the gaps that would be present without him. He is a “sharp-edged personality” (Stark 80) that represents the society that existed at the time that Alcott wrote the novel and was forced to “sell her heroine into marriage” in the first place. The first wave of people to read and love the novel who needed a happy ending. He is in direct contrast to all of the other characters in the film. On his own he does not see the beauty and value of the story being told. He is society, and we see that in his influence over Jo in the ending of her story. It gives a genuine, reasonable explanation for the dramatic, unrealistic ending for the self-declared spinster heroine without taking away any of the value from the rest of her journey in the last two hours. He is not in the story himself, but the story could not exist without him.
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
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