Fans of Little Women often divide along Jo/Amy lines. Jo was independent and smart, but Amy always seemed to get what she wanted and have more fun. Are you in the Jo camp or the Amy camp?
Says who? I haven't noticed an Amy/Jo war among fans of the novels and I think this is a drastic over-simplification of the entire book. It's like whoever does these writer's block prompts spent Black Friday tearing through malls and suddenly realized at 11:59PM that the new writer's block prompt was due by midnight.
Seriously, has the person who wrote this even read the novel in the last twenty years? And did he bother to read the follow-up novels to see the people the character's became?
And what about the other two sisters? Meg was an amazing character because she was a very conventional girl of that time, but she also had a conscience and a somewhat progressive view in a lot of areas.
Beth was my favorite out of all the girls. She loved music (I relate to that) and while I'm hardly as nervous around new people, I can still relate to her just wanting to stay home and be left in peace with her dolls and kittens.
I love Louisa May Alcott (including some of her less popular works like An Old-Fashioned Girl and I think that she does a great job of presenting characters with traits that everyone should try to emulate, but that aren't so goody-goody that a reader can't relate to them.
Really. I'm rereading this prompt again and it still annoys me. More literature-related prompts would be great, but it would be nice if whoever does them would have the decency to actually have a functional knowledge of the book and not insult LJ users by oversimplifying it to that degree.
What possible interest or concern of yours is the way I respond to a Writer's Block prompt? LJ put it out there and I gave my opinion on the subject. I don't recall seeing anything in LJ's TOS that I had to respond in a positive and enthusiastic way to everything I read on the site.
And why does the issue matter so much to you that you would leave a comment telling me to lighten up?
And see? I do rage.
The movie wasn't able to go into the detail the book did, so I think it might have made Amy and Jo seem more at odds. I think it's also easy to forget that we see a lot of Amy as a child, so her behavior is a bit self-centered sometimes. Still, I love how at the end of the story, Amy and Jo are working together for a common goal with the school at Plumfield. By the end of the novel, it seems as though all the characters are cast in a positive light.
(Sorry for going on, but I really do love Little Women. :-)
(Also, when someone asked Alcott why she never married, she said "... because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.")
It's just that I don't see why they picked Little Women for the prompt (although I do think of it as a Christmas book) and I don't see how the Amy/Jo tension was the only thing they were able to take away from the book.
It waa merely for the sake of discussion. There could have been a lot of areas in the book LJ might have brought up, but it was just thisw one. Why not ask LJ why they selected these two characters for this one issue??
It is kind of a juvenile prompt for literature, but then again I was in AP English. Maybe they're just trying to make it easy for numerous people to respond. I think the actual prompt is more like "Why does a woman with intellectual prowess have no power while the one with looks seems to get anything she desires?" Little Women might as well not even be in it.
Then it's kinda unfair to make people pick a side there, but then again nothing is ever black and white- so I think every girl would be a mix of those two attributes, just in varying proportions.