What’s In A Name?
By Meghan Coley
The Christmas season isn’t complete until my mother and I have sat down to watch the 1994 film adaptation of Little Women. Every year, without fail, we can be found on the couch, clutching mugs of hot chocolate, crying at all the scenes we always cry at because they never get old, and laughing at the jokes that never cease to amuse. I’ll sit there, under a blanket near the fireplace, and wonder how a whole year passed me by since I last enjoyed the holiday tradition.
When my mother and I heard the news of another Little Women film adaptation set to be released in 2019, we were quite excited, to say the least. We had tickets to see the movie the day after Christmas. I couldn’t help but compare the 1994 version to this new 2019 version. How the story wasn’t told in chronological order. How the costumes were brighter and more vibrant. And particularly, how exceptional I found Emma Watson’s performance to be.
“Women often don’t have roles that are complex and nuanced and fleshed-out,” Watson says during an on-set interview. She’s wearing a modest blue dress her character, Meg March, wears for a duration of the film. “They’re there to serve a story which is not their own.”
When asked what she hopes her audience will take away from the film, she expresses a hope that viewers will “feel the warmth of a movie that was made with so much love and was made with so much care.”
It’s a movie that, while certainly warming me from the inside out, reimagines a story I can’t imagine my life without.
Louisa May Alcott wrote and published her most famous novel, Little Women, in 1868. Chronicling the lives of four young women living in Concord, Massachusetts during and after the Civil War, it’s the kind of story that explores the natural course of what it means to grow up among love and loss.
The sisters are a dynamic group, timeless in their unique portrayals of femininity and womanhood, beloved in classic literature circles.
Amy March is the youngest of the troop. Exuberant, artistic, spoiled. Convinced she’ll marry rich. Self-conscious about the shape of her nose.
Next is Beth, the homebody. The shy girl in the corner playing the piano or talking to her dolls. The one who wishes time would stop moving so fast.
Jo is the story’s volatile main protagonist–the fiercely loyal, outrageously imaginative, vibrant writer. The character Alcott created with herself in mind.
And then there’s Meg. The eldest. The young woman who’d love to be an actor but worries too much about money to ever entertain the idea of pursuing her hobby as a career. The one who dreams of starting a family with the man she loves, despite a life of poverty.
She is the sister I relate to the most, though more often than not I find myself wishing I were more inclined to Jo’s bravery and wit. Emma Watson’s portrayal of Meg only strengthens my love for everything she stands for.
I wrote a poem quite some time ago titled “What’s In A Name?” in which I attempted to explore the multifaceted meanings attached to my name and its particular spelling. It ended up being a poem I cringe at now, especially after reading it aloud at a virtual poetry event. But exploring the meaning behind the intrinsic value of naming something or someone is a concept I still think about a great deal.
Perhaps the poem needs some polishing. Or perhaps it should just be scrapped.
Regardless, my name is Meghan. Translated to Margaret in some languages and dialects, to connect me to my great grandmother on my mother’s side. Meaning “treasure” or “pearl” in other translations. Note the “h” as a part of the Irish spelling. A whole host of nicknames have been created from the insertion of that silent letter, Meg-Han Solo being one of my favorites.
But my favorite nickname by far is Meg. An endearment reserved only for my family and closest friends.
With the risk of cringing once again, I ask you – what is in a name? Juliet entreated after her Romeo, sighing this question onto the rose-scented breeze of her balcony, agonizing over everything that a name, or a title, can be and, can subsequently, prevent.
I didn’t realize my mother had chosen to name me Meghan after Meg March until I was around fifteen or sixteen years old.
Since then, this newly discovered point of significance has dominated much of my writing. It was my main inspiration for writing “What’s In A Name?”, and is largely why Meg is a nickname I reserve for the people who know me best.
Being named after this book character meant I was intangibly but romantically tethered to a work of literature. I could call it mine in a personal, my precious kind of way.
Alcott’s Little Women was a part of who I was, however far removed. I felt an intense pride at being the namesake of the lovely Meg March. All thanks to a mother who loves to read nearly as much as I do.
I’ve decided to let you read some of this poem I’ve deemed cringeworthy. I believe it would be cruel of me to not let you decide for yourself whether it should be scrapped.
Shakespeare’s question
Of “What’s in a name?”
Asks me why my name is important.
My answer is that my name is many things.
Perhaps it is a rose.
Perhaps it is sweet.
But it is mine.
“It’s funny, sometimes I think you’re more like Jo than Meg,” my mother said on a day I can’t particularly remember. I don’t know where we were or what spurred her comment. But her love for every single one of the March sisters is unmatched, and the amount of conversations we’ve had about their various personalities are countless. She probably could have named me Jo, Beth, or Amy and found just as much significance in those names as Meg.
Jo is the writer, inclined to whip up short stories about blood and gore because that was what she’d been told would sell. It takes time and strife for Jo to begin to write about her own life, a life she had previously thought too unromantic, too dull and dreary. Too full of loss and messed up marriage proposals.
Jo is a relatable character. The manifestation of Alcott’s most personal insecurities who you can’t help simultaneously groaning and rooting for.
Jo talks over Meg. Links arms with her at parties. Drags her to plays and shows she knows she’ll enjoy despite claiming the money spent on the tickets isn’t practical. Jo is louder, takes up more space.
But Meg is still there. Writing and serving her own story while Jo scribbles on pages late into the night.
To quote the lines director and screenwriter Greta Gerwig wrote for Emma Watson’s Meg in the 2019 film, “Just because my dreams are different than yours doesn’t mean they’re unimportant.”
Statistics show that just because a book is a best seller doesn’t mean that every reader who picks up a copy makes it all the way to the end.
According to data collected from e-book technology (“How Many People Finish Books?”), Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch was only finished by 44% percent of its readers despite winning the Pulitzer Prize for that year. Solomon Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave was only completed by 28% of readers. And of all the genres this data encompassed, romance novels and thrillers experience the highest rates of completion.
Alcott’s Little Women doesn’t quite fall into either of those genres, though the argument for where it does belong within literary tradition is a foggy one. Genres are meant to be blended just like rules are meant to be bent.
This novel, however, has never been out of print, meaning that in the 154 years it’s been published, nearly 2 million copies have been sold. While there aren’t exact statistics to display how many of Alcott’s readers actually make it to the last page, the story has proven to endure – but how much of a role the multiple film adaptations have in explaining this story’s endurance is also difficult to pinpoint.
My mom bought me a gorgeous copy of Little Women from the Puffin in Bloom classics set for my nineteenth birthday. It’s tightly bound in a dark green hardcover with little illustrations of each of the four March sisters on the front, surrounded by vines of ivy and pink and white flowers.
It’s sat in various places since it was gifted to me two years ago. My sophomore and junior year dorm rooms. My childhood bedroom during holiday breaks from school. In these places it has sat, collecting dust and looking pretty. And yet for some reason, I keep moving it, keep brushing off the dust only to let more settle eventually. Right now, it’s sitting near my bed, sitting and looking pretty amongst my textbooks.
I’ve started and failed to read past the first three chapters of this book three times. Granted, I read an abridged children’s version many years ago, before watching any of the film adaptations or knowing the full significance of my name.
But what excuse do I have now? I’ve viewed the films enough times to quote nearly every line. I’m still in love with the best-selling story that took Alcott only 10 weeks to write, full of characters and messages pertaining to femininity, love, literature, and family. Why can’t I bring myself to experience this story at its source?
I’m aware of my place within my own story and can’t help comparing it to the fantastic ones I read. Perhaps it’s because of this undefinable connection – this tether to Meg March – that settles a strange, self-imposed kind of pressure on my shoulders.
Perhaps I can sense that I’m too close to a very good thing and worried it will shatter if I dare to get any closer.
Emma Watson reveals in her on-set interview that she’s read Little Women and watched its other film adaptations. Something that’s probably important to implement in your preparation for a role.
The joy Watson has experienced in filming this movie is palpable on her face, in the way she talks with her hands and smiles through her answering of the interview questions. In my mind, she embodies the very idea of Meg – quietly intelligent and elegant, admirable in her vast amount of thoughts revealed only when she knows she’ll command the attention of the entire room. Her portrayal can be compared to the movie’s other actresses, yes, but should also be allowed to stand alone. Or potentially, these sisters, these roles, don’t have to be pitted against each other at all. They can exist together in a world that sees their stories flourish, without one being better than the other.
Alcott never could have predicted the scope of my mother’s love for her tale of four young women. She’ll never know how my mother saw her own three sisters in Alcott’s family of March girls upon first reading the novel. She will never know my mother named her eldest and only daughter after one in particular. She never could have known that that little girl, that other Meg, would simultaneously love her name and wonder how she could better channel the essence of Jo, the writer she admired as a writer herself.
Regardless of what’s in or not in a name, a line has to be drawn between “potential” and
“capability.” A Meg can be a Jo and a Jo can be a Meg because regardless of the title, both are living out individual stories of what it means to be one’s self, contradicting and messing up every step of the way. But that doesn’t mean I can’t still wonder what this essay would look like if my name was Jo rather than Meg.
Maybe I’ll finish Little Women one day, pushing through the incomprehenisble wall of my own consciousness and expectations. I will attempt to pick up that beautifully decorated copy sitting by my bed and make it to the last page, simply because I refuse to fall into that pit of depressing data with the rest of those book-reading quitters. I don’t want to make do with the medium of film because I refuse to believe the only allure Little Women holds for me is in a name.
At the end of the day, I am glad to exist in a world where Little Women reminds us that dreams and stories are important simply because they exist, as we serve within the leading roles of our own narratives.
Works Referenced
FilmIsNow Movie Bloopers and Extras. Little Women / Emma Watson "Meg March" On-Set Interview. Performance by Emma Watson, YouTube, YouTube, 24 Dec. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVUu18VTe_0. Accessed 15 Sept. 2022.
“How Many People Finish Books?” THE IFOD, WordPress, 18 Jan. 2018, https://www.theifod.com/how-many-people-finish-books/.
Lanzendorfer, Joy. “10 Fascinating Facts About Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.” Mental Floss, Mental Floss, 6 Apr. 2021, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/56706/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-little-women.
Little Women. Greta Gerwig, Columbia Pictures Regency Enterprises, 2019. Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, et. al.
By Meghan Coley
The Christmas season isn’t complete until my mother and I have sat down to watch the 1994 film adaptation of Little Women. Every year, without fail, we can be found on the couch, clutching mugs of hot chocolate, crying at all the scenes we always cry at because they never get old, and laughing at the jokes that never cease to amuse. I’ll sit there, under a blanket near the fireplace, and wonder how a whole year passed me by since I last enjoyed the holiday tradition.
When my mother and I heard the news of another Little Women film adaptation set to be released in 2019, we were quite excited, to say the least. We had tickets to see the movie the day after Christmas. I couldn’t help but compare the 1994 version to this new 2019 version. How the story wasn’t told in chronological order. How the costumes were brighter and more vibrant. And particularly, how exceptional I found Emma Watson’s performance to be.
“Women often don’t have roles that are complex and nuanced and fleshed-out,” Watson says during an on-set interview. She’s wearing a modest blue dress her character, Meg March, wears for a duration of the film. “They’re there to serve a story which is not their own.”
When asked what she hopes her audience will take away from the film, she expresses a hope that viewers will “feel the warmth of a movie that was made with so much love and was made with so much care.”
It’s a movie that, while certainly warming me from the inside out, reimagines a story I can’t imagine my life without.
Louisa May Alcott wrote and published her most famous novel, Little Women, in 1868. Chronicling the lives of four young women living in Concord, Massachusetts during and after the Civil War, it’s the kind of story that explores the natural course of what it means to grow up among love and loss.
The sisters are a dynamic group, timeless in their unique portrayals of femininity and womanhood, beloved in classic literature circles.
Amy March is the youngest of the troop. Exuberant, artistic, spoiled. Convinced she’ll marry rich. Self-conscious about the shape of her nose.
Next is Beth, the homebody. The shy girl in the corner playing the piano or talking to her dolls. The one who wishes time would stop moving so fast.
Jo is the story’s volatile main protagonist–the fiercely loyal, outrageously imaginative, vibrant writer. The character Alcott created with herself in mind.
And then there’s Meg. The eldest. The young woman who’d love to be an actor but worries too much about money to ever entertain the idea of pursuing her hobby as a career. The one who dreams of starting a family with the man she loves, despite a life of poverty.
She is the sister I relate to the most, though more often than not I find myself wishing I were more inclined to Jo’s bravery and wit. Emma Watson’s portrayal of Meg only strengthens my love for everything she stands for.
I wrote a poem quite some time ago titled “What’s In A Name?” in which I attempted to explore the multifaceted meanings attached to my name and its particular spelling. It ended up being a poem I cringe at now, especially after reading it aloud at a virtual poetry event. But exploring the meaning behind the intrinsic value of naming something or someone is a concept I still think about a great deal.
Perhaps the poem needs some polishing. Or perhaps it should just be scrapped.
Regardless, my name is Meghan. Translated to Margaret in some languages and dialects, to connect me to my great grandmother on my mother’s side. Meaning “treasure” or “pearl” in other translations. Note the “h” as a part of the Irish spelling. A whole host of nicknames have been created from the insertion of that silent letter, Meg-Han Solo being one of my favorites.
But my favorite nickname by far is Meg. An endearment reserved only for my family and closest friends.
With the risk of cringing once again, I ask you – what is in a name? Juliet entreated after her Romeo, sighing this question onto the rose-scented breeze of her balcony, agonizing over everything that a name, or a title, can be and, can subsequently, prevent.
I didn’t realize my mother had chosen to name me Meghan after Meg March until I was around fifteen or sixteen years old.
Since then, this newly discovered point of significance has dominated much of my writing. It was my main inspiration for writing “What’s In A Name?”, and is largely why Meg is a nickname I reserve for the people who know me best.
Being named after this book character meant I was intangibly but romantically tethered to a work of literature. I could call it mine in a personal, my precious kind of way.
Alcott’s Little Women was a part of who I was, however far removed. I felt an intense pride at being the namesake of the lovely Meg March. All thanks to a mother who loves to read nearly as much as I do.
I’ve decided to let you read some of this poem I’ve deemed cringeworthy. I believe it would be cruel of me to not let you decide for yourself whether it should be scrapped.
Shakespeare’s question
Of “What’s in a name?”
Asks me why my name is important.
My answer is that my name is many things.
Perhaps it is a rose.
Perhaps it is sweet.
But it is mine.
“It’s funny, sometimes I think you’re more like Jo than Meg,” my mother said on a day I can’t particularly remember. I don’t know where we were or what spurred her comment. But her love for every single one of the March sisters is unmatched, and the amount of conversations we’ve had about their various personalities are countless. She probably could have named me Jo, Beth, or Amy and found just as much significance in those names as Meg.
Jo is the writer, inclined to whip up short stories about blood and gore because that was what she’d been told would sell. It takes time and strife for Jo to begin to write about her own life, a life she had previously thought too unromantic, too dull and dreary. Too full of loss and messed up marriage proposals.
Jo is a relatable character. The manifestation of Alcott’s most personal insecurities who you can’t help simultaneously groaning and rooting for.
Jo talks over Meg. Links arms with her at parties. Drags her to plays and shows she knows she’ll enjoy despite claiming the money spent on the tickets isn’t practical. Jo is louder, takes up more space.
But Meg is still there. Writing and serving her own story while Jo scribbles on pages late into the night.
To quote the lines director and screenwriter Greta Gerwig wrote for Emma Watson’s Meg in the 2019 film, “Just because my dreams are different than yours doesn’t mean they’re unimportant.”
Statistics show that just because a book is a best seller doesn’t mean that every reader who picks up a copy makes it all the way to the end.
According to data collected from e-book technology (“How Many People Finish Books?”), Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch was only finished by 44% percent of its readers despite winning the Pulitzer Prize for that year. Solomon Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave was only completed by 28% of readers. And of all the genres this data encompassed, romance novels and thrillers experience the highest rates of completion.
Alcott’s Little Women doesn’t quite fall into either of those genres, though the argument for where it does belong within literary tradition is a foggy one. Genres are meant to be blended just like rules are meant to be bent.
This novel, however, has never been out of print, meaning that in the 154 years it’s been published, nearly 2 million copies have been sold. While there aren’t exact statistics to display how many of Alcott’s readers actually make it to the last page, the story has proven to endure – but how much of a role the multiple film adaptations have in explaining this story’s endurance is also difficult to pinpoint.
My mom bought me a gorgeous copy of Little Women from the Puffin in Bloom classics set for my nineteenth birthday. It’s tightly bound in a dark green hardcover with little illustrations of each of the four March sisters on the front, surrounded by vines of ivy and pink and white flowers.
It’s sat in various places since it was gifted to me two years ago. My sophomore and junior year dorm rooms. My childhood bedroom during holiday breaks from school. In these places it has sat, collecting dust and looking pretty. And yet for some reason, I keep moving it, keep brushing off the dust only to let more settle eventually. Right now, it’s sitting near my bed, sitting and looking pretty amongst my textbooks.
I’ve started and failed to read past the first three chapters of this book three times. Granted, I read an abridged children’s version many years ago, before watching any of the film adaptations or knowing the full significance of my name.
But what excuse do I have now? I’ve viewed the films enough times to quote nearly every line. I’m still in love with the best-selling story that took Alcott only 10 weeks to write, full of characters and messages pertaining to femininity, love, literature, and family. Why can’t I bring myself to experience this story at its source?
I’m aware of my place within my own story and can’t help comparing it to the fantastic ones I read. Perhaps it’s because of this undefinable connection – this tether to Meg March – that settles a strange, self-imposed kind of pressure on my shoulders.
Perhaps I can sense that I’m too close to a very good thing and worried it will shatter if I dare to get any closer.
Emma Watson reveals in her on-set interview that she’s read Little Women and watched its other film adaptations. Something that’s probably important to implement in your preparation for a role.
The joy Watson has experienced in filming this movie is palpable on her face, in the way she talks with her hands and smiles through her answering of the interview questions. In my mind, she embodies the very idea of Meg – quietly intelligent and elegant, admirable in her vast amount of thoughts revealed only when she knows she’ll command the attention of the entire room. Her portrayal can be compared to the movie’s other actresses, yes, but should also be allowed to stand alone. Or potentially, these sisters, these roles, don’t have to be pitted against each other at all. They can exist together in a world that sees their stories flourish, without one being better than the other.
Alcott never could have predicted the scope of my mother’s love for her tale of four young women. She’ll never know how my mother saw her own three sisters in Alcott’s family of March girls upon first reading the novel. She will never know my mother named her eldest and only daughter after one in particular. She never could have known that that little girl, that other Meg, would simultaneously love her name and wonder how she could better channel the essence of Jo, the writer she admired as a writer herself.
Regardless of what’s in or not in a name, a line has to be drawn between “potential” and
“capability.” A Meg can be a Jo and a Jo can be a Meg because regardless of the title, both are living out individual stories of what it means to be one’s self, contradicting and messing up every step of the way. But that doesn’t mean I can’t still wonder what this essay would look like if my name was Jo rather than Meg.
Maybe I’ll finish Little Women one day, pushing through the incomprehenisble wall of my own consciousness and expectations. I will attempt to pick up that beautifully decorated copy sitting by my bed and make it to the last page, simply because I refuse to fall into that pit of depressing data with the rest of those book-reading quitters. I don’t want to make do with the medium of film because I refuse to believe the only allure Little Women holds for me is in a name.
At the end of the day, I am glad to exist in a world where Little Women reminds us that dreams and stories are important simply because they exist, as we serve within the leading roles of our own narratives.
Works Referenced
FilmIsNow Movie Bloopers and Extras. Little Women / Emma Watson "Meg March" On-Set Interview. Performance by Emma Watson, YouTube, YouTube, 24 Dec. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVUu18VTe_0. Accessed 15 Sept. 2022.
“How Many People Finish Books?” THE IFOD, WordPress, 18 Jan. 2018, https://www.theifod.com/how-many-people-finish-books/.
Lanzendorfer, Joy. “10 Fascinating Facts About Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.” Mental Floss, Mental Floss, 6 Apr. 2021, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/56706/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-little-women.
Little Women. Greta Gerwig, Columbia Pictures Regency Enterprises, 2019. Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, et. al.
All Text Copyright (C) 2023 Meghan Coley