in defense of amy march, with love.

this is an essay for the girl who was always misunderstood and deserves to be seen in her own light. part 1 of "understanding amy march"

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Amy March is, to many, the villain in a story that never promised to have one. She is remembered for the tantrums, the jealousy, the way she dared to want what wasn’t meant for her — Jo’s place, Jo’s dreams, Jo’s love. In the margins of readers’ minds, she is the sister who burned the manuscript, the girl who loved pretty things too loudly, the woman who ended up with Laurie. And yet, I’ve never been able to hate her. I’ve tried — conditioned, like so many others, to see her as the foil to Jo’s fire, the obstacle to her freedom. But when I return to Little Women, especially through the lens of Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film, I see a different Amy — not the petulant child or the shallow socialite, but a young woman navigating the sharp edges of ambition in a world that taught her she must package her desires as duty if she ever wanted them to be heard.

I would love to be Jo. And maybe that’s the very thing that makes me Amy March.

This essay is, in part, a personal defense — not to excuse Amy’s mistakes, but to offer her the complexity she has so often been denied. I will follow Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s original text, which breathes new empathy into Amy’s arc, framing her not as Jo’s usurper but as a survivor of the same impossible constraints. What Amy understands — perhaps too early, perhaps too well — is that art, love, and legacy are not things women of her time could seize without sacrifice. She does not fight the system head-on like Jo, but learns to maneuver within it, and in doing so, loses a different kind of innocence. This is not the story of the sister who stole a life — it is the story of the girl who built her own, quietly, elegantly, and against all odds.

The distaste for Amy often distills into three recurring accusations: that she is vain, that she is selfish, and that she steals Jo’s life — or at least the parts of it readers believe Jo deserves. But each of these points, when examined closely, begins to unravel. Yes, Amy values beauty, but in a world where a woman’s survival often hinges on her appearance, can we really blame her? Yes, she chooses wealth and status, but not out of laziness or greed — out of necessity, out of responsibility, out of the burden handed to her by Aunt March, who anoints her the family’s salvation long before she is old enough to understand the weight of it. And as for Laurie — that too is more complicated than betrayal.

Amy is not selfish; she is strategic. She is not vain; she is observant. She is not Jo’s replacement; she is her counterpart. Both sisters burn with ambition, but while Jo’s blazes outward in defiance, Amy’s is tempered into something more socially palatable, and no less dangerous for it. Jo rebels — she shouts, writes, runs. Amy studies the rules and masters them. She marries well not out of small-mindedness but because she knows, long before Jo does, that love alone will not keep a woman safe. While Jo denies love altogether, Amy learns to rise with it.

Amy is not to be despised for trying to rise in a society that was designed to keep her down. She is not the villain of Little Women — she is its most misunderstood heroine. And throughout this essay, I will challenge the easy criticisms and present another view: that Amy March is not only just as ambitious as Jo, but perhaps even more so — because hers is the ambition that had to hide itself, had to fold itself into civility and polish, had to become so quiet it could be mistaken for compliance.

It might seem ironic — perhaps even contradictory — to begin an essay in defense of Amy March with a scene centered on Jo. But there is no better place to begin than the first scene of Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation, because before we can understand Amy, we must first understand the world that shaped her. The scene opens with Jo racing through the streets of New York, manuscript clutched tightly, hair loose, ambition raw on her face. She’s burning with the hope that her words might matter, that her story might be enough. But what she is met with is a quiet, practiced cruelty: a publisher who tells her plainly that there’s no room for morals, that no one has time for sentimentality. The country has just emerged from war — people want distraction, not depth. And if her story dares to center a girl, then it must end with marriage or death. Preferably both.

In this opening moment, the rules are made clear. A woman’s voice must be entertaining. A woman’s story must be palatable. A woman’s life must be ornamental, or tragic — anything but revolutionary. This is not simply a detail of setting; it is the very skeleton of the society these sisters inhabit. It tells us, from the very first frame, that there is one path afforded to women, and that path is marriage. Not as romance, not as choice — but as survival. It is no wonder, then, that Jo rebels so fiercely against this constraint. And it is no wonder, too, that Amy, faced with the same road, chooses to walk it differently.

We see Amy first not as the thief of anyone’s future, but as a girl left behind. In the scene where Meg and Jo prepare to attend the Gardiners’ party, Amy hovers just outside the warm center of their world — too young, too loud, too much. Her voice rises, plaintive: “Why can’t we all go to the party? It’s not fair!” And in that brief flare of frustration, what glimmers beneath is not spite, but a yearning to belong.

She is still a child, and yet already she knows that beauty is currency, that refinement is power. She pinches her nose in front of the mirror, tugging it delicately as if sculpting herself into someone more acceptable — more classical, more loved. She tries to fix her hair and define her nose. “My nose will simply not look refined.” she keeps playing with her nose to fix it as she watches her sisters prepare for the ball she desperately wants to attend.

It is not vanity that drives her, but a desperate awareness that to be taken seriously, to be admired, even to be included, she must be beautiful. Her gestures are small but telling: the way she reaches for Jo, the way her hand is batted away. “Don’t touch me, thanks,” Jo snaps, refusing Amy’s clumsy attempt at closeness. And then, Amy, still trying, says, “You could be pretty if you tried.” It is a flawed offering — not kindness in its purest form, but the only language she has learned to speak: the language of appearance, of effort, of trying to make oneself worthy in a world that equates worth with grace. She wants Jo to be seen, just as she longs to be seen herself. And when Jo dismisses beauty as something not worth chasing, Amy is left again on the edge of the scene, holding a truth too heavy for her small frame: that she will have to chase it anyway. Not because she wants to, but because she must.

Later that evening, as Laurie enters the March home for the first time, the scene shifts gently — no longer just Jo’s adventure, but the quiet stirring of something within Amy, too. She watches him closely, her eyes trailing his every movement. “Hi. I’m Amy,” she says, pointedly — a declaration as much as an introduction, spoken with the earnestness of a girl who wants to be seen. Already, there is admiration in the way she speaks, in the way she keeps sneaking glances at him when she thinks no one will notice, as the script quietly confirms.

It is the innocent awe of someone seeing charm and possibility wrapped into a single person — the beginning of something tender, though she herself doesn’t yet know what to call it. In that brief, flickering moment, Amy is not calculating or clever — she is simply a girl captivated, quietly hopeful in the corner of the room.

No, she hadn’t stolen Laurie from Jo. She had been enamored with him from the very beginning, infatuated in the pure, impulsive way of childhood. But to her dismay — and perhaps to the watcher’s too — Laurie’s gaze doesn’t land on her. Not then. We see him that same night, eyes turned toward the attic window, where Jo sits silhouetted against the lamplight, writing. He is already watching her — as captivated by Jo’s fire as Amy is by his light. It is a quiet heartbreak, subtle and easily missed, only present to the watcher’s eye, but it lingers.

Let’s examine perhaps the perfect scene that shows the contrast of Jo and Amy. The noel morning. The parlor is a living thing that day— warm with firelight, shadows flickering softly across the wallpaper, the laughter of sisters rising and falling like a tide. It is a rare moment of togetherness, a pause between growing pains. Amy’s cheeks are flushed, not with exertion but with conviction. “I have lots of wishes,” she announces, lifting her chin, eyes gleaming. There is something ceremonial in the way she speaks — as if her dreams are already halfway real just by naming them aloud. Her arms wide open as she declares them. “But my favorite one is to be an artist and go to Paris and do fine pictures and be the best painter in the world.”

It’s bold. It’s brave. And Jo — Jo who also dreams of greatness, who writes feverishly into the night with ink-stained fingers — winces. The words sound too loud when Amy says them. Too precise. Too shiny. Too feminine, maybe. And so Jo, curled with Beth near the hearth, mutters her disapproval: “It sounds so crass when she says it.”

The wound is small, but it lands. Amy doesn’t shrink. She fires back, not with cruelty but with clarity: “Why be ashamed of what you want?” She’s not asking rhetorically — she truly doesn’t understand why Jo won’t name her own hunger. Amy is still young enough to believe that wanting isn’t a sin, that it’s not yet something to be cloaked in irony or softened with self-deprecation. She doesn’t know yet that ambition in girls is something the world loves to punish — she only knows what she wants, fiercely and without apology. To her, there’s nothing crass about it.

Jo bristles. The moment grows taut, like fabric pulled between pins. Amy calls Jo’s behavior boyish. Jo hurls an insult in return, and what follows is the inevitable descent into childhood chaos: limbs flailing, laughter erupting, bodies tumbling into each other in a whirl of tangled hair and half-serious shouting. But even in this rough play, Amy is careful. Her voice rises above the tumble: “Watch my nose! My nose!” she cries. “It’s already no good!”

It’s meant to be funny — a sibling protest in the middle of the fray — but the truth of it glints just beneath the surface. Because before the fight began, before the words were exchanged, Amy had been sitting on the couch as we seen. Her hand had reached up, fingers gently pinching and pulling the bridge of her nose, as if willing it to be straighter, smaller, finer. She is preoccupied with her nose — not out of vanity, not really, but out of fear. That it makes her less beautiful. That beauty is the one form of power she might have, and even that is fragile.

Amy knows, perhaps more instinctively than Jo, that in their world, art is not enough. Talent must be married to presentation, to elegance, to pleasingness. She is already shaping herself — her body, her manner, her ambitions — to fit a mold that will allow her to thrive. And that knowledge, that subtle pressure, is something she carries even in play.

Jo and Amy are not opposites here. They are the same chord, struck in different keys. Both want to be great. Both want to be seen. But Jo rails against the expectation, claws at it with every step, while Amy tries to bend herself into its shape without breaking. And in that contrast, we glimpse not only the roots of their conflict, but the deep and aching kinship between them.

Amy’s romantic imagination surfaces early, long before love becomes a serious possibility. One afternoon, in the comfort of her home, she speaks with that lilting, dreamy quality reserved for crushes still untouched by disappointment. “But doesn’t Laurie just seem so romantic? He’s half Italian,” she says, her eyes far away with admiration. The room is quiet for a beat before Jo snaps, dismissively: “What do you know? You’ve never spoken to him.” And just like that, the moment is gone. But it lingers. It shows that Amy, though younger, is watching — seeing the same boy Jo does, but from a different angle, one tinted by curiosity and the thrill of the possible.

At school, Amy’s world is a very different stage — far less forgiving, and far more transactional. There, admiration must be earned in tangible ways. The currency among girls is pickled limes — bright, briny treats passed from hand to hand like golden coins. Possession means popularity; debt, exclusion. And Amy is in debt.

“Well I have to go to school and I don’t have any limes,” she complains with a kind of desperate indignation as she prepares to leave home. “The other girls are all trading pickled limes. I’m in debt. I owe ever so many limes.” Her voice tightens at the end, betraying how serious this feels to her. This isn’t about snacks — it’s about survival in the hierarchy of girlhood.

Meg, ever the nurturer, slips her a coin. “Will that do?” she asks gently. Jo protests — “What did you do that for?” — but Meg just smiles knowingly. “I know what it is to want little things and feel less than other girls.” It’s a small gesture, but it anchors something essential: Amy’s hunger for beauty, attention, belonging. She isn’t greedy. She’s just aware. Aware that some girls glide through life with ribbons already tied, while others have to knot them themselves, again and again, hoping the bow holds.

Even with Meg’s coin, Amy is still not safe. Later that day, in a class where politics bubble beneath childhood conversation, she is baited. One girl repeats her father’s pro-slavery stance, saying, “Everyone benefited from the system — including you Marches. Why should only the South be punished?” Amy, whose father is away at war, snaps back: “It is immoral!” Her voice is small but steady. “Perhaps we should all be punished,” she adds, almost to herself — a moral clarity that doesn’t land well in a room full of girls taught to prize comfort over conscience.

And then the trap is laid. The girls offer her a deal: “Just do Mr. Davis,” one says, and another sweetens it: “I’ll wipe out your debt and give you five more limes besides.” It’s an impossible moment. Amy hesitates, the tension held in the slope of her pencil before she gives in. Her drawing — sharp, clever, well-observed — is a desperate offering. A sacrifice of principle for popularity. She doesn’t even see Mr. Davis approaching.

When the shadow falls across the desk, it is too late. Mr. Davis, stern and cold, sees the caricature, sees the girls scatter, and focuses his fury on Amy. He hits her. The blow is not just physical — it is humiliating. Shamed, scolded, and bleeding, Amy stumbles out of school.

And this is where Laurie sees her — really sees her — for the first time.

From his upstairs window, bored with Latin lessons and restless in the way only boys of privilege can afford to be, Laurie spots a girl in distress. He opens the window, leans out dramatically. “Hello there! Are you hurt?”

Amy looks up, sniffling but defiant. “I’m Amy,” she calls. And then, because she cannot help herself — even in pain, even ashamed — she adds: “I know. You brought my sister back from the dance. I would have never sprained my ankle. I have lovely small feet — best in my family.” Her voice cracks, but her pride doesn’t. She holds up her red, stinging hand like a badge of injustice. “Mr. Davis hit me.”

Laurie, startled into softness, brings her into the house.

Inside the grand Laurence home, she becomes someone else. Or rather — she becomes a version of herself she’s long imagined. Bandaged hand tucked neatly into her lap, she lounges in the library like she was born there. Her eyes dance over the pages of a heavy art book, her voice suddenly transformed. “Tell the servants that I want this painting purchased for me — immediately!” she demands in a mock-aristocratic accent. Laurie laughs, not because he’s mocking her, but because she is delightful. Amy, for the first time all day, feels like she is winning.

Her world has punished her for wanting too loudly, for dreaming too brightly, and here, in the safety of books and warmth and a boy who smiles when she speaks, she begins to recover.

When Jo and Meg arrive, Meg rushes to Amy, all concern and softness. “What happened, little lamb?” she asks. But Jo is suspicious — she knows Amy. “What did you do?” she demands, always ready to uncover mischief.. Amy puts on her most innocent voice. “Just a drawing... and then... Mr. Davis hit me.” She lets the tears fall again. “You did wrong, Amy, and there will be consequences.” Marmee tells her as she was awaiting sympathy.

To the most dreaded scene — the one that brands her unforgivable. The burning of the manuscript. No, I won’t defend her. It was a grave fault, a terrible thing. But I want you to look again, not to excuse her, but to understand. To see her not as a villain, but as a girl in pain. To reason with her. To see.

Because it was not just about the theatre. It never really was.

Amy had spent the day folding herself into corners — first into her longing, then into her loneliness, and finally, into her anger. When Jo and Meg prepared for the evening, when Laurie’s name came up like a bell that only she could hear ringing, Amy’s heart thudded with that desperate ache so familiar to younger sisters — the ache of being left behind. Again.

She asked once, then twice — “Please, Meg, can I come?” Her voice wobbling at the edge of hope. When she was denied, it wasn’t the first time she’d heard no. It was just the latest in a string of quiet rejections — small, sharp things that had been piling up inside her since the moment Laurie first looked at Jo and not at her. Since she was mocked for dreaming in bold colors while Jo wrote hers in ink.

She didn’t have a piano, like Beth. She didn’t have gloves or charm, like Meg. She didn’t have Jo’s talent or fire — only the hunger to be seen, to belong. And in that moment, watching her sisters leave without her, watching Jo take her place beside Laurie, Amy’s heart clamped down around the unfairness of it all.

“You’ll be sorry for this, Jo March. You will. You’ll regret this.”

She wasn’t calculating when she said it — just wounded. But her pain wanted proof. Her pain wanted Jo to feel what it was to be shut out, to have something precious taken and tossed away.

And so she burned it.

Not just the pages, not just the story — but the one thing Jo truly loved. It was the cruelest kind of precision, but to Amy, it felt just. Not because it was right — but because it was finally enough. Enough to make Jo feel her absence. Enough to matter.

She fed each page to the fire with a kind of awful satisfaction, watching the words curl and blacken, the same way she imagined Jo’s indifference would. She wanted Jo to cry — to hurt — to scream — and Jo did.

But then came the silence. The collapse. Jo’s face when she realized what had been lost — not just a story, but hours of love, of thought, of her very self — was more than Amy had prepared for. And suddenly the fire wasn’t righteous anymore. It was just destruction.

“You wicked girl! You wicked, wicked girl! I can never write it again!”

Jo’s grief was the kind of fury that doesn’t break quickly. And Amy’s apology, when it finally came, was not clever or cute — it was honest, halting, thick with tears.

“It’s just that the only thing you care about is your writing, so it’s not as if I could hurt you by ruining one of your dresses. And I really did want to hurt you.”

There, at last, it was said. Not jealousy. Not malice. Just the aching wish to be felt — the same longing that led her to pine for limes, to impress schoolgirls, to play queen in a borrowed library, to declare herself to Laurie, and to beg for an invitation to the theatre.

She was at fault. Utterly, deeply, inexcusably.

But she was also a child with too much longing and not enough room to carry it.

Forgiveness did not come quickly, nor should it have. Jo’s anger was real, and her pain was earned. But so too was Amy’s sorrow — the kind that bloomed only once she realized she had not gotten even, but only lost her sister’s love.

She wanted Jo to hurt — and she succeeded. But she did not expect how much it would hurt her in return.

Jo, for all her brilliance and warmth, could be cruel. Her anger didn’t simmer like Amy’s — it burst, wild and scorching, capable of withering anything in its path. That morning by the river, Jo chose silence. Not neutrality, not restraint — but pointed silence, the kind that closes a door with no key. Amy had begged to be included, pleaded in the awkward, hopeful way that only a younger sister can, but Jo turned her back. The fury in her heart had narrowed her world to one satisfaction: punishment. And in that punishment, she became as unkind as she had once accused Amy of being.

But the ice broke.

And in that shattering moment, so did Jo’s anger. The sound of Amy’s scream — sharp, terrified, and unmistakably real — cracked through every bitter thought. She saw, suddenly, what hate could cost. Her feet barely moved, her body trembling, but her heart shattered open in a way she hadn’t let it do the night before. My sister, my sister, she cried, all the rage replaced by raw, terrified love. Because the truth was: Jo had burned, too — not pages, but bridges. And only when she nearly lost Amy did she realize how much she needed her.

Amy, for her part, hadn’t come to the river in defiance. She came because Meg told her: kindness would heal this. She came because she loved Jo more than she loved her own pride. And that, in the end, was what saved them both — not the breaking of the ice, but the mending of something deeper: two girls, wild and willful, so different and yet made of the same storm.

Even after the fire and the ice, even after Jo’s rage and the unspoken silences that hang thick in the air between them, Amy still lingers at the edge of her sisters’ world, trying to find her place in it. When she pouts, “I wish I could go to the debutante ball,” it is not mere childish petulance. It is the voice of a girl who has spent her life in the second row — not cast out, exactly, but never quite centered either. There is something painfully earnest in her wishing, something that reveals how deeply she wants to be part of the grand, unfolding drama that her sisters seem already immersed in — Jo with her writing, Meg with her courting, even Beth with her music and quiet grace. The ball, for Amy, is not just a party — it is a portal. A symbol. A way into the glittering adult world where choices matter and where she might finally be seen as more than the baby sister who always wants too much.

But Amy is not idle in her desire. She is hungry — yes — but she is also strategic, aware of the systems that shape the world and how one might navigate them with a touch of wit and polish. When Laurie introduces her to Fred Vaughn — a boy of good breeding, British charm, and obvious future prospects — Amy’s voice doesn’t flinch. “Remember the name Amy March,” she says with surprising force, her eyes locked, her smile steady. There is no hesitation in her ambition, no apology. She is still a girl in ribbons and curls, but she speaks like someone who already sees the road ahead — the salons of London, the galleries of Europe, the kind of life where beauty and cleverness might finally be rewarded.

She understands that power wears many masks — and while Jo might wear hers in ink and rebellion, Amy wears hers in lace and perfect posture. But power is power. And Amy intends to have it.

Still, for all her calculated charm and social poise, Amy’s heart is not made of glass. When Jo, raw and shivering with grief after cutting off her hair to pay for their father’s passage home, collapses into tears in the hallway, it is Amy who finds her. There is no speech, no performance — just a quiet folding of arms, a mutual understanding that this is a sorrow only sisters can carry. “It’s my hair,” Jo sobs, and Amy, blinking back tears of her own, whispers, “I would feel the same way.” And she would. Amy is not indifferent. She is not cruel. She simply wants to be let in, to have her pain count as much as everyone else's, to be seen not as vain or petty, but as someone with a full and feeling heart.

And then — in the silence that illness brings — Amy is sent away.

It is not punishment, but protection. With Beth sick, and the March home tense and feverish, Aunt March’s cold, well-ordered world becomes Amy’s exile. She is not told what to make of this shift, only that she must leave, and so she goes, packing her sketchbooks and her French grammar with the silent understanding that once again, she is apart.

Aunt March’s house is large and still, lined with oil portraits and stiff chairs that no one ever sits in. It smells like dust and sternness. Amy studies diligently, her handwriting tight and elegant, her brushstrokes neat, precise. She is trying to be good. Not just well-behaved, but good in the way Aunt March values — composed, refined, worthy of something more.

It is in the hush of one such day that Aunt March calls her over.

“Amy? Come here.”

Amy sets down her work and obeys, folding her hands neatly as she approaches. She perches beside Aunt March on the settee, back straight, shoes aligned.

“If you are very good,” Aunt March says, holding up her hand with a ring glinting on her finger, “one day this ring will belong to you.”

Amy’s eyes widen, but she does not squeal. She marvels, but she does not gush. There is something terribly grown-up in the way she whispers: “Really?”

Aunt March nods, brisk and satisfied. “You are your family’s hope now. Beth is sick, Jo is a lost cause, and Meg... well, Meg has had her head turned by a penniless tutor. It will be up to you to support them all, and your indigent parents in their old age. So you must marry well, and save your family.”

The words settle on Amy like snow — quietly, heavily. She does not protest. She does not cry. She simply listens. A child, still, but one who understands. There is no romance in Aunt March’s warning, no kindness in the task she bestows. It is not a gift. It is a burden, dressed in velvet. But Amy accepts it — not because she wants to be a martyr, but because she knows, with an eerie clarity, that if no one else will secure the March name, she must.

Aunt March dismisses her with a wave of her hand. “That’s all I wanted to say to you. You can go finish your... little painting.”

And Amy, now more woman than girl, rises. She does not argue. She does not look back. She picks up her brush and returns to her work, painting quietly in a house where silence has sharp edges, and where ambition — for the first time — is not a sin, but a necessity.

So this is where I’ll leave Amy — for now. I’ve spent so many paragraphs tracing her childhood, trying to follow her as she tugs at hems and peeks through doorways, always just a few steps behind her sisters, trying so hard to keep up. I’ve watched her reach for limes and laughter and invitations, and I’ve watched her be dismissed, misunderstood, and sometimes cruel. But all of it — the manuscript, the skating, the rings and the gowns and the drawings — all of it has only convinced me more deeply that Amy March was never selfish. She was never vain. She was a girl who wanted to belong. A girl who wanted to be loved not in spite of her ambition, but because of it.

There’s something in her I recognize — maybe because I, too, have felt that particular ache: to be taken seriously, to be let in. Amy learns quickly that to be seen as delicate is not the same as being respected, and so she begins to shape herself into someone who can wield charm like armor. The moment with Aunt March, where she is quietly told she is her family’s last hope, wrecks me every time. Because it’s said so flippantly, so coldly — but Amy hears it. She takes it in. And she decides that if she must be their hope, she’ll be a brilliant one. She’ll make it count.

This essay has gotten long — far longer than I meant it to — and yet it still only scratches at what Amy becomes. I haven’t even begun to talk about Laurie, or the way she grows into herself while abroad, or how she makes sense of love and duty and desire. So that will be part two. But I wanted to pause here, with little Amy, still in her boots, still pressing her face against the glass of the grown-up world. Because I think before we can understand the woman she becomes, we have to understand the girl she was.

Still, I feel like I’ve said what I needed to say: Amy was never small. She was never just “the youngest.” She wasn’t a villain or a joke. She was a girl who burned bright, who wanted to be extraordinary — and who quietly, determinedly, was. Part two is coming. I’m not done with her yet. But, I think — if you’ve come this far with me — maybe you’re starting to see her a little differently too.