Little Women

Greta Gerwig’s latest movie based on Louisa May Alcott’s novel will take you into a female world in which conventions are defied, questioned and challenged by four sisters. Indeed, these four women on the brink of emancipation shatter the traditional image of upper-middle class young ladies whose role (and even duty) was to get married and comply with the rules society had set for them.

This lively and rather fast-paced trailer (below)  will enable your students to not only get a glimpse of what life was like for women at that time but also to feel the brewing change embodied by Jo and her sisters.

This work on Little Women can be a good introduction to a sequence on coming-of-age stories. (Keep it in mind for LLCER Terminale Thématique « Expression et construction de soi », Axe d’étude : Initiation, apprentissage). It is also a good addition to study of To Kill a Mockingbird or The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (LLCER Première oeuvres intégrales), both coming-of-age novels.

Vocabulary and structures

• Describing people: look / sound / seem
• Linkwords: contrast (whereas, yet…) and paradox (however…)
  • cause (as, because…) and consequence (that’s why, therefore…)
  • adding ideas: moreover, what’s more, furthermore…
  • justifying / explaining : insofar as / inasmuch as / since / as
• Preterite / present
• Hypotheses: be likely to / be bound to / must / may be…
• Activities: running, dancing, acting…
• Social status / background: well-off, affluent, upper-middle class, aristocracy...

Culture

• A classic American coming-of-age novel