There are a lot of pop culture landmarks that I missed as a result of growing up largely without a television and with a cultural worldview that was obsessively centered on books for the first eighteen years of my life to the exclusion of almost everything else. As longtime readers of this blog will know, that’s something that I try to make up for, mixing in classics with a firehose-like stream of new movies, television shows, books, and movies. And over the winter break, I knocked one of the titans off the list when I finally sat down to watch The Godfather. It’s a tremendous movie, and watching it made me want to revisit an unexpected but surprisingly logical companion piece: the 1994 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.

If The Godfather is about Michael Corleone’s inability to escape his father’s business, and about men’s desire to become their fathers, Little Women is about the ways women help their daughters transcend their own experiences. Just as women are nearly invisible figures in The Godfather, from the passivity of Vito’s wife to the movie’s relatively slim treatment of Kay’s motivations for accepting Michael’s proposal after his return, men are relatively secondary figures in Little Women. The girls’ father and Marmee’s husband is absent for almost the entire first half of the novel and the movie, Mr. Lawrence, their wealthy next-door neighbor is a kindly but distant patriarch, his son Laurie is an interloper, if a beloved one, and Mr. Brooke and Professor Bhaer are suitors rather than fully-developed characters.

Instead, the main drama is between the sisters themselves, and in the question of their mother’s hopes for them. Where Vito Corleone dreams that his son Michael will become not just legitimate, but a legitimate leader in society, Marmee harbors more modest aspirations, governed by both gender and time period, for her little women. She hopes that her daughters will be able to marry for love, that they’ll have the opportunity to see something of the world beyond Concord. All of Vito’s dreams are frustrated, his son Sonny is gunned down while doing the family’s work, his adopted son Tom enters the family business even though his ethnicity might have excluded him from it, his great hope Michael kills a police officer and a Mafia rival and ends up becoming the next Don Corleone, and his son Fredo ends up dead on Michael’s orders.

But in their own ways, Marmee’s daughters fulfill her aspirations. Meg, her oldest, marries modestly, but for true love, and for a husband who is more present in her life than Marmee’s husband was in hers, and who, unlike Meg’s father, doesn’t impose difficulties on the family in pursuit of his political ideals. Beth dies young, a fate no mother would choose for her daughter, but she leaves the world in a perfect and brave communion with her family’s Christian ideals. Amy, her youngest, marries both well and for love, gaining security for her whole family without compromising her ideals. And Jo, her second-oldest daughter, travels furthest beyond the bounds of the role proscribed of her as a woman, tasting modest literary success and finding a husband who eventually helps her found a school where she educates the scions of wealthy families in a way that comports with Marmee’s ideals and also gives poorer children an opportunity for social promotion and intellectual advancement.

In a way, and certainly not intentionally, these very disparate works have ended up capturing the dynamics of masculinity and feminism that we live in today. Women have, through very difficult work, carved out new paths for ourselves and passed them down to the generations of women that have followed after us. Men keep getting handed down the same old archetypes of how to be a man, the same demands to avenge violence done against their families, to provide, to take responsibility that isn’t theirs, to pass judgement, to provide strength. We’ve got a lot of culture that argues that this is a tragedy in and of itself and that it can lead to dreadful ends, that the diversion of Michael’s considerable talents from the sphere where they were supposed to be useful—American public life—to another one where they’re applicable—organized crime—is a terrible waste, that the rechanneling of Walter White’s talents from science and teaching to meth production results in monstrosity. But we don’t have enough triumphs and new models, enough stories of boys growing beyond their fathers in a way that produces incredible joy for both parties. It’s no mistake that Louisa May Alcott, who gave us Little Women gave us her Little Men, the story of a woman who, having transcended the limits laid out for her, raises surrogate sons who are allowed to be more than angry, more than greedy, more than merely brave.

I was fascinated to read Deborah Weisgall’s essay on Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s, in part because she says that when she went back to the novel as an adult, “I did not recognize the story I was reading”:

What happens is fierce: Jo burns off half of Meg’s bangs when she tries to frizz her hair with a curling iron, just before a party—a party organized, like the one that opens Pride and Prejudice, to introduce eligible girls and boys. But Austen’s Bennett sisters accept as a given that looks and fortune get husbands; such a crass assessment of their marketability outrages the Marches. Next, because Jo has not invited her to the theater, Amy burns Jo’s manuscript, stories that Jo had been working on for years. Jo, in retaliation, lets Amy skate on the river without warning her that the ice is thin. Amy falls through, and Jo barely manages to rescue her. Then Jo cuts off and sells her own glorious hair—the only beautiful part of her—to buy her mother a present. Beth is pathologically shy and hardly leaves the house for fear of having to talk to people. When Laurie’s tutor declares his love for Meg, everyone is thrilled but Jo, who is bereft at the imminent dissolution of her family. She understands the heartbreak inherent in marriage and in the separation, the growing apart—and possibly the growing objectivity—that marks the end of childhood.

That pain and ferocity are part of why I liked the novels in the first place: I sobbed at the movie theater when Beth (Claire Danes) died, but Little Women was one of the first novels I read where a girl was allowed to be outraged, to be genuinely uncomfortable in her own station and her own skin. Jo March is not just the heroine of literary little girls everywhere, but of ones whose clothes don’t seem to do for them what other girls’ do, whose attempts to iron their hair result in cinders and who make do at parties, who are simmeringly angry, and often uncomfortable in their own skin and the conventions they live in. When her sister Amy, a pretty, socially successful little girl, burns Jo’s manuscript after Jo has been invited to a play and Amy excluded from the invitation, the act is such a violation because Amy is invading the territory where Jo is queen. Jo goes on to write other works, but the book Amy destroys is lost to Jo, and to us, forever. Jo’s temper is presented as dangerous, but it’s also a vital life force, the thing that propels her out of her small town outside of Boston to work in New York, where she’s exposed to new people and new ideas, and ultimately to the man who will become her husband.

And yes, it’s a novel about compromise, but also about growth. The March girls begin the novel with their castles in the air, their dreams for their future, but grow up to be women who understand that, as Megan Draper’s mother put it to her in the finale of this season of Mad Men: “The world could not support that many ballerinas.” It’s not that they’re crushed—their dreams evolve. Jo March, who spent her girlhood escaping into worlds of her own invention through her fiction, becomes a woman who constructs an alternate reality in the real world, through her school for boys and girls at Plumfield. Amy, who despite her ruin of Jo’s work had artistic ambitions of her own, ultimately becomes a patron rather than a full-time artist herself, though she continues to sculpt. Meg, who wanted nothing more to be a wife, ends up a mother to two remarkable children, and in the novel’s sequel, Little Men, is widowed early, becoming the accidentally independent woman Jo always planned to be. Little Women is a fierce novel because that’s what required to stand up to the uncertainty of life and to adapt rather than be crushed by it.

“I am angry nearly every day of my life,” Mrs. March tells Jo in the novel, explaining to her daughter that she’s tried to control and transmute her anger rather than to give in to it. Being a woman, it turns out, is a lot like being Bruce Banner.