Passion can be blinding

I recently watched the film “Little Women” directed by Greta Gerwig, and the main character Jo Marth reminded me of Briony Tallis in Ian McEwan’s “Atonement”. Both girls have a wild and blinding passion for writing. 

The film “Little Women” follows the young girl Josephine Marth and her poverty-stricken family throughout the plot. While the film depicts the entire Marth family the main focus is on Jo who is extremely passionate about writing and goes out of her way to prove herself as a writer in order to provide for her family. 

I found a similarity between the two girls in their passion for writing. Briony began the novel by writing her play The Trials of Arabella and continued to write and explore the world for topics to write about, which lead to her trial. Briony’s inquisitive nature and overactive imagination led her to accuse her sister Cecilia’s lover, Robbie, of rape. Robbie has to serve a sentence for a crime he never committed. These events lead Briony to steer away from her passion and take up nursing. While all of her time was occupied by her job, in her spare time she wrote and submitted a novel to a magazine, which was rejected–similar to Josephine’s first writing attempt, and due to the harsh realities both gave up their passion. 

While both girls shared a passion for writing, they choose different reasons to revisit writing. For Jo Marth, she was determined to write again for her late sister Beth and wrote about the Marth family and all the trials they faced. On the other hand, Briony finds herself writing again after Cecilia rejects her forgiveness and Briony’s only hope of atoning is telling the truth behind the events that occurred, which is why McEwan reveals to the audience that the novel is actually written in Briony’s perspective in hopes to achieve forgiveness.