Does Twitter Know that it is no longer 1868?: The Controversy of Little Women
_______________________Spoilers____________________
When Oh In-joo meets Won Sang-ah for their final standoff in the orchid room, she comes prepared with a ladybug grenade and the truth. Both cause explosions that disrupt the schemes of a maladjusted rich lady by an unlikely foe. Throughout most of this TVn/Netflix series, the writer (the great Jeong Seo-kyung) and the director (Kim Hee-won) flaunt In-joo’s negative qualities such as her recklessness and doe-eyed responses to threats of bodily harm. At the same time, they are clear to present these qualities as assets that served her in the final showdown. In hurtling towards the series conclusion, I often wondered if the they would cave to the pressures of kdrama twitter slobbering with thirst for Choi Do-il (played by Wi Ha-joon) and the desire for a basic damsel in distress rescue. Or would the writer/director make a high-feminist maneuver and reveal the naïve In-joo, performed in episodic glory by Kim Go-eun, to be a personality hoax who was actually a mastermind one-step ahead the whole time? Thankfully, the writer rejected both ends of this spectrum and showed us something that was actually faithful to the source material and to the story we had come to love and appreciate as an audience (even those of us who don’t admit it).
Alert but confused…Oh In-joo.
Throughout the drama, it was hard to put one’s finger on In-joo’s charm despite the well-spring it produced from scene to scene. Sure, she’s beautiful, embraced male attention and loved her sisters deeply; but outside of these virtues…who was she? Well, she was kind of like Meg in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women…a quiet, “flowly” but cheerful non-entity. She is not determined and astute like In-Kyung (Jo played by Nam Ji-Hyun) or talented and calculating like In-hye (Amy played by Park Ji-hu) but In-joo has a quiet reserve of strength that allows her to take literal and metaphorical beatings (as did Meg). I love that the writer removed the Jo/Amy conflict as the drama’s centerpiece (mostly because it involved a bit of duelling over Laurie) and instead promised and delivered upon a fantastic curiosity around unsung Meg. In-joo had a lot of endurance and clarity even if she is not heroic in a conventional way. She’s courageous in a way that women often are (guarding her relationships and family as well as being generally awesome) but still routinely overlooked for doing so. She also recognized the signs of domestic violence, and for this reason, understood her rival better than most of the other characters who acknowledged but are confounded by Won Sang-ah’s lunacy to their end(s)(played to creepy and infuriating perfection by Uhm Ji-won). In-joo alone seems to recognize that the villain’s motivation for inflicting pain was actually a way of enacting her own punishment for accidentally killing her mother. She was unable to reconcile the simultaneous perpetration of suffering with her own victimization from her father’s violence. Love her or hate her, Brené Brown’s sensible warning that one should “stop working your shit out on other people” hits home pretty hard in this portrayal of treachery.
And yet, that is what the internet seems to do. All. The. Time. Social media is alive with individuals freely working their shit out on others because managing their entitlement and disappointment with life (or dramas) is just too difficult. Despite Little Women’s feast of dark tones, literary value and delicate/tawdry storytelling…the drama’s conclusion was maligned by the audience, or perhaps more accurately, mourned on Twitter. When a drama doesn’t end up in a “wedding and a kiss”, the netizens take to their keyboards! This “outpouring made me worried…for both the show and for humanity.
I couldn’t believe how many people made Wi Ha-joon’s character into the drama’s hero or situated him as a “Trojan Horse” (*snore*). Look, dude was interesting because he portayed a trustworthy criminal. An intimately placed contradiction. This also made him a trope and a common one in Korean cultural production (think Kim Woo-bin in Master or Won Bin in The Man from Nowhere for example). Yet, people made him the star of the drama! Sure, he made some valiant moves, most notably ensuring that the Oh sisters and all involved received their share of the dirty money that they stole. *slow clap* The story of Oh In-joo and Choi Do-il, which was deeply romantic (even if it was not conjugal), presented him as a partner who did what we want all our treasured person to do for us: He showed up…when it counted and when it didn’t. I will give that character credit for that…but frankly nothing more.
Choi Do-il Choi Do-il-ing.
Ultimately, Choi Do-il was successful in taking his revenge, but it took him a long time to do so because he played the same game as his opponents. He tried to copy and emulate them as a way to fool but also fit in with them, as did our beloved Hwa-young (played to perfection by Choo Ja-hyun). In the case of the Oh sisters, sometimes grit and poverty are an advantage in a battle against debaucherous insanity. Not because poverty makes the characters more virtuous (as is often the claim of kdramas) but because their experience brings a different perspective, or more importantly, a different set of strategies. Won Sang-ah needed to be confronted by strategies unfamiliar to corporate elites and political wannabes, such as overt tenacity and frankness. Directness truly shook her. Enter Oh In-joo.
As people worked their own frustrations and disappointments about hetero relationships out on innocent people and innocent dramas; the main characters fell out of focus in numerous social media postings. I guarantee the writer didn’t care about the Choi/Oh couple that much and when she did, she thought she had smoothed it over with Ha Jong-ho’s (Laurie) and In-kyung’s union. The blood payment for the realization of the latter relationship had to come in the separation of the Meg and John Brooke characters. In-joo’s life was long defined by the men who treaded on it and she (like Meg) perhaps needed a break from these narratives. And who knows where In-hye’s life will end up when she gets older, but it doesn’t seem that far-fetched to believe it could be in the queer embrace of Hyo-rin. Again, the story is about the sisters sticking together in the face of danger as opposed to them getting husbands…most notably because it is no longer 1868 (when the story Little Women was first published). Cue weeping Twitter.
The continuous demand for the outdated husband-seeking conclusion of the original novel also demonstrates how little people know or care about what it was like for women during the time period that the source material was written (in South Korea or in North America). It was very hard to make much of one’s life without marriage, children or wealth and this is why that particular narrative forms the core of the original tale. But we don’t live there anymore….thankfully! Women have a few more options nowadays. Also, insisting that hetero weddings be shown at the end of all dramas that are conceived is also some super exclusionary bullshit. While I do believe South Korea is moving in this direction of legalizing these gay unions, the international tweets surrounding this show don’t help its delay! I’m not saying that I don’t believe in love or that weddings are bad or that Choi/Oh ship isn’t top notch, but I am saying that the absence of a specific relationship being realized to its fullest extent does not make this or any drama “bad”. Different endings can exist. I would also argue that many of the frankly old-fashioned reactions to this drama are indicative of why women can’t have nice drama things very often.