Book Laurie Goes Through A Personal Transformation (That has never been adapted)
When Amy and Laurie are in Nice the role that Amy takes is traditionally seen as more masculine. She is stern but not provocative.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01nPvhMxcrg&ab_channel=LittleWomenChannel
The adult Amy is quite a catch she is worldly and uses all the right words. She even gives Laurie good advice on how he could win Jo´s love or at least gain her respect but most of all Amy wants Laurie to shape up his act for his own sake. At the same Laurie reminds Amy doesn´t love a better option than money. Amy´s lecture proves how deliberately Laurie was feeding his heartache out of spite. She was right to lecture him and the only one who got through to him. Also to be noted Fred wanted to marry Amy despite her being poor because Amy was a true lady and Fred genuinely liked her. Yet the reason why Amy wanted to marry him was that she could take care of her family in her heart she knew that it was wrong for both Fred and her and Laurie reminded Amy to examine her own heart. After leaving Nice Laurie went back to his grandfather. The relationship between the two has improved a great deal since he first moved to live with him but now it is even better because of the internal change that has started to happen inside Laurie.
When he looked about him for another and a less intractable damsel to immortalize in melody, memory produced one with the most obliging readiness. This phantom wore many faces, but it always had golden hair, was enveloped in a diaphanous cloud, and floated airily before his mind’s eye in a pleasing chaos of roses, peacocks, white ponies, and blue ribbons. He did not give the complacent wraith any name, but he took her for his heroine and grew quite fond of her, as well he might, for he gifted her with every gift and grace under the sun, and escorted her, unscathed, through trials which would have annihilated any mortal woman.
Laurie goes to Vienna to compose but as being said it does not go that well and it is easier for Laurie to give up the idea of Jo being the lead of his great operetta than giving up the idea of himself as a romantic hero. Now the phantom that looks like Amy has become part of Laurie´s fantasy projection but this time Laurie himself breaks this bubble. He comes to the conclusion that he does not possess a genius. He goes through the same process that Amy did. He has talent but he lacks vision. Largely thanks to Amy´s candidness Laurie grows a great deal during this winter. One way of reading Laurie´s time in Vienna is to see it as a rite of becoming independent. He comes to the conclusion that he needs a real earnest job which he had never wanted to do before and that is when Laurie goes to work for his grandfather. 100 years of Little Women adaptations. Not once have they included Laurie´s growth process and his time in Vienna.
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