Godless Adaptations

The Case Against Stripping Christianity From the Classics

Years ago, I sat in on my child’s first-grade Language Arts class.  They had just read a story about a protagonist facing a big challenge.  Perhaps a field mouse had lost its home to a tractor? Or a child had misplaced the bag of coins his mother entrusted to him? I don’t remember the details. I do remember, however, the teacher asking the class how the story mirrored their own — admittedly short — experience.

One by one, students raised their hands to volunteer examples. This was just like the time I let go of my mom’s hand at the carnival and got lost.  Or, This was just like when we were supposed to go to the park for my birthday, but it rained.

Maybe I was in a foul mood that day.  I admit to suffering not infrequent bouts of crabbiness.  But I found myself irked by the entire exercise.  The teacher was asking her students, in essence, How is this story and these characters relevant to your very particular existence? And the subtext of that question was, logically, If it’s not relevant, then why bother?

It’s one of the worst attitudes you can coax a young mind into adopting.  Literature, film, theater – these are vehicles for transcending your own very particular existence, not for reflecting it right back at you.  Art can transport you to times and places you’ll never experience; it can insert you directly into the otherwise forbidden interior of a stranger’s mind.  But all this is contingent upon your cooperation. You have to commit to flexing your imagination and stepping beyond the confines of your puny little perspective.  And that’s a nearly impossible feat if you can’t read a book or watch a movie without thinking, What does any of this have to do with me?

That’s the tricky thing about “relevance”: It’s a close cousin of narcissism.  And narcissism distorts meaning, re-shaping an artist’s work into the audience’s image.  A good example of such distortion is found in film adaptations of literary classics. In a bid for “relevance,” many adaptations shed historical context and authorial intent to reach a wider viewership.  Yet while these omissions may make classics more “relatable” to modern audiences, they also gut them of significance, even poignance.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in film adaptations that strip the Christianity from 19^th-Century literature.  Let’s take a look at a couple of fairly recent ones.

Little Women

Louisa May Alcott didn’t want to write for kids.  Her publisher asked her for a “moral book” for girls, but she had no interest, considering the genre “moral pap.” After months of procrastination, it was her father who finally forced her to start the novel that would make her famous.  Bronson Alcott was a Transcendentalist educator and philosopher whose career had stalled due to his erratic work ethic and impenetrable prose. But Louisa’s publisher agreed to print Bronson’s latest tome on the condition that she delivered her promised book.  And so, at Bronson’s prodding, she spent a frenzied ten weeks writing the first volume of Little Women.

She gave her publisher exactly what he asked for; Little Women is a profoundly moral book.  It’s also a profoundly Christian one.  True, there are no scenes depicting the March women at church, nor Mr. March serving as an army chaplain, nor the expression of any specific Christian dogma. The characters make no appeals to Christ – only to their “Father” and “Friend.” But all of this is in keeping with Alcott’s upbringing by a Transcendentalist who rubbed elbows with a lot of influential Unitarians. (Even by today’s standards, the Alcott’s Christianity was liberal, if not “loosey-goosey.”) Besides, Alcott not only devotes a chapter to the March girls re-enacting Pilgrim’s Progress, but borrows that novel’s conceits to illustrate how the girls confront the temptations of vanity, pride, and despair. The themes of self-mastery and self-sacrifice are rooted two centuries earlier, in the Christianity of Bunyan.

So why doesn’t Christianity make at least a brief appearance in modern adaptations?  The 1995 film starring Winona Ryder, the 2017 BBC series, and Greta Gerwig’s 2019 version all re-create Little Women in painstaking detail.  The costumes and sets bring Civil War-era Concord to life; not a crinoline or sausage curl are spared in the effort. By and large, the casting is spot-on, although we all know Winona Ryder is far too gorgeous a Jo.  Also by and large, the plotlines track the novel, save the addition of overtly feminist speechifying and Gerwig’s metafictional ending.

All this faithfulness to the original source material, yet I can’t recall God being forthrightly mentioned in any of these adaptations (please correct me if I’m wrong).  Does it matter? you might ask.  We understand how much Beth means to Jo without the filmmakers depicting her swearing, “If God spares Beth, I’ll try to love and serve Him all my life.” (Chapter 18, Dark Days). We know Jo has feelings for Professor Bhaer without seeing her glow as he out-argues a group of atheists and defends religion with vigor. (Chapter 34, Friends). The spirit of the story and characters is there, without the “G-word.”  So why is the absence of God a problem?

It’s a problem because without God, the moral force and heft of Little Women is lost.  Alcott frames the girls’ coming-of-age as a recognition of their participation in sin and their fight against it.  That’s obvious from the Bunyan-esque chapter headings: “Amy’s Valley of Humiliation,” “Jo Meets Appollyon,” “Meg Goes to Vanity Fair.”  Alcott depicts these battles in a charming, homey fashion, but they’re battles nonetheless — and the stakes so serious, God must be invoked to help the girls.  Without God, their struggles are downgraded to what modern audiences might call “issues”, and the girls’ striving to do better is reduced to mere “self-help”, rather than a commitment to serving their Father.

Case in point is Jo’s vicious temper and grudge-holding.  After Amy burns the only copy of Jo’s novel in a fit of pique, Jo will not forgive her.  She refuses to acknowledge Amy’s existence – so much so that, while skating with Laurie, Jo fails to warn Amy of the presence of thin ice on the pond.  Amy crashes through into the freezing water, narrowly escaping drowning, and Jo is tortured by guilt afterwards.  She unburdens herself to her mother, and Mrs. March confesses she also had a savage temper at Jo’s age.  Naturally, Jo asks her how she managed to quash it.

The BBC version tracks Alcott’s words quite closely.  Mrs. March admits she’s angry “almost every day of my life”, and that she’s only managed to control her temper, not eliminate it.  To their credit, the scriptwriters allow Emily Morton, as Mrs. March, to express gratitude to her husband for the progress she’s made: “His strengths speak to my weaknesses and help to bear me up.” And yet the writers chose to exclude Mrs. March’s final advice to Jo:

If I don’t seem to need help, it is because I have a better friend, even than Father, to comfort and sustain me. My child, the troubles and temptations of your life are beginning and may be many, but you can overcome and outlive them all if you learn to feel the strength and tenderness of your Heavenly Father as you do that of your earthly one. The more you love and trust Him, the nearer you will feel to Him, and the less you will depend on human power and wisdom. His love and care never tire or change, can never be taken from you, but may become the source of lifelong peace, happiness, and strength. Believe this heartily, and go to God with all your little cares, and hopes, and sins, and sorrows, as freely and confidingly as you come to your mother.

If the BBC conveniently ignores God, Gerwig takes it a step further, implying that Jo doesn’t need God’s help taming her temper because her volatility is actually a plus.  When Jo expresses her surprise at her mother’s admission to being angry, Mrs. March (Laura Dern) explains with a wistful smile: “I’m not patient by nature. But with nearly forty years of effort, I’m learning not to let it get the better of me.”

That’s it.  That’s all the advice Jo gets.  Her mother learned to control her temper all by herself – no God, let alone a husband, necessary.  There’s nothing a determined woman with a bit of self-discipline can’t achieve! Inspired (or perhaps shaken, Saoirse Ronan plays it ambiguously), Jo responds that she’ll aspire to do the same.  Mrs. March then says, with the same wistful smile, that she hopes Jo will do much better, but “there are some natures too noble to curb and too lofty to bend.” (You can watch the entire scene here.)

Gerwig lifted those words from a letter to Louisa May Alcott, written by her mother Abigail.  I appreciate how Gerwig was honoring their close and supportive relationship, as well as Louisa’s fiery spirit.  But it bears repeating that, at this juncture in the story, Jo’s vindictiveness almost resulted in her little sister turning into a human popsicle. Oh, honey, I know you nearly damn killed Amy — but you know what? You do you. The timing of the line was “off.” Not to mention that the whole point of Little Women is that the March sisters learn to curb and bend their natures to meet the demands of adult life, such that they become the “women” of the title.

For Mrs. March to not only give a bittersweet sigh at Jo’s viciousness, but to imply that it’s “noble”, undercuts the seriousness of Jo’s moral dilemma.  (And a moody, emotional temperament is a dilemma. If you don’t believe me, I urge you to read the diary of Anna Alcott, Louisa’s older sister.  She alludes to what it was like living under the same roof with volatile Louisa and equally volatile Abigail.  Spoiler: It wasn’t always fun.) But in Gerwig’s Little Women, Jo doesn’t need God to shape her character.  She just needs the ambition and drive to write and sell her book – and she already has those qualities, in spades.  Like her mother, she is impressively self-sufficient.  Or, to quote another Gerwig film, Jo is “Kenough.”

Anna Karenina

The psychological, thematic and narrative complexity of Anna Karenina is impossible to adapt into a 2-hour film, but Joe Wright and Tom Stoppard still gave it a brave go.  Their 2012 Anna famously staged all the St. Petersburg and Moscow scenes as theatrical set-pieces, illustrating the artifice and performative nature of city life.  I found it to be cleverly executed but exhausting, which I suppose was the point.  The relentless staginess of the city scenes contrasts with the open and naturalistic country scenes, which are dominated by the character Levin (Domhnall Gleeson), emphasizing his authenticity.

To his credit, director Wright gives Levin his due.  “Without the Levin story,” Wright told the New York Times, “Anna’s story doesn’t make sense at all — or just an incredibly bleak kind of sense at best.”

I happen to agree.  But I also think, when it came to Levin, Wright didn’t go far enough.  Specifically, he gave no screen-time to Levin’s awakened belief in God, an omission that distorts not only our ultimate understanding of Levin, but his marriage to Kitty. 

As Peter Leithart wrote in First Things, Levin begins as a rationalist, but an unhappy one.  He can’t embrace Orthodox dogma yet finds himself hungering for meaning.  Leithart summarizes Levin’s transformation:

Three experiences puncture his skepticism. Despite his indifference, he’s persuaded to have an Orthodox marriage service, which he finds hauntingly compelling. Later, Kitty accompanies Levin on a visit to his dying brother Nikolai. While Levin recoils at the dreadful sights, sounds, and smells, Kitty nurses Nikolai with relentless compassion. With Kitty at his side, Levin feels his despair and fear of death receding, the mystery of death displaced by the greater mystery of love.

Although skipping the wedding, Wright depicts this latter scene, with Kitty (Alicia Vikander) patiently tending to Levin’s alcoholic brother, along with Nikolai’s common-law wife, Masha, a former prostitute.  As Levin, Gleeson’s face registers his newfound respect and tenderness towards Kitty. However, as scripted the scene plays less as his “despair and fear of death receding” — pivotal to his budding faith — than as his appreciation that Kitty would tolerate, let alone nurse, the socially outcast Nikolai and his scandalous girlfriend.  This is particularly so, given that Masha is played by an Indian actress, Tannishtha Chaterjee.  While perhaps unintentional, the casting choice implies Levin is more impressed by Kitty’s willingness to buck then-societal norms than the divine mysteries expressed in her attention to a dying man.

Leithart says the third experience encouraging Levin’s faith was Kitty’s long and difficult labor, during which he turns to God in prayer and finds it surprisingly easy and comforting. Wright, however, doesn’t spend time on Kitty’s labor.  It’s forgiveable; there’s only so much of a dense, nine-hundred-plus page novel you can cram into one movie.

A subsequent omission, though, I find less defensible.  At the end of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Levin converses with a peasant, Fyodor, who remarks on another villager: “He’s a righteous man.  He lives for his soul.  He does not forget God.” Intrigued, Levin asks Fyodor how one lives for the soul.  Fyodor responds: “Why, to be sure, in truth, in God’s way.” This small exchange bundles together all Levin’s disparate, vague yearnings for God and ignites them into a single flame:

The words uttered by the peasant had acted on his soul like an electric shock, suddenly transforming and combining into a single whole the swarm of disjointed, impotent, separate thoughts that incessantly occupied his mind . . . He was aware of something new in his soul, and joyfully tested this new thing, not yet knowing what it was.

“Not living for his own wants, but for God? For what God? And could one say anything more senseless than what he said? He said that one must not live for one’s own wants, that is, that one must not live for what we understand, what we are attracted by, what we desire, but must live for something incomprehensible, for God, whom no one can understand nor even define. What of it? Didn’t I understand those senseless words of Fyodor’s? And understanding them, did I doubt of their truth? Did I think them stupid, obscure, inexact? No, I understood him, and exactly as he understands the words. I understood them more fully and clearly than I understand anything in life, and never in my life have I doubted nor can I doubt about it.

Wright tries to reproduce the foregoing scene, but without any acknowledgement of God, it plays as a personal epiphany rather than soul-shaking transcendence.  After Anna’s suicide, the film cuts to Levin amongst a row of peasants, harvesting grain in a field.  Fyodor (Steve Evets) compliments Levin on living “rightly”, for his soul and not his belly. Levin then asks: “How do we know what’s ‘rightly’”?

“Just by knowin’ it,” Fyodor responds. “How else?”

“I believe in reason,” Levin counters.

“Reason. Was it reason that made you choose your wife?”

Levin suddenly straightens and Wright illuminates his face in sunlight.  He hurries home to Kitty, who is bathing their newborn child, and announces: “I understood something.” Although Kitty asks for an explanation, none is given, and the scene ends with him cradling the baby tenderly in his arms. 

I suppose there’s an argument that Wright is implying Levin has discovered God.  After all, Wright shows he’s discovered love, at least the marital and familial variety, which Tolstoy regarded as sacred.  But if reason didn’t cause Levin to choose his wife, what did? His gut intuition? Ultimately, the unwillingness of the film to make his faith explicit undermines Levin and Kitty’s marriage as a foil to Anna and Vronsky’s.  For Tolstoy, Levin and Kitty’s union is a manifestation of God’s holiness.  For Wright, their union reads more as a really good match. Modern audiences are given the impression that Levin and Kitty’s marriage “worked” because they shared “compatible values” – something any dating app search algorithm can help you with. 

Another glaring omission of God occurs in Anna’s suicide.  In the novel, just before Anna throws herself in the path of the oncoming train, she sets down her bag and is immediately suffused with long-buried emotion:

A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed herself.  That familiar gesture brought back into her soul a whole series of memories of her childhood and girlhood, and suddenly the darkness that had covered everything for her was torn apart, and life rose up before her for an instant with all its bright past joys.

Moreover, once struck by the train, Anna exclaims “Lord, forgive me everything!” — as Tolstoy says, “feeling it impossible to struggle.”

Contrast this with Wright’s version, where Keira Knightley as Anna experiences no “bright past joys” before her suicide, only teary-eyed despair.  Once she meets the train, Knightley merely exclaims, “Forgive me!”  Over the sound of screeching brakes, the camera near-instantly cuts to Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), whose haunted look suggests he’s intuited her death.  This misleadingly implies that Anna and Vronsky’s love is so powerful as to be supernatural, a la Jane Eyre and Rochester.  Even worse, Anna seems to be begging Vronsky’s forgiveness, not God’s.

Wright portrays a suicide who, in her final moments, wants absolution from the lover who suffered her jealous paranoia and will be sure to suffer her death. Tolstoy portrays a suicide who, in her final moments, experiences the lost innocence and goodness of life, and wants absolution from God for her self-annihilation.  Both are tragic, but Tolstoy’s version is more poignant, as he intimates all the “bright past joys” could be Anna’s once more, and that in taking her own life, she’s destroying a sacred gift.

The Relevance of Christianity in a Post-Christian World

A few years back, the non-believer and historian Tom Holland published Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.  Holland’s thesis is that what modern Westerners intuit as moral and ethical have deep roots in Christianity.  Indeed, Holland argues Christianity so thoroughly permeated Western culture that we now unthinkingly accept such values as equality and compassion for the weak as basic human rights, not realizing the great debt these owe to the Christian tradition.

This is yet another reason why erasing God from the classics makes little sense on grounds of “relevancy”: It may be a Post-Christian world, but we’re still swimming in Christianity.  Isn’t it only right and proper to give credit where it’s due?  And isn’t failing to do so a distortion of meaning?

In Gerwig’s Little Women, for example, Mrs. March is seen organizing war relief efforts with Black women, and the school Jo launches at the end of the film is racially integrated.  If the film had made any explicit mention of God, or of the March family’s faith, this would have at least nodded to Unitarians, Quakers, and other Christian denominations that spearheaded the abolitionist movement.  Without that nod, modern viewers are led to believe the Marches are just being “nice”, as any well-adjusted person would by today’s standards.  It dilutes the moral significance of the March’s actions and grafts 21^st-Century secular values onto a 19^th-Century Christian world.  And in doing so, a classic becomes less a vehicle for understanding where we come from than a mirror for staring right back at our present-day selves.