Amy and Laurie Ship
Question I got in Tumblr
Do you ship Amy and Laurie?? And do you think they balance each other out and genuinely love each other?
I personally do think so (and I ship them haha) but I'd love to have your opinion too! There's a lot of contention in the fandom around their relationship and it always infuriates me, I'd love to know what you think!!
Thanks for the question! I do ship Amy and Laurie. I am actually working an episode for season 3 of the Little Women podcast where I´ll be analyzing the chapter "learning to forget" where Laurie proposes to Amy.
The bottom line is I think Laurie´s relationship with Amy is completely different from that with Jo. With Jo, he is annoyed when she tells him what to do, like in the book there are moments when Laurie is genuinely annoyed when Jo preachers him about neglecting his studies etc. Laurie gets easily agitated by Jo and Jo by him. I don´t think he was in love with Jo in the begin with, being with Jo is almost an excuse not to grow and worry about the future.
With Amy, it´s the total opposite. After re-reading the chapter, it´s amazing how he thinks of Amy´s words (aren´t you ashamed of yourself) and decides to change and Laurie as a character becomes a lot more pleasant to be around. He literally turns from a boy into a man and becomes a working member of society (with Jo he would have stayed as Lazy Laurie).
When I read Christine Doyle´s essay (Singing Mignon´s song) I had a moment of clarity about relationships. There is a quote about Louisa May Alcott highlighting the idea of how a person grows and gets into a higher level of self-understanding when they move on from an unsatisfying relationship to one that works.
That´s when I was like "Oh now I get it, that was Alcott´s quest all along". These couples represent that idea. When Jo falls in love with Friedrich, he completes her because he helps her to become the best version of herself and the same goes with Laurie when he is with Amy.
I think both couples suffer from unbelievable mischaracterization in the movies. Between 1933 and 2019 films the filmmakers put a lot more effort into romanticizing Jo and Laurie and then minimizing the importance of Jo/Friedrich and Amy/Laurie's relationships presenting them as afterthoughts.
These quotes that Alcott wrote about the character´s "transference" she penned out already as a teen, so it definitely was not an afterthought and I believe we can trace a lot of that to Louisa May Alcott´s personal relationships as well (Henry/Ladislas).
I think it is such an amazing way to look at relationships and anyone who has been in a bad and unbalanced relationship and then found a healthier one (or wished to find one) could benefit from that. So yes, Amy and Laurie and Friedrich and Jo's storylines are very important and an internal part of the story of Little Women.