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Whispers in the DarkThe Fiction of Louisa May AlcottKeyser, Elizabeth Lennox Paper Edition, $18.00s Paper ISBN: 0-87049-906-8 Status: In Print Publication Date: 
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DescriptionFor decades readers traditionally accepted Louisa May Alcott's sentimental portrayal of the domestic world of women and children as evidence of her wholehearted support of the conservative ideologies of Victorian America. The women's movement of the 1970s sparked a reexamination of Alcott's writings, revealing a more radical vein but failing to establish the extent to which this impulse was realized in her writings.In an effort to clarify Alcott's intent, Elizabeth Keyser examines representative works from each of the genres in which Alcott wrote: the sensation stories "A Whisper in the Dark," "A Marble Women," and "Behind a Mask"; the children's classics Little Women, Little Men, and Jo's Boys; and the novels for adults Moods, Work, and Diana and Persis. Keyser discerns in all three genres self-portraits or metafictions, that convey what it meant to be a Victorian woman writer. Alcott's wealth of allusion to other writers, such as Charlotte Brontë, Margaret Fuller, and, especially, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and of recurring motifs such as textiles, texts, and theatricals (as well as paintings and sculptures) reveal her consistent subversion of conventional values for women. Keyser shows that beneath the mildly progressive feminism of her domestic and children's fiction lurks the more radical feminism of the Gothic thrillers. In some works Alcott symbolically conveys her vision of a feminist future in which men and women fulfill their androgynous potential and live in a harmonious state of equality. But in her most sustained critique of gender relations, the Little Women trilogy, Alcott betrays grave misgivings about the possibility of such a future. From this dichotomy of perspectives emerges a complex interpretation of Alcott's writings—a multifaceted portrait of a feminist foremother and a sophisticated artist. The Author: Elizabeth Keyser is associate professor of English at Hollins College, Roanoke, Virginia. | |
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