Louisa May Alcott and The Textual Child A Critical Theory Approach by Kristina West

CRITICAL APPROACHES TO CHILDREN‘S LITERATURE
Louisa May Alcott

and the Textual Child
A Critical Theory Approach
Kristina West
Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature
Series Editors
Kerry Mallan
Cultural & Language Studies
Queensland University of Technology
Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Clare Bradford
Deakin University
Burwood, VIC, Australia
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Kristina West
Louisa May Alcott

and the Textual
Child
A Critical Theory Approach
Kristina West
London, UK
Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature

ISBN 978-3-030-39024-2 ISBN 978-3-030-39025-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39025-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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For my Mum, Patricia Gray, with love
Acknowledgments
This book has been inspired by the scholarship and support of friends and
colleagues in the UK and US. Thanks are due to:
Lis Adams, Jan Turnquist, and everyone at Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard
House, including staff and attendees of the annual Summer Conversational
Series, for your generosity, scholarship, and inspiration.
The staff and scholars at the Houghton Library, Harvard University,
and the Concord Free Public Library, especially Leslie Perrin Wilson, for
their assistance.
Members of the Louisa May Alcott Society, who have generously
allowed me to present papers on Louisa and Bronson at the American
Literature Association conference on their behalf.
Alcott scholars and fans who have been so supportive of my work, par-
ticularly Daniel Shealy, Anne Boyd Rioux, Anne Phillips, and Joel Myerson.
Additional thanks to Christina Katopodis for our conversation on
‘Thoreau’s Flute’.
Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, Media
(CIRCL) staff, PhD students past and present, and M(Res) in Children’s
Literature students at the University of Reading. I would particularly like to
thank Professor Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Dr. Neil Cocks, Dr. Sue Walsh, and
Dr. Jessica Medhurst for their generous support, advice, and friendship. Many
further thanks to Jeremy, Ian, Anindita, Liz, Haleemah, Kia, and Sara.
More than anyone, huge thanks to my family, without whom this would
never have been written. Mike, Liv, Daniel, Debbie, Ryan, Mum, Dad,
and Allan, I love you all.
Thank you to all at Palgrave Macmillan for the opportunity and support.
vii
Contents
1 Reading Alcott’s Textual Childhood 1
2 ‘We Really Lived Most of It’: The Trouble with

Autobiography 25
3 Subverting the Sentimental Domestic 51
4 Queering the Child 79
5 Race, Disability, and Class: Alcott’s Peripheral Children105
6 A Transcendental Childhood139
7 ‘The Model Children’: Alcott’s Theories of Education161
8 Retelling Alcott in the Twenty-First Century187
Bibliography213
Index221
ix
CHAPTER 1
Reading Alcott’s Textual Childhood
Childhood and Literature

The purpose of this book is to investigate, as a body, Louisa May Alcott’s
works for and about children. In doing so, I will also consider how child-
hood is constructed within Alcott’s texts and by those who read them,
thereby questioning the basis on which assumptions about childhood in
literature are made. All too often, and despite extensive work in this area
by theorists such as Jacqueline Rose and Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, claims
that childhood is self-evident continue to thrive; and such assumptions
direct readings of the textual child as much as they construct the so-called
real child that is frequently called into being as the literary child’s point of
origin. Alcott’s literature is of particular interest in looking at childhood
via this approach because of the overwhelming critical and popular focus
on just one of her works, Little Women, with most of her novels and short
stories for children occasioning very little attention beyond the author’s
own lifetime. I therefore intend to investigate Alcott’s children’s litera-
ture, including and beyond Little Women, to consider portrayals of child-
hood within her texts and their criticism, and to ask: why analyze the
textual child at all?
In looking at Alcott’s works, I also want to consider what is at stake in
reading the child in literature from a critical perspective. In ‘Holiday
House: Grist to The Mill on the Floss, or Childhood as Text’, Lesnik-
Oberstein claims:
© The Author(s) 2020 1

K. West, Louisa May Alcott and the Textual Child,
Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39025-9_1
2 K. WEST
[C]hildhood […] usually remains a field regarded with anything from mild
amusement to derision, judged either too simple to be serious, or too pure
to be touched. The studies that have been devoted to it have equally been
seen, and often see themselves, as strictly specialized and local, if not posi-
tively marginal.1
The assumption—or bestowal—of childhood’s status as a ‘field’ positions

it as other, as separate from a default adulthood, and places it within of a
body of literature that is positioned as marginal against an assumed norm
that is designated as prior to, or beyond the need of, the qualifying term
‘field’. The ‘field’ of childhood is therefore an adult production, separated
from the normative adult world and categorized in terms of that claim to
difference and the resultant separation. Such categorizing, here, is con-
structed in terms of an excess under the critical adult judgment: childhood
is always ‘too’ much of something, ‘too simple […] too pure’, to be wor-
thy of any serious adult engagement. As such, it sits outside the boundar-
ies of what is deemed an acceptable focus of adult critical attention, with
each claim to excess providing a reason—or excuse—to stay away. And
here can also be read the adult anxiety about engaging with childhood at
all: childhood either infantilizes the adult engaging with it, with the adult
moving into what it has constructed as the child’s space, or any such
engagement brings the child into the ostensibly adult world of sexuality
and desire, through the adult rejection of its own potential ‘touch’. It is,
therefore, the adult engagement with childhood that produces the very
child it appears to be rejecting; the child that can only exist in uneasy rela-
tion to the adult who does not want it.
However, Caroline F. Levander and Carol J. Singley, in their introduc-
tion to The American Child, disagree with this perspective, claiming that
critical study is not turning away from the child, but toward it: ‘Scholars
from a wide range of disciplines have turned their attention to the child in
order to interrogate how it comes to represent, and often codify, the pre-
vailing ideologies of a given culture or historical period.’2 According to
this cultural studies approach, scholars are investigating childhood not to
discover what it is or might be, but to see what the child can tell them
about a society of which, by default, the child is not a part. In a sense, the
child does not exist here but rather represents, or even re-presents as a
mirror, that which also produces it; and its representation of culture or
period pre-exists the adult attention that, in fact, positions it as
1 READING ALCOTT’S TEXTUAL CHILDHOOD 3
that representation. In Levander and Singley’s reading, what gives the

child its value is the very re-inscription of that which it is not.
Reading the child in Alcott’s works is no more straightforward, with
different perspectives creating a variety of responses in which the textual
child is up for grabs. Is Alcott’s child an ‘adult-in-process’, as claimed by
Charles Strickland?3 Is it the biographical Louisa and her three sisters, as
read primarily through popular and critical responses to Little Women? Is
it unproblematically female, as many of Alcott’s protagonists and her read-
ers are still assumed, largely, to be? Is her child the site of Transcendental
and Romantic simplicity and innocence, in what Levander and Singley
claim is ‘the repeated figuring, in nineteenth-through late-twentieth cen-
tury American culture, of the child as a nostalgic symbol of lost innocence
and youth’?4 Is Alcott’s child also, therefore, a nineteenth-century child,
one separated by time period from other figurations of childhood and
therefore representative of the period in which it exists? This work aims to
explore some of these possibilities through the body of Alcott’s works for
and about children; not to result in any claims to a single and knowable
Alcottian child, but to look at some of the claims that have been made and
explore the varying constructions of childhood in these texts.
So, under what terms will this book question the textual child? In Bodies
That Matter, Judith Butler claims:
To call a presupposition into question is not the same as doing away with it;
rather, it is to free it from its metaphysical lodgings in order to understand
what political interests were secured in and by that metaphysical placing, and
thereby to permit the term to occupy and serve very different political aims.5
In reading ‘child’, ‘childhood’, and other related constructions, and in

seeking to understand how they operate within and between texts, I am
not arguing that these terms no longer have currency or should be aban-
doned altogether: in asking what a child is in Alcott’s works, I am not
attempting to annihilate ‘child’ from language. Rather, as Butler argues—
in terms of ‘materiality’ rather than ‘child’, although it could be argued
that it is the supposed materiality of the child that is at stake in many criti-
cal readings—I am calling ‘a presupposition into question’ in that I intend
to argue that ‘child’ is not a stable term, that its lodging is indeed ‘meta-
physical’ and can be, if not exactly freed, at least analyzed and explored in
order to consider how it operates in literature and, in particular, to look at
both what those ‘political interests’ might be, and how they are
4 K. WEST
constructed in the locating and relocating of the child in these critical and
Alcottian texts. In questioning these terms, then, I will endeavor to ana-
lyze how each term is being used, what is at stake in its usage and, indeed,
what ‘political interests’ are both secured and displaced in doing so. In
‘permit[ting] the term [‘child’] to occupy and serve very different political
aims’, however, in no way do I intend to secure a resolution whereby
‘child’ becomes stabilized; rather, it is in the question itself that the child
will be continually re-located in this work.6
In the destabilization of the term ‘child’, however, is the concurrent
problem of children’s fiction; after all, if we cannot say with any certainty
what a child is, either inside or outside of the text, how can we desig-
nate any work as about and/or for children? Anne Scott MacLeod consid-
ers this problem in her essay on the nineteenth-century textual child, and
the development of the children’s literature market from the didacticism
of the ‘rational’ era to the idealization of the Romantics, one that she posi-
tions—in American children’s literature at least—as arising from outside
the text, ‘on a wave of social concern for the children of the urban poor’.7
Yet this separation of children’s literature into two separate camps is not
without its problems, and MacLeod calls on Alcott as a writer who trou-
bles such a linear process of children’s literature development. Having
positioned the American Civil War as the marker between one era and the
other, MacLeod argues: ‘Closest in some ways to prewar fiction, curiously
enough, was the novel that has survived longest […] Louisa May Alcott’s
[post-war novel] Little Women’.8 Yet as MacLeod proceeds to argue,
Alcott’s works sit on both sides of the divide, with the rationalism of Little
Women countered by both the sentimentality and the didacticism of later
Alcott novels such as An Old-Fashioned Girl and many of her short stories,
therefore disrupting assumptions of a linear development. Even Little
Women itself destabilizes this claim, with some faults punished in a didactic
fashion—the death of Beth’s bird due to her neglect, for example, fol-
lowed by a well-meaning Marmee homily on fulfilling one’s duties—while
the resolution of other faults is more complex: Jo’s anger at Amy for burn-
ing her manuscript results in the punishment of nearly losing her little
sister; but Amy’s anger at Jo, which resulted in the manuscript-burning, is
punished with little more than an unexpected dousing in cold water.
Perhaps it is a result of this complexity that Little Women’s reputation
survives where other Alcott fiction has been all but lost to history.
The Little Women Legacy9

In 2018, the first part of Alcott’s seminal novel of sisterhood and family
life, Little Women, celebrated its 150th anniversary. From the initial print
run of 2000 copies for Part One, published on 30 September 1868, fol-
lowed by Part Two (published as a separate text and under various names,
including Good Wives, outside of the US), delivered to her publishers,
Roberts Brothers of Boston, on New Year’s Day 1869, the novel has
become a childhood favorite and a staple of ‘top 100 novel’ lists.10 The
sesquicentennial has provoked celebrations ranging from a BBC/
Masterpiece-PBS television adaptation, screened in the UK for Christmas
2017 and in the US the following May; critical texts, including Anne Boyd
Rioux’s Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why it Still
Matters; celebratory anthologies, such as Alcott’s Imaginary Heroes: The
Little Women Legacy; and online celebrations including the Little Women
Sesquicentennial blog, with scholars and writers each looking at a chapter
of the text for a year.11 New editions of the text, both popular and schol-
arly, have been released, and at least two further Little Women movies have
been produced to mark the anniversary.12 Despite complaints that the text
is no longer being taught in schools, its popularity in the US and across
the world shows no signs of abating.13
The reasons for its enduring popularity are many and varied. MacLeod
argues: ‘Characterization is at the heart of the book’s remarkable peren-
nial appeal. […] It is Jo—her roughness, her ambition, her earnest yearn-
ing to be good; and above all, her humanness, good, bad, and mistaken—to
whom every reader responds.’14 Rioux comments: ‘It would seem that
Alcott’s fable of growing up female hasn’t grown less relevant after all. Jo’s
example as a non-conformist is as vital as ever.’15 And John Matteson, in
the introduction to his 2016 The Annotated Little Women, claims: ‘By
representing its miracles of love and togetherness as difficult but possible,
the novel encourages us to try harder, to be more accepting of one anoth-
er’s failings, all in the faint but persistent hope that we, too, can resemble
the Marches.’16 Each of these readings has its own perspective on Little
Women’s enduring popularity, yet there is one dominant note: the rela-
tionship between the fictional March family—Jo, in particular—and the
reader. It is Jo’s ups and downs, what MacLeod terms her ‘humanness’,
that ‘every reader responds’ to, although that response is neither qualified
nor quantified. Rioux claims Jo as an ‘example’, constructing the reader by
default in a relationship in which s/he can, or should, learn. And Matteson
6 K. WEST
does something similar, in claiming that Little Women ‘encourages us’ and
that there is a hope in this claim to ‘us’ that ‘we, too, can resemble the
Marches’. Any claim to reader response is, of course, problematic: no two
readers are the same, and quantifying response is a tricky science. Yet the
common thread here is that of education: that we as readers—whoever we
are—do, or should, learn from the text, and take its characters as models
for our own lives outside of its status as fiction. In this sense, although
Little Women is frequently claimed to be less didactic than Alcott’s other
works that are assumed to be for children, a lesson is still desired—by
scholars, at least—and literature is positioned via these adult responses as
a tool for personal growth, no matter the age, gender, or status of
the reader.
Not that reactions to Little Women, from the time of publication to the
current day, have been uncritically admiring, however. From the young
fans who wrote to Alcott after the publication of Part One, demanding
that Jo marry Laurie and were disappointed by the ‘funny match’ Alcott
decided on instead to appease the publisher who would not let Jo remain
a ‘literary spinster’, to the UK’s The Guardian newspaper, which marked
the release of the 2017 BBC/PBS adaptation with an article entitled ‘The
Big Trouble with Little Women’, Alcott’s tale—particularly Part Two—
continues to disappoint and challenge its readers as much as it inspires and
validates them.17 Some feminist critics complain that Alcott sold her ‘little
women’ out in their eventual marriages and what they read as subservi-
ence and loss of careers.18 Other commentators claim that the novel’s pri-
mary audience has shifted away from young girls to adult women, who
view it through a haze of nostalgia for their own lost childhood, despite its
history of appealing to all ages and genders of readership.19 And yet, it
continues to be read, watched, admired, and imitated; since its original
publication, Little Women has never been out of print.20
However, the three (or four) books comprising the Little Women series
were not Alcott’s only works aimed at the burgeoning market for chil-
dren’s fiction: her bibliography reveals an astonishing list of novels, short-
story collections, poetry, and non-fiction writing. These were supplemented
by what Alcott termed her ‘blood-and-thunder’ novels and stories, lurid
potboilers aimed at the adult market and intended to make money for the
struggling author who claimed to prefer this work to writing ‘moral pap
for the young’.21 Yet Alcott’s wider children’s oeuvre is always constructed
as other to their better-known sister, rarely featuring within discussions of
her work, unless within a limited academic discourse on children’s fiction
or as a basis for comparison with the more successful Little Women. So

where is the sustained response to Alcott’s 1880 novel, Jack and Jill? Or
for the two-part series about Rose Campbell, Eight Cousins, and Rose in
Bloom? Alcott’s short-story collections fare no better: Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag,
Lulu’s Library, and many others have been consigned to on-demand
printers or vintage editions. And Alcott’s reputation as a poet, such as it is,
is limited to ‘In the Garret’ and ‘My Beth’ from Little Women and, for
Transcendentalist scholars and historians, ‘Thoreau’s Flute’, mourning
the death of the eponymous writer and Alcott’s neighbor and contempo-
rary. Interest in her non-fiction writing is similarly limited to Alcott schol-
ars and enthusiasts.
Some critics have considered why this might be. Janice M. Alberghene
and Beverly Lyon Clark argue: ‘Alcott is sometimes dismissed because of
her associations with children.’22 Further, they propose that ‘reengage-
ment with Alcott […] sometimes takes the form of attempts to rescue a
token work from the children’s ghetto, leaving the ghetto intact. Yet
tokenism can be—and seems to be now—the first step towards recon-
struction and re-vision’.23 This work will consider why so little attention is
paid to Alcott’s other novels and short stories for children beyond Little
Women, with a reading of these texts and the issues raised by their exclu-
sion from, or by, a popular readership. However, this is not simply an
exercise in resurrection or recovery for its own sake; rather, I intend to
read Alcott’s textual constructions of childhood to explore issues such as
education, domesticity, gender, race, and Alcott’s relationship to the
nineteenth-century Transcendentalism that has been argued to inspire
and/or inform her texts. For by ignoring these works in favor of a narrow
focus on Little Women, criticism risks not just rendering these works
peripheral, but failing to sufficiently represent the variety of Alcott’s tex-
tual children.
Writing an American Childhood

Alcott famously wrote Little Women over a period of just a few months at
the request of her publisher, Thomas Niles, who asked her to write a book
for girls in September 1867.24 Her journal records: ‘Niles, partner of
Roberts, asked me to write a girls book. Said I’d try. [Horace] Fuller asked
me to be the Editor of [children’s magazine] Merry’s Museum. Said I’d
try. Began at once on both new jobs, but didn’t like either.’25 This lack of
enjoyment for her task may have been why Alcott delayed serious work on
8 K. WEST
Little Women until May of the following year, with the first twelve chapters
sent to Niles in June; Niles pronounced them ‘dull’, and Alcott agreed.
After all, Alcott wrote, ‘I never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters,
but our queer plays and experience may prove interesting, though I doubt
it.’26 However, this ‘girls book’ was not only to become Alcott’s ‘golden
egg’, but to provide the beginning of a career as a recognized children’s
writer; if also, in some sense, its apotheosis.27
Yet if her status as a popular children’s author had its inception in the
reception accorded Little Women, Alcott’s career as a writer for children
began many years earlier, with the publication of her first book, Flower
Fables (1854), a collection of fairy stories told and dedicated to Ellen
Emerson, the eldest daughter of her father’s friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Concord neighbor, Alcott family benefactor, and spearhead of the
Transcendentalist movement in New England.28 Alcott’s modesty—or
lack of faith in her abilities as a writer for children—was evident in the
covering letter to Ellen in which she wrote: ‘when you have read this story
pop it into the fire or some little corner where no one will see it’.29 She
evidenced more pride in its publication, referring to it in a letter to her
mother as ‘my “firstborn”’; however, she qualified this by stating that ‘I
hope to pass in time from fairies and fables to men and realities’.30 This
statement from Alcott speaks to a construction of childhood and adult-
hood not as binaries but as a process of development through which one
can, or should, pass. Yet this claim, qualified as it is by ‘hope’, also disrupts
that linearity: there is no surety that Alcott will pass from writing about
one to focusing on the other, from what she constructs as the literature of
‘fairies and fables’ appropriate only to childhood to her claimed goal of
‘men and realities’. Time may pass, but the transition may never be made.
While Alcott did write of men and of women too—the ‘realities’ are ques-
tionable—in her blood-and-thunder tales, her literary focus on children
and childhood continued after her success with Little Women in 1868;
although I will continue to trouble what we might read as ‘child’, both
within Alcott’s text and as reader of these texts, throughout this work. In
reading these books as ‘for children’ at this point, I am referring primarily
to modern marketing practices that insist on a difference between child
and adult readers and on the suitability of texts for each. Despite the more
recent category of Young Adult (YA) fiction in many bookstores and
online stores, Little Women is most frequently categorized as for children.
Part Two of Little Women was released in 1869, and was succeeded by
novels including An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Eight Cousins; or, The
Aunt-Hill (1875), Rose in Bloom: A Sequel to ‘Eight Cousins’ (1876),

Under the Lilacs (1877), and Jack and Jill: A Village Story (1880). Alcott’s
subsequent short-story collections for children were numerous, and
included Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag (six volumes, 1872–1882), Spinning Wheel
Stories (four volumes, 1884–1888), and Lulu’s Library (three volumes,
1886–1889).31 Unpublished Alcott juvenilia, retrieved by Madeleine Stern
in 1954, includes Jamie’s Wonder Book (1864), and the published but
largely unavailable Will’s Wonder Book (1868).32 Many of the shorter works
(and some longer, including the opening chapters of An Old-Fashioned
Girl) were published and/or serialized in children’s magazines prior to
their publication in book form. Each of these works enjoyed varying levels
of success, especially in Alcott’s home market.33 Alcott’s reputation as a
children’s writer also preceded Little Women to some extent, not just with
the publication of Flower Fables, but followed by numerous short stories
in magazines and two further short-story collections, The Rose Family
(1864) and Morning-Glories and Other Stories (1867), prior to the release
of her most successful book. And despite the critical approbation heaped
on Little Women as an early form of realism, Alcott also produced many
fantasy stories, although her reputation as a writer of fantasy is all but
forgotten.34
Two possible reasons (among others) suggest themselves as to why
these novels and short-story collections have not enjoyed the enduring
critical attention of Little Women: one is the problematic status of female
authors within claims to the nineteenth-century canon; the other is in the
works’ very focus on childhood, especially in terms of what Lesnik-
Obserstein reads as the untouchability of the child and its status as other
to the critical adult. In addition, Little Women was published into an
emerging American market for children’s literature, and at a time when
the fashion for didactic children’s literature had not entirely faded; while
Little Women is often discussed in terms of its subversion of such literary
norms, if problematically, little such discussion exists for her subsequent
children’s works, which arguably conform to the dictates of the time far
more closely and thus have fallen out of fashion as times and tastes have
changed. However, I argue that these factors can also be mobilized to
revisit Alcott’s children’s fiction, and to read how they continue to be as
relevant to a modern readership as their more successful counterpart.
Jacqueline Rose argues: ‘Children’s fiction is impossible, not in the
sense that it cannot be written (that would be nonsense), but in that it
hangs on an impossibility, one that it rarely ventures to speak. This is the
10 K. WEST
impossible relation between adult and child.’35 Fiction for and/or about
children, including—or even exemplified by—Alcott’s works is not so
simple to quantify in that it relies on an opposition that can never be sus-
tained, despite the problems of a terminology of adulthood and childhood
that always returns when unsettling such claims. In considering what it
means to say that we are reading Alcott texts as for, or about, children, we
must consider what a child is in Alcott’s works and if it can be read as such
with any stability. Alcott’s portrayals of childhood in these texts, and a
commercial assumption that these works are for children, raise questions
regarding how we can read the child as the subject of these texts and as
their reader. After all, on its release in 1868, Little Women was not mar-
keted, or read, as a book for children alone: rather, it was read by the
whole family.36 As argued by Anne Phillips and Gregory Eiselein: ‘the his-
tory of its reception reveals that Little Women has always managed to
appeal to and resonate meaningfully with different kinds of audiences—
the middle class and the working class, the native born and immigrants,
teenagers and college students, intellectuals and professional writers’—
although this claim also assumes an audience that is always, in some sense,
American.37 Yet it is in this list of differences and oppositions that we can
read an alternative history of the text to that which that produces the child
in opposition to the adult and therefore positions the text as suitable for
one rather than the other. Indeed, Joel Myerson argues that it is only with
the publication of Ednah Littlehale Cheney’s Louisa May Alcott: The
Children’s Friend in 1888 that Alcott was positioned as a children’s writer
at all.38 Yet the artificial division of adult and child is also where Little
Women—and much of Alcott’s childhood fiction—sits most comfortably.
For in its depiction of what Henry James called ‘the awkward age’, in the
transition from childhood to adulthood and its attendant difficulties,
Alcott’s fiction situates itself in that liminal space, and works to unsettle
both categories.
One issue in quantifying childhood in terms of both subject and reader-
ship is that of age, with many claims to childhood based on assumptions
of a biological status that, apparently unproblematically, situates it as child;
however, this shifts, again according to the narratives of different adult
perspectives. According to MacLeod, for example, ‘fifteen is, in every
Alcott book, the moment of transition from childhood to young adult
status’.39 However, the ‘little women’ range from twelve to sixteen at the
start of the text; Polly in An Old-Fashioned Girl is fourteen; Phebe Moore
is fifteen in the first chapter of Eight Cousins, with the eponymous cousins
‘all ages, all sizes’, later clarified by Alcott to ‘the ages varied all the way
from sixteen-year-old Archie to Jamie, who was ten years younger’; and
Anna Winslow in the short story, ‘May Flowers’, describes herself as ‘a girl
of eighteen’, one whom the narrator tells us has ‘a very innocent and con-
trite heart’.40 Needless to say, the ages of Alcott’s ‘children’ rarely remain
the same by the end of their respective novels; yet these books are still
often marketed and discussed as for and about children. Under MacLeod’s
claim, however, childhood in Alcott is fixed, unvarying, until the moment
of its transformation into something other; and although the status of
‘young adult’ troubles the binary opposition between adulthood and
childhood already discussed, it fails to take into account the adult perspec-
tive beneath which this claim must be made, and the ‘moment of transi-
tion’ itself. For these transitions—if one were to read them as absolute, as
does MacLeod—do not pass in a ‘moment’, but in months, if not years, of
education, thought, feeling, and suffering; rarely in a known and linear
predictability with an assured end result. And it is within this uncertain
period that much of Alcott’s focus lies. MacLeod’s claims to childhood as
beneath the age of fifteen can be problematized in other ways too. Viviana
A. Zelizer (among others) has argued that the American child is not a
stable and known reality, but a construct that shifts over time depending
on the needs and drivers of American society, although Zelizer also posi-
tions childhood in her work as ‘fourteen years of age or younger’.41 And
to call an American fourteen- or fifteen-year-old a child in the early twenty-
first century is problematic: terminology varies between teenagers, young
adults (especially in the marketing of fiction), adolescents, and Gen Z. The
term ‘child’ is becoming outdated earlier as the biological markers so often
invoked to signal the ending of childhood—in particular, the onset of
puberty—arrive at age ten or eleven; sometimes even younger, or occa-
sionally much later.
Childhood in Alcott’s texts is also subject to shifts that are not depen-
dent on biological age: Beth remains a child until her death, at least in the
eyes of the narrator; while Maud in An Old-Fashioned Girl performs adult-
hood as ‘a little girl of six or seven’, with ‘her tiny card-case […] her box
of dainty gloves, her jewel-drawer, her crimping pins, as fine and fanciful a
wardrobe as a Paris doll, and a French maid to dress her’.42 However, even
this reading assumes innate qualities of adulthood that are constructed as
not appropriate to childhood, and a divide between adulthood and child-
hood that is artificial at best: as Levander and Singley argue in their discus-
sion of correlations between childhood and America, it is ‘an imagined
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opposition between child and adult’ that allows these characters to shift
between childhood and adulthood beyond or even against an assumed
linear progress.43
Despite her insistence on age as the defining factor for Alcott’s chil-
dren, MacLeod argues further for a childhood that is both prior and extra
to the text of Little Women, and one that is not just dependent on age but
on its status within the nineteenth century:
The very title, Little Women, is indicative: to Alcott, as to most Americans of

her time, children were adults-in-process, apprentices to the rigors and
demands of adult life. It was not merely a matter of viewing children as
“little adults”; that was not a nineteenth-century attitude. It is simply that
Alcott, like many of her contemporaries, saw childhood primarily as a period
of preparation; children were properly engaged in learning, becoming,
forming a worthy character for the future; certainly they were not consid-
ered finished and wholly admirable as they were.44
In her assumptions of ‘the very title’, MacLeod omits to mention that the
title did not originate with Alcott but was suggested by her publishers;
although, of course, Alcott agreed to it, and the publishers could be
included within MacLeod’s claim to ‘most Americans of her time’.45 There
is also a reductive, if not dismissive, tone to MacLeod’s consideration of
childhood as construction here: ‘It was not merely […] It is simply’, and
what it ‘merely’ and ‘simply’ was is the seeing of Alcott and many—but
not all—of her contemporaries. Childhood in and beyond Alcott’s works,
in this argument, can only be a result of how it was seen by nineteenth-
century adults. And under this adult perspective on childhood, even the
child constructed by this seeing is eroded by its movement toward another
status. In being ‘properly engaged in learning, becoming, forming’ not a
character for and as child, but one that is solely ‘for the future’, the child
is process, and only ever constructed in terms of what it will, inevitably, be.
Further, Macleod’s designation of the potential adult as ‘finished and
wholly admirable’ is not one I recognize from my readings of Alcott’s
texts, as will be discussed in subsequent chapters.
In her readings of ‘most Americans of her time’ and ‘like many of her
contemporaries’, MacLeod troubles her own assumptions of the correla-
tion between childhood and age: as Zelizer has also explored, the status of
children shifts with time and with adult social constructs. Yet this whole-
sale assumption regarding ‘a nineteenth-century attitude’ fails to address
the very milieu in which Alcott found herself, one that was constantly
described in terms of change: her Transcendentalist father and neighbors
such as Ralph Waldo Emerson subscribed to the Romantic notions of the
child as the embodiment of innocence and purity, and of nature; as,
according to William Wordsworth, ‘a sleep and a forgetting’ in its move-
ment from its heavenly origins.46 Against MacLeod’s claim to children as
‘not considered finished’ but also regarding the notion that adults might
be ‘finished’, Transcendentalist claims to adulthood can also be consid-
ered in that adults—primarily adult men—remained works in progress in
Transcendentalist thought. Such a notion might be read through Alcott’s
portrayal of Little Women’s Meg, post-marriage and still learning, rather
than her story ending with her wedding day and the assumption of an
adult role; of Jo’s development through wifehood and motherhood to
return to the career she aimed for as a girl, in a disruption of any linear and
unproblematic progress from child to adult; and through adults in a num-
ber of stories, such as An Old-Fashioned Girl, who learn from the ‘chil-
dren’ around them. Adulthood, in many of Alcott’s works, is no more
‘finished’ than is childhood.
Alcott and the Canon

In exploring the status of, and lack of ongoing response to, Alcott’s fiction
beyond Little Women in the popular and critical minds, I also want to
consider Alcott’s status in terms of what is still known as ‘the canon’: can
Little Women be considered canonical in the twenty-first century? Can any
of Alcott’s other stories about childhood? And what does, or would, it
mean to do so? This question is particularly relevant to Alcott’s works:
after all, Alcott engages with the canonicity of texts as much as any critic
as she defines her child characters in relation to the literature they read, an
issue I will return to in more depth in Chap. 7. As Kelly Hager discusses,
Little Women, Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom—along with other domes-
tic stories of girlhood, such as Maud Hart Lovelace’s 1943 work, Betsy
and Tacy Go Downtown, and L. M. Montgomery’s 1908 novel Anne of
Green Gables—all promote the importance of reading canonical texts.
Hager argues that the heroines ‘are all encouraged to read the same list of
classics and forbidden to read the same kinds of novels (although the girls
secretly read “this bad trash” nevertheless)’.47 In doing so, each of the
heroines deals to some extent with shame and shaming via an assumed
canonicity of some texts which therefore excludes others: Anne is caught
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by her teacher reading Ben Hur when she should be studying her lessons;
Betsy is caught by her mother reading the hired girl’s dime novels; and Jo
is shamed by Fredrich Bhaer for her writing of ‘blood-and-thunder’ tales
for Dashwood’s Weekly Volcano. In each case, reading of non-canonical
material is constructed as secret or secretive, with certain books or catego-
ries of text positioned as attractive but forbidden fruit; thus constructing a
canon for childhood of largely instructional texts, with the reading (and
writing) of novels reserved, if problematically, for adulthood. In addition,
Alcott—like Montgomery and others after her—recommends reading
material for her own readers through the habits of her characters: the ‘lit-
tle women’ read works by Charles Dickens, John Bunyan, Maria
Edgeworth; the blooming Rose reads Henry David Thoreau and Ralph
Waldo Emerson. Canonical reading is part of growing up for Alcott’s chil-
dren, both shaped by and shaping their emerging adult self.
The dismissive parental censure of canonicity that leads to Jo and Betsy
burning their sensational writings, with Professor Bhaer playing the father
role for Jo, can also be seen in the critical dismissal of what Beverly Lyon
Clark has termed ‘kiddie lit’.48 Clark, who describes Alcott in her Preface
to the eponymous work as ‘a crossover writer’, discusses the dichotomy
between the Western valuing of childhood as it is also dismissed.49
She claims:
In the realm of children’s literature, trade publishers happily turn to chil-

dren’s books to bolster their revenues, yet contemporary critics have been
slow to take children’s literature seriously and treat it canonically. […] The
term kiddie lit captures our culture’s ambivalence towards children and chil-
dren’s literature: dismissive? self-mocking? pejorative? ironical?’50
Yet the same strictures rarely apply to children’s literature written by male
authors: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, for example, are subject to extensive scholarly debate
and still deemed appropriate for readers of all ages. What Hager describes
as ‘that first, shameful scene of reading’ in her presentation of Betsy is also
applicable here: reading Little Women and Alcott’s children’s texts is con-
sidered to be largely suitable for women and children, a link which denies
maturity to both the female reader and the female writer. Yet this is a
shaming that need not be owned, as Clark argues: ‘The relationship
between feminism and childhood is complicated, however, because adult-
hood is exactly what many feminists want to claim. The cost of doing so is
that we grind children under our heels.’51 In revaluing Alcott as a canoni-

cal writer, and in retrieving and paying critical attention to her children’s
works, a move toward erasing this divide can be made.
In considering the status of children’s literature and the canon,
Catherine Stimpson argues for a paracanon based on love of a text in her
essay on Little Women. She argues: ‘A paracanon recognizes our need for
some cultural shelter, a tidy site. Simultaneously, a paracanon finds “the
canon” both a house of orthodoxy and a house of cards.’52 In both reaf-
firming and destabilizing the canon, the construction of a paracanon based
on personal emotional response signals the breakdown of claims to literary
value. While Stimpson still endorses the need for a system of value and of
textual selection based on such claims, she also cheerfully undermines the
patriarchal canon with a feminine, not replacement perhaps, but cohort.
Despite her claim that ‘I wish to introduce the concept of the “para-
canon”’, Stimpson simultaneously establishes it as real—‘[t]exts are para-
canonical’—while shunting the canon to one side as that which cannot
ever exist except under its own terms and claims.
Despite the inherent instability of language in seeking to define the
value of a text, Stimpson claims Little Women as ‘[m]y example of a para-
canonical text […] which I chose because I once worshipped it’. The argu-
ment for Little Women as paracanonical, then, is situated in the ‘I’ which
exists in both the past (‘I chose’) and an earlier past (‘I once worshipped’);
it is based on choice, emotion, and a personal response, despite the later
claim to ‘[o]ther readers have shared my passion’.53 Yet the other readers
are situated, too, in the female: Stimpson notes that this is a book ‘for
girls’ as requested by Alcott’s publishers, and that while men and boys may
read and love it, such a response must be confessed. Stimpson’s paracanon
is therefore female.
And despite what Stimpson claims as ‘my invention of the paracanon’,
she returns again and again to Little Women’s problematic place in a prob-
lematic and divided canon that pre-exists her invention; from ‘the passion
of [Alcott’s] readers has been unable to guarantee her a place in the United
States canon’, to ‘[n]ow Little Women is canonical children’s literature’.54
Its inclusion in the paracanon does work to prevent its placing in the
canon, but a canon which has failed to stabilize itself in language: the
claim to both the American and children’s literature canons fracture any
value-based claim still further. However, in considering Stimpson’s claim
that Little Women exists in the children’s canon, if not in the American, I
wish to ask: is the inclusion of Little Women, in some sense, in the ( para)
canon the very basis of the problem for Alcott’s ‘other’, non-canonical
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children’s texts? Is its very elevation the reason these works have been, in
some sense, left behind; least loved and least valued without the emotional
pull of Little Women that is so often predicated on claims to Alcott’s own
life as accessible through the text? I will consider these issues further
throughout this work.
‘Childhood Persists’
In analyzing how we might read childhood in Alcott’s works, I begin to
consider here what might be read as her positioning of the ideal—or ideal-
ized—childhood.55 After all, if the March girls all have faults to cure, if Jill
is too wild, Fannie and Maud too ‘modern’, and Rose too ‘molly-coddled’,
each claim to an excess must have its respective and normative quality to
which its owner should attempt to reach.56 In this might be read a model
of childhood to which Alcottian characters and readers should each aspire;
yet can that be found even in an idealized textual childhood, or is it solely
the province of an adulthood toward which each is, if problemati-
cally, moving?
An Old-Fashioned Girl is notable among Alcott’s other texts of girl-
hood in that it is a girl—positioned as a ‘child’ by her more sophisticated
city friend, Fanny—who leads the way for both young and old to follow in
this text, in a reversal of traditional educational mores.57 Polly is not per-
fect, the author is at pains to tell us, but her old-fashioned, rural upbring-
ing exerts an influence on the city friends she visits, perhaps the most
significant influence of a child on others in any of Alcott’s novels. She
arrives in the text ‘a fresh-faced little girl, running down the long station,
and looking as if she rather liked it’; Alcott’s approval of her appearance
and her enjoyment of running beginning her comparison of the values of
Polly and her fashionable friends.58 Alcott also endorses the performative
childness of Polly, with child constituted here in terms of dress and a lack
of worldly knowledge, by way of Fanny’s accusation that Polly dresses like
a little girl: ‘“I am a little girl; so, why shouldn’t I?” and Polly looked at
her simple blue merino frock, stout boots, and short hair, with a puzzled
air.’59 Littleness is a repeated trope across Alcott’s works. From Little
Women to ‘little girl’ Polly; from Little Men to ‘Little Genevieve’ and
‘Little Sunbeam’, the relative littleness of so many of Alcott’s characters
positions them in terms of an idealized childhood—littleness, unlike the
petty smallness of Dickens’ Smallweed family, for example, is a positive
trait for Alcott—but also in terms of a development to come, a movement
beyond childhood to the ‘women’ and ‘men’ who have no need of such a
qualifier.60
In these two short examples of Alcott’s early presentation of Polly in
this novel (lengthened from the original six chapters that were published
weekly in Merry’s Museum during 1869, and published in full in 1870),
Alcott appears to present Polly as an ideal child: she is not just accepting,
but happy with her childhood status at the age of fourteen; she is healthy
in body and enjoys staying healthy; and she dresses appropriately in sim-
ple, serviceable clothes. However, Alcott represents her ideal childhood
through Polly as class-based. Despite further details of a genteel poverty at
her rural home, Polly’s family can afford the clothes that she needs and the
food to keep her healthy. Like the March family, as has been critically dis-
cussed elsewhere, Polly’s poverty is only of the literary variety: poor
enough to make a point about a desired simplicity and to contrast with the
over-consumption and lack of responsibility of richer families, but pictur-
esque enough to situate Alcott’s ideal child as healthy, able-bodied, mid-
dle class, from a settled family environment, and assuredly white. Even in
Alcott’s portrayal of disability in Jack and Jill, Jill’s status as poor, lacking
a father, and with a mother who wants the best for her but does not have
the means to achieve this, must be rectified to meet the demands of this
idealized childhood: Jill’s temporary disability is cured when she has
learned to curb her wild ways; she is brought within the household of her
richer friend, Jack; and her own mother is displaced, relegated to the role
of a servant by Mrs. Minot, who claims Jill for herself and her family: ‘I
borrow you to keep me happy and make the boys gentle and kind. That is
the bargain and we get the best of it.’61 Even Jack remodels Jill’s life
according to his own desires, denying her very humanity and her agency:
‘[W]e are going to keep her in this pretty cage till we can both fly off
together.’62
Levander and Singley claim: ‘Just as the generic child is construed as
“other” in relation to the adult, so too do poor, disabled, or orphaned
children or children of color occupy marginalized positions in relation to
more idealized versions of childhood.’63 And children of color fare no bet-
ter in many of Alcott’s works, frequently excluded and patronized in her
presentation of an ideal childhood. In ‘May Flowers’, for example, the
whiteness of the philanthropic heroines is implicit in their description of
‘some black imps’, also called ‘the brats’; while it could be argued that this
refers to a blackness that is not about children of color, it still constructs
blackness in terms of bad behavior.64 Further, Marion buys some ‘horrid
18 K. WEST
flowers’ in an effort to be charitable, and to get rid of them, gives them

away to ‘some colored children’ who, by default, either do not have the
taste to identify or object to what Marion judges as the horridness of the
flowers, and/or are positioned as the rightful recipients of even such a
qualified charity as this.65 Alcott also associates race with poverty in this
story: Ella’s father ‘actually went and bought balls for four small black
boys’ who could only gaze at them through a window; notably, these boys
are small, without the endorsed littleness of Alcott’s heroines and heroes.66
These issues of race, poverty, and disability will be discussed in more depth
in Chap. 5 of this work.
Although this textual childhood seems idealized into a western middle-
class fantasy of what children should be, Alcott also disrupts these very
notions, especially in other texts. Jo March tumbles toward adulthood
without Jill’s disability and cage to teach her what she ‘should’ be; and
Strickland reads most of Alcott’s heroines largely as versions of Jo.67 Alcott
also positions her girls as the chief protagonists in each of her texts, with
boys playing largely marginal roles; even in Eight Cousins, the focus is on
Rose rather than the eponymous male cousins, already only constructed in
terms of their relationship to their female counterpart.
The status of childhood, further, remains under question in Alcott’s
texts, as opposed to those critical readings that seek to stress its stability in
order to dismiss it as too simple to be read. While Alcott’s heroines (and
quasi-heroes) may not remain children and may eventually settle into the
nineteenth-century fate of marriage and babies, the status of childhood, as
Jacqueline Rose claims, often ‘persists’. Jo, in Jo’s Boys, reclaims her career
and her boyishness; Nan, in the same text, stays stubbornly single and
career-oriented, training as a doctor rather than for a more traditional
female role; Phebe’s childhood singing also results in a successful career
(although her devotion and servility to Rose also persist; Alcott’s working-
class characters are rarely allowed to outgrow their plebian origins,
although they may be helped by the more fortunate to bear them); and
Polly’s old-fashioned virtues survive her transition to adulthood even if, as
Strickland claims, the death of Grandmother Shaw makes ‘clear a point
that Alcott only hinted at in her literary fiction, namely, that the clock can-
not be turned back’.68 It can be argued, therefore, that childhood only
‘persists’ in reading; in a retention of childhood dreams and plans; or in
what is argued to be childhood characteristics.
I will continue to discuss each of these readings of an Alcottian child-
hood, and the questions they have raised, throughout this text.
The Chapters
As far back as 1979, Paul de Man was questioning received notions of
autobiography, in particular the assumptions and difficulties around auto-
biography as a figure of reading or understanding. However, the child in
literature is often given value by an appeal to biography, or to a construc-
tion of the ‘real child’, that cannot be sustained. Chapter 2 will question
the trend toward biographical readings of Alcott’s works on childhood, in
which the experiences of Alcott and her sisters are invoked by critics to add
value to her textual portrayals of children, although primarily in Little
Women rather than in her less-regarded texts. In looking at criticism of
these works, I consider the question posed by Jacqueline Rose: ‘Why is it
so hard to hold writing in its own place?’ I intend to analyze the ongoing
critical dialogue on this issue within readings of Alcott, to see if these bio-
graphical readings are and can be sustained, and to evaluate if and how
they have the potential to limit and/or damage readings of the child in her
works. This chapter will conclude by considering the child in the archive,
looking at how an appeal to the claimed origin of the archives might
inform, or trouble, a reading of Alcott’s texts. In this way, I will be reading
‘private’ texts, such as letters and journals, for their own constructions of
childhood, rather than simply as they might—or might not—inform por-
trayals of childhood in Alcott’s fiction, and to consider the problems that
might be encountered in reading them in this way.
Chapter 3 will evaluate the sentimental domestic space and the relative
positioning of the textual child in Alcott’s works. Alcott’s popular works
are often known for their domestic and familial settings: I will therefore
examine some of these settings to consider the relationship between child
and domestic, claims to the sentimental domestic, and the relationship
between child and space, particularly in terms of respective value. I will
further explore how the child is often positioned as either outside of this
domestic space or in subversion of the space itself. Through orphan boys,
displaced parents, and a flight from the domestic into nature, Alcott’s
children frequently challenge the sentimentalized domestic space.
No discussion of Little Women is complete, it seems, without troubling
gender claims in respect to Jo March. Chapter 4 will expand this discus-
sion of gender to consider Alcott’s further works on childhood, analyzing
how these both create and challenge gender norms. I also consider claims
to child sexuality and its relation to Alcott’s works, particularly via her
repeated language of queerness, which both engages with and challenges
20 K. WEST
claims to the queer child. I will also read intersections between the cross-
dressing child and constructions of play in her works.
The gendering of childhood is not the only means by which children
are constructed as other in literature for and about children. A modern
reprint of Alcott’s Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag carries a disclaimer as to content
that ‘does not reflect the same views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity,
and interpersonal relations as it would if it was written today’. Chapter 5
therefore considers representations of race, class, and disability in Alcott’s
works, and questions the assumption that classic texts may, or will, hold
views that differ from those of the twenty-first century. Via a reading of
disability and race theory in children’s literature, I will consider Alcott’s
constructions of those children who do not fit within her representation of
an ideal or idealized childhood; those who can be redeemed into this
model, and those who—for reasons of race and poverty—cannot. I will
also read the nineteenth-century trope of disability as education, via a
comparison between Jack and Jill and What Katy Did. Finally, this chapter
will consider why, and how, these children are rendered as peripheral in
Alcott’s works.
Alcott’s relationship with Transcendentalism was always problematic:
her 1873 essay on the Alcott family’s Fruitlands experiences,
‘Transcendental Wild Oats’, troubles genre status while also considering
the less practical aspects of Transcendentalism; however, her 1888 essay,
‘Recollections of My Childhood’, takes stock of the impact of
Transcendentalist thinkers on her life and work. Chapter 6 will therefore
explore the claim to a childhood constructed or impacted by
Transcendentalism through Alcott’s works; questioning what a
Transcendental child might be and from whose perspective such a claim
might be made; whether a childhood influenced by Transcendentalist
thinking can yet be described as a Transcendental childhood; and how
Alcott both honors and subverts Transcendentalist philosophies in
her works.
Education was a central trope for the Transcendentalist movement,
with Alcott’s father, Bronson, one of its key innovators. While Alcott had
no formal schooling of her own, theories of education play a key role in
her fiction for children. Chapter 7 will analyze the education of children in
Alcott’s texts, looking at Transcendental models of schooling and how
Alcott both incorporates and subverts them in her fiction. I will also con-
sider Alcott’s portrayals of less formal methods of education, such as her
claim that her mother ‘let me run wild, learning of nature what no books
can teach’. This chapter looks at the role of books, reading, and writing in
Alcott’s texts, particularly in relation to education as self-reliance and as a

key aspect in the development from child to adult; and considers a mutual
education in which adults and children teach each other.
Chapter 8 will conclude this work with a look at recent adaptations of
Little Women to consider how the text is being constantly rewritten to
appeal to new audiences and to take advantage of new forms of media, and
to consider how these adaptations construct and reconstruct the Alcottian
child. Through an analysis of rewritings of Alcott’s classic texts, including
modern-day adaptations, sequels, and horror mash-ups, and the genre of
fan fiction, I will consider how the rewriting of a text raises questions: to
whom does the text belong? Can it ever be said to be the property of the
author? To what extent do fans dictate the text? And how do construc-
tions of childhood shift and change within such rewritings? This chapter
will engage with the questions of origin and value in considering a place
for Alcott’s works in the twenty-first century.
Notes
1. Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (2002) ‘Holiday House: Grist to The Mill on the
Floss, or Childhood as Text’, The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 32,
Children in Literature, pp. 77–94, 78.
2. Caroline F. Levander and Carol J. Singley, eds. (2003) The American
Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press), p. 3.
3. Charles Strickland (1985) Victorian Domesticity: Families in the Life and
Art of Louisa May Alcott (University of Alabama Press).
4. Levander and Singley, p. 4.
5. Judith Butler (2011) Bodies That Matter (London and New York:
Routledge Classics), p. 6.
6. Despite my status as a British writer, I will be retaining American spellings
throughout my text as most of the critical texts I will be quoting and, I
suspect, most readers of this text will be American. However, I will con-
sider differences in British publications and readings at what I feel to be
relevant points.
7. Anne Scott MacLeod (1992) ‘From Rational to Romantic: The Children
of Children’s Literature in the Nineteenth Century’, Poetics Today, Vol. 13,
No. 1, Children’s Literature, pp. 141–153, 141.
8. MacLeod, ‘From Rational to Romantic’, p. 147.
9. In taking a close-reading approach to Alcott’s works, her spelling and punc-
tuation will be retained as written or first printed (depending on the source),
unless otherwise stated.
22 K. WEST
10. In the UK, Little Women came in at number 20 in The Guardian’s 2014
top 100 books: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/03/
100-best-novels-little-women-louisa-may-alcott; it also made the top 21 in
the BBC’s ‘Big Read’: https://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/br_read-
ing_grp_pck.pdf; in the US, Little Women is in the top 100 of The Great
American Read; votes were not in for its final position at the time of writ-
ing: https://www.pbs.org/the-great-american-read/books/#/ [all
accessed 8/8/18].
11. Little Women 150 https://lw150.wordpress.com/.
12. https://louisamayalcottismypassion.com/2018/06/14/official-trailer-
for-little-women-a-modern-movie/ [accessed 8/8/18]; Alcott, Little
Women: 150th Anniversary Edition, ed. Anne Boyd Rioux (New York:
Penguin, 2018).
13. Anne Boyd Rioux (2018) Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women
and Why it Still Matters (New York: W.W. Norton & Co), pp. 161–163.
14. Anne Scott MacLeod (1994) American Childhood: Essays on Children’s
Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Athens: University of
Georgia Press), p. 15.
15. Rioux, p. 204.
16. John Matteson, ed. (2016) The Annotated Little Women (New York:
W.W. Norton & Co), p. xxiii.
17. Samantha Ellis (2017) ‘The Big Trouble with Little Women’, The
Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/22/little-
women-bbc-version [accessed 9/8/18].
18. In her ‘Introduction to Little Women’, for example, Ann Douglas describes
‘the matrimonial mill’ of the text and equates Meg’s marriage with Jo’s
‘abandonment of her career’: Janice M. Alberghene and Beverly Lyon
Clark, eds. (1999) Little Women and the Feminist Imagination (London
and New York: Routledge), pp. 43–62, 55.
19. Alberghene and Clark, ‘Introduction’, Little Women and the Feminist
Imagination, p. xix.
20. Rioux, p. 76.
21. Alcott (1989) The Journals of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Joel Myerson, Daniel
Shealy, Madeleine B. Stern (Boston: Little, Brown and Company), p. 204.
22. Alberghene and Clark, p. xxviii.
23. Alberghene and Clark, pp. xxxiv–xxxv.
24. Alcott (1995) Selected Letters, ed. Joel Myerson, Daniel Shealy, Madeleine
B. Stern (Athens: The University of Georgia Press).
25. Alcott, Journals, p. 158. Merry’s Museum was a children’s magazine, which
Alcott edited from 1868 to 1870; Journals, p. 160n.
26. Alcott, Journals, p. 166.
27. Alcott, Journals, p. 166: note added by Alcott in 1885, reading: ‘An hon-
est publisher and a lucky author, for the copyright made her fortune, and
the “dull book” was the first golden egg of the ugly duckling.’
28. Alcott (1854) Flower Fables (Bedford: Applewood Books, 1898).
29. Alcott papers 1847–1887 Folder 1, first manuscript of Flower Fables,
Concord Free Public Library Archive Collection [accessed 14 July 2017].
30. Alcott, Letters, p. 11.
31. A bibliography of Alcott’s children’s works is available at the end of
this work.
32. Madeleine B. Stern (1954) ‘Louisa’s Wonder Book: A Newly Discovered
Alcott Juvenile’, American Literature, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 384–390.
33. See Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy (1990) ‘The Sales of Louisa May
Alcott’s Books’, Harvard Bulletin, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 47–86, for further
details on Alcott’s sales.
34. With thanks to Daniel Shealy’s 1992 edited collection, Louisa May Alcott’s
Fairy Tales and Fantasy Stories (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee
Press) for information on Alcott’s career as a fantasy writer. Shealy also
notes that The Rose Family was first published in December 1863, despite
its copyright date of 1864; p. xxvii.
35. Jacqueline Rose (1984) The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of
Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).
36. As time went on, men might read it but would do so with some embarrass-
ment: Theodore Roosevelt admitted his liking of Alcott’s works ‘[a]t the
cost of being deemed effeminate’: Alberghene and Clark, p. xv.
37. Alcott, Little Women (1868) Norton Critical edition, ed. Anne K. Phillips
and Gregory Eiselein (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004), p.
ix. All Little Women references are to this edition unless otherwise stated.
38. Joel Myerson, conference paper, Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House
Summer Conversational Series 2018.
39. MacLeod, p. 19.
40. Alcott, Little Women, p. 327; (1869) An Old-Fashioned Girl (New York:
Dover Evergreen Classics, 2007), p. 7; (1875) Eight Cousins, or The Aunt-
Hill (New York: Dover Evergreen Classics, 2007), pp. 4, 8, 14; (1888)
‘May Flowers’, A Garland for Girls (Boston: Roberts Brothers), p. 3.
41. Viviana A. Zelizer (1985) Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social
Value of Children (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 3.
42. Alcott, Little Women, pp. 294, 327; An Old-Fashioned Girl, pp. 8, 30.
44. MacLeod, p. 23.
45. Niles to Alcott, 16 June 1868: ‘What do you say to this for a title Little
Women. Meg. Jo Beth, and Amy’, Alcott, Little Women, p. 417.
24 K. WEST
46. Writing in 1842, Emerson described ‘these new times’ as a split at almost
the mid-century point: Emerson (1842) ‘The Transcendentalist’, Essays
and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics,
2004); William Wordsworth (1804) ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality
from Recollections of Early Childhood’, The Collected Poems of William
Wordsworth (London: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1995), p. 701.
47. Kelly Hager, ‘Betsy and the Canon’, in Levander and Singley, pp. 106–127.
48. Beverly Lyon Clark (2003) Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of
Children’s Literature in America (Baltimore: The John Hopkins
University Press).
49. Clark, p. ix.
50. Clark, p. 2.
51. Clark, p. 5.
52. Catherine R. Stimpson, ‘Reading for Love: Canons, Paracanons, and
Whistling Jo March’, Little Women (Norton Critical Edition),
pp. 584–599, 585.
53. Stimpson, p. 593.
54. Stimpson, pp. 594, 598.
55. I will expand on this reading in Chap. 5 of this work.
56. Alcott, Eight Cousins, p. 19.
57. Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl, p. 7.
60. Charles Dickens (1853) Bleak House (London: Penguin Classics,
1996), p. 332.
61. Alcott (1880) Jack and Jill: A Village Story (Carlisle, Mass.: Applewood
Books, 1905), pp. 201–202.
62. Alcott, Jack and Jill, p. 57.
64. Alcott, ‘May Flowers’, pp. 14–15.
65. Alcott, ‘May Flowers’, p. 32.
67. Strickland, p. 98.
68. Strickland, pp. 100–101.
CHAPTER 2
‘We Really Lived Most of It’: The Trouble

with Autobiography
Genre Trouble
A 2018 article in The New Yorker claims: ‘It would be hard to find an
English-language work of fiction more autobiographical than Little
Women.’ It concludes: ‘Of some novelists it is said that they only had one
book in them, or only one outstanding book. Such novels […] are fre-
quently autobiographical.’1 In looking at Alcott’s works and on the child
in literature more widely, both author and ostensibly fictional child are
frequently assigned value in such readings by an appeal to the author’s life
and autobiography, or to a construction of the ‘real child’ that cannot be
sustained; the character of Jo in Little Women is often read as a representa-
tion of Alcott herself, for example. This chapter will question the trend
toward such readings of Alcott’s works on childhood, in which the lived
experiences of Alcott and her family are invoked by critics to confer value
on her textual portrayals of children. I am not intending to either prove or
disprove any autobiographical basis for these works; rather, I intend to
question what is at stake in making such claims.2
After all, what does it mean to read a text as autobiographical, or for an
author to make this claim about their own text? Many read Little Women
as grounded in the life of a young Alcott and her sisters due to similarities
between life and art: four sisters growing up in nineteenth-century
America, one a writer, one an artist, one married with children, and one
who died young. Yet this knowledge of Alcott’s family life derives from

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39025-9_2
26 K. WEST
readings of other texts: biographies, critical studies, and/or Alcott’s family

papers. The titular quote from this chapter—‘We really lived most of it’—
is taken by many, in addition to other such claims in her letters and jour-
nals, as Alcott’s positioning this text as, if not autobiography as such, at
least fiction informed by or based on the author’s own life.3
However, claims to autobiography as a figure of authorial intent or of
reading are almost impossible to stabilize. In his 1979 essay, ‘Autobiography
as De-facement’, Paul de Man questions received notions of autobiogra-
phy, in particular the assumptions and difficulties around autobiography as
a figure of reading or understanding.4 What he calls ‘[t]he theory of auto-
biography’ is, in fact, multiple theories, ‘plagued’ as it is by ‘a recurrent
series of questions and approaches […] that are, in fact, highly problem-
atic’ due to the assumptions that they work to maintain; these multiple
‘approaches’ trouble any claims to a singular theory from the outset.
Questions also prove problematic for de Man, in that they undermine
attempts at generic definition of autobiography, being ‘both pointless and
unanswerable’.5 Reading autobiography in terms of genre serves to desta-
bilize such theories further. According to de Man:
One of these problems is the attempt to define and to treat autobiography

as if it were a literary genre among others. […] By making autobiography
into a genre, one elevates it above the literary status of mere reportage,
chronicle, or memoir and gives it a place, albeit a modest one, among the
canonical hierarchies of the major literary genres.6
Genre is something that is imposed, de Man argues, a method of classifica-

tion, and one that does not—or should not—apply to all forms of writing.
Genre is an elevation, he claims further, and one that autobiography does
not deserve, yet has—if problematically—gained. What, therefore, does it
mean to claim a work as autobiographical if said work must then fit into a
previously-defined structure of what autobiography is, or should be, but
only ever under the judgment of those who seek to categorize it as such;
and how can we read a work that appears to sit within the (also problem-
atic) genre of fiction when so many readers, critics, and even the author
herself claim an autobiographical basis or origin?
The problem of genre classification is one that matters in reading Alcott
because it is so often invoked to assign value to, or withhold it from, a text
and its subject, especially if it sits outside of the male, western canon.
Readings of autobiographical content or inspiration are therefore a
2 ‘WE REALLY LIVED MOST OF IT’: THE TROUBLE WITH AUTOBIOGRAPHY 27
double-edged sword for Alcott: on one hand, some critics see their auto-
biographical readings as valuing both text and childhood; on the other,
such a reading also enables a dismissal of both text and child as simple, as
known, and as somehow generically lacking as de Man has shown above,
with the text damned by its status as autobiography and as ‘kiddie lit’.
Alcott also constructs an autobiographical approach to her work largely in
terms of value, although her claims are sometimes contradictory. In 1868,
she wrote: ‘The characters were drawn from life, which gives them what-
ever merit they possess; for I find it impossible to invent anything half so
true or touching as the simple facts with which every day life supplies me.’7
Yet, in 1872, she claimed: ‘“Tom” [in An Old-Fashioned Girl] is no more
Edward Emerson than “Laurie” is Julian Hawthorne. None of the charac-
ters in my books are drawn from life but the Marches.’8 The obvious issue
here is: why claim value in terms of one family as ‘drawn from life’ in her
books, yet decide never to repeat the success, both as claimed by Alcott
and in terms of the longevity of the respective texts?
Even without the instability of such claims from the author, an appeal
beyond the text to an origin that is always itself problematic also destabi-
lizes the classification of autobiography.9 In looking to Alcott’s life to
claim a value based on the real, the issue remains that such claims are
always and only based on text themselves: on Alcott’s letters and journals,
on the written recollections of her contemporaries, and on earlier critical
readings that equate her life with her work. Even appeals to the archive for
an origin beyond the printed word—as I will discuss in more detail later in
this chapter—cannot avoid these problems. For in appealing to a text
beyond the fictional work, the issues of incompleteness, of memory, and
of intent that trouble so-called autobiographical writing as a claim to real-
ity are glossed over to avoid the problems that threaten that very claim to
origin; the endless deferral that such a move must always entail is denied;
and the question of what is at stake in the need to make such claims is
ignored.
Women Writing
Alcott’s status as a female author is often invoked to provide a claim to
both origin and value through readings of the domestic scenes in Little
Women as reflections of Alcott’s own life; with origin placed outside of,
and as prior to, the text. I therefore wish to question why and how it is
that women’s writing is so often subject to a critical judgment in which a
28 K. WEST
claim to reality is deemed necessary to provide value, despite the troubling

of the text’s status as origin that must follow. In the Preface to her work,
On Not Being Able to Sleep, Jacqueline Rose asks:
Whether in the case of the woman writer struggling to transform the most
painful aspect of her story into writing, or political actors brought face to
face with the worst of their own past, the question is always: how do we
negotiate the passage between those parts of ourselves which belong to oth-
ers by the mere fact of being in the world, and those parts, sometimes too
painful to contemplate, which we yet feel to be most fiercely our own?10
In her consideration of ‘the passage between’ private and public, Rose

gives two examples of the participants in such a scenario: the ungendered
and pluralized ‘political actors’ who have been ‘brought’—by others than
themselves—to face the problems of their past; and the singular, gendered
writer, who chooses—despite the claim to ‘struggling’—to share ‘her
story’. Why, then, is it ‘the woman writer’ in particular who struggles to
negotiate that passage between story and writing, and what might it mean
to do so? Under Rose’s construction, the female writer sits apart from
both writing and story: it is ‘her story’, the story that belongs to her rather
than is her, that must be translated ‘into’ writing; story precedes writing
and is not, or not necessarily, the woman writer’s life. This unsettling of
the relationship between story and self anticipates a wider question from
Rose: how do we—and how does the woman writer—decide what belongs
to the reading world and what we wish to keep private? Yet under Rose’s
construction, women writers are always transforming the private into the
public via the medium of ‘story’; there is no claim to a pure fiction, one
not based to some degree on, or from, the writer’s own life. As is so often
the case with critical readings of Alcott’s works, fiction and autobiography
are intertwined, and any origin of the text is troubled.
If we accept Rose’s claim, what is therefore at stake in writing the
female self as, or into, the story? Discussing the American poet, Anne
Sexton, Rose claims that ‘performed self-exposure may be one of the best
ways for poets, and not only for poets, to hide’.11 This claim to a ‘per-
formed self-exposure’ can be read, as Rose does, in terms of the ‘confes-
sional’ female poets of the 1960s, in that to expose one aspect of the self
allows the writer to hide others; for what seems like full exposure is only
an illusion. Take Sylvia Plath’s poem, ‘Lady Lazarus’, in which she explores
this very issue: ‘The peanut-crunching crowd/Shoves in to see/Them
unwrap me hand and foot—/The big strip tease.’12 In these lines, the nar-
rator is both unwrapped by someone other than herself—by ‘them’—for
the edification of the crowd; yet it is a ‘strip tease’, an uncovering of one-
self. The question here is, is the narrator teasing the crowd and/or ‘them’,
or is Plath teasing her readers with this show of show?
In considering this uncertain divide between the personal and the
‘tease’, writing exists, as Jacques Derrida claims regarding the ‘troubling’
nature of language and archive, ‘always at the unstable limit between pub-
lic and private, between the family, the society, and the State, between the
family and an intimacy even more private than the family, between oneself
and oneself’.13 And nothing is more troubling, perhaps, than the first-
person narrator, the claim to ‘I’. Although Alcott’s most popular text is
not written in the first person (although others, particularly some shorter
works, are, as I will discuss later), this troubling of the genre boundaries
between fiction and autobiography often involves the reading of the
author into the text. Take Jo March, Alcott’s most famous character, and
the reviews and critical analyses she has inspired. An anonymous reviewer
of Part Two of Little Women, writing in 1869, said: ‘Autobiographies, if
genuine, are generally interesting, and it is shrewdly suspected that Joe’s
[sic] experience as an author photographs some of Miss Alcott’s own liter-
ary mistakes and misadventures.’14 In 1968, Sean O’Faolain wrote that:
‘[Alcott’s] personality is all over Little Women’, although she simultane-
ously ‘fibbed about almost all the facts’ and was ‘as honest a woman as was
ever shaped by the Puritan traditions of New England’.15 More recently,
Ann Douglas wrote that Little Women is both Alcott’s ‘rewriting of her
own autobiography’, and ‘a fictionalized family journal’ and therefore
‘figuratively speaking, the work of many hands’.16 Each critic refers to nar-
ratives of Alcott’s life to understand her work: in the case of the anony-
mous reviewer, s/he ‘shrewdly suspects’ that at least parts of Alcott’s work
are based on her life; yet questions the status of autobiography as only ever
problematically genuine, without explaining what a ‘genuine’ autobiogra-
phy might be, or how such a claim could be substantiated. O’Faolain
expects Little Women to be autobiographical, and calls out what he sees as
untruths, which only exist as such against his own claim to truth in the
text; yet he simultaneously praises Alcott’s honesty, if one situated within
a historical tradition that simultaneously worries such claims. Finally,
Douglas also situates the text within a claim to autobiography, but here, it
is the autobiography of a family, one that troubles a single authorship as it
is ‘the work of many hands’, if only ‘figuratively’. In this claim to work as
30 K. WEST
living as well as writing, Douglas problematizes critical appeals to the ori-

gin of the text. Further, each statement works to unsettle what is so often
read as the nature of autobiographical writing: the anonymous reviewer
claims ‘photographs’; O’Faolain that Alcott’s personality is ‘all over’ the
text; and Douglas that Little Women is a ‘rewriting’, not of Alcott’s life,
but of her ‘autobiography’. In each case, the writer constructs a passage
between life and text, but one that acts as a deferral that only serves to
separate the two still further.
The Trouble with ‘I’

A first-person narrator may not provide any guarantee of stability when
discussing authorship, but the confessional poets in particular are still
often critically discussed in the equation of these very terms. In contrast to
this critical trend, however, writing on Sexton, Jacqueline Rose claims:
‘[She] was a mistress of the ‘I’ as fiction—the personal as the ultimate
persona.’17 Rose therefore constructs the personal as fiction in terms of
authorial intent, as a method of hiding in plain sight; Sexton may have
been the ‘mistress’ of the genre, but genre it was and is. In apparently
writing autobiographically, particularly through an ‘I’ narrator, the
(female) author can perform a reality that simultaneously hides what she
‘feel to be most fiercely our own’. And as Rose also claims: ‘[I]t is the most
confessional and intimate of poets who can show us most clearly that the
personal is always self-invention and myth’; an invention that is both by
and of the self, fracturing the claim to a single identity knowable under the
claim to ‘I’ or the personal still further.
A number of Alcott’s first-person short ‘stories’ trouble the author,
narrator, and biographical subject via readings of genre. As the first ‘story’
in Vol. 1 of Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag, the first-person narrator of ‘My Boys’
appears directly linked to the ‘Aunt Jo’ of the book’s title, a fictional char-
acter that may—or may not—be drawn from Jo March, who in the Little
Women series was an aunt before (and while) she was a mother. However,
positioning this text within standard genre definitions is problematic, par-
ticularly as the other pieces in this collection are not first-person narratives.
In ‘My Boys’, the narrator claims:
Feeling that I have been unusually fortunate in my knowledge of a choice

and pleasing variety of this least appreciated portion of the human race, I
have a fancy to record some of my experiences, hoping that it may awaken
an interest in other minds, and cause other people to cultivate the delightful,
but too often neglected boys, who now run to waste, so to speak.18
The narrator’s claims to ‘knowledge’ and ‘record’, the appeal to ‘other

minds’ and the call to ‘cultivate’ boys can be read as the author speaking
to ‘other people’, with the desire for a practical application of her ideas in
the wider world in mind. However, this narrator’s ‘first little lover’ at age
fifteen, as invoked later in the text, is not Laurie as the claim to ‘Jo’ might
suggest, but Augustus; indeed Laurie does not feature as a ‘lover’ in ‘My
Boys’ at all, suggesting that Aunt Jo—whoever she may be—is not Jo
March, at least.19 This Jo was ‘a boyless being for many years’ until she
went to the hospital during the war, ‘and found my little sergeant [whose]
story has been told elsewhere’, in a potential reference to Alcott’s earlier
work, Hospital Sketches.20 Finally, however, Alcott offers what might be
read as an autobiographical moment in her discussion of Ladislas
Wisniewski.21 The ‘story’ ends with: ‘It is hardly necessary to add, for the
satisfaction of inquisitive little women, that Laddie was the original of
Laurie, as far as a pale pen-and-ink sketch could embody a living, loving
boy.’22 But does this, therefore, mean that we could, or should, read the
story’s narrator as Alcott herself, if she is not the Jo March of Little Women?
After all, the narrator positions herself here outside of the text, as writer in
terms of the ‘sketch’ of Laurie. She also both constructs and troubles an
autobiographical reading of Laurie: ‘Laddie was the original of Laurie’,
claiming an origin outside the text in a lived boy; yet one that is qualified,
with the sketch deemed always a failure, a representation that is inade-
quate (‘pale’) and that is never the thing itself. Further, in reading the
narrator as Alcott, and the reference to ‘Laddie’ as autobiographical, one
must again return to the problem of origin and of reference to other texts
in order to provide value for this story. And, finally, in the claim that ‘it is
hardly necessary to add’, Alcott constructs a knowledge of this story that
precedes the text, one in which the origin of Laurie is known to be located
prior to both Little Women and ‘My Boys’, although it could also assume
a certain reader response to this text and therefore positions the reader,
too, as both textual and known child.
‘Recollections of My Childhood’ is a work that also troubles genre
boundaries via a first-person narrator who appears to be telling the story
of Alcott’s younger life: her ‘earliest memories’ playing in her father’s
study and falling into the Frog Pond; her days in Concord with the young
Emersons, Hawthornes, and Channings; and her teenage crush on the
32 K. WEST
elder Emerson.23 Names of lived people are used; anecdotes that are
referred to elsewhere and by other writers are told; and family life is
explored in terms of ‘Anna’ and ‘Mr. Alcott’, rather than Meg and Mr.
March (or any other fictional or assumed names; I will discuss Alcott and
naming later in this chapter). This piece was initially published in chil-
dren’s magazine, The Youth’s Companion, on 24 May 1888; it was repub-
lished in the last of the Lulu’s Library series in 1889, after Alcott’s death;
and it has been included in Lawrence Buell’s edited collection, The
American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings.24 This history of republi-
cation questions the text’s genre status as factual essay, as fiction, or as
what Buell, in his introduction to the text, terms a ‘sketch’ and ‘a kind of
short story’ into which ‘Alcott weaves her early life’.25 He concludes:
‘Here and elsewhere, Alcott drew on her Transcendentalist childhood to
tell a story about its innocence as well as hers.’ I will discuss the claim to
‘her Transcendentalist childhood’ in Chap. 6; however, I would like to
think here about the shift from ‘a sketch’ to ‘a kind of short story’ ‘into’
which Alcott, Buell claims, has woven her childhood to ‘tell a story’. In
this prefatory piece, Buell constructs a portion of Alcott’s life as that which
has moved via an uncertain and truncated narration to the telling of a
story that is neither short nor qualified in its status. This does not neces-
sarily define it as fiction; as read via Jacqueline Rose, the term ‘story’ is
often problematic. Nevertheless, under Buell’s reading, its potential status
as autobiography—as containing ‘early life’ via ‘into’, the move already
established by biographers and arguably by Alcott herself as read previ-
ously—is perhaps more problematic than even that of Little Women, first-
person narrator notwithstanding.
Retrieving the Real

In her work on American childhood and literature, MacLeod considers
her views on genre and Alcott’s works: ‘As a quasi-autobiographical novel,
[Little Women] is both more revealing and more carefully hedged against
revelation than [Alcott’s] less autobiographical books. […] As every reader
recognizes, Jo March is the author, the author is Jo March, and so is every
girl that reads the book.’26 According to MacLeod’s perspective, all of
Alcott’s books are ‘quasi-autobiographical’, it is just a question of extent,
of more or less; although is troubled by MacLeod’s claim that the author
is Jo, and that every female reader is Jo, too. Readers cannot elect to be
Meg, or Beth, or Amy, or some mixture of the sisters, or even none of
them at all; Jo alone is ‘every girl’. And although the female author might
also be argued to form part of this claim to ‘every’, both the placing of the
author within Little Women as Jo, and the text’s status as ‘quasi-autobio-
graphical’, are problematized; for if we accept this perspective, it might be
argued that for each reader, it is our own autobiography that we are
reading.
In addition to the critics, Alcott’s biographers are also keen to equate
life with art, in a claim to a life that can be unproblematically recalled and
recounted within her work as autobiography. Three popular and well-
regarded biographies—Madelon Bedell’s The Alcotts: Biography of a
Family; John Matteson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Eden’s Outcasts: The Story
of Louisa May Alcott and her Father; and Eve LaPlante’s Marmee and
Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother—interest
me for a number of reasons.27 The first of these is their titles and subtitles:
each, while ostensibly a literary biography—a biography, therefore, of
Alcott as writer—situates itself within the domestic family setting familiar
to readers of Little Women, the text most frequently claimed as (quasi)
autobiographical. However, Alcott is constructed in these titles and sub-
titles not as writer, but within those familial relationships. Two of these
biographies announce themselves in terms of ‘story’, each the—singular—
story of a specific familial relationship, with ‘Marmee’ and ‘her father’
respectively. LaPlante’s text therefore aligns itself with a blurring of the
boundaries between Louisa’s life and the text of Little Women from the
outset; while Matteson’s, too, invites consideration of what seems less a
boundary and more ‘the passage between’ genres with their invocation of
‘story’. Bedell’s text, alternatively, situates itself as ‘biography’, a problem-
atic term here with a singular biography for the composite unit of ‘a
family’.
Reference to the indices of these texts also shows evidence of genre
trouble. In searching for page references for Little Women, Bedell’s index
(as one example) offers a list of Alcott family members that are ‘portrayed
in’ Alcott’s ostensibly fictional text: ‘Abbie May’, ‘Abby Alcott’, and
‘Louisa May’ among them.28 Apart from a few unspecified references in
terms of subject which begin Bedell’s Little Women index entry, the only
referenced subjects apart from the names of Alcott family members are
‘appeal of story’, ‘fantasy vs fact in’, and ‘Pickwick Club in’ Little Women.
Bedell’s claim to ‘fantasy vs fact’ sets up a dichotomy in which fantasy and
fact can be read as opposing forces and factors in Little Women; however,
the apparently unproblematic insertion of the Alcott family members into
34 K. WEST
the text undermines this very claim. The referenced pages, however, make
interesting claims to Bedell’s reading of individual Alcott family members
within the text. She notes, variously: ‘As Meg in Little Women, Anna is
described as’; ‘Louisa describes [Lizzie] as “Beth” in Little Women’; and
‘There is no father present at the warm family union, for his daughter, the
author, has put him out of the book, far away at war’.29 Each of these
entries works slightly differently. In the first, Alcott’s elder sister, Anna, is
not Meg but is positioned ‘[a]s Meg’; she retains her identity as Anna but
can also be described as Meg within Alcott’s text. The second entry is also
subject to an authorial description, but here, Alcott ‘describes her as
“Beth”’. ‘Beth’, in speech marks, is not the same as ‘Meg’ without; and in
describing Lizzie ‘as “Beth” in Little Women’, Bedell places both Lizzie
and Beth within Alcott’s text. Finally, in place of ‘father’ is only an
absence—‘[t]here is no father present’—yet he immediately returns in that
‘his daughter, the author, has put him out of the book’. Louisa is both
daughter—‘his’ daughter in a claim to both relationship and ownership—
and ‘the’ author, no longer ‘his’ in her status as writer. And as writer,
under this reading, Alcott acts to displace the absent/present father: how-
ever, in putting him ‘out’ of the text, Bedell simultaneously creates a father
who was, by necessity, previously inside the text from which he has been
ousted. For Bedell, therefore, the relationship between text and family,
fiction and biography, is fluid, with members able to cross from one to the
other and back again without troubling her claimed dichotomy of the
genres themselves. The only shift, it seems, is in name.
Claims to autobiography as a basis for Alcott’s texts are troubled by this
issue of naming via the work of critics and biographers, and also within
Alcott’s own writings. After all, the assumption of Little Women as autobi-
ography cannot be dismissed out of hand when Alcott makes many similar
claims herself, particularly via naming. In a letter to Alfred Whitman, she
wrote: ‘“Laurie” is you & my Polish boy “jintly”. You are the sober half &
my Ladislas (whom I met abroad) is the gay whirligig half, he was a perfect
dear.’30 And writing to a Mr. Wiley: ‘The original “Plumfield” was
quenched forty years ago in Boston, & has never sprung up again except
on paper’, therefore arguing for an existence of Little Men’s Plumfield that
is prior to the text.31 She also mixes family and text in her use of names. In
the same letter to Mr. Wiley, she hopes ‘the little man’ will be ‘“an honor
to his country and a terror to the foe”, as my Demi says’. The accompany-
ing note explaining the nomenclature of ‘the little man’ reads: ‘George
Emerson May (b. 1844), youngest son of Mrs. Alcott’s brother Samuel
Joseph May’; ‘my Demi’ is not explained as either a reference to the tex-
tual son of Meg March or in a claim to a counterpart in Alcott’s eldest
nephew, as is often assumed by biographers. Similarly, in a letter to Mrs.
Graham, Alcott writes:
The Marches send thier [sic] regards & are all robust except Marmee who is
much broken & is now the cherished “old baby” as she calls herself. Amy is
painting away in London & coming home to keep house in March. Meg &
the lads are with us here in Boston for the winter. Mr. M. lectures & takes
care of his large parish of young men & women. Jo is nurse, housekeeper,
scribbler & Papa to the boys.32
The March family and the Alcott family are intertwined here through the
appropriation of Little Women’s names; although this passage could also
be read as an update on Alcott’s fictional characters. If assuming this is
referring to the Alcotts, however, what purpose is served by the naming
and renaming of her family? Again, these letters blur the line between
genres, conflating life and art to claim a value based on autobiography for
the art—as Alcott has done elsewhere—but also to claim some of the suc-
cess of her ‘little book’ for her family and friends: this is a two-way street.
After all, there is danger in using letters, or other personal documents, to
back up any claim to fiction as autobiography. As the letter to Whitman
claims, Laurie was never the autobiographical recollection of one boy, but
an amalgam, in contrast to her claim in ‘My Boys’ and then in terms of
character only as ‘the sober half’ and ‘the gay whirligig half’; the events
and settings of Laurie’s life are fictional.33 Likewise, Alcott’s free mixing of
names was not confined to her own family but encompassed other people
and other texts: the name ‘Ariadne Blish’—a minor character in the first
printing of Eight Cousins—was taken from a chance encounter some
thirty-five years before the book was written, much to the displeasure of
the name’s first owner.34 The character was subsequently rechristened as
Annabel Bliss.35
Beyond the naming of her characters, this appeal to an apparent real via
personal documents contains other problems; in particular, the return of
both the ‘I’ narrator and the previously discussed issues with genre classi-
fication. After all, in what sense can we claim letters and journals as ‘pri-
vate’ or personal? Letters, by their very nature, address a reader, while
journals in the Alcott household and beyond were not necessarily deemed
private, but were shared among family and friends, particularly in the
36 K. WEST
Transcendentalist circle in which Alcott was raised. Furthermore, the jour-

nals that are available to us are only partial (although any claim to a ‘com-
plete’ journal must also be problematic) in that Alcott burned many
herself, and left instructions for more to follow after her death. And,
finally, the appeal to the ‘I’ narrator of these documents as Alcott herself—
an Alcott that is singular, stable, and can be known as such—can be prob-
lematized, particularly through her habit of annotating and editing her
journals years after they were first written. Can we claim, with any surety,
that the Alcott writing later, commenting on the writings of her earlier
self, was the same person in every way? The annotations themselves sug-
gest otherwise.
Despite Alcott’s claim that the March family were her only characters
‘drawn from life’, she also made claims to inspiration from life for works
other than Little Women; yet these have not been seized with the same
degree of interest. Jack and Jill, for example, begins with an inscription:
‘To the schoolmates of Ellsworth Devens whose lovely character will not
soon be forgotten. This Village Story is affectionately inscribed by their
friend the author.’36 A letter to Ann E. Devens from Alcott notes: ‘I should
dearly love to record in a few tender pages, for other boys & girls to read
& remember, this sweet & noble life whose influence is still felt, whose
memory is still green in the hearts of many’, though she qualifies, ‘I give
no names & merely use such characteristics, events & games as will give
life to the picture’.37 Dedication and letter both claim and trouble an auto-
biographical reading of this text. The ‘few tender pages’ are a ‘record’ of
‘this sweet & noble life’; yet the life itself is already a memory, one that
‘will not soon be forgotten’, but in the ‘soon’ is constructed the imperfect
recollection of a memory that must ultimately result in a forgetting. The
claim to ‘I give no names’ can be troubled, not only by the inscription
itself, but by the naming of the character ostensibly representing Ellsworth
Devens as ‘Ed Devlin’, and that both names are given in the fictional text.
In addition, ‘this […] life’ is reduced in the text to component parts of
‘characteristics, events & games’, and then only those that will ‘give life to
the picture’ that, in its very creation, is without life, the record of a boy
already gone. However, Alcott both brings Ellsworth Devens into the
text, and troubles his naming still further, with the following:
I […] try to tell the history of a boy who really lived and really left behind
him a memory so precious that it will not soon be forgotten by those who
knew and loved him. For the influence of this short life was felt by many, and
even this brief record of it may do for other children what the reality did for
those who still lay flowers on his grave, and try to be “as good as Elly”.38
The boy may have ‘really lived’, and Alcott may claim ‘reality’ and/or
‘really’ three times in this short passage, but this is a ‘history’ the author
can only ‘try to tell’ in ‘this brief record’, and the knowledge of his life is
rather in its influence on others and in their performative retrieval of the
again-renamed ‘Elly’. The reason for a lack of critical and popular interest
in this link to a claimed reality, however troubled, may never be known—it
is always hard to quantify an absence—but I will consider this further below.
The writing of ‘a boy who really lived’ does not constitute the only pos-
sible reading of autobiography in Jack and Jill. The story of the subtitled
‘A Village Life’ could be read as full of sly references to the author’s home
of Concord, Massachusetts. It takes place in ‘Harmony Village’, a nomen-
clature not a million miles from ‘Concord’; one character is named Ralph,
potentially after her father’s friend and her own ‘Master’ Ralph Waldo
Emerson; similarly, the boys’ boat is named the ‘Rhodora’, like the epony-
mous Emerson poem.39 Jack’s family name is Minot, a common name in
Concord in the late 1800s.40 And in a letter to Mary Mapes Doge, Alcott
claims: ‘“Jack and Jill” are right out of our own little circle, & the boys &
girls are in a twitter to know what is going in, so it will be a “truly story”
in the main.’41 As in the language of her biographers, Alcott’s claims to an
‘out’ and an ‘in’, in terms of reality and story, collapse as soon as they are
made, with movement in both directions. I am not claiming a value in
reading or constructing autobiographical readings in this way; merely that
such claims in Little Women are taken as autobiographical and therefore
as proof of its value in the portrayal of ‘real life’ and ‘real childhood’; yet
the same claims are rarely made for Jack and Jill, which has been dismissed
rather as ‘nothing like real character drawing, and the air of life is secured
not by an endowment of the persons represented, but by the animation
and cheerfulness of the author’.42
Alcott also claimed inspiration for her ostensibly fictional children out-
side of her own family and immediate Concord circle. In the 1877 letter
to Mrs. Graham referenced above, Alcott writes: ‘I am thinking of a new
book like Old-Fashioned Girl […] So if Miss Alice has any good experi-
ences, funny adventures or interesting incidents in girl-life I shall be very
glad to hear of them, and shall calmly put em [sic] in & then take all the
credit […] That’s the way books are made’.43 Again, Alcott constructs an
inside and outside in terms of story, but one in which the boundaries are
38 K. WEST
blurred, for outside can be leveraged to fill the inside; in fact, Alcott claims
this as the basis of the making of ‘books’; and in this case, books about
childhood in particular. In her argument here, Alcott constructs all books
as ‘made’ from this blend, not exactly of life and art, but of the ‘good […]
funny […] or interesting’ parts of life, and the author not as a creator as
such, but as a translator between one and the other, and the one who, after
all, gets to ‘take all the credit’.
Alcott and the Archives

As the reading of her letters has already shown, an appeal to Alcott’s pri-
vate papers may not provide the stable origin that readers, critics, and
biographers may be seeking, with contradictions and a constant deferral
that never quite provides the ‘reality’ of a life; however, I wish to take a
brief look at Alcott and the archives, via my own reading and that of oth-
ers, to consider how and why this appeal to something outside of the
text—to a prior or a personal—is often claimed by scholars in constructing
value for a fictional text, particularly a text for, or about, children.
One of my own favorite moments in Little Women is Jo’s poem, ‘In the
Garrett’, which is discovered by Fredrich Bhaer and which he returns to Jo
on the occasion of their engagement ‘under the umbrella’ in Chapter 23.44
In what Jo calls her ‘very bad poetry’ and which she subsequently rips up
to let ‘the fragments fly away on the wind’—whether because of its claimed
bad quality or because it had been ‘where it could tell tales’ is not stated—
she has written of four chests which revisit the characters of the sisters that
were first established with the famous fireside scene at the very beginning
of the text.45 Meg’s shows the ‘record of a peaceful life’, with marriage and
children to take away the toys that had once lain there to be pressed into
service once again by the ‘happy mother’. Beth’s is that of a ‘saint’, canon-
ized by death but ‘ever less human than divine’, a memory for the narrator
who tells of the love that keeps Beth’s chest dust-free in her sister’s fre-
quent visits. Amy’s chest bears testament to a more fashionable life than
the others, no toys but slippers and snoods; but no less than theirs, it is a
record of a childhood and girlhood that are done, replaced by a heart
‘now learning fairer, truer spells’. Jo’s own chest is perhaps sadder even
than Beth’s: while the younger sister is lamented in death, the older seems
stalled, ‘memories of a past still sweet’ giving way to ‘hints of a woman
early old’; yet in the poem’s return to Jo by Fredrich Bhaer, readers already
know that the promise, ‘Be worthy, love, and love will come’, has been
fulfilled, no matter their feelings about the recipient of Jo’s love.46 To me,
this poem—perhaps more than any other singular moment in Little
Women—marks the ‘passage between’, the nostalgia for a lost childhood,
as well as the celebrations and sorrows of a womanhood that never did,
perhaps, match up to the girlhood ‘castles in the air’.
Yet the conceit of Jo’s writing in Little Women is always, of course, that
it was Alcott’s writing first. And in this case, the poem had a life not only
prior to Jo, but prior to the text: according to Madeleine B. Stern, ‘In the
Garrett’ was first written for The Flag of Our Union and had ‘centered
about the characters of Nan, Lu, Bess and May’.47 I had read this version
of the poem in the Houghton archives on a visit in July 2017 prior to
reading of it in Stern’s work as a poem published prior to Little Women,
and was interested to read the differences between the Houghton and
Little Women texts. There are more differences than just names of ‘the
characters’, as read by Stern. Rather than summarize where they occur, I
want to concentrate on the very desire to read between them, to look to
the archives for a ‘Lu’ whose story reads differently to that of Jo. Many
differences are minor—a word omitted or added; the swapping of line
order—but the last four lines are significantly different. The Little Women
version, from the 1869 text, reads:
A woman in a lonely home,

Hearing like a sad refrain,—
‘Be worthy, love, and love will come,’
In the falling summer rain.
The Houghton MS reads:
A woman musing here alone,

Hearing ever her life’s refrain—
“Labor and love, but make no moan”—
In the drip of the summer rain.48
The key word for me is ‘here’: Alcott has again troubled the divide between
author and narrator to claim herself, if problematically, as ‘character’, as
the ‘Lu’ of this poem to whom she has given one version of her own name.
This woman’s fate is different to that of Jo, too: no love waits for her
except the love that she must give, second only to labor, and neither of
which, it seems, do or will make her happy.
40 K. WEST
Another archival read (though this, too, is available in published form)

is Alcott’s poem, ‘Our Angel in the House’.49 For those one have read one
of Alcott’s biographies, this could be assumed as a poem to sister Elizabeth,
or Lizzie, who died in 1858 at the age of twenty-two.50 The ‘I’ narrator,
and the address ‘O my sister’, both speak to this reading; yet, they also
speak to Jo’s loss of Beth in Part Two of Little Women. In Part One, the
novel’s narrator tells us that:
Jo meantime devoted herself to literature and Beth, who remained delicate

long after the fever was a thing of the past. Not an invalid exactly, but never
again the rosy, healthy creature she had been, yet always hopeful, happy, and
serene, and busy with the quiet duties she loved, everyone’s friend, and an
angel in the house, long before those who loved her most had learned to
know it.51
Beth, here, is ‘an angel in the house’ [my emphasis], thereby creating a
community of potential domestic angels such as herself. After all, the
‘angel in the house’ was not restricted to Alcott’s lived and/or fictional
textual girls, but was a nineteenth-century conceit, apparently beginning
with Coventry Patmore’s titular 1854–1862 poem, which is claimed by
the British Library to have been inspired by his wife.52 The image contin-
ued to have a life beyond the nineteenth century, with Virginia Woolf’s
1942 call to kill the angel in the house as ‘part of the occupation of a
woman writer’.53 Patmore’s angel is a wife while Woolf’s is ‘a certain phan-
tom’ that is still ‘a woman’, but this female phantom was such a torment
that ‘at last I killed her’. Woolf’s construction is of interest due to the dif-
ference of perspective between the angel for male and female writer: the
angel embodies all the elements of domestic virtue and self-sacrifice for
each, but the effect is the difference between celebration and a desired
annihilation. After all, Woolf’s angel is both already dead—a ‘phantom’—
and able to be killed, although there is no guarantee by the end of the text
that she will stay dead as Woolf claims: ‘It is far harder to kill a phantom
than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had dis-
patched her.’ The past tense of ‘was’ allows us to argue that she is gone;
but the ‘always creeping back’ undermines any such certainty.
Alcott’s ‘angel’ has many of the characteristics of both Patmore’s and
Woolf’s angel: she is female, ‘patient in the shadow’, ‘serene and saintly’;
more like Patmore’s angel in Alcott’s seeming approval but as irritating
and sentimental to some readers as Woolf’s tormenting ghost. However,
Alcott’s poem is not really about her ‘angel’ at all (as, really, neither
Woolf’s nor Patmore’s works are) but rather explores how the narrator
experiences her sister’s death. This non-perfect narratorial sibling makes
demands of the shadow-sister she addresses: ‘Give me—for I need it
sorely—/Of that courage’. And, by the end of the poem, an exchange has
taken place between the voiceless ghost-sister and her living sibling, allow-
ing the narrator to take some comfort in her loss, the ‘render[ing] of her
wild nature more serene’ and feels that this lesson has given ‘to life new
aspirations’. While the taming of the narrator-sibling remains as contro-
versial as Jo’s fate as an adult later in the Little Women series, the hope of
‘new aspirations’ and that grief ‘[g]ive[n] to life’ produces new life from
the death of the ‘domestic spirit’; the narrator does not replace her sister
as ‘the angel in the house’, but rather lives her own life anew as the result
of the sister’s passing. This narrator is far more successful than Woolf at
finally leaving the domestic goddess behind.
So why read Alcott from the archives at all, if not to claim the archival
versions as origin and as, problematically, autobiographical? In scholarly
insistence on the archive as origin—in consulting it for our writing of aca-
demic and critical works—we run the risk of what Derrida calls mal
d’archive, usually translated as ‘archive fever’. In the eponymous text,
he writes:
Beyond every possible and necessary inquiry, we will always wonder what
Freud (for example), what every ‘careful concealer’ may have wanted to
keep secret. We will wonder what he may have kept of his unconditional
right to secrecy, while at the same time burning with the desire to know, to
make known, and to archive the very thing he concealed forever. What was
concealed? What did he conceal even beyond the intention to conceal, to lie,
or to perjure?54
Derrida’s claim is that of the ‘beyond’, the unreachable even by exhaustive

inquiry, that which is deliberately and carefully concealed, with an unre-
solvable tension between the desire (‘we will always wonder’) and the
secret. The desire is created by the very act of concealing, encompassing
not just Freud but ‘every careful concealer’—those successful or diligent
at their concealment—and a ‘we’ that encompasses not just Derrida and
his assumed readers, but every inquirer now and in the future: ‘we will
always wonder’. In Derrida’s construction, therefore, is a desire to fill in
the gaps; to know what cannot be known and which, perhaps, should not
42 K. WEST
be known. After all, famously uncomfortable with fame, Alcott burned

many of her private papers to protect (what was left of) her privacy.
Yet this realization, Derrida claims, is not enough: we are ‘burning with
the desire to know’ and, crucially, ‘to make known’. This desire, this
archive fever, is centered not just around the pursuit of personal knowl-
edge but around the ‘institutional passage from the private to the public’,
the making known of that which is ultimately secret, ‘between oneself and
oneself’, or even more secret than that; the destruction of Jacqueline
Rose’s performed selfhood for one that is, somehow, real.55 Under
Derrida’s formulation, the reading of the archive is always incomplete,
fragmentary, composed of both safekeeping and absence, that which sits
along the unstable line between private and public, and that which is ‘for-
ever’ secret but is overwhelmingly desired. This desire, this burning that
Derrida articulates, is truly archive fever, the desire ‘to archive’, to find,
uncover, then to fix, domicile, keep and, finally, crucially, make public
despite the ‘right to secrecy’ and the concealment that is, or should be,
‘forever’. In reading Alcott in and from the archives, then, in looking
beyond and before the texts composed to be in the public domain, we are
less able to find an Alcott to complete what we see as the fragmentary and
troubled fictionalized record of a life, than we are likely to embark on a
reading that can have no end. There is no more truth, no more reality, in
the archives than can be found in the fiction.
Real Child, Real Author: Jo, Peter, Alice

In writings such as Alcott’s that are considered to be on childhood in par-
ticular, a critical appeal to the so-called reality of that childhood, often via
the author’s life and experience, is more frequently invoked than in litera-
ture deemed to be for, or about, adults, as Lesnik-Oberstein has discussed
in her work on critical representations of the child in The Mill on the Floss.
Lesnik-Oberstein argues:
[T]his text about childhood is judged to be successful because it is seen as

being true to life (judgements again relying on a particular author’s narra-
tive), and this in terms of particular notions of emotion, society, and psy-
chology. And the truth to life establishes childhood as a thing that can be
simply itself, recognizable and inevitable.56
In this sense, a text deemed to be ‘about childhood’ is frequently read by

critics (with Lesnik-Oberstein situating herself as outside this reading) in
terms of a value based on a claimed reality of that childhood, but one that
is always problematic due to the investment in making such a reading: the
claim that childhood’s ‘reality’ is homogenous and unquestionable, and
does not need to be read. Therefore, the appeal to a reality beyond the
text, whether situated in an author’s life or a claimed reality of childhood
itself, is always an appeal to an origin that cannot be sustained.
Such readings of a claimed reality of the author into a text on child-
hood—whether through archives or other textual sources—are not
restricted to Alcott, by any means. Two other texts deemed to be on, or
about childhood, if largely by an adult readership, can also have a bearing
on critical readings of Alcott’s works in that they, too, are often subject to
such claims to autobiography, childhood, and authorship. I will therefore
briefly consider readings of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland, published in 1863—just five years before Little Women—and
J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, published in differing forms from The Little White
Bird (1902), Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), and the novel,
Peter and Wendy (1911), bookended by various versions of Barrie’s play,
Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up (1904–1928).
Many critics have looked to records of Barrie’s personal life to find the
origins of his most famous story, that of the eponymous Peter Pan. As
such, Barrie’s biographical relationships with children, and the assumed
portrayal of these children in his works, has come under close scrutiny.
Barrie’s relationship with the five Llewellyn Davies boys, three of whom
he met in Kensington Gardens in the summer of 1897, has often been said
to inform the various versions of Peter Pan—a relationship which has been
invoked repeatedly in discussions of the claimed homoerotic or pedophilic
content of both novel and play—to the extent that the character of Peter
has been read as an amalgam of the Llewelyn Davies boys, one of whom
was also named Peter. Further, Barrie prefaced his first publication of the
play Peter Pan with a dedication ‘To the Five’, addressing the Llewellyn
Davies boys as both inspiration for and participants in the story, blurring
the lines between an assumed reality and fiction still further.57 Peter as
character, then, is troubled before we even begin: like Jo March before
him, he may be fictional or real; one boy or multiple like Laurie; an amal-
gam of different boys across novel, plays, and film, or a recognizable char-
acter across all. Even his name causes an unsettling that cannot be
reconciled, as ‘March’ is read as allied to the maternal Alcott family name
of ‘May’: to Wendy he is ‘Peter’, yet to Hook he is ‘Pan’. After all, Barrie
emphasizes that it is Pan that Hook wants, whereas Wendy wants and
addresses Peter. The appellation, Pan, also carries many possibilities: the
44 K. WEST
Greek god of the wild; Wordsworth’s Arcadian bucolic god; the archetypal
Romantic child; the bestial Dionysian god of wine and sex; although, as
‘pan’, he is also ‘all’.58
The history of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland reads in a similar way
to that of Peter Pan: rather than reading the author into the text, critics of
both books look to, and for, a nominally ‘real child’—in this case, Alice
Liddell—to inform their readings, and to a particular reading of the rela-
tionship between that child and the author.59 As with responses to Peter
Pan, critics read beyond the pen name of Lewis Carroll to claim a pedo-
philic interest from Charles Dodgson in the non-fictional Alice. As dis-
cussed in Juliet Dusinberre’s Alice to the Lighthouse, a comparison between
Alice in Wonderland and the authorship of Little Women can be made:
‘The book based on the author’s experiences with her sisters is Little
Women (1868), and the grumbling tomboyish tone [in Alcott’s letters to
her publisher] is authentically that of Jo March’.60 Both Peter Pan and
Little Women are assumed to be based on ‘real’ children and to contain the
author’s own story within the text. Readings of Alice also trouble the sta-
tus of the text as ‘for’ children, as has been claimed regarding Little
Women, in particular Part Two: as Dusinberre discusses, Virginia Woolf
noted that ‘the two Alices are not books for children; they are only books
in which we become children’.61
The so-called ‘real’ child as it is read in these texts is therefore con-
structed in terms of its relationship with the author. Both the Alice and
Peter texts are claimed to be about a pedophilic relationship or interest
between man and child subject; both children are subject to readings of a
sexualized and (perhaps) sexualizing male gaze, and to a prurient ‘peanut-
crunching crowd’ voyeurism over what may have taken place outside of
the text. This approach, of course, is reliant on a reading of author and
man, art and life, as the same. Jo, on the other hand, is read as offering a
window into Alcott’s own childhood, despite the problems inherent in the
separation of the ‘I’ writing and the ‘I’ (if one reads Jo as Alcott) as sub-
ject; and that relationship, somehow discovered both within and outside
of the text, giving a claimed value to the text in terms of authority and
troubling the boundaries between fiction and autobiography, as is com-
mon in readings of Little Women. As discussed regarding Rose’s analysis of
Sexton, the ‘I’—even if intentionally fictionalized by the author, or if only
read as such by readers who want to know more—is always and only ever
fiction. If the child can only be read within claims to autobiography in its
relationship with the adult author, what effect does this have on the con-
struct of the child, whether claimed as fictional, as autobiographical, or as
something that crosses or exceeds such generic classification? In construct-

ing the lived child solely within this relationship, the appeal to the real is
fatally undermined, for what we are left with is a child that is neither real
nor fictional but only ever a production of the author’s and the reader’s
perspectives; as argued in Chap. 1, the child’s separation from and posi-
tioning in relation to the adult world effaces the very claims made to valu-
ing the child.
In looking at readings of autobiography in terms of childhood in par-
ticular, I also want to consider what value may (arguably) be gained by
making such a reading, and why critics choose to claim such value by read-
ing outside of the text in an appeal to something prior or extra to textual
constructions of children. Zelizer’s Pricing the Priceless Child considers in
detail ‘the profound transformation in the economic and sentimental
value of children’.62 Her argument, briefly, is that children in eighteenth-
century America were considered in terms of ‘economic value’, but that by
‘the mid-nineteenth century, the construction of the economically worth-
less child had been in large part accomplished among the American urban
middle class’, a shift that continued well into the twentieth century. In
considering Zelizer’s argument throughout her text, one can read that the
value of childhood is not stable, that it shifts according to societal needs
and mores; what Alcott might call ‘fashion’. As Lesnik-Oberstein argues
further, and as discussed previously, the assumed status of the child as self-
evident, not in need of analysis, or as too precious to touch, has resulted
in the critical turn to biography in order to show why the child need not
be read: if a ‘real’ child can be shown as origin for its fictional counterpart,
nothing more need be said. In a literature that is often othered and deni-
grated as ‘kiddie lit’ in particular—it is notable that Peter Pan and Alice, as
well as Little Women, were considered literature for all before their subject
matter, of childhood, reduced them to suitable for children only—its spe-
cialized nature, as categorized by those who place themselves outside of its
boundaries, is always reductive of both the work and the childhood it
apparently contains.
Negotiating the ‘Counter-Flow’

The aim of this chapter has not been to argue that autobiographical writ-
ing does not exist, or that reading autobiography into ostensibly fictional
texts is wrong or somehow undesirable. Rather, I argue that there is no
reality to which any text defers, only another text from which such claims
46 K. WEST
have been read, or even a whole chain of them, claimed as generically dif-
ferent (the ostensibly ‘private’ forms of letters, journals, et cetera) and
therefore privileged over the fictional text: yet these do not offer reality
any more than the fiction does. This approach, in which a so-called ‘real’
child is privileged above the fictional child, so often puts a stop on the
reading: if Jo is Alcott, or Alice is Alice Liddell, then there is no need to
analyze further, to consider what is at stake in the construction of the tex-
tual child. Problem therefore solved and ‘victory to the critic’.63 And
when, as in so many cases, it is the child that is rendered ‘peripheral’, as
Neil Cocks argues is the case in literature of the nineteenth century and
beyond, texts for and about children will always remain on the sidelines.64
I am highlighting these issues for a number of reasons: principally to
explain further the theoretical approach I am taking to Alcott’s works on
childhood and ‘the passage between’, and to create a space in which
Alcott’s writings beyond Little Women can be deemed worthy of critical
attention and, hopefully, a new readership.
In concluding this chapter on the issues with reading autobiographi-
cally, I therefore want to consider briefly Daniel Shealy’s Little Women: An
Annotated Edition. In his Introduction, Shealy claims:
Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy were real. Meg yearns for nicer clothes and wealthy
society; Amy desires popularity, good looks, and admiration; Beth wishes for
a voice and self-confidence; and Jo burns for fame and literary success. Their
hopes and dreams are largely those shared by adolescents, then and now.65
Although Shealy’s picture of adolescence ‘then and now’ may be argued

to mirror Alcott’s—western, middle class, with money and leisure to wish
for such things, even if life is sometimes hard—it is in the verbs, perhaps,
that we can consider his claims to reality: ‘Meg yearns […] Amy desires
[…] Beth wishes […] Jo burns’. In this desire for something other, some-
thing better—if only in the perception of it as such—we can read a univer-
sality, a reality in which the canonical status of Little Women, in comparison
to Alcott’s other texts, might lie: as less a question of its claimed autobio-
graphical reality, and more in its appeal to its readers’ reality, whether lived
or fantasized. The following dedication to the sesquicentennial celebra-
tion of Little Women from Pink Umbrella Books, Alcott’s Imaginary
Heroes: The Little Women Legacy, also speaks to Shealy’s reading of ‘real-
ity’: ‘For Louisa—and the generations of little women who grew up with
her’.66 In this dedication, we (as readers) and the author are both situated
within the text: we are the ‘little women’ and we grew up, not with Jo, but
with ‘Louisa’, who is therefore both ‘in’ Little Women and in this text too.
And, as scholars rather than popular readers, we are not necessarily
immune to this pull. As Jacqueline Rose claims: ‘[H]owever closely the
critic tries to follow the currents of the writing, she is likely to feel this
counter-flow, find herself drifting into her writers’ lives, into the inexora-
ble logic of fame.’67 For Rose, writing and life are inseparable, however
critically we read, and her question—‘Why is it so hard […] to hold writ-
ing in its own place?’—can only be answered by considering what writing
is, in a world of celebrity, fandom, and identification through literature:
never pure fiction, but never quite autobiography either, but rather a fig-
ure of understanding both text and ourselves.68 In considering the issues
with autobiography in this chapter and in relation to Alcott, therefore, it
is autobiography as genre that fails to sustain itself, while autobiography as
reading, it seems, cannot be avoided.
Notes
1. Joan Acocella (2018) ‘How Little Women Got Big’, The New Yorker,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/how-little-
women-got-big [accessed 20/8/18].
2. Some sections of this chapter are informed by my article, Kristina West
(2019) ‘Who Owns Little Women? Adapting Alcott in the 21st Century’,
Women’s Studies, Vol. 28, No. 4. By permission and with thanks.
4. Paul de Man (1979) ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, MLN, Vol. 94, No.
5, Comparative Literature, pp. 919–930.
5. De Man, p. 919.
6. De Man, p. 919.
9. Origin will be discussed further regarding adaptations and fan fiction in
Chap. 8.
10. Jacqueline Rose (2004) Preface, On Not Being Able to Sleep (London:
Vintage), unnumbered.
11. Rose, ‘“Faking it up with the truth”: Anne Sexton’, On Not Being Able to
Sleep, pp. 17–24, 18.
12. Sylvia Plath (1962) ‘Lady Lazarus’, Collected Poems (London: Faber and
Faber, 1981), pp. 244–246.
13. Jacques Derrida (1998) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric
Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 90.
48 K. WEST
14. Madeleine Stern, ed. (1984) Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott (Boston:
G.K. Hall & Company), p. 83.
15. Stern, Critical Essays, p. 106.
16. Douglas, ‘Introduction to Little Women’, p. 46.
17. Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep, p. 20.
18. Alcott (1872) ‘My Boys’, Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag: The Complete Six Volumes,
Vol. I (McAllister Editions, 2015), p. 3.
19. Alcott, ‘My Boys’, p. 5.
23. Alcott (1888) ‘Recollections of My Childhood’, The American
Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, ed. Lawrence Buell (New York:
Random House, 2006); I will discuss Buell’s version of the essay unless
otherwise stated.
24. Alcott (1889) ‘Recollections of My Childhood’, Lulu’s Library, Vol. III
(London: Amazon), pp. 2–10.
25. Buell, p. 513.
26. MacLeod, p. 15.
27. Madelon Bedell (1980) The Alcotts: Biography of a Family (New York:
Clarkson N. Potter); John Matteson (2007) Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of
Louisa May Alcott and her Father (New York: W.W. Norton & Company);
Eve LaPlante (2012) Marmee and Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May
Alcott and Her Mother (New York: Free Press).
28. Bedell, p. 397.
29. Bedell, pp. 246, 247, 298–299.
30. Alcott, Letters, ‘To Alfred Whitman’, pp. 120–121.
31. Alcott, Letters, ‘To Mr. Wiley’, pp. 175–176.
32. Alcott, Letters, ‘To Mrs. Graham, pp. 219–220.
33. Alcott also made other claims to the origin of Laurie, thereby troubling
any claim to a reality beyond the fiction.
34. Alcott, Letters, ‘To Ariadne Blish’, p. 197.
36. Alcott, Jack and Jill, frontispiece.
37. Alcott, Letters, ‘To Ann E. Devens’, p. 239.
39. Alcott, Jack and Jill, pp. 1, 262, 1.
40. Josephine Latham Swayne (1906) The Story of Concord, Told by Concord
Writers (Boston: The E. F. Worcester Press) lists three Minots in its
index, plus the Minot House; index, p. vi. Henry David Thoreau also
refers to the ‘Minott House’ as his birthplace; today, it is known locally
as ‘Thoreau Farm’. https://thoreaufarm.org/thoreau-birth-house/
[accessed 25/7/18].
41. Alcott, Letters, ‘To Mary Mapes Doge’, p. 237.

42. Anonymous, ‘Review of Jack and Jill: A Village Story, 1880’, Stern,
Critical Essays, p. 171.
43. Alcott, Letters, pp. 219–220.
44. Alcott, Little Women, p. 372.
45. Alcott, Little Women, pp. 362–373.
47. Madeleine B. Stern, from Louisa May Alcott: A Biography, Little Women,
Norton Critical Edition, pp. 434–446, 435.
48. Alcott, ‘In the Garrett’, Alcott family additional papers, 1707–1904,
(bulk) 1821–1888, MS Am 1130.14-1130.16, Houghton Library,
Harvard University.
49. ‘The Angel in the House’, Louisa May Alcott papers 1847–1887 Folder 1,
first manuscript pages of Little Women, Concord Free Public Library
Archive Collection [accessed 14 July 2017].
50. Rioux, p. 37.
52. Coventry Patmore, ‘The Angel in the House’, https://www.bl.uk/collec-
tion-items/coventry-patmores-poem-the-angel-in-the-house, [accessed
25/7/18].
53. Virginia Woolf (1942) Professions for Women, http://faculty.mercer.edu/
glance_jc/English_264_Online/resources/eng264_files/Woolf_
Professions.pdf [accessed 25/7/18].
54. Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 101.
55. Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 2.
56. Lesnik-Oberstein, p. 80.
57. Jack Zipes (2004) ‘Introduction’, in J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan (London:
Penguin Books), pp. vii–xxvii.
58. An earlier version of this paragraph will be published in the forthcoming
The Sage Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications).
59. Michael Irwin (1993) ‘Introduction’ to Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Ware: Wordsworth Classics),
pp. 7–27.
60. Juliet Dusinberre (1999) Alice to the Lighthouse (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan), p. 76.
61. Dusinberre, pp. 3–4.
62. Zelizer, p. 3.
63. Roland Barthes (1967) ‘The Death of the Author’, from Modern Criticism
and Theory, a Reader, Third Edition, ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood
(Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2008), p. 316.
50 K. WEST
64. Neil Cocks (2014) The Peripheral Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature

and its Criticism (London: Palgrave Macmillan).
65. Daniel Shealy (2013) ‘Introduction’, Little Women: An Annotated Edition
(Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press), p. 2.
66. Merry Gordon and Marnae Kelley, eds. (2018) Alcott’s Imaginary Heroes:
The Little Women Legacy (Pink Umbrella Books).
67. Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep, Introduction: ‘Shame’, pp. 1–14, 5.
68. Rose, p. 49.
CHAPTER 3
Subverting the Sentimental Domestic
Positioning the Textual Child

Many of Alcott’s works—including, on occasion, her blood-and-thunder
novels and stories—are read by critical readers as domestic fiction: woman-
authored; written at a time when a woman’s place was still largely assumed
to be in the home; and centered on house and home, frequently focusing
on female characters and/or children. In this sense, it is avowedly non-
canonical, frequently read in opposition to the male-authored and male-
endorsed nineteenth-century canon. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alcott’s
Concord neighbor, famously condemned domestic fiction as written by a
‘d[amne]d mob of scribbling women’ writing ‘trash’.1 Her contemporary,
Henry James Jr., was no more complimentary about either the genre or
Alcott’s place within it. A case in point is his review of Alcott’s adult work,
Moods. Writing for The Atlantic Monthly in 1865, James dismissed the
novel as an unconvincing version of ‘the old story’ of the domestic love
triangle and Alcott’s ‘ignorance of human nature’ as the reason for its lack
of conviction; however, he disapproved of Eight Cousins, some ten years
later, for the opposite reason, believing it too realistic for a children’s story
and Alcott’s ‘smart, satirical tone’ as inappropriate for the age of its
intended audience.2 In each case, a claim to a known real is invoked to
withhold a value judgment from a female-written text, with James arguing
that Alcott’s knowledge and experience of life is insufficient to write about
adults but inappropriate when applied to children. This claim to value

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39025-9_3
52 K. WEST
within an assumed reality is troubled by James’ approach to the relative

positioning of adulthood and childhood within a strict binary; but the
question of what confers value on a ‘domestic’ text remains.
Alcott’s works, while without doubt endorsing the value of the domes-
tic space, also trouble its sentimental configuration: men are frequently
excised; the traditional family structure is splintered and reconfigured; and
the sentimentality that MacLeod reads as informing many of Alcott’s texts
is questioned at every turn. This chapter will therefore consider the domes-
tic space and the relative positioning of the child in Alcott’s works. I will
examine some of Alcott’s domestic and familial settings to consider the
relationship between child and domestic, and between child and space,
further exploring how the child is often located as either outside of this
domestic space or in subversion of the space itself. Through orphan chil-
dren, displaced parents, and a flight from the domestic into the wild,
Alcott’s children frequently challenge the sentimental domestic trope.
Discussing the impact of family magazine The Delineator’s 1907 child
rescue campaign, in which the publication ran a series of stories on chil-
dren available for adoption, Mavis Reimer claims: ‘[T]he series explained
that the connection between the home and the child is a “natural” one.’
However, she notes further, that this was not, and is not, a universal view:
If the connection between the happy home and the happy child appears to
be a natural one, structural and post-structural theorists contend, it is
because it has been naturalized; in other words, social ideology has obscured
the process of the construction of this linkage in a specific time and place.3
In this argument, there is no ‘natural’ connection between home and child

except through its ‘appearance’ and through the conditional adult claim
that works to place the child within the domestic environment but also
believes that its presence is beyond that very perspective and placing.
According to Reimer, the claims of such theorists are based on the conten-
tion that this naturalization of the link between ‘happy child’ and ‘happy
home’ took place ‘in a specific time and place’. I will argue that the confla-
tion of child and the domestic setting takes place just as much in language
as in assumed history; and, further, that literature for and about children
plays a role in the creation of the sentimental and domestic child.
3 SUBVERTING THE SENTIMENTAL DOMESTIC 53
‘There’s No Place Like Home’: Locating

a Sentimental Childhood
The child’s relation to the domestic environment—indeed, the very cre-

ation of the sentimental domestic by and around the textual child—was
enshrined in Victorian-era literature long before Alcott began to write
Little Women and was not confined to literature marketed primarily at
children. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 text, Émile, or On Education, has
often been argued to form the basis for the later Romantic child; indeed,
for a much wider understanding of the Romantic movement. Émile, from
birth, is ‘Nature’s pupil’ as much as that of his tutor, raised in pastoral
seclusion as ‘[m]en are devoured by our towns’, prefiguring William Blake
and William Wordsworth, among others, in this division of an original and
natural innocence contrasted with the moral darkening of an adult and
urban experience; a division that Alcott considered in works such as An
Old-Fashioned Girl.4 Wordsworth’s children, unlike those unfortunates of
earlier Puritan literature who were born riddled with sin, were both the
embodiment and emblem of purity—indeed, of heaven itself—and in this
emblematic state, they too were often constructed in terms of their differ-
ence from, and as commentary upon, the troubled adult world. Alcott was
not immune to the pull of the sentimental child: she references
Wordsworth’s ‘We Are Seven’ in Under the Lilacs, while Dickens’ orphans
and sentimental children might be read to inform her own portrayals of
such a childhood, with frequent references to his texts in Alcott’s works.5
As Strickland comments: ‘Charles Dickens […] marched before his
American readers a succession of pure yet doomed young heroes and her-
oines who were exploited, betrayed, and in many instances destroyed by
vicious adults.’6 This construction of a ‘pure yet doomed’ childhood char-
acterized by a natural innocence that was threatened by too-early exposure
to the adult world was explored in many sentimental narratives of the
mid-late nineteenth century, and this claim to sentimentalism is largely
predicated on a shift in the valuing of the child. As Zelizer explains: ‘The
emergence of this economically “worthless” but emotionally “priceless”
child has created an essential condition of contemporary childhood.’7 The
child viewed through a lens of emotional worth is, at heart, the sentimen-
tal child: one who is not simply removed from any necessity of proving
financially advantageous to a family, but whose very presence is antithetical
to commercial value. Yet this claim to a sentimental childhood is always
problematic: what happens to the child when it, inevitably, enters what is
54 K. WEST
constructed as the adult world of commerce, sexuality, and all that has
been held at bay by its unassailable innocence?
One solution taken by many writers to this looming paradox is the
death of the sentimental child, removing it from the world to keep its
assumed innocence untouched. This textual focus on the dead and dying
child belongs to a common critical reading of much nineteenth-century
American and English literature. As Judith Plotz comments: ‘Nothing in
literary history quite compares with the sudden turn between 1840 and
1910 to searching treatments of childhood death and dying both in works
intended for children and those for adults.’8 Indeed, literary tomes abound
on what Dusinberre terms ‘the top favourite[s] in the necrophilia stakes’;
Zelizer calls ‘[t]he romantic cult of the dead child’; and Max Cavitch
describes as ‘ample literary journeywork for the industriously maudlin’.9
And much of this concentration is concerned with the significant shift in
conceptions of childhood over the course of the nineteenth century. Not
that this shifting in the status of the child stopped dead, as it were, at the
end of the nineteenth century; but the bar was set for a construction of the
grief of a parent—and, therefore, a reader—at a child’s death as a natural,
even desirable reaction during this time, although as Peter Gregg Slater
points out, ‘moderation was expected for deaths both great and small:
“Not to mourn at all is unnatural; and to mourn beyond the stinted
bounds is unChristian”’.10
Perhaps surprisingly, in her passage between the rational and the senti-
mental, the dying or dead child was not a common trope in Alcott’s works
on childhood: most of her children, no matter their sufferings, tended to
live; and most of those that did not—the Little Women series’ Dick and
Billy; the baby brother, also called Billy, in Alcott’s short story, ‘The Blind
Lark’, for example—were dispatched with very little fuss. Yet the link
between death and a sentimental childhood still runs throughout her
work. Significant deaths—in the sense that the text pays prolonged atten-
tion to them—in Alcott’s works for children include Ed Devlin in Jack
and Jill; though not a child, John Brooke in Little Men, whose death is
described largely through its impact on his own children and those of
Plumfield; and, of course, Little Women’s Beth March. Interestingly, each
of these three deaths has been critically read to have its roots in Alcott’s
own history.
Beth’s death seems to fit the pattern established in other nineteenth-
century children’s texts, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin and Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World; indeed, Steven Bruhm
and Natasha Hurley’s roll-call of such texts—as will be discussed further in

Chap. 4 on gender and sexuality—brings out an interesting parallel
between Stowe’s Little Eva, Dickens’ Little Nell, and little woman Beth,
for in their early deaths, each of these sentimentalized girls remains ‘little’,
both in that she remains child and that she retains Alcott’s idealized and
sentimentalized littleness. Beth alone, among her less-sentimentalized sib-
lings, can never grow up; a status that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
figure as ‘Beth’s prolonged suicide’.11 Judith Fetterley comments further:
‘Beth’s slow death takes place on center stage and occupies several chap-
ters’; possibly the only time she takes such a central position in the entire
narrative, although even this is figured largely as an object lesson to Jo.12
Leslie Fielder, too, considers the role of the dead or dying child in senti-
mental literature:
It is the unendurable happy ending, as the white slip of a thing too good for
this world prepares to leave it for the next, while readers and parents, lovers
all, sob into their handkerchiefs. The Good Good Girl, blond, asexual god-
dess of nursery or orphanage or old plantation house […] must die not only
so we may weep—and tears are, for the sentimentalist, the true baptism of
the heart—but also because there is nothing else for her to do.13
Like the sentimental heroines of other nineteenth-century novels, Beth

‘must die […] so we can weep’; her death is less tragedy to her than it is
to those who must learn from her experience: her family and her readers.
The pathos of Beth’s death is directly linked to her goodness and her sta-
tus as Romantic, innocent child: it is the death of innocence itself—the
impossibility of keeping it in the world—for which we weep. But this is
also a ‘happy ending’ for Fielder, if one that is also ‘unendurable’: for if
childhood is constructed as a learning stage through which one must pass
to reach (a problematically-perfect) adulthood, there is no future for the
already-perfect household angels, except in their example to others. Beth,
therefore, is the stereotype that must be left behind; the domestic, senti-
mental child who cannot grow up because there is nothing for her to grow
into except an adulthood intolerable both to herself and to her readers.14
Little Women is located as domestic fiction from the outset: the home
setting, the domestic trials and tribulations of a family of sisters, and
Alcott’s own claim within the text that it is a ‘domestic drama’ and, as
such, it both reiterates and troubles the Victorian trope of the sentimental
child, with Beth playing the role of both ‘angel in the house’ and the
56 K. WEST
sentimentalized dying or dead nineteenth-century child.15 As the angel in

the house, Beth not so much inhabits the sentimentalized domestic space
as constructs it, as Nina Auerbach comments: ‘The spirit of home, it dies
when Beth does.’16 Yet Beth also troubles her own sentimental positioning
in the home through the ‘affliction’ of her shyness; for despite her inhabi-
tation of the domestic space as ‘a housewifely little creature’, she uses it as
a barrier between herself and the world to which she knows she should
belong, while simultaneously fleeing it to ‘a happy world of her own’ and
to ‘her shadowy corner’.17 Similarly, her ‘dishes and dusters’ are both
choice and ‘burden’.18 The domestic space that Beth constructs and inhab-
its is one of both safety and self-imprisonment.
Yet Beth troubles the sentimental space of Little Women in other ways,
too, as also perhaps the only candidate in the March family for a sentimen-
talized childhood innocence, in comparison to the sisters who shun con-
ventional gender roles (Jo), commit shocking acts of destruction against
their siblings (Amy), and yearn for riches and glamor outside the home
(Meg), each of whom also fights to find her place in the adult world. Beth,
rather, rejects such worldly experience, situates herself out of reach of both
work and society outside the home, and is constituted in terms of child-
hood until her death. She never achieves the status of ‘women’ that her
sisters, each in their own ways, gain at different points in their lives and
textual histories.19 Jo’s attempt to imagine that a secret passion for Laurie
is the source of Beth’s troubles when she becomes sick is never believable,
because Beth herself cannot imagine such a desire: ‘“Why, Jo, how could
I, when he was so fond of you?” asked Beth, as innocently as a child. […]
“[H]e could never be anything to me but my brother.”’20 Beth might be
‘as a child’ in this speech, rather than the ‘child’ she is at other points of
the text, but the innocence expressed is both hers and the natural, unques-
tioned, and unquestioning state of the Romantic child.
In Little Men, however, the innocence of a sentimental childhood is
portrayed as that which should belong to childhood, but which, Alcott
claims, is frequently lost due to a too-early exposure to the adult world;
there is no Beth, remaining untouched and unsullied through withdrawal
from the world, in this school of boys. However, this claim to a prema-
ture adult experience can be, and is, negotiated in different ways. While
sentimental orphan Nat has been exposed to the commercial world in his
need to play the violin for money, and has suffered due to his poverty-
stricken status, he has not lost what Alcott constructs as his innate,
Romantic innocence: he remains ‘an innocent-hearted lad’ and ‘although
his body had suffered, his soul seemed to have taken little harm, and came
ashore as innocent as a shipwrecked baby’.21 Yet despite Alcott’s apparent
approval of the sentimental child-model here, Nat’s innate childhood
innocence is troubled as constituting a weakness:
Father Bhaer took pleasure in fostering poor Nat’s virtues, and in curing his
faults, finding his new pupil as docile and affectionate as a girl. He often
called Nat his “daughter” when speaking of him to Mrs. Jo, and she used to
laugh at his fancy, for Madame liked manly boys, and thought Nat amiable,
but weak.22
Innocence, here, has a gendered quality, unmanly and unsuitable for boys,
and sufficiently damning for Nat to lose Jo’s respect, if not her care. Dan,
on the other hand, is ‘manly’ enough for Mrs. Jo, despite her first reac-
tion: ‘A bad specimen, I’m afraid’.23 Dan’s experiences are outside the
narration’s construction of childhood innocence in many ways: despite
Strickland’s claim that ‘sex, violence, and drug use—themes that appear in
her sensational work—do not find their way into her children’s books’,
Dan uses his street experiences to teach the boys to smoke, swear, gamble,
and fight, and is banished from Plumfield for his adult sins.24 While Nat’s
innocence troubles his gender, Dan’s experience of a harsh world rather
troubles his status as child.25 Despite how Alcott questions the innate
nature of childhood innocence in these texts, as that which can be lost, or
situated outside of societal bounds, it retains the claim that it should
belong to childhood, and its sentimental and Romantic status endures.
The sentimental child is not just portrayed in Alcott via Victorian rep-
resentations of childhood death or Romantic innocence, however; child-
hood is also subject to a similar sentimentalization that is located in an
adult nostalgia for a time deemed to be lost. Bruhm and Hurley comment:
Utopianism follows the child around like a family pet. The child exists as a
site of almost limitless potential (its future not yet written and therefore
unblemished). But because the utopian fantasy is the property of adults, not
necessarily of children, it is accompanied by its doppelganger, nostalgia.26
Adult nostalgia about and for childhood acts in a similar way to the senti-
mentalization of childhood: it rejects both capitalism and sexuality as evils
of the modern and adult world, returning to a vision of childhood that can
only ever be located in a sentimentalized past by the adult for whom such
58 K. WEST
a construction of childhood is their sole means of reconciling their place

in a world to which they feel they do not, quite, belong. Alcott’s novel, An
Old-Fashioned Girl, celebrates and thus sentimentalizes a vision of child-
hood and a domestic past that is dying or already dead; if, indeed, it ever
existed except in the nostalgia that creates it as such. In her Preface to the
work, Alcott comments:
The “Old-Fashioned Girl” is not intended as a perfect model, but as a pos-

sible improvement upon the Girl of the Period, who seems sorrowfully
ignorant or ashamed of the good old fashions which make woman truly
beautiful and honored, and through her, render home what it should be,—a
happy place, where parents, and children, brothers and sisters, learn to love
and know and help one another.27
This disclaimer, if one might read it as such, is predicated on the very

model that it disavows: that girlhood is divided by ‘Period’ solely and that,
despite her imperfections, the old-fashioned girl could and should be used
as an example by modern girls. Although Alcott often adds prefatory
remarks to her novels, this has more of a flavor of didacticism about it than
many others in that the narrator is also telling readers how and what to
read from the text from a position that is both textual and extra to the
text, and one that posits itself as real through the signature of the author.
This is also about a claim to value that is absent to the ‘Girl of the Period’
but not to the narrator, and one that the narrator feels necessary to pass
on in order to nudge the assumed girl-readers into an appreciation of old-
fashioned values, and therefore to create such values in the present time
and place. These values are based upon a woman’s place in the domestic
sphere and the default patriarchal gaze that renders her ‘beautiful and
honored’, and one that takes place—despite its return to an earlier
period—in the present tense of ‘make’ and ‘render’. Alcott’s vision of
home here is sentimentalized as a state of domestic harmony in which each
member helps the others, but the woman’s role in managing this situation
is overlooked in that her value is only ever constructed by and in terms of
those others. The advice for the girl of the period is, therefore, a return to
a self-abnegation that will, magically, restore the world—and the home—
to what it ‘should be’. However, the very definition of nostalgia is that it
is based on the longing for a time that is already past and therefore cannot
be retrieved.
Subverting the Domestic

Alcott’s approbation for the sentimental domestic may well be read in
these examples; but having set up this idealized home and family life, she
also subverts both sentimentalization and its idealization as the model for
an ostensible real throughout her works for children. One example of this
is the short story, ‘Back Windows’, in which Alcott both establishes and
undermines the home as the place of sentimental domesticity.28 Neither
the home of the narrator—in that she spends all day spying and reporting
on her neighbors, always looking away from her own domestic interior—
nor the homes she sees and judges as lacking meet the sentimental ideal
that acts as a desired norm. However, the sentimental returns in the stan-
dards constructed by the narrator on which her judgments are based: the
children (and their parents) should conform to the gendered roles and
behavioral expectations of the sentimental family, and potential conse-
quences wait for those who do not. This voyeuristic construction of
domesticity—one based on what is seen rather than experienced or under-
stood; one that is both hidden and known in that people might ‘forget’
who is watching them even while the watchers remain; and one that is
predicated on a view through and from the ‘back windows’ that are con-
structed in terms of an assumed privacy that is never sustained—recalls
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s assertion that ‘the Gods see everywhere’;
or, in this case, it is Alcott’s narrator, who wonders:
whether the kind spirits who feel an interest in mortals ever take a look at us
on the shady side which we don’t show the world, seeing the trouble, vani-
ties, and sins which we think no-one knows […] what rewards they prepare
for those so busy with work and play that they forget who may be watching
their back windows with clearer eyes and truer clarity than any inquisitive
old lady with a pen in her hand?29
Despite her inclusion with the ‘us’ and ‘we’ of the mortals who hide their
wrongdoings, the narrator also identifies with the conditional gaze of the
‘kind spirits’, although the gaze of the narrator is known—by the reader,
at least—and less generous than the supernatural ‘look’ she imagines.
After all, Alcott’s domestic environment in this story is ‘the shady side’ of
life, one that is both hidden and exposed, and one that is subject to judg-
ment by the narrator and her imaginary ‘kind spirits’ who not only see
60 K. WEST
everywhere but are ready to dole out rewards and punishments—Santa

Claus-style—based on what they see.
The narrator’s constructions of the children she can see from her ‘back
window’ positions them within the sentimental tradition via an iteration of
traditional gender roles and an adult judgment that renders the children as
morally good or bad under her gaze. The three babies she sees are charac-
terized as, relatively, ‘aristocratic […] happy-go-lucky […] forlorn’; and
the older boys and girls—the babies pre-exist gender—are divided into
‘good’ and ‘naughty’, although these judgments are qualified by their
assumed gender.30 For example, there is a ‘good, domestic boy’ who
‘brushes and curls his three little sisters’ hair’, about whom the narrator
remarks: ‘I respect that virtuous boy.’31 Yet, as in the comparison of ‘wild
boy’ Dan and feminized Romantic innocent Nat in Little Men, ‘the
naughty boy [who] is very funny’ is far more to her taste, as the narrator
is ‘afraid I find this little black sheep the most interesting of the flock’; as
such, Alcott reiterates her claim to a superiority of ‘manly’ boys over their
better-behaved counterparts and positions naughtiness as a desirable and
naturalized male quality. Under the narrator’s judgment, the girls should
also adhere to traditional gender roles, and largely they do, with the claims
to ‘of course’ and to copying their mothers naturalizing such behavior:
they ‘have tea-parties, make calls, and play mother, of course’. The value
of this gendered play is shown through the two girls who are mentioned
apart from the pack in terms of a disobedience that, unlike the boys, does
not earn them any approbation; rather the narrator judges them nega-
tively: ‘I don’t admire her’. Instead, the girl who earns the narrator’s favor
is ‘a good, house-wifely little girl, who tends the baby, washes the cups,
and goes to school early with a sunshiney face and kisses all round’. Despite
Alcott’s usurpation of the sentimentalized home in her narrator’s unin-
vited voyeurism, she also seeks to make redress with the reinstatement of
desired and gendered roles for children.
However, this domestic is also a place of hiding—if unsuccessfully—
those things that we do not wish the world to know, with the home as a
place of secret shame which Alcott’s narrator has no qualms about drag-
ging into the light. Adults, as well as children, are subject to her judgment
on how they should behave, though she qualifies this with: ‘But as some
might think it was unjustifiable curiosity on my part to see these things,
and an actionable offense to speak of them, I won’t mention them’.32 This
is tongue-in-cheek, of course, as she already has mentioned them, but
there is no such mock-justification for her reporting on the children: an
unknown and unseen adult spying on children is perfectly acceptable in

this narrative. Such an intrusion on the private domestic space—both in its
apparently unseen self and through its unknowing observation by oth-
ers—stands in contrast to Laurie’s voyeuristic watching of the March fam-
ily in Little Women, although it too is known solely through its confession:
Laurie sees, but does not judge ‘a picture’ and ‘you all round the table
with your mother’, and the result of his uninvited watching of the senti-
mental domestic tableau is that Jo gives him ‘leave to look as much as you
like’. Indeed, her response takes Laurie from voyeur to invited participant
in the female domestic sanctum: ‘I just wish though, instead of peeping,
you’d come over and see us.’33 In ‘Back Windows’, however, the narrator
remains outside of the picture she views, and even outside of the friendly
spirits she conjures up to dispense judgment: despite her claims to identi-
fication as one of the ‘mortals’, she is not being watched and recorded,
or—more importantly—seen (except by the reader), and her initial appeal
to ‘us’ soon gives way to ‘those’ who are being watched. Her own domes-
tic space—the room from which she watches—is only constructed via the
moral code she applies to others but fails to adhere to herself.
As will be discussed further in Chap. 4 with reference to gender roles
and sexuality, Alcott also subverts family roles in her works on the domes-
tic space: famously with the matriarchal space of Little Women in which the
male role is sidelined, and less so with a parent-child role-reversal in her
short story, ‘The Children’s Joke’.34 In this story, Harry and Kitty are tired
of being bossed around by their parents; maiden Aunt Betsey suggests a
solution in the ‘joke’—which is also both ‘play’ and ‘experiment’—that
parents and children change places for a day. In a subversion of the domes-
tic space, and of normalized parent/child and educational roles, the chil-
dren ‘play’ their parents through language and action; rather than showing
an example of how they might be, the children reflect their ‘realities’ of
daily life, much to the amusement, chagrin, and exhaustion of the allegori-
cally and ironically named Mr. and Mrs. Fairbairn (‘good child’). Yet
despite such subversion, as in ‘Back Windows’, sentimental gender roles in
this story remain unquestioned for both parents and children: Mrs.
Fairbairn, playing child, is constructed as ‘pretty’ and ‘good’, and passed
around ‘as if she was a doll’, while Mr. Fairbairn is subject to the school-
room horrors of a boy who has not learned his lessons.35 The children may
be simply reflecting their parents’ insistence on such gendered roles, but
neither are they questioned by the narrator or the children after the exper-
iment’s end. The point of this ‘joke’ is a serious one: Aunt Betsey—not
62 K. WEST
unlike the voyeuristic narrator of ‘Back Windows’—has seen ‘the mischief

brewing’, a judgment of bad parenting that is reiterated by the narrator.
She therefore engineers the role-reversal with the agreement of both par-
ents and children: ‘Why not put yourselves in their places for a day and see
how you like it? I think you would understand the case better than anyone
could describe it, and perhaps do both yourselves and the children a last-
ing service.’36 Such a role-reversal necessitates a binary division of roles
between parents and children for them to be subverted, with the family
structure constructed as that in which parents command and children
obey. Alcott troubles the wisdom of this setup through the experiment,
but in its set timeline of a day and an ultimate reversion to the norm, this
can only ever be a ‘joke’. Indeed, the direction of Aunt Betsey, who ‘laid
out the order of performances, and told each what to do; for the little
people would never have thought of so many sly things if left to them-
selves’, divests the children of any agency in this story: they are replacing
one form of adult direction with another.37 It is therefore the parents who
are the true beneficiaries of this new form of education; the children are
merely subject to any future impact.
Perhaps, then, the real subversion here is not the role-reversal—which,
after all, is only temporary—but that both maiden aunt and children can
see what proper parenting ought to be, while the parents cannot. Alcott
also subverts traditional educational roles, in that the parents learn how
the children feel by direct experience rather than through a more didactic
form of education, although Kitty insists on driving the lesson home:
‘Poor little mamma! did she have a hard time? and didn’t she like being a
good girl and minding her parents?’38 Harry, meanwhile, tutors his father
in the hardest subjects he can find, and ‘when he got stuck offered no
help, but shook his head and called him a stupid fellow’; it is through his
own humiliation that Mr. Fairbairn learns that his method of education is
not working.39 Yet subversion is not the point of the exercise; indeed, Kitty
comments: ‘Don’t think I quite like it, everything is so turned round,’
reinstating a desired family and educational norm in which each member
accepts his or her proscribed role, even if it is a role that can be improved
through this temporary subversion.40 But any improvement is not certain:
while Alcott leaves the story hanging on a ‘hope for the future’, there is no
guarantee of change.41
Reconstructing the Family Unit

Alcott’s sentimentally-regulated family unit is troubled by the orphan fig-
ure in many of her works for children, despite this child’s simultaneous
presence as a sentimental trope. Orphans appear in children’s literature as
frequently as the books themselves, from Anne of Green Gables to Harry
Potter, via The Secret Garden, The Jungle Book, A Series of Unfortunate
Events, and too many others to mention. They also appear frequently in
nineteenth-century literature for adults, particularly in the works of
Dickens: from Jo and Esther in Bleak House; Pip in Great Expectations;
Oliver Twist; and especially Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, the
nineteenth-century orphan child suffered under a tide of sentimentality
that threatened to overwhelm it. In texts such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and
The Wide, Wide World, orphan children—particularly girls—were posi-
tioned as figures of sympathy, the innocent victims of a cruel fate. The
orphan trope often works differently in twentieth- and twenty-first-century
literature: the modern orphan elicits sympathy too, but the lack of parental
control also frees them to take on more fantastical adventures than would
be possible within a traditional family structure; however, like their nine-
teenth-century counterparts, later orphans also allow an exploration of the
role of family, with the introduction of other parental figures who explore
the possibilities and limitations of a non-traditional family structure.
Alcott may have subverted the sentimental domestic in many of her
novels, and her children may have problematized the sentimental and
moral positioning of much children’s literature of her time, but the orphan
trope was one that she both utilized and troubled. In troubling the genre,
there are few ‘full’ orphans—in that they have lost both parents—in
Alcott’s works; rather, many of her children are what Joe Sutliff Sanders
terms ‘half orphans’ after the death of one parent, although I would like
to stretch the definition of this term to include those with absent parents,
children who are assumed to be orphaned until their parents return unex-
pectedly, and those whose parents fail to fulfill their expected roles.42
Examples abound: the March girls’ father is absent for the majority of the
first novel, and makes very little impact even with his presence in Part
Two; Polly in An Old-Fashioned Girl has parents, but they never appear in
the text except through her narrative, while Fan, Tom, and Maud are so
emotionally distant from their parents that they are as good as absent dur-
ing their childhood; Under the Lilacs’ Ben Brown believes himself to be an
orphan for the majority of the text, although a traditional, if reconfigured,
64 K. WEST
family unit is established by the novel’s end when his father returns; and
many of Alcott’s short-story children are missing at least one parent in one
way or another; or have a parent who is always working; or, as in one story,
is absent through alcoholism, leaving the child to assume the parent’s role,
earning money and caring for younger siblings. The parents’ removal (in
that they often make a return) therefore both allows the child an auton-
omy that they could not otherwise achieve, but also acts as commentary
upon what is positioned as the rightful and sentimental roles of parent and
child in their temporary subversion.
Two orphan girls who both fulfill and subvert the role of the sentimen-
tal orphan are Rose and Phebe in Eight Cousins. Sanders argues:
Eight Cousins clearly arranges its male cousins around the orphan girl, and a
major turning point of the novel is Rose’s discovery that she can and should
influence the boys. She is a pitiful, morose, sickly child at the beginning of
the novel, and only when she ignores her sadness […] in service of influenc-
ing her cousins does she become stronger. […] The orphan girl of this
novel, situated at the opening of the period, uses sympathy as a sentimental
girl might; there is only a hint that there might be some significant reward
in this relationship for herself.43
Sanders’ reading of the sentimental impact of Rose’s orphan status is

problematic in its assumption that it is Rose’s status as orphan that predi-
cates her impact on her boy cousins, and that there is little or no reward
for herself in her doing so. While she does have an impact on the boys’
manners and morals from an early stage, it is more through a desire to
please her and because her beauty, and, on occasion, her money impress
them, rather than from any stated wish to appease her sentimental orphan-
hood. And they have a positive influence on Rose, too: from the initial
carriage trip in which ‘the “delicate little creter” seemed all the better for
her trip, and ran up the steps looking rosy, gay, and dishevelled’ to Mac’s
positive impact on her reading habits, the influence works both ways, and
is based on contingency rather than her orphanhood; though it might be
argued that Rose’s loss of her parents occasions that very contingency.44 As
for reward, Rose’s chosen career as a philanthropist troubles the idea of
reward as something more material than gratitude, though it takes her
some time to figure out its complexities.
Eight Cousins is not an orphan novel in the same way as Montgomery’s
later Anne of Green Gables, for example. Rose is not a sentimental orphan
in that she is also poor and homeless; rather, she is rich, relatively healthy,
and has a huge family to care for her. Servant Phebe Moore fits the senti-
mental brief more closely in her poorhouse history, but even her hardships
are already in the past and have become a ‘story’, at least from Rose’s
perspective, as will be discussed further regarding representations of pov-
erty in Chap. 5. Phebe must fight for acceptance in the middle-class world,
but not until she is an adult; neither is her narrative central to the text.
Rather, her orphan status and eventual ‘adoption’ by Rose serve more as
an opportunity for the instigation of Rose’s philanthropic career than for
Phebe’s own development and happiness. Adoption in the two ‘Rose’
texts also raises the question of what Zelizer constructs as the difference
between sentimental and practical adoption, or of how the orphan is
expected to pay for his/her keep. Adoption in Eight Cousins is figured as
sentimental in that no financial payment or additional income is required,
but it cannot be anything else as it operates largely as a kind of fiction or
even child’s play in this text, through Rose’s adoption of the older girl
Phebe and youngest cousin Jamie’s copycat adoption of his little friend,
Pokey. Phebe, meanwhile, is a maid who is paid for her work, and is not
adopted by the family until her later marriage to Archie as an adult,
although she must earn her keep via the proving of her moral worth before
this shift in status can take place. And while Rose is, in a sense, adopted by
Uncle Alec and the aunts, she is already family and she is rich: she is under
no necessity of paying for her keep by work. Each of Alcott’s adoptions of
children in this text are sentimental in the sense that they predicated on
love and/or philanthropy rather than to exploit the ‘useful’ orphans, as in
the history of Anne Shirley’s adoptions before—and as a trigger for—her
arrival at Green Gables in which she was kept to look after other, ‘own’
children deemed central to the family unit as she was not, or to work on
the farm if she had been the boy sent for by the Cuthberts.45
One of Alcott’s ‘half orphans’, in more than one reading of that phrase,
is Under the Lilacs’ Ben Brown. This novel queers the domestic space in a
number of ways, including the play house in which the novel begins—an
‘old house’ which ‘had been shut up for several years’—and in the subver-
sion of parental roles in that Bab and Betty are playing mother to fourteen
doll ‘babies’, each like Little Women’s Beth’s dolls in various states of dis-
ability.46 The broken dishes from which the dolls’ birthday tea is to be
served also subvert the domestic as a sentimentally-ordered place of love
and security, in that each of its component parts is broken: ‘the tea-pot
66 K. WEST
had lost its cover, the cream-jug its handle, the sugar-bowl its cover, and
the cups and plates were all more or less cracked or nicked’.47 Even the
feast itself disappears unexpectedly before it can be eaten. This troubling
of the family and household space prefigures the girls’ discovery of a boy
who introduces himself as permanently outside of the domestic: ‘Please,
‘m, my name is Ben Brown, and I’m travellin’.’48 Not only does Ben sub-
vert the domestic space in that he does not belong and has never belonged
in a traditional family unit and in that he disrupts the female space into
which he is eventually welcomed, he is presented—at least, initially—as
one of Alcott’s many orphan children; however, he proceeds to problema-
tize this trope too. Ben believes himself to be alone, a half-orphan in that
he has no mother and his father has left him behind, and presents himself
in accordance with the sentimental type: ‘the people I was left with beat
me so, I—run away’, he tells Mrs. Moss.49 His orphan status is also con-
firmed, if mistakenly, in a letter shared with him by Miss Celia, one of the
two women who share a voluntary adopted motherhood of the boy.
Further, ‘he knew he was an orphan now’, his status as such—with its
appeal to the sentimental tears of Alcott’s readers—revisited again and
again.50 The unexpected return of his father who is not dead, but has only
been sick in California and unable to travel, predicates both a return to
and a remaking of the sentimental family unit, one now composed of two
families deemed insufficient in themselves without the heteronormative
mother-and-father parental unit:
If one wedding were not quite enough for a child’s story, we might here
hint what no one dreamed of then, that before the year came round again,
Ben had found a mother, Bab and Betty a father, and Mr. Brown’s hat was
quite at home behind the kitchen door. But, on the whole, it is best not to
say a word about it.51
The relationship between Mrs. Moss and Mr. Brown is glossed over, with
its hints of sex as that which should not be spoken about in ‘a child’s
story’; rather, it is the children’s status as ‘half-orphans’ which is patholo-
gized within the myth of the sentimental family and which must be righted
at the end of the text. As in Little Women, families deemed incomplete or
otherwise disrupted cannot be tolerated, and neither can the predomi-
nantly female space: the patriarchal order must be restored for the senti-
mental home to be considered complete.
However, Alcott’s disruption of both domestic space and family unit

risks longer-term effects than a reinstatement of the desired norm in which
partial families are made, somehow, whole. ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’
can be read as a warning against the subversion of the family unit, but a
subversion that comes from the choice of one member rather than through
external circumstances, a choice beneath which the family risks being lost
entirely with no patched-together restitution possible. While this story
could be read as arguing against traditional gender and parent/child roles,
Alcott focuses more on how the idea of a blended ‘Consociate family’
might be damaging to the traditional American family unit.52 This family
structure was rethought in Little Men, in which Jo’s own ‘consociate fam-
ily’ consists not just of the Marches, their husbands and children, but also
those children she takes in to raise and educate; however, this new struc-
ture is built around the core family unit of the Bhaers, in an extension of
the norm rather than an attempt to replace it.
Changing Spaces
As discussed earlier in this chapter, the assumed natural status of the link
between child and home has been troubled by theorists who contend that
this process is the result of its construction in a specific ‘time and place’. If
the domestic place or space is the natural environment for the child, or if
the child’s place in the home is naturalized under a specific ideology, what
happens to the child who disrupts that space? In Little Women, Beth and
Jo each contest the family space and their ‘natural role’ within it, for each
is in subversion of the space in their own way, in that they take ownership
of specific and opposing places within the house while still troubling their
occupation of those very spaces. Beth, the angel of the house, is located
primarily within the kitchen; yet it is only ‘her corner’ in which she feels
she truly belongs and is at home. Jo, on the other hand, is emblematic of
Gilbert and Gubar’s ‘madwoman in the attic’ figure, rejecting the domes-
tic for the creation of her own work and leisure space, one which other
family members are only safe to visit if the position of the writing pillow
allows. The two sisters coexist in a balance of female roles, therefore: the
sentimental and normalized female role in the kitchen, and the hidden
aspects of the female psyche in the attic. Yet Beth is also in subversion of
her space in that she never claims the adult female space, but remains on
its edges—in her corner—as the sentimental doomed girl-child; while Jo’s
attic is only ever a quasi-female space in that the ‘madwoman’ may be
‘woman’, but she troubles what woman is and should be in by that very
68 K. WEST
qualification. It could also be argued that the attic is only ever problemati-
cally in the house; rather, as signified by her cushion, Jo uses it as a barrier
against the domestic, one where she can be alone in imaginary spaces that
fly far from the home. Further, the madwoman allegory questions Jo’s
status as child, and certainly as any version of the sentimental Romantic
child. As Gustavus Stadler comments: ‘During Jo’s retreats to the garret,
“the family … kept their distance, merely popping in their heads semi-
occasionally, to ask, with interest, ‘Does genius burn, Jo?’”’53 He contin-
ues: ‘Although the association of genius with burning is an old one, Little
Women is particularly adept in its play with the ideological content of
burning as domestic hearth versus burning as genius authorship and with
the word’s grammatic doubleness.54 However, I read Jo’s burning further
as intrinsically erotic: like Derrida’s ‘burning’ at end of Archive Fever, this
is about consumption, but a particularly erotic consumption in which one
both consumes and is consumed by the object of one’s desire. But, accord-
ing to Stadler, Beth burns too:
Meanwhile, as with any blush, Beth’s face both burns and is burned […]
Burning Beth, beginning after a long period of physical decline after an
unfortunate charity visit to the consumptive child of a German immigrant
family, soon refines her role in Jo’s life, increasingly becoming an external
source of inspiration, or perhaps we should say ignition, for Jo’s writing.
That is to say, Beth and Jo become a genius-pair.55
The angel and the demon are therefore co-dependent, in Stadler’s con-
struction, and locked into a quasi-erotic relationship in which neither can
survive the burning.56 Jo’s genius both creates and destroys; and threatens
to destroy her sentimental child’s innocence when she turns to the blood-
and-thunder stories which must be burned in their turn to allow her, if
problematically, to take Beth’s place as the household angel.57 The binary
female spaces can therefore only coexist for so long. Keren Fite argues:
Jo can be regarded as an illustration of an investigation into the two extremes

the madwoman allegory suggests: writing sensation stories allows Jo to
experiment in monster-like creativity, while attempting to replace Beth in
the family home is an experiment in angelic domesticity.58
While Fite is discussing roles rather than space, this balance between
‘angel’ and ‘monster’ is, at best, temporary: the angel must die, but in
doing so, she vanquishes the madwoman and with the intention of trans-
forming her into angel to take her place. The attic, only ever conditionally
domestic, is left behind with the four coffin-like chests of childhood and
Jo’s genius, while Jo herself takes a place in the household that neither she
nor Beth had held previously, although one that has lost any sentimental
allure it had previously offered: Jo’s domestic space is one of duty and
sacrifice, a prison like Beth’s, and one only problematically of her choosing.
Alcott subverts the March family domestic space in other ways, too. In
figuring the March family house via the landscape of Pilgrim’s Progress, for
example, she problematizes both gender and genre. The girls take on the
role of Christian rather than the wife and children left behind in Bunyan’s
tale, while they fictionalize their already problematically-fictional space;
problematic in that it is fictional to the reader rather than the characters,
and in that readers and critics often read this space as a claimed reality of
either Hillside or Orchard House, two of Alcott’s family homes in
Concord, Massachusetts. Further, Alcott subverts the female utopia by
remaking the domestic space as male in Little Men and Jo’s Boys. Girls are
only afterthoughts; Plumfield is a male utopia. The only sentimentally
girly girls—Daisy and Bess—are on loan from other branches of the March
family, while the quasi-masculine ‘wild’ girls—Nan and Jo—carve out new
spaces for themselves. An unsettling of gendered domestic spaces can be
argued here in that they are masculine figures, or that they are refiguring
the female role; or both.
Alcott also plays with the role of the child within the domestic space
through her exploration of class. In Eight Cousins, Rose crosses class bar-
riers when she crawls through the china closet into the kitchen to see
Phebe; she is chased out by Dolly, leaving the same way she came; but
continues to try to cross the class barrier, with Phebe at least, although
more separates them than a china closet. And Polly’s little room in An
Old-Fashioned Girl is more attractive than the big house to its inhabitants:
although it often represents poverty and loneliness to her, it also repre-
sents home comforts to her friends, those they have never really experi-
enced. As such, the child’s space in the domestic environment is regularly
configured as a subversion of the space itself and of the sentimental domes-
tic. Alcott’s children challenge accepted and proper interactions with their
environment to recreate their respective spaces in their own image.
70 K. WEST
Fleeing the Domestic: Outside Spaces

and Wild Children
Beyond the subversion of the child’s naturalized role in the domestic

space, many of Alcott’s short stories and novels explore both the attrac-
tions and pitfalls of leaving the domestic nest. Alcott’s ‘Recollections of
My Childhood’ is one of many examples where she celebrates the delights
of running away. The narrator claims: ‘Being born on the birthday of
Columbus I seem to have something of my patron saint’s spirit of adven-
ture, and running away was one the delights of my childhood’.59 Running
away, for Alcott’s children, is set up here in terms of a return rather than
as a permanent process in its appeal to the plural, and as adventure: a
chance to escape from the domestic to see the world, but with the promise
of a return home always available. In this text, running away—running
‘wild’ in particular—is also a maternally-sanctioned activity, one that is not
approved by the patriarchal educational structure. Alcott writes:
My wise mother, anxious to give me a strong body to support a lively brain,

turned me loose in the country and let me run wild, learning of nature what
no books can teach, and being led, as those who love her seldom fail to be,
‘Through nature up to nature’s God’.60
It is ‘my wise mother’ who is the force, or at least the enabler, behind the
child’s ‘strong body’, one that must be given by the adult rather than pre-
existing the giving or able to be attained solely by the agency of the child.
The wisdom of the mother is constructed in her knowledge of this one
aspect of what a child needs and through her power to ‘give’ the necessary
support for ‘a lively brain’; although the giving is qualified by the anxiety
that precedes it. This child is constructed within a naturalized belonging
to the domestic household: she needs both permission and the maternal
actions of letting and turning loose to leave the home, with the wildness
therefore controlled, allowed, and constructed as occurring under that
judgment of adult wisdom from the adult narrator. Both running and
wildness, then, are maternally-sanctioned activities that retain a hold on
the domestic in a trope that recurs repeatedly across Alcott’s works.
One such construction of fleeing the domestic is familiar from chil-
dren’s texts such as L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz series, and
J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings: a rejection of home
followed by a return; or, as the subtitle to The Hobbit puts it, ‘There and
Back Again’. And as in these texts, Alcott’s exploration of the trope always
brings experience and knowledge with it: home and its inhabitants may
appear unchanged on the child’s return, but the child’s experience of it
shifts. Two stories from Alcott’s Lulu’s Library series address this, but the
experience of the runaway children differs to some degree. However,
they—and the story of Dan in the Little Women series—contrast with
‘Recollections of My Childhood’ in that running away is frequently gen-
dered male; as experienced by Jo in Little Women, those positioned by
society as female may dream of running away, but are bound far more
closely by the expectations and duties of home and the associated
female role.
In Alcott’s short story, ‘How They Ran Away’, ‘cautious’ Billy and
‘bold’ Tommy decide to run away in order to ‘do something jolly’, with
the intention of becoming hunters.61 Unlike many similar stories, they are
not escaping an overtly negative domestic situation—despite the ‘away’ of
the title establishing a home base from which the boys set off—so much as
looking for fun and adventure, specifically in the contrasted and non-
domestic ‘wild’. This running away is performative, despite an ostensible
lack of any audience which is always troubled by the assumed gaze of the
reader: ‘No one was looking at them, and they might have walked quietly
off; but that the “running away” might be all right, both raced down the
road, tumbled over a wall, and dashed into the woods as if a whole tribe
of wild Indians were after them’. So the boys run from the domestic to the
wild; yet the narrative claims that they are also running away from the
wild, if only an imaginary (and pejoratively-raced) wildness conjured up to
chase them from one place to the other. As such, a construction of the
domestic as a place of safety and sanctuary is troubled: the wild does not
necessarily stay in its own place and can disrupt the most stable and senti-
mental of homes. Yet the assumption of a return to such a stability is
always there: ‘“I guess I’ll risk it and have some fun to tell about when we
go home,” said Billy.’62 And the return is desired at the first hurdle, when
the home-made lunch turns out to be missing, and neither fishing nor
berrying fill the hungry stomachs: Billy ‘went slowly back to the brook,
wishing with all his might he was at home eating sweet corn and berry
pie’; the food of the wild is no replacement for farmed and cooked food.63
Further, despite the difference in character between the two boys, the lure
of the domestic soon attracts them as ‘both felt very homesick for their
mothers and their good safe beds’.64
72 K. WEST
The wild in this story is neither the natural place for the child, nor its
learned place as home is, as the domestic always returns in the running
away, with the desire for home also constructed in terms of the maternal,
of safety, and of rest. Yet the boys are impacted by the wild beyond the
desire to leave it: on falling into a bear pit in the dark, Tommy ‘shouted,
and whistled, and raged about very like a little bear caught in a pit’.65 Billy,
too, after falling and hanging from a tree by his belt, is finally ‘handed […]
down like a young bird’.66 The children are constructed both within a
claim to the wild in their status as like—but never actually—wild creatures;
however, they are also ‘caught’ and ‘handed down’. As wild children, they
are in subversion of the naturalized domestic space and an adult taming is
necessary to restore their rightful status.
Both running away and wildness are constructed differently in ‘Music
and Macaroni’.67 Tino lives with his sister and grandmother in the village
of Valrosa in Italy; but while the narration first states that ‘none were
busier, happier, or more beloved’ than the two orphans—a contrast with
many of Alcott’s other portraits of child orphans—praise for Tino’s sing-
ing has ‘made the lad vain’, a moral weakness that leads Tino into dan-
ger.68 A ‘well-dressed, handsome, smiling gentleman’ with ‘white
hands’—a hint that the man may be one of Alcott’s idle, morally-degenerate
rich, although a warning of which Tino is unaware—hears him sing, and
offers him money and luxury to work for him as a singer. The man encour-
ages Tino to ask permission before he leaves claiming that ‘I don’t steal
nightingales, I buy them’, but Tino’s family refuse to enter into such a
commercial transaction for their sentimental child. Tino, ‘in his rebellious
state’, considers running away to ‘show the women that he, Tino, […] was
not to be treated like a child any more […] and did not mean to be
insulted, or tied to an old woman’s apron-string forever’; like Billy and
Tommy, Tino thirsts for adventure, but he explicitly rejects the comforts
of home and the childness he feels it represents. However, like Billy and
Tommy, home always constitutes a return for Tino: ‘It would give them a
good fright, make a fine stir in the place, and add to his glory when he
returned’; there is no option or desire to stay away, with the relation
between child and domestic space naturalized under such a construction.69
Needless to say, Tino’s experience of running away fares little better than
that of Billy and Tommy; although, in this case, Alcott rather critiques the
commercial imperative that threatens childhood and corrupts adulthood
when Tino is dressed as a doll, feted for his good looks, and used to earn
money for his new master, Mario, who neglects and eventually forsakes
him. Tino finally returns home, though like Tommy and Billy with a touch
of the wild about him: ‘Like an affectionate little bear did the boy fall
upon and embrace the two astonished women’; and he returns to the same
construction of the sentimental domestic: bed, safety, and humility. In
each case, the boys have learned the value of home and bring their
enhanced education to bear on lives that yet retain their experiences in the
wild; as such, the wild represents a rite of passage not unlike Alcott’s
depictions of ‘wild oats’, as a stage that boys and young men in particular
tend to pass through, but which should be left behind once the lesson is
learned.
Perhaps the best known of Alcott’s runaways and wild boys is Little
Men and Jo’s Boys’ Dan; although his negotiation of the line between home
and the wild is somewhat less straightforward in both its structure and its
lessons, resisting some of the sentimental didacticism of the short stories.
Plumfield is early figured in terms of a wildness—Jo describes it as ‘my
wilderness of boys’—subverting the domestic space of the March family
home in terms of both wildness and gender, and also the home space of its
previous owner, Aunt March.70 This claim to a ‘wilderness’, however, is
troubled in that it, too, exists primarily to be tamed, through an education
of boys to fit them for their place in adult life: as in the short stories, the
wilderness can only ever be temporary and is designed to be left behind.
Wildness is also subject to perspective; one that constructs it as a relative
status, both in terms of those to whom its language is applied and in claims
to its value. Dan is the epitome of Alcott’s wild boys, a model that
Strickland claims to inform many of her portrayals of men in her adult
works, with wildness and masculinity often linked. However, in her chil-
dren’s works, the wildness that is attributed to many of her child charac-
ters must be tamed to allow for a movement into a socially-regulated
adulthood. Yet Dan is a problem that cannot ever quite be resolved.
Strickland claims:
The reason that orphan Dan proves to be such a disruptive influence in the
family world of Plumfield is precisely because he brings with him the vulgar
ways of the street, and though Mother Bhaer admires his adventurous ways,
she cannot rest until she has converted him and has restored, in a measure,
his childhood innocence.71
Dan, too, is therefore both wild boy and sentimental child. Like Under the
Lilacs’ Ben Brown, he has been raised in difficult circumstances on the
74 K. WEST
streets, but his inclusion in another’s family is fraught with far more prob-
lems: as Strickland comments, the skills he has learned on the street do not
endear him to the middle-class denizens of Plumfield, and his experience
is figured as ‘sorrowfully unboyish’.72 Further, in failing to display the
required gratitude toward his beneficiaries, Dan is othered within the ‘wil-
derness of boys’ from the outset. Both Jo and Mr. Bhaer attempt to tame
him in their own ways: Mr. Bhaer rejects his wife’s framing of the school
as a ‘wilderness’, ending Dan and Emil’s fight with: ‘I keep a school for
boys, not for wild beasts’, devaluing the wildness that Jo prizes.73 However,
he also creates a situation in which Dan’s wildness can be accepted: in
sending him to the naturalist Mr. Page, he encourages a wildness that is
less about undesirable behavior and more focused on an education in
nature. On his return to Plumfield, Dan passes this education onto the
other children, with the help of Laurie, who sets up a museum for his
finds, thereby regularizing the wild within the confines of a building. Yet
Dan still struggles with his ‘taming’ and finds himself an occupation that
both reflects and troubles the Plumfield educational process: the colt he
tames, of course, is a metaphor for his own taming. However, colts must
be ‘broken to harness’; and, by the end of Jo’s Boys, a broken man is all
Dan can become. No matter Jo’s preference for her ‘wild boy’, even she
cannot pretend that he would ever be accepted into what is, again, the
nuclear family of the Marches in his love for Meg’s daughter, Bess. He is
not, and never will be, good enough, and remains Jo’s ‘lost boy’.74
Although wild boys predominate in Alcott’s works, a few of her textual
girls are subject to the adult need to take them into their respective and
normalized domestic space. Little Men’s Nan arrives at Plumfield for the
boys’ benefit, ‘[t]o help make little gentlemen of you’, Jo claims.75 Yet
Nan rejects the role of the sentimental girl that Eight Cousins’ Rose argu-
ably fulfills, and the ‘little gypsy’ sets herself up for another taming.76
However, despite the harshness of her taming—Nan is tied up ‘like a
naughty dog’ for one particular transgression—she coolly rejects any and
all attempts to make her into a socially-acceptable sentimental women.77
Instead, she grows into an independent, single, feminist icon, with her
own career; by the end of the series, she is Dr. Nan, dispensing medicine
and common sense to more sentimental females as well as the growing and
grown ‘boys’ of the title. In contrast, however, the eponymous ‘wild’ her-
oine of Jack and Jill is prevented from achieving any such feminist future.
Despite Jill’s disability being figured as that which cages her, she is far
more restricted by the social pressures of being an adolescent female than
is Nan. Her cage, as child, is less her temporary disability than her future,
and the moral and sentimental education which claims to fit her for this
purpose. In this sense, the domestic also acts as the cage for the wild bird,
in that it is her mother’s desire for domestic stability and her adoptive
mother, Mrs. Minot, who wishes to keep Jill and shape her as a middle-
class woman, who reject her wildness. Strickland claims that it takes ‘the
pull of mother love to bring both Nat and Dan into line’; saddled with
two mothers, Jill can do no more than acquiesce to the same fate.78
Notes
1. John T. Frederick (1975) ‘Hawthorne’s “Scribbling Women”’, The New
England Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 2, pp. 231–240, 231.
2. Henry James (1865) ‘[Review of Moods]’, Critical Essays, pp. 69–73, 73;
James (1875) ‘[Review of Eight Cousins; or, The Aunt-Hill]’, Critical
Essays, pp. 165–166, 165.
3. Mavis Reimer (2011) ‘A Daughter of the House: Discourses of Adoption
in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables’, The Oxford Handbook of
Children’s Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 329–350, 330.
4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) Émile, or On Education, trans. Barbara
Foxley (NuVision Publications, 2007), p. 33.
5. Alcott (1878) Under the Lilacs (Fairfield, IA: 1st World Library, 2004), p. 9.
7. Zelizer, p. 1.
8. Judith A. Plotz (1991) ‘A Victorian Comfort Book: Julian Ewing’s The
Story of a Short Life,’ in Romanticism and Children’s Literature in
Nineteenth-Century England, ed. by James Holt McGavran, Jr. (Athens:
The University of Georgia Press), pp. 168–189, 168.
9. Dusinberre, p. xix; Zelizer, p. 27; Max Cavitch (2007) American Elegy:
The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press), p. 1.
10. Peter Gregg Slater (1977) Children in the New England Mind in Death
and in Life (Hamden, Conn: Archon Books), p. 36.
11. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1984) The Madwoman in the Attic (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press), p. 483.
12. Judith Fetterley, ‘Little Women: Alcott’s Civil War’, Little Women and the
Feminist Imagination, pp. 27–42.
13. Leslie Fielder (1960) Love and Death in the American Novel (New York:
Stein and Day), p. 269.
14. I will discuss fan fiction portrayals of Beth’s death in Chap. 8.
76 K. WEST
16. Nina Auerbach, ‘Waiting Together: Alcott on Matrimony’, Little Women

and the Feminist Imagination, pp. 7–26, 16.
17. Alcott, Little Women, pp. 38, 13, 16.
19. It is telling that, in the 1949 movie, Beth is portrayed as younger than Amy.
21. Alcott (1871) Little Men (London: Collins Classics, 2013), pp. 48, 49.
22. Alcott, Little Men, p. 50.
26. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, eds. (2004) Curiouser: On the Queerness
of Children (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. xiii.
27. Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl, p. iii.
28. Alcott (1872) ‘Back Windows’, Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, The Complete Six
Volumes, Vol. 1 (McAllister Editions, 2015), pp. 38–39.
29. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1850) ‘The Builders’, https://www.
hwlongfellow.org/poems_poem.php?pid=118 [accessed 14 March 2019];
Alcott, ‘Back Windows’, p. 39.
30. Alcott, ‘Back Windows’, p. 38.
31. Alcott, ‘Back Windows’, p. 39. All further quotes from this story are from
this page.
32. Alcott, ‘Back Windows’, p. 39.
34. Alcott, ‘The Children’s Joke’, Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, Vol. 1, pp. 18–23.
35. Alcott, ‘The Children’s Joke’, p. 23.
42. Joe Sutliff Sanders (2008) ‘Spinning Sympathy: Orphan Girl Novels and
the Sentimental Tradition’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly,
Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 41–61, 44.
43. Sanders, pp. 52–53.
45. L. M. Montgomery (1908) Anne of Green Gables (London: George
G. Harrap & Co, 1941).
46. Alcott, Under the Lilacs, p. 7.

52. The ‘Consociate family’ will be explored further in Chap. 6 on Alcott’s
portrayals of Transcendentalism.
53. Gustavus Stadler (1999) ‘Louisa May Alcott’s Queer Geniuses’, American
Literature, Vol. 71, No. 4, pp. 657–677, 667.
54. Stadler, p. 669.
56. I will discuss this claim to an erotic relationship between Jo and her female
family members further in Chap. 4.
57. Alcott’s neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, used the eroticism of burning to
particular effect in his 1850 work, The Scarlet Letter, in which scarlet not
only denotes adultery, but clothes Pearl, the scarlet product of this particu-
lar erotic burning.
58. Keren Fite (2009) ‘The Veiled, the Masked, and the Civil War Woman:
Louisa May Alcott and the Madwoman Allegory’, Gilbert & Gubar’s The
Madwoman in the Attic After Thirty Years, ed. Annette R. Federico
(Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press), pp. 170–182, 178.
59. Alcott, ‘Recollections of My Childhood’, p. 514.
61. Alcott (1886) ‘How They Ran Away’, Lulu’s Library, Vol. 1 (London:
Amazon), pp. lxxvi–lciii, lxxvi.
62. Alcott, ‘How They Ran Away’, p. lxxix.
63. Alcott, ‘How They Ran Away’, p. lxxxi.
64. Alcott, ‘How They Ran Away’, p. lxxxvii.
65. Alcott, ‘How They Ran Away’, p. lxxix.
66. Alcott, ‘How They Ran Away’, p. xci.
67. Alcott (1888) ‘Music and Macaroni’, Lulu’s Library, Vol. 3 (London:
Amazon), pp. li–lxxix.
68. Alcott, ‘Music and Macaroni’, pp. lii, liii.
69. Alcott, ‘Music and Macaroni’, p. lvii.
CHAPTER 4
Queering the Child
Narrating the Queer Child

In the previous chapter’s discussion of the sentimental child, we could see
how innocence is frequently prized against a fear of what ostensibly adult
experience might do to that troubled and precarious notion of an innate
childhood innocence. And in her subversion of the sentimental child
trope, Alcott’s queering of childhood is perhaps her most subversive act.
After all, no recent discussion of Little Women is complete, it seems, with-
out troubling gender claims in respect to Jo March; this chapter will there-
fore expand on the extant critical discussion of gender to consider how
Alcott’s further works on childhood confirm and challenge societal and
textual gender norms. I will also consider Alcott’s frequent use of the
adjective ‘queer’ in her work and how language both engages with and
challenges claims to queerness and the queer child; readings of child sexu-
ality; and intersections between the cross-dressing child and constructions
of play in her works. As such, I will suggest that childhood itself is con-
structed as queer in Alcott, and consider why and how this might be
the case.
There is no doubt that considering the queerness of children still excites
some controversy, even when discussing fiction for and about children.
Bruhm and Hurley claim:

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39025-9_4
80 K. WEST
There is currently a dominant narrative about children: children are (and

should stay) innocent of sexual desires and intentions. At the same time,
however, children are also officially, tacitly, assumed to be heterosexual. […]
People panic when that sexuality takes on a life outside the sanctioned scripts
of child’s play. And nowhere is this panic more explosive than in the field of
the queer child, the child whose play confirms neither the comfortable
stories of child (a)sexuality nor the supposedly blissful promises of adult
heteronormativity.1
According to this claim, children are ‘currently’ subjected to ‘a dominant

narrative’: as such, according to Bruhm and Hurley, children are social
constructs, only known within the adult language that tells a certain story,
one that might shift over time and that might be subject to other, minor,
narratives, but that always constructs them in terms of, and through, story.
The child pre-exists the narrative in that ‘children are’ [my emphasis], but
they are also constructed by it. This particular ‘dominant narrative’ sepa-
rates the pre-existing child from the narrative of which it is the object, a
narrative that therefore belongs to the adults, the ‘people’ who constitute
the ‘dominant’ and whose story it essentially is. Sexuality disturbs any
claim to an ‘innocent’ which, here, is about both a lack of knowledge—to
be innocent of—and an introduction to a sexuality that, it is assumed, has
no part of childhood until it is taught or otherwise enabled at what should
and must be childhood’s end. Despite this dismissal of the possibility of
child sexuality—one in which the sexuality of the child must return in
order for it to be dismissed—the child is ‘assumed to be heterosexual’. In
the dominant narrative identified by this narration, therefore, the child is
‘queer’ in the sense of a potential homosexuality that disrupts the adult
narrative, but also in its relation to sexuality at all: the child constructed as
prematurely sexual must always be ‘queer’ too. Further, according to
Bruhm and Hurley, both the ‘(a)sexuality’ and heteronormativity of the
adult approach to the child is couched as ‘narrative’ and ‘story’: in the
claim that a truth lies behind this adult fantasy of childhood, they con-
struct a real child that is known as such by this narration, one that might
be ‘queer’ but that is fixed in terms of its difference. In discussing queer-
ness and childhood in Alcott, I will therefore trouble such a claim to a real
child that exists in contradiction to the adult narrative of the normal, and
consider how the child always and only exists in terms of the narrative that
positions it as such.
4 QUEERING THE CHILD 81
Queering Language
This claim to a narrative construction of the child is of particular interest
in Alcott’s frequent employment of the words ‘queer’ and ‘odd’ in her
texts read as about and for children. In Little Men, for example, ‘Demi
once asked in his queer way’; in Little Women, Meg is scandalized by Jo’s
‘queer performances’; and in Alcott’s Journal, she claimed that she ‘never
liked girls nor knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and expe-
riences may prove interesting though I doubt it.’2 In each example,
Alcott’s claims to queerness are linked to specific or repeated instances of
behavior that challenge an assumed norm. Alcott’s ‘queer’ language cre-
ates children—and a few adults—who deviate from this norm, not neces-
sarily in terms of sexuality, but in the language that constructs them in
terms of their difference; yet Alcott’s use of this term is so widespread
across her works that the dominant norm from which they apparently stray
is under threat.
In addition to ‘queer’, Alcott also describes many of her child charac-
ters as ‘odd’, at least from the point of view of other characters. I am not
suggesting that odd and queer, in Alcott’s texts, are interchangeable; how-
ever, I will read below how each operates in Alcott’s usage to consider her
claims to a difference through language in terms of her textual children.
One example of Alcott’s claims to oddness is in the early interchange
between Polly and Fan in An Old-Fashioned Girl. Fan explains what she
perceives as the difference between her ways and Polly’s—a difference
predicated on their respective positions as ‘the country mouse’ and ‘the
city mouse’—claiming that her friends ‘laugh at everything the least bit
odd’.3 Polly’s oddness, at least at this point in the text, is based on dress.
Fan promises that ‘I’ll take care of you, and fix you up, so you won’t look
odd’, to which Polly responds, ‘Am I odd?’4 Privately, however, ‘she
thought that Fanny looked the oddest of the two’, an opinion endorsed by
the narrator, who describes Fan’s costume in terms of excesses concluding
with ‘and, heaven knows what’ and the implication that Fan should take
care of her cleanliness more than her clothes.5 Oddness can therefore be
‘fixed’ or mended with a change of dress in terms of adhering to societal
and fashionable norms, but the gaze that configures it as oddness is already
fixed or unmoving in its assumptions of normality, linked as it is to identity
and constructions of the self as known. It is this construction of the fash-
ionable self—one that both fixes and defies notions of selfhood as fashion
is always subject to change while adherence to fashionable mores does not
82 K. WEST
shift in most of Alcott’s works—that Polly troubles throughout the text.

In Alcott’s constructions of ‘look odd’ and ‘looked the oddest’, oddness
here is that which can be seen and/or projected through visual appear-
ance. In Fan’s offer to ‘fix you up’, however, the appearance of oddness,
at least, can be changed in order to restore societal norms; any deeper
oddness, one that defines identity as in Polly’s question, ‘Am I odd?’, is
not so easily ‘fixed’.
It might be read that this construction of oddness is based entirely on
perspectives predicated on limited personal experience: each girl thinks the
other ‘odd’, at least in terms of a fashion of dress to which they are unac-
customed. As such, both girls are characterized as ‘queer’ in the sense of
difference, and any appeal to a norm is undermined, as these two pages of
Alcott’s text show how difference is constructed and reconstructed accord-
ing to perspective. However, Alcott’s further narration of Fan’s fashion-
able family and championing of Polly’s simplicity both endorses and
undermines this claim. Polly is different from the majority of the charac-
ters she encounters throughout this text—most belong to the fashionable,
city world and adhere to Fan’s view of Polly’s oddness—and Alcott posi-
tions Polly as ‘odd’ through her contrast with others in her old-fashioned,
if ‘wholesome’, views. Yet Alcott also centralizes her titular character as the
example that others—including her readers—should emulate, and by the
end of the text, the Shaw family and others embrace Polly’s simplicity,
both destabilizing her status as odd and theirs as representations of the
societally-endorsed norm. As such, Alcott positions Polly’s oddness less as
that which can and should be ‘fixed’ than as desirable; here, at least, the
difference of the Alcottian child should be retained, even as it effaces itself
in inspiring others to follow its example and thus renders itself as the new
norm. Despite her championing of its cause, difference, in Alcott’s chil-
dren, is rarely sustained.
Alcott’s language of queerness is repeated throughout Eight Cousins
and Rose in Bloom, her texts on the orphan girl, Rose Campbell. Rose is
constructed in terms of difference throughout the texts, from the absence
of her parents compared to the panoply of aunts and a smattering of uncles
who constitute the parents of her cousins; to the assumed, if occasionally
troubled, gender difference between her and the seven boys who terrify
her at the beginning; and in terms of her later feminist beliefs, which are
largely met with derision from the boys as these beliefs trouble the assumed
norm of the proper middle-class female. Rose is ‘unlike any child they had
ever seen’ and ‘the odd child’ according to aunts Peace and Plenty, who
are unable to account for their inability to amuse her, constructing Rose
in terms of both her generational difference from their own childhood
recreational activities and from the normative modern child they expect
she should be.6 The cousins, too, narrate what they see as her difference
from their assumed behavioral norms: on Rose’s sacrifice of her Fourth of
July trip to the island to let Phebe take her place, Prince Charlie pro-
nounces her ‘the queerest chicken ever seen’.7 As with Polly and Fan,
queerness is that which can be, and is, seen; but here, internal difference
manifests itself in appearance rather than the appearance itself being at
odds with fashion and therefore able, if problematically, to be fixed.
Charlie further denigrates Rose as ‘chicken’: Alcott may construct her
children in terms of birds throughout her work, but ‘chicken’ acts here as
a diminution of Rose against a normative humanity. However, Rose uses
Charlie’s language against the cousins when they upset Mac during the
illness that threatens his eyesight. Archie attempts to bring an irate Rose
back into the fold of the boys—that is, he tries to mitigate her unexpected
temper, another alarming instance of her queerness—by praising her dif-
ference rather than denigrating it: ‘Yes, but you can do heaps of things
better than we can’, to which Rose responds: ‘I’m glad you think so,
though I am a “queer chicken”’.8 Rose appropriates the language of
queerness and subsumes it by owning her status as queer, shaming Charlie
in particular and the boys in general for their othering of their cousin for
both her views and her abilities. As such, and as with Polly, Rose’s status
as queer is troubled, with her queerness both desirable and centralized
within the text.
Rose is not the only queer character among the cousins, however: each
has his defining characteristic that removes him from the initial homoge-
nous ‘Clan’ in which they were ‘seven boys’, ‘all yellow-haired and blue
eyed, all in full Scotch costume, and all smiling, nodding, and saying as
with one voice, “How are you, cousin?”’9 Steve, for example, is renamed
by the boys as ‘Dandy’ for what is considered an excessive attention to his
appearance; Jamie is both the youngest and stands out by reason of his
untimely malapropisms. The ‘exemplary young man’ Archie, the oldest
and most respectable of the seven boys, is also the boring cousin, ‘practical
and steady-going’: even Dr. Alec prefers ‘a little more romance in a man
than he seems to have […] He might be forty instead of three or four and
twenty’.10 To be normal, here as in much of Alcott, is not to be desired,
despite the problems of living with the appellation of ‘queer’; and even the
84 K. WEST
standard young man Archie is queering an assumption of age-

appropriateness, in his uncle’s eyes, at least.
Yet to accept queerness for oneself, even to celebrate it, is not to accept
that everyone else is, therefore, ‘normal’; and the cousin that ‘queer
chicken’ Rose views primarily in terms of a queerness positioned variously
against herself and the other cousins is Mac. Throughout Eight Cousins,
Mac’s devotion to books and lack of social graces sets him apart from the
other male cousins in Rose’s eyes, even bearing in mind their own differ-
ences from each other: ‘He was rough, absent-minded, careless, and awk-
ward, rather priggish, and not at all agreeable to a dainty, beauty-loving
girl like Rose.’11 Through his illness, Rose comes to know Mac better, and
appreciate what she then sees as the positive aspects of his character. But
this shift in judgment from Rose does not position Mac any differently
from a wider social perspective; and in Rose in Bloom, Rose comments:
‘You are queerer than ever.’12 Queerness, therefore, is subject to degrees,
as also shown in Charlie’s comment that Rose is ‘the queerest’ and Polly’s
observation that Fan looks ‘the oddest’. From the perspective of others,
both Mac and Rose are not just queer, but queer in excess of that which is
therefore deemed permissible or even desirable in Alcott’s repeated cham-
pioning of difference. Yet Rose’s comment, in contrast to Charlie’s, is not
intended as an insult, as prior to this comment she was ‘conscious of a
sudden admiration never felt before’. Mac’s queerness may set him apart
from the others, but this realization of the positives of queerness presages
a new interest from the queer girl, Rose.
Despite Rose’s incipient romantic awakening in terms of this cousin,
Mac’s queerness is also constructed through a questioning of his sexuality.
In a conversation about Mac’s lack of interest in girls, Rose comments: ‘Of
all queer boys you are the queerest! Do you really mean that you don’t like
or notice girls?’13 The discussion continues about Mac’s views of women,
and preference for Rose as what he calls a ‘remarkably good specimen’; as
such, Rose is both emblematic of the perfect romantic female and divorced
from it as merely a ‘specimen’ to be studied, and therefore both female
and queered as other. This is also one of few points in Alcott’s texts when
an appellation of queerness is related so directly to sexual and romantic
interest or what is constructed as its lack. Yet Rose’s seemingly binary divi-
sion of gender and her assumption of heteronormativity is troubled by a
continuation of Alcott’s consideration of degrees of queerness: not only
are other boys also queer, but Mac is queerer. As such, gender difference
itself is constructed as queer, with boys queered by Rose next to her
normative femininity. But Mac, in her view, is in excess of even this queer-
ness in his general dislike of ‘girls’: the biological sexes may be different in
this work, but sexual interest between them is assumed as a given.
Mac’s later comment in this scene—in fact, much of this scene—sug-
gests queer readings of Henry James’ 1903 novella, The Beast in the Jungle,
particularly when Mac says to Rose: ‘I […] depend on your keeping me
straight’.14 This recalls the scene in James’ text in which John Marcher says
to May Bartram: ‘You help me pass for a man like any other.’15 The two
comments are not the same, but there are a number of similarities: both
Mac and Marcher are troubled by their lack of desire for women; both
explore this absence through a close friendship with a woman; each
depends on the woman to perform socially an expected heterosexuality;
and both May and Rose are, in some sense, ‘queer’ too. When May dis-
cusses how she helps to cover Marcher’s tracks, he asks: ‘And what covers
yours?’; she also ‘had a wonderful way of making it seem, as such, the
secret of her life too’.16 But the key difference is in the characters’ intent:
Marcher, although seemingly oblivious of his troubled sexuality in that
May is the ‘only person who knows’ [my emphasis], aims to ‘pass for a man
like any other’; Mac, in contrast, aims for a normative straightness, one
that he already possesses but feels slipping away from him in his language
of ‘keeping me straight’, and that he believes Rose can help him achieve.17
And help she does: Rose permits herself a romantic interest in Mac when
much of the queerness, from dress to social graces, has been smoothed
away under her guidance and that of the cousins, and Mac’s irresolute
sexuality is subsumed into a conventional heterosocial and heterosexual
romance with Rose. The consideration of these two texts in tandem, in
readings of queerness, is not to return to issues of origin—although James
read and critiqued Alcott’s works, I am not for a moment suggesting, or
even denying, any direct or deliberate intertextuality—rather, there is
something about the queerness of repetition between Alcott and James in
their consideration of sexuality that is, again, both queer and the very
opposite, in that it serves to normalize any claims to queerness.
In many ways, Mac epitomizes Eve Kofosky Sedgwick’s late-nineteenth-
century bachelor figure who cannot remain untroubled by his lack of
interest in women, as his very identity and social standing is threatened by
this absence of socially-sanctioned heterosexual desire. Sedgwick argues:
‘Mr. Bachelor had played at falling in love with women, but felt no urgency
about proving that he could […] the most consistent keynote of this late
literature is exactly the explicitly thematized sexual anesthesia of its
86 K. WEST
heroes’.18 My claims here are less about seeking to find a latent homosex-
ual meaning in Alcott’s works, or even using the possibility of a homo-
sexual meaning to destabilize other readings of the story, but more about
showing how Alcott’s language of ‘queer’ and ‘straight’, as applied to Mac
in these two texts, positions the burgeoning relationship between him and
Rose as operating in the liminal space between compulsory heterosexuality
and the excessive queerness of which both are accused but neither can
escape; thereby queering the seemingly fixed binary of homo/hetero
identity by setting up notions of difference. Again, however, it is a differ-
ence that Alcott does not sustain: the joining of the two queer characters
in a heterosexual romance cancels out the queerness of both.19 As Nancy
Armstrong comments:
As the heirs to a novelistic culture, we are not very likely to question the
whole enterprise. We are more likely to feel that the success of repeated pres-
sures to coax and nudge sexual desire into conformity with the norms of
heterosexual monogamy affords a fine way of closing a novel and provides a
satisfactory goal for a text to achieve.20
As with Little Women, the queerness of Rose and Mac must be swept back
into the closet by the end of the text to provide the heterosexual satisfac-
tion of a socially approved and unproblematic male/female marriage that
publishers demanded. However, one thing remains: in positioning Mac’s
lack of attraction to women as immaturity, it might be argued that sexual
queerness, at least in this instance, also belongs to Alcott’s constructions
of childhood.
Child Sexuality
Writing about child sexuality, even within literature, is still beset with dif-
ficulties, as discussed in the introduction to this chapter. But, as Jacqueline
Rose claims more widely: ‘When we think about childhood, it is above all
our investment in doing so which counts.’21 After all, what is at stake in
thinking about textual childhood and sexuality at all? Clark considers pub-
lic reaction to Alcott’s depictions of romance in Kiddie Lit:
The most frequently invoked boundary marker [between adult and chil-
dren’s literature] was the absence or presence of romance. In 1881 in the
Atlantic, for instance, Horace Scudder does not “altogether find satisfaction
in the suppressed love-making of these young people” in Alcott’s Jack and

Jill. As late as 1911 a writer for the Atlantic found “an inexcusable amount
of love-making” in both Under the Lilacs and Jack and Jill. Even Lyman
Abbott, who in an 1871 review for Harper’s would happily suggest that
children would read Little Men with interest while their parents would read
it with profit, could note the marriages in part 2 of Little Women and remark
that it “is a rather mature book for the little women, but a capital one for
their elders”. Alcott directly challenged such a perspective in the opening
paragraph of part 2 of Little Women: “if any of the elders think there is too
much ‘lovering’ in the story, as I fear they may (I’m not afraid the young
folks will make that objection), I can only say with Mrs. March, ‘What can
you expect when I have four gay girls in the house and a dashing young
neighbor over the way?’”22
The language of each of these instances of criticism bears further investiga-

tion. Horace Scudder’s criticism of Jack and Jill is curious in that he states
that the ‘love-making’ is ‘suppressed’, but he does not state if the suppres-
sion he reads is by the author, the reader, or even the characters; and his
ability to read the love-making is not, apparently, affected by this suppres-
sion, no matter its origin. Further, in Scudder’s claim that he does not
‘altogether find satisfaction’, the question might be asked: would he prefer
that the love-making he reads was not suppressed? And what satisfaction
might he experience, or did he expect to find, either way? Similarly, the
Atlantic criticism is not about the love-making itself—although again it
presupposes its availability to be read in the text—but that the quantity is
‘inexcusable’; begging the question, what would constitute an excusable
amount? Clark also points to differences in views on the subject based on
the time period in which the criticism was written, with ‘as late as 1911’
suggesting that such prurience might be expected in the late-nineteenth
century, but not in the early twentieth. In these instances of criticism,
what appears to be at stake is the adult construction of the child as inno-
cent both within the text as textual child and problematically outside of
the text as reader, and the threat to that assumed innocence by what each
critic constructs as an inappropriately early exposure to ‘love-making’; as
such, it is less the threat to the child than to the adult construction of the
child as sexually innocent that the critics are problematizing. Alcott, how-
ever, both embraces and troubles this construction of the child in her
rebuttal of any such claims in her parenthetical observation that ‘(I’m not
afraid the young folks will make that objection)’. As such, she constructs
‘lovering’ as that which is both appropriate and desirable to young people,
88 K. WEST
and dismisses the anticipated fears of their ‘elders’ in Marmee’s voice as

that which is natural—‘what can you expect’—within heterosocial
relations.
However, not all relations in Little Women divide neatly into either
social or sexual; and readings of erotic relations between Jo and other fam-
ily members have gained some critical attention. Jo’s familial relationship
with Meg is problematized when Jo rejects her impending marriage to
John Brooke because ‘you can’t know how hard it is for me to give up
Meg’, even though she tries to ‘bear it like a man’; she even offers to
‘marry Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family’.23 Jo states too that
‘Mothers are the best lovers in the world’; while her relationship with
Beth has also been read as that of lovers as well as sisters, as discussed in
Chap. 3. Donna-Marie Tuck is among the critics who have considered Jo’s
relationships with Marmee, Meg, and Beth in terms of their sexuality. In
her essay, ‘Blurring the Boundaries: The Sexuality of Little Women’, she
claims24:
Jo’s transgressiveness and bi-sexuality allows her to explore this female com-
munity of female love and sisterhood. Consequently, her desire to “marry
Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family” is not because she has passion-
ate desires for her sister, but because she fears losing this female sanctuary in
favor of forced male identification.25
As the essay’s title shows from the outset, Tuck constructs ‘boundaries’
that insist on a binary sexuality in Little Women, no matter the claim to a
‘blurring’ which only acts to reconstruct the very binary it seeks to dis-
turb. Indeed, the whole essay rejects the queerness that is appealed to in
much of Alcott’s work—both regarding gender and sexuality, and in other
issues such as genius—to reinstate the either/or binary that always, even-
tually, leads back to the heteronormative reading that the author is osten-
sibly working to problematize. In her claim to Jo’s ‘transgressiveness and
bi-sexuality’, Tuck positions Jo within a necessarily sexual relationship to
the world around her, one that may transgress societal norms and rules,
but which still can be seen as existing within a sexuality that may include
desire for both male and female potential partners, but restates the bound-
aries between them in terms of binary opposites. However, Tuck also
rejects the transgressiveness that she identifies, claiming that Jo’s sexual
desire for women cannot and should not be read as extending to her sister
and, later, her mother because the appearance of such is predicated on Jo’s
own fears of assuming a male identity.26 In my reading, Tuck can only

therefore accept what she constructs as Jo’s bisexuality if it is kept as theo-
retical; after all, if Jo has no sexual desire for her female family members,
as Tuck seems keen to prove, where is this claim to bisexuality located? As
Bruhm and Hurley claim, I am reading here a form of ‘panic’ about the
possibility of both child sexuality beyond the theoretical ‘play’ that Tuck
reads in Jo’s language to a desire to avoid any need to explore what such
a desire might mean: the ultimate taboo of (homosexual) incest.
To discuss the sexual child in Alcott’s works, however, is not to assume
that Alcott approved of child sexuality any more than her critics have
done, despite my troubling of Tuck’s claims. Strickland argues:
[A]nother danger to moral development, [Alcott] believed, was precocious

sexual activity, which threatened girls as well as boys. Fashionable families
were especially careless about protecting their young from its vice, as Fannie
Shaw’s waywardness shows. In witnessing bawdy shows and learning the
subtle art of flirting with boys, Fannie is clearly growing up too fast for her
own good. One danger is that a girl might engage in premarital sex and even
fall into a life of prostitution. […] In her juvenile fiction, she was consider-
ably more reticent [than in her adult works], dealing with the subject in
oblique ways. Marmee, for example, is ever watchful to protect the “inno-
cence” of her daughters and to prevent them from doing “foolish or
unmaidenly things”, a Victorian code word for sex.27
Strickland’s argument is that Alcott did portray the sexual child in her
novels, but as a warning and with punishment awaiting any transgression
from the assumed and desired non-sexual norm, rather than the casual
attitude she showed to ‘lovering’ in the second part of Little Women.
However, in his construction of Fannie Shaw as ‘wayward’, Strickland
abandons Alcott’s perspective to state his own: that she is ‘clearly growing
up too fast for her own good’, a trope which returns again and again in
criticism, positioning the passage between childhood and adulthood as
that which should be known, predictable, and controlled. Strickland’s
claim to clarity in ‘clearly’ problematizes the sexuality that Alcott positions
as inevitable elsewhere in her works for children, and also in portraying
girls of a similar age to some of her child heroines in her works for adults:
Rosamund, the heroine of A Long, Fatal Love Chase, for example, is eigh-
teen, the same age as the ‘girls’ of ‘May Flowers’. The didacticism that
90 K. WEST
Strickland reads is therefore as much about his positioning the child in

terms of innocence as Alcott’s; and perhaps even more so. He is also curi-
ously reticent in exploring those works for children in which Alcott does
deal with the subject of sex and its dangers: Polly champions the cause of
‘girls no older than us [who] kill themselves because their dreadful poverty
leaves them no choice but sin or death’, for example.28 Here, Alcott
explores both the ‘sin’ of prostitution and that of the attempted suicide
that follows. Yet what Strickland constructs as a link between ‘precocious
sexual activity’ and the risk of ‘fall[ing] into a life of prostitution’ is not
Alcott’s point here: rather, she is exposing the inequalities of a society in
which young girls are unable to make a living and must pay with their bod-
ies if they are to survive; an issue which is never, and has never been, about
child sexuality. Even Fan’s ‘waywardness’ does not threaten this fate, but
serves to show the class differences that Alcott explores throughout her
works: she may grow up too ‘fast’—which I read as both too quickly and
with an excess of sexuality—but her fashionable world encourages such
performative precocity. It is only in the reality of trading sex for money
that child sexuality becomes unacceptable in society’s eyes; and it is this
that Alcott sought to portray.
Queering the Family: Gender and Domestic Roles

Alcott’s language of queerness, oddness, and difference is most often dis-
cussed in the context of her constructions of gender in Little Women; and
I intend to further the debate here, but with a more extensive look at
representations of gender across her works for children and through
Alcott’s constructions of the family. Roberta Seelinger Trites, in her queer
reading of Little Women, claims:
Alcott uses the word queer to describe Jo’s (and her own) nonconformist
behavior […] Jo’s most blatant act of non-conformism is her rejection of
socially inscribed heterosexual gender roles; the text often describes her
‘performances’ in masculine terms to express her androgynous non-
conformity. In Jo’s gender role lies a critique of heterosexuality that can be
read as a strong affirmation of lesbian politics.29
In Trites’ reading, Alcott ‘uses’ the language of queerness ‘to describe’

that which therefore precedes it: what she reads as Jo’s and Alcott’s non-
conformity. However, in positioning their non-conformism as pre-existing
language—as therefore existing within a claim to the real—Trites troubles

her further claim to this as ‘act’ and ‘performance’, that which is always
temporary and existing within, and as, the constant possibility of change.
Trites also argues that Alcott’s queer language expresses Jo’s non-
conformity in positioning her against both gender and heterosexual
norms. While she proceeds to trouble such certainties in the passive voice
and conditional of ‘can be read’, her claim to ‘Jo’s gender role’—a singu-
lar role which is known by Trites as such, despite the prior claim to
androgyny—is solidified further by the ‘critique of heterosexuality’ that
unproblematically ‘lies’ within to be accessed by the critic. As such, the
queerness of Alcott’s language is denied by Trites, at least in this section
of her work, as what it represents is known and beyond reading.
Most critical analysis of this issue has centered around what is read as
Jo’s rejection of the female role; she claims, famously: ‘I can’t get over my
disappointment in not being a boy’ and ‘played male parts to her heart’s
content’.30 Her sisters, at the beginning of the text, variously accept and
reject her gender preference, according to their characters: Amy detests
‘rude, unlady-like girls’; Beth is happy for Jo to be ‘playing brother to us
girls’; while Meg constructs an appropriate period for such unsettling of
gender as belonging to childhood, telling Jo that ‘you are old enough to
leave off boyish tricks’.31 However, each of these comments on Jo’s gender
choices is linked by the language of performativity: Beth is happy for Jo to
play brother; Jo herself plays male parts; Jo’s boyishness is constructed
through her actions as the playing of tricks for Meg; and even Amy’s dis-
missal is only of the ‘unladylike’, positioning femininity just as performa-
tively as the narration of Jo’s boyishness. As such, Jo’s identification with
maleness is only ever seen as temporary, a queerness that belongs to child-
hood and cannot outlast the socially imposed sanctions of adulthood to
which Jo gradually begins to subscribe after the death of Beth.
Another commonly discussed gender trope in Little Women is that of
naming, not just relating to Jo—to whom Beth says ‘you must try to be
contented with making your name boyish’—but in terms of Laurie.32
Many critics equate the naming of Theodore Laurence as ‘Laurie’ as an
authorially-endorsed femininity of the boy-next-door as opposed to the
masculine Jo over the hedge; Stadler, for example, discusses ‘the boy-sister
named Laurie, who is as contradictorily gendered as Jo herself, though a
more world-bound object of desire’.33 Yet, this does not quite wash. My
initial confusion when first coming across this argument is the assumption
that ‘Laurie’ is a girl’s name; while I cannot comment on whether it was
92 K. WEST
known as such in Alcott’s time, this is not a common girl’s name in the
UK, and therefore this claim does not translate across the Atlantic. Further,
Laurie adopts this name to escape a female naming from the other boys;
the notion that Laurie might be a girl’s name is therefore not supported
by the text, which instead narrates Laurie as stating: ‘My first is Theodore,
but I don’t like it, for the fellows called me Dora, so I made them say
Laurie instead’, positioning the name ‘Laurie’ as an improvement on the
feminine ‘Dora’ and Laurie as rejecting what he reads as an enforced femi-
ninity.34 However, Jo renames Laurie again herself, calling him the gen-
derless (and sexless) ‘Teddy’, thereby refusing to participate in any
feminized or non-feminized renaming of Laurie. And finally, despite the
frequent flagging of Jo’s name as masculine, Alcott does not flag ‘Laurie’
as feminine at any point in the text.
However, Ken Parille argues that Amy’s later renaming of Laurie is a
method of gender-shaming:
An essential part of Amy’s shaming of Laurie involves renaming him; as his

friends had called him “Dora” to emphasize his failure to measure up to
their standards of masculinity, Amy calls him “Lazy Laurence” to feminize
him by emphasizing how unindustrious, and therefore unmanly, he seems to
her. […] [Amy] soon says “Aren’t you ashamed of a hand like that? It’s a
soft and white as a woman’s, and looks as if it never did anything but wear
Jouvin’s best gloves”.35
I agree with this reading to some extent, but rendering Laurie ‘unmanly’—
even with Amy’s claim to his hand being ‘as a woman’s’—does not neces-
sarily result in feminizing him, particularly as this is not a model of
femininity ever endorsed by Alcott in this novel, where the women typi-
cally work harder than the men. This is about class as much as societal
ideas of masculinity: there is never any hint that Laurie engages in manual
labor and, again, the women are far more likely to do so as it is Meg who
has hard spots on her hand by the end of the first part of the novel, making
her father proud and endorsing femininity as work. In the repeated renam-
ing of Laurie, it might therefore be argued that his weakness lies in his
inability to self-realize: each person in his life renames him, and Amy, after
marriage, calls him ‘my lord’, rendering him without name, as possession,
and only ever in relation to herself. This is not to deny any troubling of
Laurie’s gender in this text; rather, the frequent presentation from Jo’s
perspective renders him less feminine than asexual and agender in my
reading, particularly in Alcott’s own claim to a pre-sexual childhood in

Jo’s frequent infantilizing of Laurie as ‘my boy’. As such, Alcott queers the
family in Jo’s assumption of the mother role with Laurie as much as she
queers the gender of the respective characters. Jan Susina also positions
Laurie as a pre-Peter Pan figure in Little Women as the boy who never had
to—or had the chance to—grow up.36 He argues: ‘Laurie’s chief attraction
to Jo is not so much as a romantic suitor, but as a boy who needs a
mother’.37 He concludes: ‘Better to be a little woman than an eternal
boy’.38 However, in this final claim, the same argument may be made—if
problematically—about Jo, who most emphatically disagrees with this
conclusion in most of Little Women, if not (always) in its sequels. While
she arguably positions herself as the man of the house in the absence of her
father, it is boyhood that she clings to most tenaciously.
Alcott also queers family, gender, class, and sexual roles in the ‘Rose’
texts. Rose’s relationship with Mac has been discussed above; however, I
also want to touch briefly on Alcott’s upsetting of conventional and
societally-endorsed family relationships through this romance, Rose’s
prior romance with cousin Charlie, and her ambivalent relationship with
her uncle. Although the idea of cousins marrying is even less acceptable in
western society today than it might have been in Alcott’s time, Alcott’s
depiction of Rose’s family romances still act to blur the lines between
cousin and lover. Further, Rose’s relationship with Uncle Alec verges on
the sexual at times: he offers ‘my heartiest kiss’ as an incentive to bake a
good loaf of bread; and ‘she was moved to put up her innocent lips and
seal the contract with a confiding kiss’ when establishing their relation-
ship.39 Despite—or perhaps because of—Alcott’s claim to Rose’s inno-
cence here, the possibility of sex returns in this ‘contract’ that defines their
relationship to come. Rose’s comparison of Mac with Uncle Alec queers
the family structure still further. At a time when she is beginning to worry
the boundary between cousin and lover, Rose compares Mac to their
uncle, much to his dissatisfaction, one that Rose cannot understand and
Alcott declines to explain, though the implication is that Mac wishes both
an independence from his family and the changing of family ties to
romance with Rose. However, Mac positions himself in this role earlier in
the text: when discussing Charlie with Rose, Mac advises her to ‘[p]lay
I’m Uncle’ in order to speak freely to him.40 Although Alcott returns to
the language of ‘play’ here, she also queers the family relationship still
further when the cousin who most resembles Rose’s father-figure both
posits himself as such and denies it to become her lover. And Rose’s rela-
tionship with Phebe is no less queer. As will be discussed in Chap. 5 on
94 K. WEST
class, Rose both troubles the class divide between herself and Phebe, while
regularly reinstating it; and she also queers Phebe’s status within the fam-
ily framework. Rose ‘adopts’ Phebe early in the text in order to give her
the advantages of Rose’s own life, thereby positioning herself in the
mother role. However, she also claims Phebe as her ‘sister’ at various
points of the texts; yet they remain ‘the little mistress’ and ‘the little
maid’.41 And as they reach adulthood, their relationship is described in
more sexual terms, as Rose and Phebe were ‘enjoying one another like a
pair of lovers’.42 Alcott’s claim to ‘like’ both appears to preclude a sexual
relationship between the two and reinstates its possibility. Phebe’s position
within the family—especially in her eventual marriage to Archie—and in
relation to Rose queers boundaries of class, family, and sexuality through-
out the text.
It could also be argued with some justice that the subversion of what
Strickland calls ‘the sharp separation of gender roles’ sometimes fails in
Alcott’s works for children such as Jack and Jill, for example, in which Jill
has to be taught the socially approved femininity that she must grow into,
while leaving behind a troubled childhood androgyny in which the femi-
ninity is problematized as much as the masculinity.43 Prior to the accident
that sets the scene for the text, Jill is predominantly constructed in terms
of the female, but with the femininity of Eve compared to Jack’s angelic
perfection. In discussing the choice of ‘coasts’, he asks: ‘“Now, which will
you have?” […] with a warning look in the honest blue eyes which often
unconsciously controlled naughty Jill against her will.’44 This is both an
endorsement and challenge to traditional gender boundaries in that Jill is
the rebel and Jack the ‘angel’; yet she is also Eve tempting him to his
downfall, as she does again when choosing the dangerous coast with ‘such
a rosy, pleading face that Jack gave in at once’.45 Again, it might be argued
here that Jill’s strength—if misguided—versus Jack’s passivity troubles
accepted gender roles, despite the Adam-and-Eve trope.
After the accident, Mrs. Minot enrolls Jack to teach Jill the responsibili-
ties of her gender, but in doing so, repositions his own role as teacher to
Jill and as failing in a proscribed masculinity: ‘Another time, stand firm
and help Jill control her headstrong will. When you learn to yield less and
she more, there will be no scrapes like this to try us all.’ His reply—‘I’ll
take better care of her next time’—shows that the lesson is learned imme-
diately, even as it troubles traditional gendering; after all, in teaching her
son his societally approved gender role, it might be argued that Mrs.
Minot is yielding to the masculine imperative herself.46 Yet despite the
attempted regendering of his relationship with Jill, the accident acts to

emasculate Jack still further:
A white-covered table stood near, with all manner of dainties set forth in a
way to tempt the sternest principles. Vases of flowers bloomed on the
chimney- piece,—gifts from anxious young ladies, left with their love.
Frivolous story-books and picture-papers strewed the bed, now shrouded in
effeminate chintz curtains, beneath which Jack lay like a wounded warrior in
his tent.47
Despite the ‘wounded warrior’ analogy and the normative heterosexual

desire behind the ‘gifts from anxious young ladies, left with their love’,
Jack is feminized by his injury, and such feminization is a form of death in
which Jack is ‘shrouded’ and ‘beneath [which he] lay’. However, the
repeated language of temptation shows this as a desirable path, even as it
is one to be resisted; the feminine always represents both the strength of
Eve’s wiles and the weakness that is assumed to lie at the heart of the
‘effeminate’. Jack must resist the temptations of the feminine both to
ensure his own masculinity and to teach Jill to perform the expected adult
female role which she must assume to escape poverty and to be considered
a suitable future wife.
Jill’s injury also acts as an opportunity, not for a regendering based on
an assumed queer masculine childhood, but in a resetting of the danger-
ous feminine that she embodies; the injury to her back acts as a breaking
of the child’s problematically-female body to reset it as the desired and
normative adult female. Merry suggests the formation of a missionary
society to help others and to amuse Jill, one in which ‘[w]e wouldn’t let
the boys come in’, although the masculine returns immediately as ‘[w]e’d
have it a secret society, as they do their temperance lodge’; the female
society can only exist along masculine lines and with patriarchal prior
approval.48 But Jill’s mother takes this opportunity to teach Jill her future
female role:
“I can tell you some one to begin on right away,” said her mother, nodding
at her. “As wild a little savage as I’d wish to see. Take her in hand, and make
a pretty-mannered lady of her. Begin at home, my lass, and you’ll find mis-
sionary work enough for a while.”
“Now, Mammy, you mean me! Well, I will begin; and I’ll be so good,
folks won’t know me. Being sick makes naughty children behave in story-
books. I’ll see of live ones can’t.”49
96 K. WEST
Jill must change so dramatically that ‘folks won’t know’ her to become an
acceptable woman; but this is solely a societally approved version of wom-
anhood, a performative femininity. It could be argued that the goodness is
also performative, and that ‘folks won’t know’ her due to a sublimation or
hiding of her true, ‘queer’ self, the often-repeated Alcottian trope of the
child as a ‘wild’ thing. As such, the taming that the mother prescribed—
one that is to come both from outside and from Jill herself—troubles the
status of the socially adapted adult in that its goodness might be as perfor-
mative as the child’s queerness. Further, in the claim to what happens ‘in
story-books’ is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the text’s own status as
fiction and as educational tool, and an Alcottian blurring of the already
problematic boundaries between story and life.
Alcott’s short story, ‘Shadow Children’, appears to reinforce the gender
roles of the sentimental family with less ambivalence than many of her
novels.50 The children’s shadows are detached from them by a combina-
tion of their musings about the nature of shadows and the magic of mid-
summer day; they must promise to reverse roles and follow their shadows
faithfully as the shadows do them. The purpose is an educational one: the
shadows show the children how to do their duty before following their
urge for pleasure, with children thus created as sensual creatures rather
than being governed by reason or logic, at least before an education that
shows them an assumed correctness of behavior. However, the gendering
of the shadows in this story creates a divide between work suitable for girls
and for boys. Polly’s shadow ‘had a frock on, and two bows, where its hair
was tied up’ and was her ‘new mistress’.51 Her work is inside the house,
washing up the breakfast cups and looking after the baby, while Ned and
Will work outside, picking peas and chopping wood. However, these tasks
are not solely directed by the shadow children but by the parents who
have already asked their children to undertake these tasks. The job of the
shadows is to reiterate rather than establish gender norms within the fam-
ily, constructing them as shadows not of the children but of the parents
and of a patriarchal society that divides them by gender. However, the
shadows also aim to achieve what the parents, it seems, cannot: the chil-
dren’s obedience and an education concerned with duty and self-
abnegation. However, they do it largely through kindness: Polly’s shadow
shows her how to keep the baby happy while it is changed, and care for a
poor child beyond what the shadow has demonstrated. Polly reflects,
thinking ‘what a queer day we had’.52 As such, Alcott queers not only the
family here but the day itself, with the queerness of this single day
predicated on a shared experience linked to the ‘magic’ of midsummer, a

magic that is therefore both lacking in everyday life and in subversion of
it. Further, the ‘we’ that shares the queer day in Polly’s statement under-
mines the claim to queerness as difference, with queerness defined as a
common experience that is outside of those experiencing it in that it can
be ended with the day. Family roles may also have been queered here but,
as with many of Alcott’s more didactic short stories, gender roles are more
firmly established by the end than at the beginning through a teaching
beyond that of the heteronormative family structure.
Gender Performativity and the Cross-Dressing Child

In considering the performativity of gender roles, Butler argues:
Perhaps we think we know what the anatomy of a person is (sometimes we

do not, and we certainly have not appreciated the variation that exists at the
level of anatomical description). Or we derive that knowledge from the
clothes that the person wears. This is naturalized knowledge, even though it
is based on a series of cultural inferences, some of which are highly
erroneous.53
This claim to a ‘knowledge’ of gender roles based on ‘the clothes that the
person wears’ is both addressed and queered by Alcott in her frequent
juxtaposition of cross-dressing and performance in her texts. In her adult
texts in particular, including short stories ‘My Mysterious Mademoiselle’
and ‘Enigmas’, Alcott explores cross-dressing as a trope, as has been dis-
cussed by Harriet Reisen; however, she also does so in her works for
children.54
Jo’s cross-dressing in Little Women has already been critically discussed
in terms of her play-acting and therefore performing the male roles that
she has written for herself throughout the text. However, the conventional
Meg is also queered by clothes in her trip to ‘vanity fair’. Dressed as a
‘doll’ for the evening—a hyper-feminized, painted doll of which Alcott
clearly disapproves—Meg confesses: ‘I feel so queer and stiff, and half-
dressed’; further, ‘[t]he “queer feeling” did not pass away’.55 This most
sentimentally-normalized of the four sisters—even more so than Beth,
despite her sentimental death—has her femininity shaken by its exaggera-
tion into something she no longer recognizes as female; Meg is made into
a drag version of herself. However, this performative hyper-femininity
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exists to allow a lesson from Marmee on what a woman should be (and, of

course, for Alcott to denigrate the fashionable life still further); and Meg’s
performative queerness—performed in the sense that it is only ever a ‘feel-
ing’—is allowed to pass away unchallenged, despite her later problems in
reconciling herself to the domestic female role that both she and others
expect of her.
Alcott considers cross-dressing in Eight Cousins, too, and not just via
the ‘Dandy’, Steve. On her first foray outside with the cousins, Rose is
worried about being cold; the cousins say: ‘We’ll fix you!’ As Fan attempts
to ‘fix’ Polly, this fixing is about clothes; but rather than meeting the
demands of fashionable life, the cousins’ fixing of Rose cross-dresses her:
‘one clapped his cap on her head, another tied a rough jacket around her
neck by the sleeves’.56 But this fixing works in multiple ways: it fixes her in
the sense of a mending, in that it makes her warm; it dresses her as male
and, in that dressing, it subsumes the problematically-female Rose into the
male Campbell clan; but in doing so, it also fixes Rose’s status as female:
she needs not just the boys’ clothes, but for the boys to dress her as such,
and in doing so, her performative maleness fails in that it is always an addi-
tion, not chosen, but imposed upon her by those who confirm her status
as other in doing so.
The cousins are not the only family members to dress Rose as male,
however; Mrs. Clara, the aunt positioned by Alcott to be representative of
the fashionable life the author so dislikes, enters into a standoff with Uncle
Alec over Rose’s clothes. She supplies a fashionable outfit for Rose to per-
form the kind of femininity experienced by Meg at ‘vanity fair’ when she
allows others to dress her. Rose, too, dons the chosen outfit and experi-
ences its shortcomings: the lack of breath, the high heels that restrict her
movement, and a coat completely insufficient for an East Coast winter.
Uncle Alec’s alternative, a suit of underwear based on pajamas, reverses
these inconveniences, allowing Rose free movement but still able to ‘have
as pretty frocks as she likes outside’.57 Despite the dress, Alcott’s narrator
tells us that Rose’s legs ‘might now be as free and active as a boy’s under
the modest skirts of the girl’; Rose may dress as a ‘modest’ girl on the
outside, but her skirts fail to sufficiently cover the boyishness underneath.58
Aunt Clara confirms the failure of this dress to allow Rose to perform the
expected femininity: ‘“There! you see how it will be; dress her in that boy-
ish way and she will act like a boy. I do hate all these inventions of strong-
minded women!” exclaimed Mrs. Clara, as Rose came back at a run.’59
However, she does so by assuming that it is Rose’s dress—rather than the
freedom of the legs underneath—that renders her ‘boyish’, although it is

not enough to make her into a boy: her assumed female gender returns in
the claim to ‘act like’. However, Mrs. Clara upsets the gender binary fur-
ther in her complaint about ‘these inventions of strong-minded women’,
in which strong-mindedness—as it is elsewhere in this text and others—is
equated by society to masculinity; although, again, Mrs. Clara is one of the
aunts of whom Alcott does not approve, representing as she does a perfor-
mative femininity that Marmee equates with ‘unmaidenly girls’ in contrast
to the ‘little women’ she wishes her girls to become.60
The Alcott text that explores cross-dressing and performativity most
closely is An Old-Fashioned Girl, in which Tom dresses in his sister’s
clothes:
[Tom] roved around the room, till Fan’s bureau arrested him. It was cov-
ered with all sorts of finery, for she had dressed in a hurry, and left every-
thing topsy-turvey. A well-conducted boy would have let things alone, or a
moral brother would have put things to rights; being neither, Tom rum-
maged to his heart’s content, till Fan’s drawers looked as if someone had
been making hay in them. He tried the effect of ear-rings, ribbons, and col-
lars; wound up the watch, though it wasn’t time; burnt his inquisitive nose
with smelling-salts; deluged his grimy handkerchief with Fan’s best cologne;
anointed his curly crop with her hail-oil; powdered his face with her violet-
powder; and finished off by pinning on a bunch of false ringlets, which
Fanny tried to keep a profound secret.61
In this first section, Alcott constructs the performative nature of Tom’s

cross-dressing; one which—unlike Rose—does not trouble his gender or
the male body that Alcott positions as both beneath and in excess of the
hyper-feminized fashionable clothes. Tom’s attributes remain stubbornly
male: ‘his inquisitive nose […] his grimy handkerchief […] his curly crop’
are set in opposition to ‘Fan’s best cologne’ and ‘her violet powder’, and
the normative gender roles are reinforced by what is constructed as Tom’s
attempted transgression. However, this is troubled somewhat in that the
femininity that is problematically achieved through dress is not just Tom’s,
but Fan’s too. In the addition of her ‘ear-rings, ribbons, and collars’ and
particularly the ‘bunch of false ringlets, which Fanny tried to keep a pro-
found secret’, Alcott positions Fan’s gender as that which can be, and is,
selectively donned; performed for the outside world, but discarded in pri-
vate. Further, in the gendering of what belongs to Tom and what to Fan,
it might be asked if it is the possessor that is gendered, or the objects
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possessed, given their power to bestow gender on their wearer. Yet, in this
claim to Tom as gendered male despite his donning of his sister’s clothes,
Alcott also predicates two types of boyhood for Tom—that of the ‘well-
conducted boy’ and the role of ‘a moral brother’—which are dismissed in
that he fits neither, but are not replaced by any positive construction of his
boyhood; positive in terms of what type of boy he therefore is.
The passage continues:
When the curls had been put on, with much pricking of fingers, and a blue
ribbon added, a la Fan, [Tom] surveyed himself with satisfaction, and con-
sidered the effect so fine, that he was inspired to try a still greater metamor-
phosis. The dress Fan had taken off lay on a chair, and into it got Tom,
chuckling with suppressed laughter, for Polly was absorbed, and the bed-
curtains hid his iniquity. Fan’s best velvet jacket and hat, ermine muff, and a
sofa-pillow for a pannier, finished off the costume, and tripping along with
elbows out, Tom appeared before the amazed Polly just as the chapter
ended. She enjoyed the joke so heartily that Tom forgot consequences, and
proposed going down into the parlor to surprise the girls. […]
“I ain’t going to dress up for nothing; I look so lovely, someone must
admire me. Take me down, Polly, and see if they don’t call me ‘a sweet
creature’”.62
In this section, Tom’s cross-dressing is constructed as performative in dif-

ferent ways: not only in his putting on of gender but, like Fan, that he
does so for the benefit of an audience, although with a secrecy that makes
this a ‘still greater metamorphosis’; as such, this cross-dressing is both
performance and a more fundamental change. However, the performance
wins out in that this is both ‘effect’ and a ‘joke’, and that Tom requires not
just a greater audience than Polly, but one that will affirm his ‘metamor-
phosis’ in calling him ‘a sweet creature’; a calling that, interestingly,
appears to remove his femininity, even his humanity, in this desired nam-
ing, although this also acts as an indictment of heterosexual relationships
and constructions of the female in a patriarchal and fashionable society
that values women principally as objects. Tom further represents the safety
of such a performative cross-dressing, one which allows it to take place but
without any threat to either the assumed underlying masculinity or the
approved social order. As such, the queerness of his cross-dressing is less
in the subversion of gender than in that it can take place outside of subver-
sion, both normalizing the action and queering it still further.
In each of these examples, Alcott explores the gendering of the child’s

body through clothes, both those constructed as appropriate to each child
and those that are, largely for reasons of performance, designated as cross-
dressing. Although it might be argued that Alcott is destabilizing gender
roles in this trope, in that gender is fluid enough to shift according to what
is being worn, it could equally be claimed that, as Lesnik-Oberstein argues
in her discussion of Victoria Flanagan’s Into the Closet: Cross-dressing and
the Gendered Body in Children’s Literature and Film, to do so would mean
that ‘both the body and sex remain consistently before and outside of the
cultural, the social and the symbolic, known for what they are without
question’.63 As in any constructions of cross-dressing, Butler’s troubling
of a known anatomy beneath clothes designated as gender-appropriate or
cross-gender assumes a body that is posited as known and knowable, with
a reality that removes it from the gaze that always renders it not as gender,
but as gendered.
Can Childhood Be Queer?

The issue that remains in this chapter, for me, is if and how an Alcottian
childhood can be constructed in terms of the queer. If so many of Alcott’s
child characters—Polly, Tom, and Fan; Jo and Meg; Rose and Mac—are
constructed in terms of their difference, their oddness and queerness, it
might be argued that Alcott sees childhood itself as queer, as the liminal
space in which the difference that stems from nature is educated out of the
child until—like Rousseau’s Émile—s/he is ready to take on the socially
endorsed model of adulthood with its compulsory heterosexuality and
agreed-upon gender roles. But the paradox remains: most of Alcott’s child
characters are named as queer by their peers, who variously both position
themselves as the norm and accept the subversion of their own naming as
queer by others; and the performative queerness of childhood—as con-
structed by Alcott—seems to be replaced by an equally-performative
adulthood in which accepted gender roles are played as much as the queer
explorations of childhood. In addition, the frequency of the queer child’s
appearance in Alcott’s texts also problematizes differences between chil-
dren, suggesting further that childhood itself is constructed as queer. As
such, while it might be argued that the queerness of Alcott’s children can
be located in their refusal to conform, it can equally be argued that the
normalized status of adulthood is no less problematized.
102 K. WEST
Notes
1. Bruhm and Hurley, p. ix
2. Alcott, Little Men, p. 19; Little Women, p. 239; Journals, p. 166.
6. Alcott, Eight Cousins, pp. 1, 2.
10. Alcott (1876) Rose in Bloom (New York: Puffin Books, 1995), pp. 1, 110.
12. Alcott, Rose in Bloom, p. 30.
15. Henry James (1903) The Beast in the Jungle (London: Penguin Modern
Classics, 2004), p. 36.
16. James, pp. 28, 25.
17. James, pp. 11, 36.
18. Eve Kofosky Sedgwick (1990) Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), p. 194.
19. Uncle Alec is also constructed through the language of queerness through-
out this text, but reasons of space do not permit me to discuss this in any
depth; however, the unmarried adult male—apparently still holding a can-
dle for Rose’s mother, also upsetting the conventional family unit in his
desire for his brother’s wife—rejects any notion of a fulfilled heterosexual
romance in his own life, preferring an asexual existence, if not desire.
20. Nancy Armstrong (1987) Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History
of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 6.
21. Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, p. 12.
22. Clark, Kiddie Lit, p. 112.
24. Donna-Marie Tuck (2006) ‘Blurring the Boundaries: The Sexuality of
Little Women’, Working with English: Medieval and Modern Language,
Literature and Drama, 2.1: Literary Fads and Fashions, pp. 82–88.
25. Tuck, p. 84.
26. Tuck, p. 84: ‘With mothers being responsible for the physical nurture of
their children as well as emotionally caring for them, it is natural for Jo to
acknowledge, “Mothers are the best lovers in the world”’ (Alcott, 437).
27. Strickland, pp. 143–144.
29. Roberta Seelinger Trites (1999) ‘“Queer Performances”: Lesbian Politics

in Little Women’, Little Women and the Feminist Imagination,
pp. 139–160, 139.
30. Alcott, Little Women, pp. 13, 24.
35. Ken Parille (2001) ‘“Wake up, and be a man”: Little Women, Laurie, and
the Ethic of Submission’, Children’s Literature, Vol. 29, pp. 34–51, 42.
36. Jan Susina, ‘Men and Little Women: Notes of a Resisting (Male) Reader’,
Little Women and the Feminist Imagination, pp. 161–172.
37. Susina, p. 165.
38. Susina, p. 170.
50. Alcott, ‘Shadow Children’, Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag, Vol. 6, pp. 383–391.
51. Alcott, ‘Shadow-Children’, p. 384.
52. Alcott, ‘Shadow-Children’, p. 391.
53. Judith Butler (1990) Gender Trouble (London and New York: Routledge,
2007), pp. xxiii–xxiv.
54. Reisen, p. 260n.
62. Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl, pp. 62–63.
63. Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (2016) ‘Children’s Literature: Sexual Identity,
Gender and Childhood’, Breac, https://breac.nd.edu/articles/childrens-lit-
erature-sexual-identity-gender-and-childhood/ [accessed 7 February 2019].
CHAPTER 5
Race, Disability, and Class: Alcott’s Peripheral

Children
Reading Alcott’s Peripheral Children

Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag, a collection of Alcott’s short stories for children, is
not an easy set of books to acquire, especially if you live in the UK; I have
had to make do, therefore, with a modern, print-on-demand edition of all
six volumes.1 This edition, printed in 2015, begins with a disclaimer on
the inner title page: ‘This book is a classic of its time. It does not reflect
the same views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal rela-
tions as it would if it was written today’.2 This may be a standard dis-
claimer at the beginning of all ‘classic’ reprints from McAllister Editions;
however, the disclaimer itself deserves a closer look in a consideration of
how the queering of childhood is not the only means by which children
are constructed as other in literature for and about children, and how
childhood is valued—or not—by such terms.
The McAllister edition of Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag is ‘a classic of its time’. In
denoting Alcott’s six-volume set as ‘of its time’, the publishers are includ-
ing a time period of at least ten years—the 1872–1882 dates of publica-
tion for the individual volumes—plus, one suspects, the time of writing
which may have prefigured the publication date by some months or even
years; after all, many of the stories were printed previously in journals
aimed at a child market, and some in earlier Alcott compilations such as
Flowers Fables, The Rose Family, and Morning-Glories and Other Stories.
However, McAllister’s claim to ‘of its time’ is set in opposition to ‘today’

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39025-9_5
106 K. WEST
in which, the editors state, views on the above categories would not be the
same, constructing the writers of today—and Alcott, should she be writing
today—as a homogenous group with the same opinions on and textual
representations of each of these matters. Of course this is problematic;
however, what is of greater interest is that the publisher feels the need to
distance itself from constructions of so many categories—race, gender,
sexuality, ethnicity, and ‘interpersonal relations’—any or all of which the
author may be presenting contrary to the views of today’s readers who,
again, are constructed as a single and homogenous mass with known opin-
ions on these subjects. Butler argues:
[A]s the critique of gender normativity, able-ism, and racist perception have
made clear, there is no singular human form. […] [C]ertain kinds of bodies
will appear more precariously than others, depending on which versions of
the body, or of morphology in general, support or underwrite the idea of
the human life that is worth protecting, sheltering, living, mourning.3
As Butler explains, the precarity of the body—whether it the body that is

deemed ‘child’, that which is raced, or one constructed in terms of a dis-
ability against that which is therefore considered able or even whole—
always leads in turn to an evaluation of that body against claims to the
ideal and/or the norm. It is this precarity, one that is so often in, or of,
language, that I will explore.
Any textual conflation of such distinct categories as those referenced by
McAllister is not without its problems: in what sense can, or should, they
be read together? In reading Alcott’s fiction, and other children’s fiction
of nineteenth-century America, I would echo Peter Stoneley who argues
that in portrayals of the fictional middle-class girl and the issues she faces
in growing up: ‘Her volatility becomes a metaphor of class, racial, and
ethnic uncertainty; the possibility of “fixing” her coalesces with the pos-
sibility of resolving such social uncertainties.’4 As Alcott’s frequent linguis-
tic recourse to the ‘queer’ shows, as discussed in the previous chapter, so
her representations of the normative white, middle-class girl—despite this
girl’s struggles, variations, and ultimate growth beyond the status of girl—
remain central to an understanding of those child characters who are
always constructed in relation to this girl, as ‘other’. This chapter will
therefore consider representations of children from outside of this textual
norm, those who are constructed in terms of race, class and poverty, and
disability (about which both Stoneley and the publishers of Aunt Jo’s
5 RACE, DISABILITY, AND CLASS: ALCOTT’S PERIPHERAL CHILDREN 107
Scrap Bag remain curiously silent), and the intersections between these
categories in Alcott’s portrayals of children.
However, I also want to consider how these children are positioned
within their texts; for while the middle-class girl may be central to many of
Alcott’s works, the author also devotes significant textual space to repre-
sentations of children who are constructed as outside of this sphere. As
with Alcott’s ‘queer’ children, the precarious status of those children who
are othered by reason of class, disability, and race is often troubled by the
focus on their stories within the frame of the text. I will be considering
how Alcott’s children negotiate this positioning of centrality and periph-
erality via an assumed societal positioning relative to their status of class
and race, but also via the narration’s attempts to reposition them within a
more central social and textual role. Neil Cocks considers the nineteenth-
century child in literature’s status as peripheral thus:
My claim is that there is no knowable “real” child waiting in the darkness for
its coming to light, and that the return itself is not, again, of an object.
Instead, the peripheral child returns to these texts as a reading: an engage-
ment with, and in, language. It is the reading that produces the child as
neglected, in other words, neglect being a deferred action, its meaning pro-
jected backwards. On these terms, language and reading are not secondary
to that which is returned, but constitutive of it. [Author’s emphasis]5
Cocks is arguing here, as I have already discussed in Chap. 2 on autobiog-

raphy, that any claim to the ‘real’ child is, at best, an illusion; it is not an
‘object’ that can be retrieved and recognized as such via its fictional or
textual portrayal. Rather, he claims, ‘the peripheral’ is always located in the
very language and understanding of language that constructs it as such:
‘[i]t is the reading that produces the child as neglected’ in terms of its
portrayal in nineteenth-century literature; but I would argue further that
it is the reading that produces the child, not just as neglected in terms of its
presence (or otherwise) in criticism of nineteenth-century literature, but
that it is in only the language of both author and critic that the child is
positioned (and positioned as child) at all.
Within Alcott’s constructions of childhood, therefore, I am claiming
that she renders many of her child characters as peripheral in societal
terms, while simultaneously centralizing them—or some of them, at
least—within her own narrative in an attempt to reposition them within
society; or, indeed, to reposition society itself in terms of a utopian ideal.
108 K. WEST
Such a construction also depends on a view of childhood that, if not nor-

mative, is perhaps ideal: what a child could or should be within an ideal
world, which Alcott’s rarely is. I will therefore argue that while Alcott
both reflects and constructs the peripherality of these children in society
and in language, she also—at times—produces a discourse in which they
can and should be central.
‘Poor Lads’ and ‘Brave Little Girls’: Class

and Poverty in Alcott
It may seem curious to claim the poor child as peripheral in Alcott’s works;
after all, sentimental accounts of child poverty abound in her children’s
fiction. Criticism of Little Women, both popular and academic, has fre-
quently both equated and compared the March family’s ‘genteel poverty’
with the ‘harsh reality’ of Alcott’s own life. Douglas claims: ‘Mr. March’s
poverty, like Bronson Alcott’s, protects his family from the psychological
consequences of living in a profit-oriented society’.6 Rioux notes: ‘Jo goes
to New York because she wants to spread her wings, but in real life, neces-
sity often drove the girls away from home, […] supporting themselves and
sending money home when they could’.7 And Marjorie Worthington
writes: ‘Louisa May Alcott has given us a poignant picture of genteel pov-
erty in Little Women, although she couldn’t help softening the sharp edges
a little and adding so much charm to the telling that one almost overlooks
how ugly and mean poverty of that sort can be.’8 This return to biography
in criticism of Alcott’s works, particularly in Little Women, both informs
and troubles readings of poverty in the text, and echoes a construction of
poverty in Alcott’s works that frequently appears relational, thereby con-
structing financially-poor characters as peripheral against an assumed
middle-class norm.
That which constitutes poverty in Alcott’s works, however, is not nec-
essarily stable. The scene that begins Little Women, most famously, focuses
on the poverty of the March family, when Meg complains about the loss
of the March family property after her father tried to help a friend: ‘It is so
dreadful to be poor!’9 But this poverty, despite the assertion of Meg that
her family is poor so early in the text, is constructed as such through an
assumed prior position which predates the period of the text, and in rela-
tion to the social and financial status of others, such as the Laurences, who
are clearly wealthy and considered by others as existing at the top of the
social ladder. As Nina Auerbach comments: ‘Despite the girls’ mechanical

grumbling, it is difficult for the reader to believe in what they have given
up when she finds herself surrounded by what they have.’10 After all, the
comparison with the ethnically-othered Hummel family, to whom the sis-
ters give their Christmas breakfast, is stark: the March girls—despite their
claimed poverty—have cream, muffins, and buckwheat pancakes to give
away, and a servant to help them carry the charitable provisions; while the
Hummels live in a room constituted in terms of its many absences and
inadequacies, with each item qualified by what it is not and, therefore,
what it should be: ‘A poor, bare, miserable room it was, with broken win-
dows, no fire, ragged bed-clothes, a sick mother, wailing baby, and a group
of pale, hungry children cuddled under one old quilt, trying to keep
warm.’11 And the charity of the March family only offers temporary relief
as the Hummels never move beyond their status as poor: rather, they serve
as an object lesson for the girls who never quite do enough from their
position as relatively privileged, and who ultimately lose Beth due to their
neglect, while the death of the Hummel baby has relatively little further
impact in terms of its own family within the text. The relation to Beth here
is an interesting one: as the only sister who keeps up her care of the
Hummels, she is punished by sickness and, ultimately, death; while the
Laurences never neglect their care of the ‘poor’ Marches and survive
unharmed, or even enhanced, by the experience. Irredeemable poverty in
Little Women—one which both begins and ends the life of a family, rather
than being a temporary state—is therefore one in which a character is
always peripheral. This immigrant family can never escape their relative
position as poor, marginalized, and at best an object lesson for the
normatively-classed central characters. Yet, at least, they are represented.
Poverty is explored in more depth through the character of Phebe
Moore in Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom. Phebe is constructed in a rela-
tional capacity to the story’s heroine, Rose, from the outset: Rose is rich,
Phebe poor; Rose is the mistress, Phebe the maid, despite the repeated
troubling of her status within the family unit; neither has parents—Phebe
was ‘left on the poor-house steps a little mite of a baby’—but Rose has a
surfeit of relatives to care for her, while Phebe has no one.12 Phebe’s pov-
erty is neither that of the Hummels nor the Marches as she is employed,
fed, warm, and happy; yet none of these factors impact her social status
within the Campbell family, a family that might have been ethnically-
othered due to its non-American origins as the Hummels are, but rather
takes pride in its Scottish origins and titled ancestors. Despite the various
110 K. WEST
relationships—friends, sisters, mother-daughter, and ‘like’ lovers—

between the two girls, their respective social status always marks a division,
and Phebe remains a foil to Rose’s normalized middle-class existence
throughout the two texts. Rose’s social superiority is felt by all of the char-
acters, and perhaps Phebe most of all: ‘[I]f [Phebe] had dared, she would
have gone and hugged her afflicted guest. Fearing that might not be con-
sidered proper’, she did not.13 Phebe is aware of difference in social class,
and her fear that she ‘might not be considered proper’ constructs a nor-
malized ‘they’ who have the right to sit in judgment on her actions. This
is ratified further by the first response of Uncle Alec to the announcement
of Rose’s friend: ‘I’m glad to see that you are not aristocratic in your
tastes, but I don’t quite make out why you like this young lady from the
poor-house.’14 Although Uncle Alec has not yet met Phebe himself, she is
constructed in terms of her origins alone, and her friendship with Rose
exists despite those origins and the social difference between the two girls.
However, after Rose’s explanation, Uncle Alec says: ‘So she doesn’t call
desertion, poverty, and hard work, troubles? She’s a brave little girl, and I
should be proud to know her.’ He therefore sees what Rose does not—
what poverty has meant to Phebe’s life—but he also categorizes her as the
‘deserving poor’: she must be ‘brave’ to earn Uncle Alec’s pride in her, a
trope that recurs throughout Alcott’s works.
In Rose in Bloom, Alcott attempts to reposition Phebe in relation to
Rose, but this attempt is only partially successful as Phebe is unable to
outpace her origins: any personal achievement or moral superiority counts
for very little against the prejudice of the wealthy middle classes. The
eldest cousin, Archie, falls in love with Phebe and she with him, but the
match is unacceptable to the only family that Phebe has known due to her
previous position as maid and her uncertain social origins. Aunt Plenty
comments: ‘What do you suppose our blessed ancestress Lady Marget
would say to our oldest boy taking a wife from the poorhouse?’15 Like
Uncle Alec before her, Aunt Plenty can only ever see Phebe as ‘from the
poorhouse’; and in the claim that Archie is ‘taking’ Phebe ‘from the poor-
house’ [my emphasis] is the assumption that no matter her life since then,
the poorhouse is still her rightful place. Despite Alcott’s consideration of
both sides of this social impasse—Rose, Uncle Alec, and a few other mem-
bers of the family support the match—she stops short of condemning
these socially-exclusive views. Phebe is only accepted when she has proven
herself worthy through her care of Uncle Alec through a serious illness in
which he—and she—could have died. In her acceptance of the family’s
decision and their assessment of her social position, and her subsequent
willingness to die for them, Phebe is positioned as the deserving poor, and
is finally permitted to join the family. Yet neither gratitude nor achieve-
ment are enough to mitigate or change a social status imposed at birth, an
attitude that informs many of Alcott’s works. Social mobility is neither
desirable nor possible, even with a change of fortune: the March family’s
status as the new poor at the beginning of Little Women does not negate
their status as ‘one of our first families’ despite their reversal of fortune,
even if Meg considers this a ‘fib’.16 And Phebe must be willing to give up
her very self to provoke a change that can only come from outside herself,
one predicated not on her worth but on the value system of those posi-
tioned as socially superior.
Phebe also provides an early opportunity for Rose to practice the
middle-class profession of philanthropy, one that Alcott both endorses and
troubles. In Eight Cousins, Rose first teaches Phebe to read, and then
decides to ‘adopt’ her, a move which is echoed in Jamie’s adoption of his
little friend, renamed Pokey by his older cousins, in the subsequent chap-
ter, and again in Rose’s adoption of a motherless child in Rose in Bloom.17
Although Pokey’s social origin is not much discussed, the patronage—in
both senses—of the act by both Jamie and Rose is disturbing in that it
depends on a social hierarchy. Phebe is more grateful than Pokey, however:
“I think you are the dearest girl in the world and I’ll let you do anything you
want with me. […] As for patronizing, you may walk on me if you want to,
and I won’t mind”, […] for the words, “we are sisters” went straight to her
lonely heart and nestled there.18
This notion of sisterhood is one that depends on both patronage and

gratitude, an unequal social status that is understood as such by both ‘sis-
ters’: the poor girl must be grateful to the point of abjection toward the
normalized middle classes, showing the power imbalance between the
girls. Phebe’s ‘proper’ attitude is contrasted to the women Rose first tries
to help in her chosen career as a philanthropist in Rose in Bloom. Finding
her inheritance a burden, Rose ‘wanted to begin at once to endow hospi-
tals, build homes, adopt children, and befriend all mankind’; again, the
sentimental trope of adoption is considered as a solution to the world’s
ills.19 But Alcott soon subverts this model of philanthropy as Rose’s first
attempt reveals unexpected obstacles:
112 K. WEST
[I]t was a pleasant sight to see the comfortable rooms filled with respectable
women busy at their various tasks […] But, presently, Rose was disturbed to
find that the good people expected her to take care of them in a way she had
not bargained for.20
Rose’s response to her difficulties is: ‘I didn’t expect to make anything out
of it, but I did think they would be grateful.’21 The philanthropic project
is therefore portrayed solely from Rose’s point of view: the ‘pleasant sight’
is hers; she is ‘disturbed’ that it does not live up to her expectations; and
despite her claim that she ‘didn’t expect to make anything out of it’, she
clearly expects gratitude for her charity, if not financial reward. While this
section portrays the normalized middle-class point of view on the poor—
that they should be properly grateful for any help—it also shows that the
problems of poverty are not so easily solved. Uncle Alec advises Rose on
the issue with her expectation of gratitude, and how ‘many a friendship
[is] spoilt by the obligation being all on one side’, but Rose rejects the
lesson to instead help ‘Phebe’s orphans’ as ‘they don’t complain’; and
middle-class mores are re-established.22
In Little Men, Jo takes boys from all financial situations into Plumfield,
but predominantly favors the poor, the disabled, and the socially-othered
in one form or another, potentially disrupting any claim to their status as
peripheral: the school is planned to benefit these children the most, plac-
ing them at the center of both Jo’s intent and the story’s narrative. At the
end of Little Women, Jo’s plan is to ‘pick up some poor, forlorn lads, who
hadn’t any mothers, and take care of them, and make life jolly for them
before it was too late. I see so many going to ruin for want of help, at the
right minute’.23 However, she qualifies this, just a couple of paragraphs
later, with: ‘Of course, I shall have rich pupils, also,—perhaps begin with
such altogether; then, when I’ve got a start, I can take a ragamuffin or
two, just for relish.’24 The speech continues to outline how Jo wishes to
help all boys—rich and poor, for all have their problems—in an early
attempt to bring social classes together under the Plumfield utopia of
Little Men; but despite this attempt to erase differences of class, Alcott’s
language remains problematic. The poor boys to be helped in the first
quote are those Jo can ‘pick up’ and they add ‘relish’ to the diet of rich
boys that she considers necessary for the success and stability of the school,
and they are marginalised by the addition of ‘just’. Poverty is also con-
structed in terms of moral temptation: the rich boys, although subject to
some of the same pressures as their poor counterparts, are unlikely to go
‘to ruin’ in the same way.
The boy who introduces the reader to Plumfield is perhaps the most
exemplary of Alcott’s approach to poverty across her works for children:
Nat is a street violinist who—like Phebe—is blessed with musical talent,
but who has been left orphaned after the death of his father. Sent to
Plumfield by Laurie-as-philanthropist, he arrives and is positioned by the
narration both as the sentimental orphan and as an outsider: ‘Nat […] felt
that it was hardly possible that the light and warmth and comfort within
could be for a homeless “little chap” like him.’25 The claim to ‘like him’
creates the homeless child within a sub-class that Nat feels, to some degree,
is undeserving of the small, domestic pleasantries of life. In contrast to the
outside viewpoint constructed through Nat, Alcott also constructs a view
of Nat from the inside, from the Bhaers: ‘Both [Jo] and Mr. Bhaer
observed him quietly; and in spite of ragged clothes, awkward manners,
and a dirty face, they saw much about Nat that pleased them. […] [A]
gentle speech called up a look of gratitude, very sweet to see.’26 Again, the
normative middle classes and the requirement for gratitude are summed
up in this passage, one that positions Nat as other to what he could or
should be through the perspective of the middle-class Bhaers, whose own
prior poverty and the social indignities it has occasioned have been conve-
niently left behind. Nat is there to be helped, but also to be changed in
accordance with this same model. As such, Alcott’s construction of Nat
can be compared to that of Phebe; however, while Phebe’s poverty places
her as morally superior at the outset, Nat struggles with what could be
termed as a moral poverty in his propensity for lying, one that afflicts him
into adulthood. His weak chin is a physical sign of this lack compared to
Alcott’s normative, or desired, child; and Nat, in Jo’s Boys, must renounce
public life and the appearance of financial wealth to rediscover Alcott’s
construction of true riches: a sound conscience, the deserved love of
friends, and the romantic love of Daisy March. As with Phebe and the
Campbells, Nat’s reward is his tentative and conditional infantilizing adult
adoption into the central unit of the middle-class March family.
As Nat’s object lesson reveals, while Alcott repeatedly positions poor
children as both foils to, and opportunities for, their middle-class counter-
parts, she also shows a disapproval of a marketplace that is entered into for
the sake of financial gain alone. The boys of Plumfield are encouraged to
earn their own money via selling eggs or raising animals, helping with
teaching or making items for sale to their friends: ‘Several of the boys were
“in business”, as they called it, for most of them were poor, and knowing
that they would have to make their own way by-and-by, the Bhaers
114 K. WEST
encouraged any efforts at independence.’27 Yet while the Bhaers applaud

any childhood moves toward an eventual Transcendentalist self-reliance,
this encouragement only goes so far, as exemplified in the character
description of Jack:
Jack Ford was a sharp, rather a sly lad, who was sent to this school because
it was cheap. Many men would have thought him a smart boy, but Mr.
Bhaer did not like his way of illustrating that Yankee word, and thought his
unboyish keenness and money-loving as much of an affliction as Dolly’s
stutter, or Dick’s hump.28
As is often the case in Alcott’s works, there is significant overlap between

moral poverty and disability here.29 Jack’s interest in money is therefore
constructed in terms of ‘an affliction’ that is worse, in Alcott’s terms, than
both physical disability and the perceived moral failings of the other boys;
he is harshly punished by his eventual expulsion from the Plumfield Eden
for the sins of both stealing and lying.30
The positioning of Alcott’s financially-poor children as peripheral in her
works can be read through a claim that poverty in her works is that which
must, or should, be changed: poor children are to be pitied and helped
from a perspective that always situates itself as both outside of poverty and
as a desirable outcome. However, as shown through Little Men’s Jack and
elsewhere, the rich do not fare much better: both money and no sense,
and an excessive focus on money, are derided in Alcott’s works. As Stoneley
comments: ‘The move towards a spend-and-display culture gives [Alcott]
cause for concern.’ For example, the rich Moffat family, who Meg visits in
Little Women, are constructed primarily in terms of what they lack:
The Moffats were very fashionable, and simple Meg was rather daunted, at
first, by the splendor of the house, and the elegance of its occupants. But
they were kindly people, in spite of the frivolous life they led, and soon put
their guest at her ease. Perhaps Meg felt, without understanding why, that
they were not particularly cultivated or intelligent people, and that all their
gilding could not quite conceal the ordinary material of which they
were made.31
The simplicity of Meg is contrasted with the showiness of the rich Moffats,
one that renders them both ‘vulgar’ and ‘ordinary’; Meg, though ‘simple’,
is not ‘ordinary’ in this sense. Maud and Fan in An Old-Fashioned Girl—
particularly in contrast to the poor-but-exemplary Polly, probably the
closest to the ideal/idealized child in Alcott—are also tarred by the brush

of the vulgar and ignorant rich: ‘Aren’t Fan and Maud little girls too?’ asks
Polly. ‘Oh, dear, no! not what I call little girls. Fan has been a young lady
this two years, and Maud is a spoiled baby,’ responds the Shaws’ grand-
mother.32 While what constitutes ‘little girls’ is therefore fluid and subject
to a ‘calling’ from a perspective that positions itself as outside girlhood,
the ‘old-fashioned’ view of Grandmother Shaw claims girlhood as that
which can be, and is, denied through the adherence to a fashionable life.
Further, in contrast to many Alcottian families which rely on the maternal
presence to provide a moral and educational compass, the Shaw children’s
mother is mostly absent, a demanding invalid, while Father is ‘indifferent
and absent-minded’ and ‘he had not found time to teach his children to
love him’; both fashionable parents therefore subvert the normative and
desired family unit.33 A family thus engaged with fashion and money are
unhappy; it takes the simplicity of Polly to challenge values that are con-
structed in terms of a moral poverty far more debilitating than any finan-
cial and social poverty. At the end of the novel, it takes a descent into a
relative financial poverty and the attendant potential of social humiliation
to make the Shaws fully realize the error of their ways and adopt a simpler
and more fulfilling life.
Class is therefore not about money in Alcott but is constructed as a
moral superiority which often involves charity to others; in many of
Alcott’s short stories, as well as the novels discussed above, philanthropy is
seen as a positive to both giver and receiver: and therefore necessitates a
poor that stay poor.
Reading the Disabled Child

In their introduction to a special childhood-focused issue of Disability and
the Global South, Erica Burman et al note:
Our understanding of disability […] is rooted in the epistemology of dis-

ability studies, seeing it not as a medical state contained within the body or
mind of a person, but as a socially created phenomenon that takes its shape
through social relations, cultural representations, and modes of production
and reproduction. This means that disability cannot be discussed in univer-
sal or generalized terms, but always requires attention to the specific embod-
ied, social, cultural and economic contexts in which it occurs.34
116 K. WEST
Disability, therefore, is not stable and known, subject as it is to ‘seeing’, to

‘our understanding’, and to academic disability studies that both consider
and construct it as ‘a socially created phenomenon’. This definition of dis-
ability is useful in that it suggests how representations of disability and the
disabled child in literature—in ‘cultural representations’—might have a
wider impact on social and historical understanding of the ‘phenomenon’
beyond the text; but it also speaks to a construction of disability that is
always predicated in, and of, language. The disabled child is a recurring
trope in Alcott: from Jill in Jack and Jill, to the boys of Little Men’s
Plumfield, and in short stories ‘The Blind Lark’ and ‘A Hole in the Wall’,
among many others, Alcott returns to the subject of child disability as
often as she does to poverty; indeed, the two frequently occupy the same
space in her works. Yet her representations of disability vary from physical
to mental or even moral; from that which can be cured to that which can-
not; and from children to dolls. As Burman et al suggest, it is therefore
difficult to discuss these representations of and as disability in ‘universal or
generalized terms’; each claim must be considered individually to under-
stand how Alcott shapes it through language. I therefore intend to explore
Alcott’s constructions of disability to question how the disabled child
both endorses and troubles previous claims to an ideal or idealized
Alcottian child, and how disability is both represented and constructed in
language.
Alcott’s 1880 novel, Jack and Jill, can be argued to consider represen-
tations of the disabled child in some depth, more so than her other novels,
although some short stories also explore disability through a central child
character. Yet in what sense can we consider Jill disabled; indeed, can she
be read as such? I will argue that the focus on Jill’s injury, its triggers and
consequences, and its intended moral lesson construct her long-term
injury as disability, no matter its eventual resolution, in physical terms at
least. Jack and Jill come to grief in the very first chapter of the novel, when
Jill, ‘a little gypsy of a girl’, is dared by another boy to take a ‘coast’ that is
known as a ‘perilous path’.35 Jack tries to talk her out of it, but the persua-
sion of ‘naughty Jill’ ends in disaster for both: Jack with a broken leg, and
Jill with a more seriously-injured back.36 The issue of Jill’s disability, how-
ever, precedes the fatal sled-ride, with her physical disability constructed as
a punishment for moving outside her proper feminine sphere. Jill claims:
‘You boys think girls like little mean coasts without any fun or danger in
them, as if we couldn’t be brave and strong as well as you’.37 In impugning
Jack’s courage, and trying to co-opt his naturalized male bravery for
herself, Alcott punishes her heroine not just with her own physical injury,
but with causing Jack’s too: as in the story of Adam and Eve, temptation
is deemed the larger sin. Both children begin the novel as able-bodied,
and return to that normative position at its end, problematizing a reading
of disability; however, Jill’s injury fundamentally changes her, and the
long-term impact enables her to move from her social class as the poor and
ethnically-othered French-Canadian neighbor of the rich Minot family to
be a fit future wife for the middle-class American child, Jack.
Disability figures as education throughout Jack and Jill, in an appeal to
a constructed linearity of childhood development in which education con-
ducts a child from imperfect childhood into a provisionally finished adult-
hood. Mrs. Minot says to Jill:
This painful little back will be a sort of conscience to remind you of what
you ought to do and leave undone, and so you can be learning obedience.
Then, when the body is strong, it will have formed a good habit to make
duty easier; and my Lucinda can be a sweet example, even while lying here,
if she chooses.38
This scene reinforces the adult as educator and the child as subject to a
linear development which can be seen and known as such by the adult, but
which needs interpretation for the child to understand; and Jill’s disability
is therefore figured by the adult as both punishment for lack of prior obe-
dience and a constant reminder of the need to do, and be, better. The
disability is assumed to be temporary—‘when the body is strong’—and
that this is the desirable outcome due to the constructed inferiority of the
disabled child who, ‘even while lying here’ [my emphasis] can and should
be doing good for others. Childhood disability is figured as a stage in this
text, one that teaches certain skills—patience, obedience, and living for
others—to benefit both the child and wider society and, as a stage, it can
be left behind once the lessons are learned.
Burman et al comment further that ‘disabled children are often margin-
alized in [critical] texts, and their lives are often considered in terms of
their deficit in relation to “normal” childhoods’, a model of disability that
can be seen throughout Alcott’s works.39 However, I would also argue
that the disabled child is repeatedly figured in terms of its inferiority in
comparison to adulthood, as well as to a normatively-abled childhood.
Jack and Jill has much in common with Susan Coolidge’s 1872 novel,
What Katy Did, with the narrative arc describing how an injury that is not
118 K. WEST
permanent—but which might be—is used to educate a wild girl to make

her fit for the role of a socially-accepted and valued woman in late
nineteenth-century American society.40 Neither girl is marginal in terms of
her position in the text, with each a named central character in the books’
titles, yet the portrayal of their disabilities is of that which must and will be
overcome and left behind along with the willfulness that has both charac-
terized and marked their childhood. Katy has an accident resulting from
her disobedience; like Jill, she is subsequently figured as a scholar, and
once the lesson is learned, she is allowed to recover. However, there are
several key differences between the texts. As the first in a trilogy of books
(What Katy Did Next, What Katy Did at School), Katy progresses beyond
her injury—it informs her, but does not define her—while Jill’s recovery is
followed solely by a brief round-up of what happened ten years after the
story ended, with Jill’s obedience rewarded by marriage to Jack, and a final
homily from Alcott for any adults reading: ‘Let those who launch them see
to it that they have good health to man the oars, good education for bal-
last, and good principles as pilots to guide them as they voyage down an
ever-widening sea.’41 Her didacticism in this novel is not just for chil-
dren—troubling the critically-assumed childhood readership for these
texts—but for the adults to whom she entrusts the construction of a
proper childhood beyond the text, one in which the child is configured as
a scholar with certain lessons to learn and a set voyage, or developmental
direction, ahead. Yet ‘good health’ is the first recommendation: without
it, Alcott claims, the journey is likely to fail, thereby problematizing the
existence of disability and long-term illness in adulthood as resulting from
a lack of proper adult care in childhood and as outside a desired norm.
Another contrast between the two texts is in their constructions of
adult disability. Katy learns from disabled adults both before and after her
own injury. Coolidge’s narrator discusses Katy’s propensity for falling ‘vio-
lently in love with new people’ in what is ‘one of the jokes of the house-
hold’.42 One of these friends is Mrs. Spenser, a ‘mysterious lady’ who was
‘said to be an invalid’. Katy visits, ‘and the visits did her as much good as
they did Mrs. Spenser, for the intense pity she felt for the sick woman
made her gentle and patient as she had never been before’.43 Mrs. Spenser
is not required to learn lessons from her disability, as both Katy and Jill
are; rather, she serves as a lesson to Katy, one that is to be taken by the
child when she is disabled in her turn. As such, it seems that disability is
only a learning tool for children; once the lesson is learned, Mrs. Spenser
disappears from the text, her only task to serve as an object lesson for an
able-bodied child achieved. However, Cousin Helen disrupts that notion

in this text: a long-term invalid, she seems to exist somewhere between
child and adult as they are constructed in Coolidge’s novel: ‘There was
something in Cousin Helen’s face and manner that made the children at
home with her at once.’44 She becomes Katy’s guide, in health and in sick-
ness, both by example and in leading her to the comforts of an education-
based religion: ‘God is going to let you go to his school—where He
teaches all sorts of beautiful things’, including the lessons of ‘Patience’,
‘Cheerfulness’, and ‘Making the Best of Things’. Cousin Helen has
learned from her own disability and passes the lessons onto Katy.45
Disability in both the long and short term is framed as a trigger for the
moral and social education of children.
Alcott’s Jill, in contrast with Katy, has neither religion to guide her,
nor—more importantly—the example of, or opportunity to help, a dis-
abled adult; for none exists, either in this text, or in Alcott’s wider works
for children.46 Reading absence—here, a lack of disabled adults compared
with another text or texts—can be problematic; but in this instance, it
merits further discussion. Burman et al comment on ‘the strict binaries
and disabling assumptions that govern adults’ and children’s lives and
shape the notion of development as a linear process through which chil-
dren leave the dependent and innocent state of childhood to progress
towards responsible, autonomous (non-disabled) adult independence’.47
In considering Jack and Jill, and other Alcott texts, the lack of disabled
adults compared to the frequent descriptions of disabled children points
to a ‘linear process’ such as that which Burman et al describe. Jill’s disabil-
ity is about this very progress; not, then, to make her into or to suggest
she should be a perfect child, but to render her a perfect, non-disabled
adult, one whom is both autonomous—if only beneath a socially-
proscribed model of femininity—but also a benefit to society. However,
such an expectation of a perfect adulthood is rarely realized in Alcott’s
works, as I will discuss further in subsequent chapters.
Disability also features in the Little Women series, predominantly in
Little Men, through a number of characters, each of whom is, in various
ways, constructed in terms of a disability in contrast to their normatively-
abled peers. Compared to representations of children of color across
Alcott’s works, they are central to this text: therefore, can these variously
disabled children be considered peripheral, and if so, how? In Alcott’s roll-
call of ‘all sorts of boys’, Dick Brown and Adolphus ‘Dolly’ Pettingill are
the only two who share their introduction within a single paragraph;
120 K. WEST
potentially through a common age in that they were ‘two eight-year-olds’,

but both are also described in terms of an ‘affliction’ that others and mar-
ginalizes them in the text.48 ‘Dolly’ is described thus:
Dolly stuttered badly, but was gradually getting over it, for no one was
allowed to mock him and Mr. Bhaer tried to cure it, by making him talk
slowly. Dolly was a good little lad, quite uninteresting and ordinary, but he
flourished here, and went through his daily duties and pleasures with placid
content and propriety.49
There is some prospect of what is figured as redemption into a non-

disabled adulthood for Dolly in that he is ‘gradually getting over it’; yet,
like Nat’s innocence, Dolly’s disability feminizes him and condemns him
as ‘quite uninteresting’ despite his goodness. Further, in the claim that ‘no
one was allowed to mock him’, he is set apart from the group of boys,
particularly in a language that separates them and in the forbidding of a
language of mockery that still returns in the necessary prohibition of its
use. The non-disabled norm is also restated in that ‘Mr. Bhaer tried to
cure it’, thus marginalizing Dolly in language and in society as a result of
his disability.
Dick Brown’s disability is categorized as an ‘affliction’ by Alcott, a term
that suggests suffering despite an initial troubling of it as such:
Dick Brown’s affliction was a crooked back, yet he bore his burden so cheer-
fully, that Demi once asked in his queer way: ‘Do humps make people good-
natured? I’d like one if they do.’ Dick was always merry, and did his best to
be like other boys, for a plucky spirit lived in the feeble little body […] [T]he
Bhaers soon led him to believe that people loved his soul, and did not mind
his body, except to pity and help him to bear it.50
Language such as ‘[c]rooked back’, ‘feeble little body’, and ‘yet he bore
his burden so cheerfully’ restates the normatively-abled child body, one
without crookedness, feebleness, or burden. Like the ‘deserving poor’,
Dick’s disability renders him grateful and allows him to serve as an object
lesson to able-bodied children; specifically to Demi, although his wish for
Dick’s disability to keep his own nature ‘good’ is qualified by a queerness
of speech that is specific to him, and also renders any desire for disability—
despite its construction in problematically-positive terms—as an aberra-
tion. Despite Dick’s cheerfulness, his body is always a ‘burden’: ‘the Bhaers
soon led him to believe that people loved his soul, and did not mind his
body, except to pity and help him to bear it’.51 They do not believe this
themselves, but only ‘led’ the boy to believe this is so, therefore construct-
ing him as outside of the love, and even the pity, of others beyond the
utopia of Plumfield. Alcott also constructs the child here—or the disabled
child, at least—as neither the soul nor the body which are, rather, owned
by him; and the claimed disability of the body is that which is to be borne.
The construction of Billy Ward is somewhat different, in that his mental
disability is the result of hothouse schooling, a form of education that
Alcott despised as much as Dickens did:
Billy Ward was what the Scotch tenderly call an “innocent”, for though
thirteen years old, he was like a child of six. He had been an unusually intel-
ligent boy, and his father had hurried him on too fast […] expecting him to
absorb knowledge as a Strasburg goose does the food crammed down its
throat. He thought he was doing his duty, but he nearly killed the boy, for a
fever gave the poor child a sad holiday, and when he recovered, the over-
tasked brain gave out, and Billy’s mind was like a slate over which a sponge
has been passed, leaving it blank. It was a terrible lesson to his ambitious
father; he could not bear the sight of his promising child, changed to a fee-
ble idiot, and sent him away to Plumfield.52
Again, disability is constructed as both punishment and opportunity for

learning, but here, both are inflicted on the adult, and it is ‘a terrible les-
son’; Billy, in comparison to the majority of Alcott’s disabled children, is
therefore figured as an opportunity for adult education rather than his
own, as well as giving Alcott the opportunity to comment on the iniquities
of hothouse schooling methods. Billy’s construction as ‘a feeble idiot’
would, I am sure, be an instance of the kind of language problematized by
the editors of the Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag series; however, more important is
that Alcott does not challenge the father’s conclusions about his son, and
holds out no hope for Billy: he cannot be cured, and neither can he
become a useful member of society. And despite the claim to an ‘inno-
cent’—even one that is merely called as such by a group positioned out-
side of the text, and as an appellation that is constructed as both appropriate
for ‘a child of six’ and not for one of ‘thirteen years old’—Billy is no
Romantic child. Living as a mentally disabled child cannot be tolerated:
Billy, like Little Women’s Beth whose emotional, social, and perhaps psy-
chological disability of shyness seems beyond cure, does not outlive child-
hood. At the start of Jo’s Boys, the boys are described thus: ‘Poor little Dick
122 K. WEST
was dead, and so was Billy; and no one could mourn for them, since life
would never be happy, afflicted as they were in mind and body.’53 To be
disabled—physically or mentally—is to be pitied, belittled, and always to
be unhappy, to the point that death is preferable both for themselves and
for the society that would otherwise be charged with their care.
‘The Blind Lark’ is Alcott’s short story about Lizzie, who lives ‘[h]igh
up in an old house’, ‘full of poor people’; the narrator claims that ‘[w]e all
pity the poor princesses who were shut up in towers by bad fairies, the
men and women in jails, and the little birds in cages, but Lizzie was a sad-
der prisoner than any of these.’54 Poverty is equated with imprisonment as
well as with disability here, and also returns to the trope of poor children
as caged birds, like Eight Cousins’ Phebe, and Jill, whose poverty and dis-
ability render her vulnerable to the well-meaning Minots, who ‘are going
to keep her in this pretty cage’.55 Yet Lizzie is both deserving and not
deserving of pity: she may be ‘a sadder prisoner’ than many others, but she
is not among the list that ‘we all pity’; the narrator may be lobbying for
her inclusion, but she also places barriers in her way. The more significant
imprisonment and reason for pity, in Alcott’s terms, is that of Lizzie’s
blindness: ‘Only nine years old, and condemned to life-long helplessness,
loneliness, and darkness,—for she was blind.’56 Blindness is positioned
here as that which should not belong to childhood—‘only nine years
old’—and as a punishment to which Lizzie is ‘condemned’. It is also
equated with a wider range of social disabilities: Lizzie’s blindness results
in lack of company and agency, as well as light, with no possibility, it first
appears, of redemption from her prison. Along with the poverty with
which the story began, Lizzie’s disability threatens to erase her very self:
‘the light went out when she was six, and the cruel fever left her a pale
little shadow to haunt that room ever since’, resulting in ‘a sad, solitary,
unchildlike life’.57 Again, childhood is constructed as an opposition
between the ideal childhood—one that is free of poverty and disability—
and one which, despite the sentimental tone, is lived by many of Alcott’s
textual children. Lizzie is ‘left’, not a child but ‘a pale little shadow’ that
‘haunts’, problematizing her status as that which troubles the dreams of
society and diminishing her even beyond what a shadow might be; a life
constructed as a living death due to her illness and subsequent blindness
in perhaps one of Alcott’s most troubling constructs of disability.
Lizzie’s disability, unlike Jill’s, is not positioned as the punishment for
a perceived wrong that can be redressed, and is therefore permanent.
However, the effects of both blindness and poverty can be, and are,
ameliorated somewhat by the charity of strangers. In this case, unlike

many others in Alcott’s works, it is the family’s peers rather than their
social superiors who attempt to provide relief. Yet their charity is based on
pity for the ‘deserving’ poor child—like Phebe, Lizzie has a talent for sing-
ing—rather than for this disability: instead, her neighbors describe Lizzie
as ‘a burden’, and state: ‘It will be a mercy if the poor thing doesn’t live;
blind folks are no use and a sight of trouble.’58 Like Dick and Billy, Lizzie’s
disability is figured as an inconvenience to a normatively-abled society;
and it is her talent for singing that proves Lizzie’s salvation, not by the
neighbors who consider her life as at best a trouble to others and at worst
worthless, but by a woman who hears her singing and enters to tell her of
a ‘House Beautiful’, in which blind children learn to be ‘a great help’ to
others and ‘happy, useful creature[s]’; a ‘wonderful place where blindness
was not a burden’.59 The effects of disability, then, can be mitigated not by
helping oneself to independence, but by abnegating the self and living for
society. Disability can be endured, but only in a removal from an able-
bodied society that has rejected it, while still continuing to serve that same
society.
From a reading of these texts, disability in Alcott is constructed as a
difference that must be solved: Alcott’s assumption of childhood as a
developmental stage means that disability cannot survive it under this par-
adigm, and the physically or mentally disabled adult can never exist. Even
child disability is always shut down: in the need for a development from
one stage to another, the only options are cure or death, with cure regu-
larly figured as a lesson under the developmental stage that leads to a non-
disabled adulthood. Disability manifests in different ways: it is often of the
body, but varies between characters such as Jill who injures her back but
recovers; Dolly, who stutters but recovers; and Lizzie, whose blindness
remains, but still teaches the lesson of being happy and useful to society,
rather than a burden. Disability is mental, in the case of Billy Ward and
perhaps Beth; and moral: Nat, Jack, and many others fall under this cate-
gory, one that Alcott also describes in terms of poverty, with both states
and linguistic terms thereby signifying a lack or disruption of what should
exist. Disability is both that which one is born with and that one acquires
due to either one’s own folly or that of another (often a parent); in these
cases, disability of body or mind is a punishment, a form of Transcendentalist
‘compensation’ that is both troubled and troubling. Finally, in terms of a
claim to peripherality, the disabled child is always positioned as other to
the normatively-abled child: the disabled child should get better or die
124 K. WEST
and, if getting better, they should learn a moral lesson, often of cheerful-
ness and ‘usefulness’ to themselves and to society, before they can be
allowed to return to an able-bodied state. Further, in the paucity of dis-
abled adults in Alcott’s texts, the disabled child is positioned even further
from an idealized and able-bodied norm; like the queerness of childhood,
disability cannot be tolerated in an adulthood which should be—even if it
rarely is—perfect.
Language and Race

As might be seen through the disclaimer from the publishers of Aunt Jo’s
Scrap Bag, reading race in Alcott is not without its problems. It is all too
easy to point out that Alcott’s central characters are portrayed within a
normative whiteness and as solid New England stock, often with links
back to the important—and socially superior—Boston families; as Stoneley
argues: ‘[E]ven as [Alcott] seeks a redress of social inequity, she longs to
reunite with the well-modulated conservatism of Beacon Hill’.60 As such,
it can be argued, as Stoneley does, that ‘race and ethnicity are seldom
more than passing issues with Alcott’; after all, no character of color or of
non-American origin plays a major role in Alcott’s works for children;
neither does she explore issues of race within these works to any significant
extent.61 It seems, then, that a status of peripheral for children of color and
of non-American origin can be assumed without too much trouble; how-
ever, I would like to explore how that status is both portrayed and ques-
tioned in these works.
Racist language in nineteenth-century literature has problemati-
cally been dismissed as a product of its time, an argument still made by
some critics. However, this approach is even more troubling in consider-
ing Alcott’s language, given she grew up in an abolitionist family; her father
risked his life trying to find information about an escaped slave in Boston;
she had a picture of British abolitionist George Thompson hidden under
her bed as a child; and she claimed, towards the end of her life, to have
taught a runaway slave who had found his way to the Alcott house—a
known stop on the underground railroad—to read and write. She com-
ments: ‘[M]y greatest pride is in the fact that I have lived to know the
brave men and women who did so much for the cause, and that I had a
very small share in the war which put an end to a great wrong.’62 In her
Journal, Alcott also wrote: ‘Saw the great procession [at the end of the
civil war], and though few colored gentlemen were in it, one was walking
arm in arm with a white gentleman, and I exulted thereat.’63 Further,
Alcott’s works for adults—as discussed in some detail by Sarah Elbert in

her book on Alcott, race, and slavery—are frequently positioned within an
abolitionist context:
The issue of racial amalgamation [marriage between races] was lightly intro-
duced [in Hospital Sketches] as the “personal” politics of Nurse Tribulation
Periwinkle, a “fanatic” in the cause. Alcott’s openly abolitionist story, an
interracial thriller, ‘The Brothers’, was published in the Atlantic Monthly in
November 1863; in subsequent publications it was retitled ‘My Contraband’.
Readers of the Commonwealth found ‘Colored Soldiers’ Letters’ in July
1864, and the slave rebellion story ‘An Hour’ in November and December.64
Each of these stories is published and discussed in Elbert’s book as a tex-

tual representation of Alcott’s abolitionist principles, as can also be read in
biographical criticism of her letters and journals. However, Elbert has little
to say about portrayals of race and raced children in Alcott’s works for and
about children, although she points out further:
[Alcott’s] personal and familial need to publish her writings for a living
meant that she wrote sensationalist thrillers, domestic stories, children’s sto-
ries, and importantly, abolitionist adventure stories at top speed and almost
simultaneously. Characters jumped from the pages of one story to another,
as did her mixed settings: she deployed mulattos, mulattas, white women,
white men, as well as African-born heroes and heroines in relationships that
often radically transgressed conventional genre boundaries.65
Despite Elbert’s claim that ‘characters jumped […] the pages’ between
intended genres and audiences, Alcott’s child characters are almost exclu-
sively white, read as such by Alcott’s sole linguistic racing of non-white
and non-American characters. But why read race and childhood in Alcott
if only to highlight such a lack of representation and instances of problem-
atic language when such issues remain in need of urgent attention in chil-
dren’s literature today? Rather, I want to think about my previous claims
to an ideal or idealized Alcottian white, middle-class childhood as central
to her works and available as a model for those who do not meet its ideals,
and the relative impact on those characters who are portrayed as othered
by their race.
Assumptions about and portrayals of childhood in the nineteenth cen-
tury were subject to an upheaval that had been in play for some time, and
which continues to unsettle claims to known and fixed assumptions about
126 K. WEST
childhood. As nineteenth-century views of childhood shifted, with reli-

gious opinion moving away from Calvinism and its doctrines of original
sin and natural depravity toward John Locke’s ‘tabula rasa’, and the
Romantic ideal of children as ‘envoys from Heaven’ with an innate inno-
cence, a view endorsed by the Transcendentalists, this change in perspec-
tive inevitably impacted on textual portrayals of the nineteenth-century
child.66 However, as Robin Bernstein argues, such a textual assertion of an
innate childhood innocence has been inevitably constructed beneath a
normative whiteness:
By the mid-nineteenth century, sentimental culture had woven childhood

and innocence together wholly. Childhood was then understood not as
innocent but as innocence itself; not as a symbol of innocence but as its
embodiment. The doctrine of original sin receded, replaced by a doctrine of
original innocence. This innocence was raced white.67
Bernstein’s consideration of race and innocence rejects the notion of the

naturally innocent child, positioning it as a view or understanding belong-
ing to the mid-nineteenth century only, and thereby reestablishing claims
to childhood as narrative. These narratives therefore construct a default
childhood whiteness and construct that whiteness as innocent, similarly to
previously-read claims on the body of the child. I am therefore reading the
claims to color that follow in this chapter with reference to my under-
standing of this statement.
Bernstein gives the example of Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the
‘emblematic child-angel’ who was ‘a spectacle of phenotypical and chro-
matic whiteness’, especially at her death, where the whole room—and the
child herself—was draped in white.68 While it could be argued, as Bernstein
does, that this ‘spectacle’ of whiteness is both emblematic and the embodi-
ment of childhood innocence, there is little doubt that Alcott’s child char-
acters rarely fit such a sentimental and Romantic prototype. Beth may be
the exception that proves the rule in Little Women, but Jo and Amy both
struggle with temper, both Meg and Amy are vain, and Laurie is lazy;
Polly may be too good to be true in An Old-Fashioned Girl, but the squab-
bling siblings Fanny and Tom have plenty of flaws; ditto Rose and her
cousins; Jack and Jill; and many others. It is in Alcott’s sentimental short
stories, however, that the correlation of innocence and whiteness can pri-
marily be read, both through the absence of many characters of color—
Alcott’s sentimental heroines and heroes may be poor and disabled, but
they are inescapably white—and through a reading of race and color more
widely in her works.
One example of what might be read as a raced childhood, and one that
exposes a binary assumption of innocence as white and badness as black, is
Alcott’s short story, ‘Cockyloo’.69 One might argue that it is a story about
chickens rather than children, but Alcott’s conflation of birds and children
can be seen throughout her works: Phebe is a song-bird; Jill a caged bird;
Beth is punished for a single day’s laziness by the death of her pet bird; and
Polly ‘often felt like a little wood-bird shut up in a gilded cage’ during her
time in the city; further examples abound throughout Alcott’s novels and
short stories.70 This reading relies on a certain knowledge of what distin-
guishes animals from humans—a need to know what a child is and what
an animal or bird is—and in Alcott, this is frequently about a caging that
is located in poverty and/or disability. Here, however, in a reversal of
Alcott’s common trope, most of the birds in ‘Cockyloo’ are described in
terms of childhood despite the claim that ‘chickens are not like babies, and
don’t have to be tended at all’, and are positioned within a hierarchical
family structure that is strictly divided in terms of color71:
There were eight little hens and two little cockerels, one black and one white
as snow, with yellow legs, bright eyes, and a tiny red comb on his head. This
was Cockyloo, the good chick; but the black one was named Peck, and was
a quarrelsome bad fowl, as we shall see.72
The whiteness of ‘the good chick’—whose name is also the title of the
story, stressing his central narrative position—is subject to ‘as snow’, a lyri-
cal description that doubles the claim to whiteness, along with the accom-
panying description of his positive physical attributes; ‘the black one’, on
the other hand, was ‘a quarrelsome, bad fowl’, with blackness equated to
badness from the outset. Further, although it is only the boy-chicks who
are divided in terms of color in this sentence, an earlier assertion notes that
‘the eight little daughters were all white and very pretty’; while the pretti-
ness is an addition to the whiteness, the claim to ‘all’ brings the two attri-
butes together.73 The equation of blackness with negative morals is set
against a whiteness that, in one sense, is less normative than in other works
as Alcott points out both colors, but on the other hand is shown as the
dominant and preferred color, with superior physical and moral attributes,
and repeatedly renders the black chick/child as socially peripheral.
128 K. WEST
Peck’s badness results in the deaths of three of his white sisters, and all
the hens ‘put a black feather in their heads to show how sorry they were’.74
This may well reflect a nineteenth-century New England (and wider geo-
graphical) tradition of wearing black when someone died, but also links
blackness with death and sorrow. Peck finally gets his comeuppance, not
just for his blackness of body and of soul, but for an even worse crime: he
is killed when the perfect white sibling, Cocky, has tried to keep him dry
in a shower by covering his head with white paper; a fox mistakes Peck for
Cocky, and eats him. The white bird survives; the bird ‘passing’ as white,
if only by the intervention of his white brother, is punished for his trans-
gression, and ‘King Cockyloo grew to be a splendid bird—pure white’; a
return to what Bernstein reads as the sentimental equation of whiteness
and an innate innocence and goodness but also, here, the equation of
whiteness with power.75 Such a power imbalance is created from the out-
set: the correlation of Peck’s blackness with badness, in the eyes of the
characters, the narrator, and it is assumed, the reader too in that ‘we shall
see’ [my emphasis], prefigures his removal to allow the good white brother
to take his rightful position as king.
The Little Women series is not immune to problematic portrayals of
raced characters either. The Plumfield utopia may claim to be for every-
one, but the language of its very construction as such problematizes its
claim: ‘old Asia, sitting in the corner, joined in at times with the sweetest
voice of any, for in this family, master and servant, young and old, black
and white, shared in the Sunday song, which went up to the Father of
them all.’76 The attempt is one of inclusion, even of equality, but the rein-
statement of the binary and the difference between the social groups at
every turn troubles its own claims, and Asia ‘in the corner’ is included by
the assumed generosity of a white narration. Further, the final pages of Jo’s
Boys reinforce the ‘Cockyloo’ equation of blackness with badness, with
Mrs. Jo ‘still clinging fast to her black sheep [Dan] although a whole flock
of white ones trotted happily before her’.77 And the single child of color—
‘the merry little quadroon […] who was welcome to the “Bhaer-garten”,
though some people predicted that his admission would ruin the school’—
goes missing between the end of Little Women and the beginning of Little
Men, no matter that ‘the little quadroon’, like Asia, ‘had the sweetest voice
of all’.78 This child is unnamed, and only ever included by virtue of his
color and his accompanying status as peripheral.
This omission of the single child of color in the series might preclude
further investigation of race in Little Women and its sequels, were it not for
this character of Asia, Plumfield’s ‘black cook’, who is often portrayed

through her interaction with the children.79 Like the ‘quadroon’ and Peck,
the black chick, Asia is othered by her definition as ‘black’, with white
therefore assumed as the norm unless otherwise stated; she is also defined
by function and her servant status rather than as an autonomous character.
Most problematic, however, is Tommy Bangs’ portrayal of Asia—and the
wider reaction to it—in his letter to his grandmother, read to the school
on Composition Day:
We had a Frenchman working here the other day, and Asia called his name
so funnily that I will tell you about it. His name was Germain: first she called
him Jerry, but we laughed at her, and she changed it to Jeremiah; but ridi-
cule was the result, so it became Mr. Germany; but ridicule having been
again resumed, it became Garrymon, which it has remained ever since.80
Language is invoked to construct racial difference between the othered

Asia and the grouped claim to ‘we’, and repeated ‘ridicule was the result’:
Asia’s apparent inability to pronounce the French name—assuming a cor-
rectness of language that she cannot attain—was not only the source of
amusement to the children, but was deemed amusing enough for Tommy
to write to his grandmother about it, and read it to the school for their
further edification. Asia’s language is therefore repeatedly othered by the
white child who knows what is correct, knows that the adults of his
acquaintance—his grandmother and schoolteachers—will agree with him,
and finds humor in mocking those who do not achieve a standard of lan-
guage endorsed by a narration that does not question his approach.
Native Americans fare little better in this text, although their appear-
ance is brief and by proxy, and again, humor is invoked as an excuse. In a
chapter on Thanksgiving, Meg’s son, Demi, is telling his younger brother
about the origins of the festival, describing the Pilgrim Fathers in such a
way that ‘would have made even those grave gentlemen smile if they could
have heard it’.81 In Demi’s story, the country ‘was all full of Indians, and
bears, and wild creatures’ when the Pilgrims arrived; these worthy gentle-
men had a dreadful time because ‘the Indians troubled them. […] The
Pilgrims killed all the Indians, and got rich; and hung the witches, and
were very good’. Again, a humorous outcome to the story is assumed:
‘Uncle Fritz’s eyes laughed at Aunt Jo’. And although this is based on the
assumed errors of a character—the white child rather than his raced sub-
ject here—the portrayal of ‘Indians’ in terms of the ‘wild creatures’ with
130 K. WEST
which they are associated, and the presumed dominance of the Pilgrim
fathers over the dehumanized native Americans, is not questioned by
either adult characters or the narrator. The flagged humor therefore both
troubles a racist reading of this passage, in that it is based on the white
child’s errors, but also reinforces it in the very assumption of humor in
such a description.
However, Alcott explores the lives of native Americans more positively
through the character of Dan—who is raced, not specifically as native
American himself, but as if he might be—who has great respect for the
tribes with which he works. They, like Dan, are represented in terms of a
wildness and an othering from mainstream society, but one of which
Alcott approves; and although they are in need of help, they are also wor-
thy of it. Although their portrayal is only ever by proxy, and a (problemati-
cally) white character must speak on their behalf, this portrayal creates
some balance in Alcott’s narrative.
Yet the issues with race in Alcott’s works for children extend further
than the portrayals of characters of color in cases such as those described
above. No less problematic is her presentation of white Irish characters,
who are also othered in terms of race but who are so peripheral in her
works that little of value can be read, except for Shealy’s claim that ‘Alcott
herself held the common prejudices of the time about the Irish’, who were
immigrating to Boston in large numbers in the wake of the Irish potato
famine.82 Unnamed Irish children hold a marginal place in Little Women,
as the sworn enemies of Amy and her classmates and the unintended recip-
ients of the ejected pickled limes. The family servant, Hannah Mullet, is of
Irish descent and much loved by the family; yet in characterizing the
March family as financially poor, Mullet is placed as both financially and
socially inferior to their middle-class norm. And in Jack and Jill, Irish
characters are rather the recipients of charity, their poverty so assumed that
it needs no stating: ‘[Jack] fell to planning what he would buy with his
pocket-money to surprise the little Pats and Biddies who were to have no
Christmas tree.’83 Irish characters are rarely named, and only ever exist on
the periphery of Alcott’s works.
This is not the case, however, with Alcott’s few Chinese characters.
Unlike the evocation of black and Irish children, who remain peripheral in
her works both in terms of textual space and societal position—both are
poor, but with a poverty that cannot and is not ever redeemed—Fun See,
in Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom, is granted a chapter, several reappear-
ances across the two texts, and financial stability. Chapter 7 of Eight
Cousins is entitled ‘A Trip to China’; however, Rose does not travel to

China but to her Uncle Mac’s shipyard, reducing the country and its
inhabitants to what can be seen in the warehouse of a shipyard and under
the perspective of the white, middle-class Rose. Further, Uncle Mac’s boat
is named the ‘Rajah’, with its associated colonialism unquestioned. Fun
See is characterized predominantly by a white western view that constructs
him in terms not only of inferiority, but—as his name suggests—a figure
of fun under their amused gaze. On a single page, Alcott races him in the
following terms: ‘chin-chin with the Celestials […] the yellow gentlemen
[…] delightfully Chinese […] highly satisfactory Chinaman’.84 The adjec-
tives are deeply raced in a way that positions the Chinese visitors—no mat-
ter their financial status, unlike other raced characters—as socially inferior
to the point of Rose’s embarrassment. Further, before meeting the two
men, Rose requests: ‘Don’t ask me to speak to them, Uncle; I shall be sure
to laugh at the odd names and the pig-tails and the slanting eyes.’85 Laugh
she does, and the narrator with her: Fun See ‘waddles comically’; he is ‘so
like a toy Mandarin that she could hardly keep sober’; and Uncle Mac
‘seemed to enjoy the joke’ of their meeting.86 As already seen in Little
Men, raced characters are constructed under the normalized white gaze
and in terms of an inferiority that it is acceptable to find funny. Rose’s
naivety notwithstanding, a claim that she hoped ‘that he had not gone to
get a roasted rat, a stewed puppy, or any other foreign mess which civility
would oblige here to eat’ further constructs the binary of the civilized
west against the decidedly uncivilized and othered East, under the Western
gaze.87 Equality is neither expected nor evident. In Rose in Bloom, Fun See
is finally accepted into the establishment as the husband of Annabel Bliss;
but to do so, he must be westernized in both dress and manners, and
although his interracial marriage seems revolutionary for the time, it is
qualified by the union with Annabel, who is also a figure of some fun in
Rose’s world. Annabel is as othered by the union as the constantly renamed
‘Mr. Tokio’ is accepted into white American society.88 As with the naming
of Asia, this inaccuracy between geography and race goes unquestioned.
Alcott may rarely portray raced characters positively in her children’s
fiction, but one questionable portrayal is in the problematically-genred
‘Recollections of My Childhood’, in which she states: ‘I fell into the Frog
Pond and was rescued by a black boy, becoming a friend to the colored
race then and there, though my mother always declared that I was an abo-
litionist at the age of three.’89 While this claim may sit in the liminal ground
between autobiography and fiction as already discussed, Alcott’s portrayal
132 K. WEST
of her child self in relation to people of color is interesting: firstly, it

depends on gratitude for an act of kindness from black child to white; and
secondly, that Alcott found this story—and the following about her fami-
ly’s role in the anti-slavery movement—suitable and even desirable for the
child audience of Youth’s Companion. Yet she did not address abolition
and slavery in any of her fiction works for children, with the exception of
a single short story. ‘Little Gulliver’ first appeared in Alcott’s short-story
collection, Morning-Glories and Other Stories, and tells multiple threads of
the same story regarding Davy, a young boy who is marooned on a light-
house island when his guardian, Uncle Dan, fails to return from a trip to
the mainland.90 The titular ‘Little Gulliver’ is a seagull, one that can be
understood by children when he speaks, and is Davy’s best friend. Gulliver
flies to the mainland for help when Davy is left alone, but is captured and
kept in a cage by a young girl. His eventual savior is Moppet, Alcott’s most
sustained depiction of a black child across her works for children. Moppet
appears first from Gulliver’s perspective as ‘a black shadow and a soft
voice’, who frees Gulliver ‘kase you’s a slave, like I was once; and it’s a
dreadful hard thing, I knows’.91 Yet, it seems, Moppet is still a slave as she
wishes to be ‘free to do as I’se a mind’ and is subject to ‘hard words and
blows [that] made heart and body ache’. Further, her blackness is also
constructed as a form of burden: the other children will not play with her
because ‘I’se black’. However, Alcott challenges Moppet’s position and
her treatment by the normalized white children: the bird rejects such
notions as ‘silly’, claiming ‘Color makes no difference’ in nature and vow-
ing to love Moppet himself, although this is qualified slightly by his grati-
tude for her help: ‘she had done a kind thing, and made a friend’. When
the uncle is found and is lying sick, ‘she tended him like a loving little
daughter’, and when he recovers, Moppet returns to the island with him
for a new home in an interracial family that is revolutionary in Alcott’s
works and beyond.
This story is not without its problems, however, constructing Moppet’s
blackness always against a normative whiteness, and frequently in raced lan-
guage that problematizes the escape that Alcott describes: Moppet
addresses Uncle Dan as ‘massa’, and is described in terms of her ‘fuzzy
hair’ and her use of a language that is always raced against that of the other
child characters. Further, as the story draws to a close, Uncle Dan ‘took
her for his own. He did not mind the black skin: he only saw the loneliness
of the child, the tender heart, the innocent white soul; and he was as glad
to be a friend to her as if she had been as blithe and pretty as Dora’. The
comparison with Dora, the child that took Gulliver captive and was among
those who rejected Moppet due to the color of her skin, constructs a nor-
mative whiteness in which color (or what is constructed as its lack) is val-
ued above moral worth and personal behavior. Further, ‘the black skin’ is
something that, Alcott claims, most people would mind; Uncle Dan is the
exception, and even he constructs her in terms of a lack of prettiness next
to the white child, Dora. Alcott also returns to the sentimental construc-
tion of whiteness found in ‘Cockyloo’ in that Dan prizes ‘her innocent
white soul’ despite the black skin; as Bernstein claims, innocence, here, is
most definitely raced white, with Moppet an exception but one that it
takes a certain (white) person to see and approve. Finally, in the claim that
Dan ‘took her for his own’ is a continuation of the language of slavery;
although Alcott claims that ‘it was a happy day’ when they departed
together for the island, and lodges no objections for or from Moppet, the
taking leaves her without agency in similar terms to the slavery that she has
ostensibly escaped. Yet ought we to give Alcott credit for this centraliza-
tion of a black child in her narrative; for calling attention to the issue of
child slavery for her child readers to consider; and for her construction of
the child beyond her skin color, even if Moppet never escapes it? For as
human as she is—at least as far as can be expected in a short story and
textual construction, and in comparison to other constructions of raced
characters in Alcott’s works for children—Moppet also serves as a repre-
sentative for black childhood, as ‘a little black figurehead of Hope’ as she
moves into her new life and the most subversive construction of a family
that Alcott ever achieved.
The intention of this section has never been simply to call attention to
Alcott’s problematically raced language, or to the paucity of raced charac-
ters, especially children, in her works; although undoubtedly I have
achieved this too. Rather, I want to return to Butler’s claim that ‘certain
kinds of bodies will appear more precariously than others, depending on
which versions of the body, or of morphology in general, support or
underwrite the idea of the human life that is worth protecting, sheltering,
living, mourning’. Alcott’s raced characters are constructed in terms of
bodily difference under a gaze that sees little beyond their color and/or
race and that brings with it certain assumptions: that names can or should
be changed to either suit western tastes or for the amusement of the nor-
mative white central characters; that color and race impact social status
and language, both of which are viewed as inferior to the white American
middle-class heroines and heroes; and that these attributes are fair game
134 K. WEST
for the amusement of white characters, even those constructed in terms of

poverty, as they are always able to be redeemed in a way that raced charac-
ters such as Fun See—who can wear ‘American costume’ and speak
‘remarkably good English’, but who can never be accepted when these
changes are still further opportunities for a joke at his expense—cannot.92
And this claim to the Americanism of Fun See’s ‘costume’ positions an
American identity that can never be shared by characters such as Fun See,
Asia, and the marginal Irish children, who always retain a raced identity.
Language and the Utopian Society

In discussing a feminist critique of literature, Adrienne Rich argues that a
radical approach ‘would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live,
how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how
our language has trapped as well as liberated us’ in order that ‘we can
begin to see and name—and therefore live—afresh’.93 In relating this to
Alcott’s portrayals of race, disability, and poverty, I would argue that this
definition is of some help, to me at least. After all, a chapter in which one
simply points out the offensive language in an author’s works is of little
value when such a judgment is always subjective. Rather, I would prefer to
reflect on this as a representation of both ‘how we live’ and ‘how we have
been living’, and to consider the role of Alcott’s language in both trapping
and liberating her textual children.
Although I would argue that much of Alcott’s work is groundbreaking—
particularly on gender—she also reflected the society in which she was
writing, one in which middle-class, male ideologies dominated. The poor,
the non-American by birth and the people of color, and the disabled were
(and are) marginalized in western society; that Alcott wrote about this,
that she troubled their status as peripheral, even with all the problems that
I have read, is perhaps the most groundbreaking of all. Her depiction—
and the absence of any sustained depiction, except in ‘Little Gulliver’—of
raced characters is a problem that I struggle to reconcile, but given that
she does address it further and more positively in her adult works and her
journals, it could be argued that this is more a question of what she and/
or her publishers deemed was, and was not, suitable for works aimed pri-
marily at children. With her depiction of Plumfield, Alcott also imagines a
world in which life is better, and in which the divides of class, color, and
disability can be overcome. It still has its problems—Alcott’s utopia is one
in which everyone is happily white, able-bodied, and middle class, with
those that cannot be reconciled either killed off or quietly removed—but

it is a school, an opportunity to make mistakes and to learn from them,
and if the classless society Alcott envisages is wrought with problems, their
resolution is still a dream for the future.
The issue, however, returns me finally to Burman et al’s claim to ‘a
socially created phenomenon that takes its shape through social relations,
cultural representations, and modes of production and reproduction’.
Each of the categories discussed in this chapter might fall under this con-
struction, and although we can argue that Alcott militated against the
ideology of her time in portraying these characters at all, their ‘production
and reproduction’ as relative and as other to their white, middle-class, and
able-bodied counterparts still reproduces certain tropes and stereotypes
for the reader: that people of color and those othered by race are inferior;
that if the poor stay poor, they only have themselves to blame for their lack
of gratitude; and that child disability is sent as a punishment for some
misdemeanor or moral lack, with disabled adults an impossibility. As such,
as Cocks argues, it is through language—through reading—that these
characters cannot escape their status as peripheral, as Alcott attempts to
reconstruct a fundamentally unequal society in a fairer mold but still
reproduces it through language. And while this perfect, if unreachable,
society is reserved for the adult, constructed as such by the variously prob-
lematized, educational, but still linear state of childhood, Alcott’s periph-
eral children cannot ever take central stage.
Notes
1. With huge thanks to my husband, I have since acquired an 1888 com-
plete set.
2. Alcott, Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag: The Complete Six Volumes (66 Short Stories)
(McAllister Editions, 2015).
3. Judith Butler (2009) Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London and
New York: Verso), pp. 52–53, as quoted in Sue Walsh (2015) ‘The
Recuperated Materiality of Disability and Animal Studies’, Rethinking
Disability Theory and Practice: Challenging Essentialism, ed. Karín Lesnik-
Oberstein (London: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 25.
4. Peter Stoneley (2003) Consumerism and American Girls’ Literature,
1860–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 2.
5. Cocks, The Peripheral Child, p. 8.
7. Rioux, p. 32.
136 K. WEST
8. Marjorie Worthington (1958) Miss Alcott of Concord (New York:

Doubleday and Company), p. 52.
10. Auerbach, p. 13.
17. See Chap. 3 for further discussion of adoption in Alcott’s works.
20. Alcott, Rose in Bloom, pp. 240–241.
26. Alcott, Little Men, pp. 9–10.
29. I will discuss this further later in the chapter.
30. For a detailed discussion of representations of the marketplace in Alcott’s
works, see Stoneley, Consumerism and American Girls’ Literature,
1860–1940.
34. Erica Burman, Anat Greenstein, and Manasi Kumar (2015) ‘Editorial:
Frames and debates for disability, childhood and the global South:
Introducing the Special Issue’, Disability and the Global South, Vol. 2, No.
2, pp. 563–569, 563.
35. Alcott, Jack and Jill, pp. 2–3, 6.
36. Alcott, Jack and Jill, pp. 3, 6.
39. Burman et al., p. 564.
40. Susan Coolidge (1872) What Katy Did (London: Wordsworth
Classics, 1994).
42. Coolidge, p. 62.

46. The only possible candidate for this position is Eight Cousins’ Aunt Peace
who, like Jo, is ‘in the attic’ and, like Beth, is framed as the ‘angel in the
house’. However, the decline in her health appears to be from the emo-
tional trigger of a broken heart rather than Alcott’s usual representations
of disability as physical, mental, or moral; and her departure takes place
between the texts, almost unnoticed.
47. Burman et al., p. 564.
53. Alcott, Jo’s Boys, p. 173.
54. Alcott, ‘The Blind Lark’, Lulu’s Library, Vol. 3, pp. 34–51, 34.
56. Alcott, ‘The Blind Lark’, p. 34.
59. Alcott, ‘The Blind Lark’, pp. 40, 39.
60. Stoneley, p. 34.
61. Stoneley, p. 12.
63. Quoted in Worthington, p. 156.
64. Sarah Elbert, ed. (1997) Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery
(Boston: Northeastern University Press), p. x.
65. Elbert, p. xxii.
66. Slater, pp. 19, 151.
67. Robin Bernstein (2007) Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood
from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press), p. 4.
68. Bernstein, p. 4.
69. Alcott, ‘Cockyloo’, Lulu’s Library, Vol. 1, pp. 56–64.
71. Alcott, ‘Cockyloo’, p. 56.
72. Alcott, ‘Cockyloo’, pp. 56–57.
77. Alcott, Jo’s Boys, p. 510.
138 K. WEST

82. Shealy, Little Women: An Annotated Edition, p. 116n. Shealy adds: ‘Most
of the immigrants were Catholic, poverty-stricken, illiterate, and unskilled,
and thus were often the object of discrimination, especially in New
England’; showing the correlation between racial discrimination and pov-
erty. This contrasts sharply, however, with other New England writers such
as Thoreau, who wrote in his Journal on 28 January about an Irish child,
Johnny Riordan, who was freezing in the snow: ‘Oh that I should rather
hear that America’s first born were all slain than that his little fingers and
toes should feel cold while I am warm’. Henry David Thoreau, Journal,
Vol. 4: 1851–1852, ed. Leonard N. Neufeldt and Nancy Craig Simmons
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
87. Alcott, Eight Cousins, p. 58. The claim is reiterated in Rose in Bloom, when
Annabel Bliss becomes engaged to Fun See: ‘Think of her going to house-
keeping in Canton one day, and having to order rats, puppies, and bird’s
nest soup for dinner!’, p. 188.
88. Alcott, Rose in Bloom, p. 190. Fun See is also nicknamed by the cousins in
Eight Cousins: ‘Will called him the “Typhoon”, meaning Tycoon, and the
name stuck to him to his great disgust’, p. 172.
90. With thanks to Daniel Shealy’s Introduction to his 1992 edited collection,
Louisa May Alcott’s Fairy Tales and Fantasy Stories (Knoxville: The
University of Tennessee Press) for the publication details of this story;
p. xxix.
91. Alcott (1867) ‘Little Gulliver’, Morning-Glories and Other Stories (New
York: G. W. Carleton & Co), pp. 109–122; no pagination given within
reprint of text.
93. Adrienne Rich (1971) ‘When we dead awaken: Writing as re-vision’,
Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry: Essential Essays (New York and
London: W. W. Norton & Co, 2018).
CHAPTER 6
A Transcendental Childhood
Reading Transcendentalism
Thus far in this work, I have troubled the recurrent critical attempts to
read Alcott’s life into her works, and I will continue to do so here.
However, claims to Transcendentalist influences on her works—particu-
larly those for children—bear further investigation; not from the stand-
point of evaluating to what extent her work was influenced by the
Transcendentalist philosophies of her father and her Concord neighbors,
as this is a claim that would be almost impossible to quantify, but to con-
sider what might be at stake in making such claims and how they might
influence readings of Alcott’s textual childhood. With critical claims to
Plumfield as a reworking of Bronson’s failed utopia at Fruitlands or his
Temple School in Boston; Alcott’s textual representations of education as
based on her own Transcendental childhood education; and claims to
characters in her adult’s and children’s fiction as being drawn from the
Transcendentalist circle within which she was raised, this is perhaps the
most common critical autobiographical approach to her work beyond that
of equating her immediate family to the characters of Little Women. As
such, claims to a Transcendental education in Alcott’s works bear further
investigation.
Reading Transcendentalism in or through Alcott’s works is problematic
beyond the issues of origin and autobiography, not least because
Transcendentalism has always resisted a singular definition of its

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39025-9_6
140 K. WEST
philosophies, purposes, and participants. This is partly due to its existence

as a catch-all name for a set of largely harmonious but sometimes compet-
ing philosophies including self-reliance, the importance of feeling and
intuition over worldly experience, and the presence of what Ralph Waldo
Emerson conceived of as an ‘Over-soul’ in which each man plays his part.
As such, and as has already been read in Alcott’s own works, naming
unsettles as much as it defines. In Emerson’s essay, ‘The Transcendentalist’,
he claims: ‘What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is
Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842’. Here, Transcendentalism is that
which is constantly deferred: it is ‘popularly called Transcendentalism’,
but the popular calling negates any inherent link between being and call-
ing, a claim reiterated by Emerson’s statement that it is, rather, ‘Idealism’;
the calling returns but with a claim to actuality that is denied by the popu-
larity of the term ‘Transcendentalism’. However, even this claim to an
appropriate nomenclature remains problematic, as Emerson’s calling of
Idealism is tied to a certain timeline: ‘Idealism as it appears in 1842’.
Idealism, therefore, is not stable but subject to change in both the per-
spective that calls it such, and across time; further, it ‘appears’, a claim
which troubles its existence through the construction of an evanescence of
what ‘is’ Idealism and through a subjectivity in its understanding.
Emerson’s most direct statement on Transcendentalism, therefore, only
serves to disturb any claims to Transcendentalism at all.1
In addition to Transcendentalism’s ungraspable philosophies, the
movement had its practical side, encompassing feminism and women’s
rights (particularly in Margaret Fuller’s seminal work, Woman in the
Nineteenth-Century); the anti-slavery movement; education; religion; and
social reform. Its expressions also varied in form, through essays, conversa-
tions, poetry, fiction, tract, and educational treatise. Perhaps the most use-
ful definition to encompass these often complementary but sometimes
contradictory facets of Transcendentalism is this, addressing the change-
able nature of the movement, the tensions between self-reliance and com-
munity action, and the variations within the movement in terms of origin
and participants:
Though they disagreed on many things, as a group they rose to challenge

the materialism and the insularity of an expanding United States by bringing
to its shores the latest texts from across Europe and Asia; German theology
and European post-Kantian philosophy; Romantic poetry and fiction, from
Goethe to George Sand to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth
6 A TRANSCENDENTAL CHILDHOOD 141
and Thomas Carlyle; Persian poetry and Buddhist and Hindu scriptures.
Consolidated as a group by their rebellion against conservatives, who were
shocked at such daring cosmopolitanism, various Transcendentalists then
diverged to found and contribute to a range of radical reforms in religion,
education, literature, science, politics, and economics, centered especially on
securing equal rights for the working classes, women, and slaves.2
Many of these ‘radical reforms’ are also represented in Alcott’s works,

from women in science in her portrayal of Jo’s Boys’ Nan; to the duty of the
rich to help the poor in a number of works, and especially in An Old-
Fashioned Girl; and—as will be discussed in Chap. 7—the failings of the
American educational system. Yet should these multiple instances of con-
gruity therefore result in a claim to influence, particularly in reference to
representations of childhood?
Although textual constructions of childhood in Transcendentalist lit-
erature have gained little critical attention beyond that paid to education,
childhood was a focus of Transcendentalist philosophy, particularly in the
exploration of the relationship between an ideal manhood and an assumed
perfection of early childhood, one that is rooted in nature. In his 1836
work, Nature—frequently positioned, if erroneously, as the beginning
point of the Transcendentalist movement—Emerson asks: ‘What is a
child?’ He also explores this relationship between childhood and
Transcendentalism in essays such as ‘Experience’ and ‘Domestic Life’,
journal entries including a loose-leaf exploration that begins: ‘I am most
of the time a very young child’, and in poems including ‘Threnody’ and
‘The Sphinx’. Alcott’s father, Bronson, had a deep and abiding interest in
childhood that informed his educational theories and practices, one that
he explored through unpublished works such as Observations on the
Spiritual Nurture of My Children, Researches on Childhood and Psyche,
published works including Conversations with Children on the Gospels and
Observations on the Principles and Methods of Infant Instruction, and fifty
volumes of journals and countless letters. And it is such questioning and
investigation of assumptions regarding childhood and its relationship with
adulthood, one that also recurs throughout Transcendentalist literature,
that is key to my understanding of Alcott’s works. However, critical con-
sideration of the relationship between Alcott and Transcendentalism has
focused largely on her ambivalent personal views and, perhaps understand-
ably, its impact on her life rather than her works; after all, any attempt to
separate Transcendentalism from Alcott family life will always be fraught
142 K. WEST
with difficulty. As Harriet Reisen comments, showing the difficulty in sep-

arating Bronson as Transcendentalist from Bronson as father: ‘While most
of his freethinking counterparts looked for God in nature, Bronson Alcott
searched for the divine in his children’s souls. His careful observations of
the “Inner Life of their Spirits” resulted in a record of Louisa May Alcott’s
earliest years.’3 Similarly, Clark points out that ‘the Transcendentalist
Bronson billed himself, on his lecture tours, as the “father of the Little
Women”’.4 Douglas, however, focuses on Alcott’s interactions with
Transcendentalism in both life and work: ‘Louisa May grew up in and near
the Transcendentalist milieu. She rejected what she felt as
Transcendentalism’s impersonalism, its abstraction, but she used her fic-
tion to question and redefine Transcendental ideas and beliefs.’5 According
to Douglas, Alcott’s relationship with Transcendentalism both in life and
in her writing was that of both observer and participant, with her status as
‘in and near’ allowing her to ‘question’ and ultimately ‘redefine’ the move-
ment in her own terms. In considering critical readings of Transcendentalism
in Alcott’s works, therefore, I will focus on how her constructions of
childhood can be read to reflect, disrupt, or endorse Transcendentalist
theories and practices, and question if—as Douglas argues—she reformu-
lated its theories to suit her fiction.
A Transcendental Childhood
The inclusion of Alcott’s 1888 essay ‘Recollections of My Childhood’ in
Lawrence Buell’s anthology of The American Transcendentalists: Essential
Writings makes it particularly apt for consideration in this chapter, as does
the connection of childhood, Transcendentalism, and Alcott’s works for
children in Buell’s prefatory short essay. In situating this Alcott work
within his compilation, Buell is including her under the umbrella of both
‘The American Transcendentalists’ and their ‘Essential Writings’; position-
ing her, by default, as Transcendentalist and as contributing to the essence
of their literary canon, therefore both endorsing and troubling Douglas’
claims to her relative position to the movement. Further, by including this
work under the section-heading of ‘Literature and the Arts: Narrative’,
rather than the following section entitled ‘Remembrances’, Buell is con-
sidering the genre of such writing, and problematizing critical assump-
tions of autobiographical writing in such a first-person narrative. Within
his prefatory passage, Buell characterizes Alcott’s work as, variously, a
‘sketch’, a ‘story’, ‘a kind of short story’ into which she ‘weaves her early
life’, and ‘this family history’.6 This genre-based terminology attempts to

classify this work in terms of its relation to Alcott’s life, its intent as ‘writ-
ten for a leading children’s magazine’, and how it might be read to con-
struct a portrait of what Buell terms a ‘Transcendental childhood’; as such,
it appears to defy conventional narrative forms.7 However, the existence of
a childhood that is both Transcendental and Transcendentalist, in Buell’s
words, seems to be beyond doubt, as it can be read as such in each of these
literary genres.
According to Buell, Alcott ‘was motivated to publish in this area of fast-
growing demand [as a “writer for children”], which she herself helped
create, by the need for a reliable breadwinner in a family whose patriarch
was the most impractical of all the leading Transcendentalists’.8 Buell
therefore links what he reads as Alcott’s intent behind her writings for
children—to be ‘a reliable breadwinner’—with the impracticality of
Transcendentalism: Bronson may have been ‘the most impractical’ of the
group, but ‘the most’ indicates an assumption that impracticality and
Transcendentalism go hand-in-hand. Writing for children, at least in
Alcott’s case, stems from the failings of Transcendentalism itself as well as
of her Transcendentalist father under this perspective. Buell continues:
In Little Women and later novels, Alcott drew upon the memories of her
girlhood in order to create a body of fiction suffused by a combination of
drollery and nostalgia that paid a certain homage to Transcendentalism even
as it reinforced mainstream impressions of it as a bygone moment of ante-
bellum enthusiasm and whimsy.
According to Buell, the relation between ‘girlhood’, Transcendentalism,

and the creation of Alcott’s fiction is without question: each informs the
others. He also claims that, by the time Little Women was published in
1868/9, the Transcendentalist movement was largely over, retrospectively
constructed and dismissed by ‘mainstream impressions’ as ‘a bygone
moment’, despite its continuation through the presumed adulthood that
allows Alcott to access her childhood via memory and the fiction that he
reads to both endorse and dismiss the movement. However, both ‘droll-
ery and nostalgia’ are quantified as ‘homage’, and as Buell can read the
homage in Alcott’s ‘body of fiction’—one which is ‘suffused’ by this quali-
fied ‘homage’—the dismissal of the movement as ‘bygone’, even by 1888,
is problematized.
Buell concludes:
144 K. WEST
[Alcott] pays tribute to Bronson Alcott’s mission as a progressive educator

and social reformer, but the final and decisive lesson she extracts from this
family history is that the Alcott women had to learn to be more practical.
Here and elsewhere, Alcott drew on her Transcendentalist childhood to tell
a story about its innocence as well as hers.
Here, Alcott’s childhood is both a ‘family history’ and ‘Transcendentalist’,

a construction of the two as intertwined, or even the same. However,
Buell also differentiates between ‘A Transcendental Childhood’, as defined
in the sub-heading to the essay, and ‘her Transcendentalist childhood’;
‘Transcendental’ might be read apart from Transcendentalism as a move-
ment, and as that which transcends or goes beyond, possibly in learning
the lesson of practicality that Transcendentalism lacked. Yet the two are
reunited in the final sentence under a claim to ‘innocence’, one which
Alcott can recognize in both her own childhood and in Transcendentalism
and convert to a ‘story’ to be told. Throughout this essay, however, Buell
constructs Transcendentalism as a point of origin for Alcott’s works for
children, and for this work in particular.
The Trouble with Utopia

Alcott’s ambivalence about Transcendentalism has been read from many
of her personal writings, including letters and journals, and much of this
claimed ambivalence has been translated into similar readings of
Transcendentalist philosophies and practices in her published works; per-
haps none more than in her exploration of Transcendentalist visions and
practices of utopia, ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’. In this work, Alcott
claims: ‘[I]n those days communities were the fashion and transcendental-
ism raged wildly’.9 Alcott constructs Transcendentalism here as out of
control and also as a passing fad; as such, however, it appears to exist inde-
pendently of human thought, choice, and action. There were many such
communities in Alcott’s Massachusetts: from the successful Shakers, to
communities in Hopedale, Northampton, and Providence.10 The most
successful of the Transcendental communities was Brook Farm, George
Ripley’s community in West Roxbury, Mass., which survived from April
1841 until its eventual failure late in 1846.11 However, Bronson preferred
to set up his own community with the English friends who had built a
school in his name—Alcott House, in Ham, Surrey—and accompanied
him back to Concord to form what they called the ‘Consociate family’, a
blended family in which each member was to be equal and play his or her
part. Given that biographies of the Alcott family recount how the 1843
venture failed after just seven months; that Abba Alcott was driven to
despair by her workload; that it almost resulted in the breakup of the
Alcott family, as recorded in Alcott’s childhood journal; and that it caused
a mental breakdown and an almost-successful prolonged suicide attempt
in Bronson, it is fair to say that the historical Consociate family philosophy
was not a success for the Alcotts. Bronson claimed that his own journal of
the period was lost during a later journey.
Alcott reflected on the formation of, and difficulties with, such a
Transcendentalist utopia in ‘Transcendental Wild Oats: A Chapter from an
Unwritten Romance’, first published in The Independent on 18 December
1873. This work represents Alcott’s most sustained commentary on and
textual construction of Transcendentalism and, like her ‘Recollections of
My Childhood’, it appears to defy genre, sitting in the space between story
and memoir. It is also her most direct engagement with the movement, as
one of the few points in her public works where the term ‘Transcendentalism’
is used: while I will consider how one might read Transcendentalism in her
wider works during this chapter, this is the only one that uses the nomen-
clature. Rather than approaching this to see how it reflects Alcott’s lived
experiences at Fruitlands, I will be considering how Alcott constructs
childhood through an exploration of the darker side of Transcendentalism.
Both the title and subtitle of this work indicate Alcott’s approach to the
formation of utopian communities and to Transcendentalism. Throughout
her works, ‘wild oats’ are constructed in terms of youthful folly, particu-
larly for boys: consider Laurie sowing his wild oats in Little Women, and
the Campbell cousins doing the same in Rose in Bloom. Yet, although
Laurie survives fairly intact—with Marmee’s help and despite his inclina-
tion to balk at Jo’s well-intended interventions—the same cannot be said
for ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ Campbell. Despite Rose’s best attempts,
Charlie must pay the ultimate price for allowing what should be a passing
moment of boyish indiscretion to become an episode of drunkenness and
its associated lack of control that makes Rose say: ‘Act like a man, and
never let me be so terribly ashamed of you again as I was last night.’12 The
still-boyish Charlie is unable or unwilling to move beyond this stage of
immaturity: ‘I tried to flee temptation—I tried to say ‘no’, but I am so
pitiably weak, I couldn’t.’ Wild oats, according to Alcott, are to be
expected in their place, but what they offer is only ever illusory, and the
desire for their dubious pleasures is to be left behind with the constructed
146 K. WEST
immaturity of childhood and, ultimately, conquered. Alcott’s association

of Transcendentalism with the follies of what she frames as this transitory
stage between childhood and manhood appears to damn the movement
from the outset. However, it can also be read that it is just this singular
fictional or fictionalized folly—the creation of a utopia by those so utterly
unfit to do—that is being thus condemned, rather than Transcendentalism
as a whole. After all, the subtitle, ‘A Chapter from an Unwritten Romance’,
appears to denote this as merely a stage along the route of
Transcendentalism’s own development and, in ‘Romance’, one that is
associated with an impractical sentimentality; after all, as we have already
seen, Transcendentalism was anything but fixed, and grew from a philoso-
phy of self-reliance to encompass many socially-beneficial reforms, many
or even most of which also engaged Alcott during her life and in her
fiction.
Childhood occupies a significant place in ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’,
both in its role as a signifier for wider points within the text and through
frequent references to the effects of the experiment on ‘the children’, the
‘four girls’, and, less frequently, ‘a brown boy […] Timon’s son’, particu-
larly in terms of what this Transcendental utopia means as both ideal and
lived experience within the boundaries of the narrative. After all, as Alcott
shows, theories of what might constitute utopia can only ever be subjec-
tive: despite the joint statement of intent in The Transcendental Tripod,
the narration notes that ‘Timon Lion intended to found a colony of Latter
Day Saints […] under his patriarchal sway’ which would ‘glorify his name
forever’, while ‘Abel Lamb desired to plant a Paradise, where Beauty,
Virtue, Justice, and Love might live happily together’. Meanwhile, ‘his
wife, unconverted but faithful to the end, hoped, after many wanderings
over the face of the earth, to find rest for herself and a home for her chil-
dren’.13 While the narration praises the saintly Lamb above the selfish
Lion, it is Mrs. Hope who thinks of others, and of the children in particu-
lar, and desires utopia not as a means but as an end to a peripatetic lifestyle
that, the narration implies, is damaging to the children in her care.
The perspective of the children within this divided Transcendental uto-
pia evidences further division between the experiences of the children and
of their adult counterparts, and also through a narration that gives their
impressions of the experiment as they occur while foreshadowing the
damage that will follow as a result of the sowing of these ‘wild oats’. For
example, Alcott writes: ‘the children heartily enjoyed this foretaste of what
they believed was to be a sort of perpetual picnic’; while the children may
have enjoyed at least the early days of their experience, the qualifying
‘what they believed’ already predicts their forthcoming lack of food and
enjoyment in the Fruitlands enterprise.14 Despite further instances of fun
for the children—finding Moses drinking forbidden cows’ milk in the
barn; the ‘great delight’ they took in the youthful member of the
‘Consociate family’ who crowed like a cockerel in the night ‘when a great
thought burst upon him’; and the ‘naughty satisfaction’ they gain from
outing Jane Gage for eating a piece of forbidden fish tail and in her subse-
quent expulsion from the community—the language gives an adult per-
spective on their experiences more frequently as the sketch progresses.15
Their education suffers under a regime of self-reliance in which each mem-
ber goes his/her own way with no thought of common good: ‘Having
been a teacher, [Miss Jane Gage] was set to instructing the children in the
common branches. Each adult member took a turn at the infants; and, as
each taught in his own way, the result was a chronic state of chaos in the
minds of these much-afflicted innocents.’16 While Alcott’s representations
of a Transcendental education will be discussed further in the next chap-
ter, in this text is it is more about the selfishness of the teachers than the
needs of the children who are taught ‘at’ under a variety of methods that,
the adult narrator claims, only add to the afflictions of these sentimental
‘innocents’, powerless under the chaotic impact of a Transcendental self-
reliance that ignores the needs of the larger community.
The further irresponsibility of the textual Fruitlands’ philosophers
results in a temporary change of role for the children, who must subvert
their authorially-proscribed role as helpless dependents to act as providers
when the men fail in their duties:
About the time the grain was ready to house, some call of the Oversoul
wafted all the men away. An easterly storm was coming up and the yellow
stacks were sure to be ruined. Then Sister Hope gathered her forces. Three
little girIs, one boy (Timon’s son), and herself, harnessed to clothes-baskets
and Russia-linen sheets, were the only teams she could command; but with
these poor appliances the indomitable woman got in the grain and saved
food for her young, with the instinct and energy of a mother-bird with a
brood of hungry nestlings to feed. This attempt at regeneration had its
tragic as well as comic side, though the world only saw the former.17
This text, and this passage in particular, speaks to Alcott’s repeated con-
structions of female work across her children’s works, in which men can
148 K. WEST
be, and frequently are, ‘wafted […] away’, while women take on both the
men’s work and their own. The ‘call of the Oversoul’—perhaps the most
repeated and bitter of Alcott’s constructions of Transcendentalism in her
writing—is one that takes precedence over human needs, most particularly
those of the children, who are therefore required as ‘forces’ in gathering
the harvest. They are inadequate to the task, constructed as the ‘only
teams’ and ‘poor appliances’; yet their inadequacy serves to highlight fur-
ther the lack in the male members of the ‘family’, who should provide
both labor and food, but do not. However, these children are also con-
structed as ‘her young’ and ‘a brood of hungry nestlings’, restoring them
to what the narration believes should be their place in this utopia, one in
which they are cared for in a more traditional family structure that is
rooted in nature. The qualifying statement—that this enterprise ‘had its
tragic […] side’ despite the comedy assumed from its textual representa-
tion—shows the impact of an ultimately damaging attempt at the forma-
tion of a Transcendentalist utopia on these children.
As the experiment draws to its inevitable close in ignominious failure,
the children are once more called upon to represent the victims of such
foolishness, as Mrs. Hope asks: ‘Who is to pay us for what we have lost! I
gave all I had,—furniture, time, strength, six months of my children’s
lives,—and all are wasted.’18 There is a claim to a lack of value in the
Fruitlands enterprise here, but also that the children’s lives are both Mrs.
Hope’s to give and her loss to suffer. Further, on the family’s departure
from Fruitlands, the narrator comments: ‘the wan shadow of a man came
forth, leaning on the arm that never failed him, to be welcomed and cher-
ished by the children, who never forgot the experiences of that time.’19
What those childhood memories of their Fruitlands experience might be is
not defined, although it positions the children as survivors of the experi-
ment, who are able to look back on and analyze their experiences, despite
Mrs. Hope’s claims to waste and loss. However, the children are mobi-
lized in a different way too, as hope for the future: it is Abel Lamb’s ‘faith-
ful wife, my little girls’ for whom he finally decides to live, and the repeated
construction of both in terms of possession acts to reinforce their value
rather than reducing them in relation to Lamb.20 And finally, despite
Lamb’s mournful look back on what he has left behind, Sister Hope—true
to her allegorical name—reminds him of what they take away: the children
and each other.
Childhood, in ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’, is not fixed: rather, its place
in the allegory is representative in that it shows the troubled move from
innocence to experience that categorizes Alcott’s construction of this

Transcendentalist utopia, the ‘Fruitlands’ that is named after her father’s
own project. The children’s happy acceptance of the situation at the begin-
ning, although problematized through the narrator’s commentary, reflects
the troubled innocence of such an enterprise; while their mobilization in
terms of both victimhood and future promise positions their status as
without agency, constructed solely in relation to the adults who control
their lives, and through a Transcendentalism that may define them, but
which they did not choose.
Despite this damning portrayal of the effects of the dream of a
Transcendentalist utopia on children, Alcott returned to the subject for
her construction of Jo’s school, Plumfield, in Little Men and, later, Jo’s
Boys. Richard Francis discusses Bronson’s Fruitlands experiment in rela-
tion to the fictional Plumfield:
They called the new property Fruitlands. The land below the farmhouse,
stretching down toward the Nashua River, had been known as the Plum
Tree Meadows since early colonial times, so that name provided a sort of
precedent. The connection would one day be honored in Louisa May
Alcott’s Little Men, when Jo calls her school Plumfield.’21
Further, he claims: ‘On August 28th there was a Conversation on the

subject of faults. Louisa wished to get rid of impatience; Lane, of self-will.
Years later Louisa would make Mr. Bhaer conduct a similar Conversation
with Jo’s boys.’22 While this again shows the tendency of critics to claim
value by reading Alcott’s life into her texts, it also claims that Alcott
returned more than once to a consideration of a Transcendental utopia
and Bronson’s failed ‘Consociate family’. In the Little Women series,
according to Francis, ‘the connection’ is ‘honored’; in comparison to what
Elizabeth Lennox Keyser constructs as: ‘the real hardship and pain the
family, including ten-year-old Louisa, endured’ which ‘readers can […]
sense, beneath the burlesque treatment of the Fruitlands experiment’.23 In
both of these cases, a prior ‘connection’ within the text between the
author’s lived experience of Fruitlands and her writing is assumed by the
critics and, as such, an origin situated beyond the text is unquestioned; but
what remains troubled in that claim to Transcendentalism is that it can be
both ‘honored’ and a ‘hardship’ in its relation to childhood.
That the fictional Plumfield constructs a ‘Consociate family’ that is suc-
cessful, under its own terms, is widely agreed, although there is a conflict
150 K. WEST
between the lived failure and the textual ideal in that Plumfield is what
Alcott feels a consociate family should be rather than being a representa-
tion of the failure of her father’s experiment. The March family of Little
Women has expanded with Jo’s marriage to Mr. Bhaer, the birth of their
two sons, and the adopted family members who live and learn with them
and are treated as their own. Laurie participates in this extended family by
sending along boys such as Nat and—on occasion—his and Amy’s daugh-
ter, Bess; Meg has lent her twins, Daisy and Demi; Marmee and Mr. March
contribute their individual skills and experience; and by the time of Jo’s
Boys, the family all live together on an extended estate. Jo tells her father
at the end of Little Men: ‘I only want to give the children a home in which
they can be taught a few simple things which will help to make life less
hard to them when they go out to fight their battles in the world’; a quote
that could be read to echo that of Mrs. Hope in ‘Transcendental Wild
Oats’, but that looks beyond the home and Transcendentalist self-reliance
to the development of the children toward taking an adult place in society;
again echoing Alcott’s construction of the movement as ‘wild oats’, a
moment along the trajectory of life that plays its part, but should yet be
discarded in its season.’24 And as the school evolves into a college in Jo’s
Boys, this development from the self-reliance that is practiced—if not
preached—by the independent young women of Little Women has also
matured to the aim of fitting young men and women for the wider world.
The Transcendentalist utopia, if one can read Plumfield as such, is about
the growth and development that was always out of reach in the Fruitlands
experiment of ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’ as each man worked only for
himself; while each participant also contributes the work that best suits her
or him at Plumfield, there is still a sense of harmony and working together
for a common goal, one in which the welfare of the children is central.
And perhaps this is the key difference between the two: in focusing on the
education and development of the children, the founders of the Plumfield
utopia gain the benefits for themselves and for society too, and the
Transcendentalist dream can come to fruition, if only within the bounds
of Alcott’s fiction.25
‘This Large-Hearted Child’: Emerson, Thoreau,

and Childhood26
Alcott’s father was only one of the Transcendentalist influences on her life
who has been read by critics to have an impact on her fiction. Alcott’s
poetry can be interpreted to reference her Transcendentalist neighbors as
well as Bronson, with ‘The Children’s Song’ reading like an allegorical
roll-call of Concord’s great and good, including Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Henry David Thoreau, and Ephraim Bull, the developer of the
Concord grape:
There’s the Shepherd of the sheepfold; the Father of the vines;

The Hermit of blue Walden; the Poet of the pines;
And a Friend who comes among us, with counsels wise and mild
With snow upon his forehead, yet at heart a very child.27
Less flatteringly, Alcott’s poem ‘Philosophers sit in their sylvan hall’ dis-
cusses ‘the terrible dust they make’ while debating ‘Chaos and Cosmos,
Hegel and Kant’; Maria S. Porter comments: ‘The “sylvan hall” was, as I
know from bitter experience while attending the sessions of the School of
Philosophy, the hottest place in historic old Concord.’28 Biographical
readings continue to both inform and limit our understanding of Alcott’s
works; yet reading Alcott’s portrayals of named men from her father’s
Concord circle, particularly Thoreau and Emerson, can aid an exploration
of Transcendentalism and childhood in her works.
Yet not all of the textual representations of the two men in Alcott’s
works are critically read in terms of their Transcendentalist philosophies
and practices. Regarding Little Women, Rioux claims: ‘In choosing a mate
for Jo, Alcott seems to have drawn on her attraction to older men like
Thoreau and Emerson.’29 Laura Dassow Walls’ reading also places the two
Transcendentalist men as the lovers in Alcott’s adult work, Moods:
That May, when Thoreau joined the wedding dance around Anna Alcott
and John Pratt, […] he may not have known that she was already drafting
her novel Moods, in which her heroine must choose between two lovers—
one a serene and kindly minister who teaches her the wisdom of self-
governance, the other a dashing naturalist-explorer who liberates her
deepest desires. Her thinly disguised portraits of Emerson and Thoreau hint
at layers of feeling hidden beneath the few surviving anecdotes, letters, and
fragmentary journals.30
152 K. WEST
But what does it mean to take such an approach, beyond further reading
of the author’s biography into the text? In Walls’ claim to ‘portraits of’,
these are not the lived Emerson and Thoreau but textual (or even
visual) representations, indications of a biographical romantic interest, or
signifiers of Transcendentalist philosophies in their turn.31 I will therefore
read each appearance of Thoreau and Emerson where they are named
(rather than simply read as such) in Alcott’s children’s texts on its own
merits to see what it might suggest about her representations of
Transcendentalist philosophies and practices, focusing on and in relation
to Alcott’s consideration of childhood.
The Transcendentalist concern with childhood has been critically
explored in relation to Thoreau, at least, to some degree. In Walter
Harding’s 1982 essay, Thoreau and Childhood, he comments:
[I]f we are to see Henry Thoreau whole, we cannot overlook his relation-
ships with children. As a Transcendentalist, Thoreau believed deeply that
children have a far clearer and less prejudiced view of the universe around
them and the people in it than do adults. He saw children as potential founts
of wisdom.32
Harding suggests that the path of influence was not a one-way street from
adult to child, but beneficial to both. Thoreau’s dealings with children
were ‘relationships’, constructing a reading of equality; and an under-
standing of these relationships is necessary to ‘see Henry Thoreau whole’.
Although this claim that there is a ‘whole’ Thoreau who can be known, or
at least seen, is problematic, it can still be read that it is in his relations with
children that we can know him better, and that without this knowledge,
an understanding of Thoreau can only ever be partial or limiting. Harding
also links Thoreau’s views of children to Transcendentalism, in a claim to
a common view of those grouped together under this name. This there-
fore constructs an understanding of—and belief in—the difference
between children and adults, with a more positive view of children and
their worldview, as a fundamental tenet of Transcendentalist belief.
However, Harding’s reading of Thoreau’s view of children is split here
into what children are and what they might become, giving evidence of
that Transcendentalist dichotomy between an opinion that children are
inherently superior to adults, but also that adults can educate them into an
ideal beyond both adult and child. I am considering this here to further an
analysis of what a Transcendentalist childhood might be, and to consider

how Alcott constructs Thoreau and childhood in her works.
Alcott’s poem, ‘Thoreau’s Flute’, may appear to have little to do with
childhood; however, I believe a consideration of this work aids an under-
standing of what is at stake in her engagement with Transcendentalism in
her children’s texts. Unlike many of Alcott’s works, which are read to
transcend boundaries of form, this poem can be categorized as a fairly
traditional elegy; indeed, it strongly suggests Emerson’s poem, ‘Threnody’,
in which the narrator discusses the loss of a child and is consoled by the
voice of ‘Deep Heart’.33 Here, too, the narrator mourns the passing of a
friend, and finds consolation from a voice of uncertain origin but that has
superior knowledge to the narrator, although the origin of the speaker is
harder to quantify than in Emerson’s poem as ‘Music’s airy voice is lost’;
yet ‘from the flute […] came a low, harmonious breath’, resulting in the
speech that forms the rest of the poem. While this is frequently and rea-
sonably read as the textual representation of a lived man and a sign of
mourning at his death, particularly through Thoreau’s naming in the
poem’s title, such a claim is also troubled by the poem’s status as both
pastoral and allegorical, and in which the object of loss is representative of
both the speaker’s grief and of the consolation of the natural world.
Alcott’s lost subject is constructed in natural, even pastoral, terms with
Thoreau rendered here as Pan, the Greek god of the wild and of shep-
herds, but also perhaps in the sense of ‘every’ or ‘all’, a pastoral reimagin-
ing that is traditional in elegiac poetry.34 Alcott further constructs this
textual Thoreau as ‘the Genius of the wood’. While ‘Genius’ may well pay
tribute to the lived Thoreau’s skills as a naturalist, the term has various
meanings throughout Alcott’s works; here, it could represent the spirit of
a place (genius loci), or in its derivation from the Latin gignere, to bring
forth, Alcott could be praising the lived Thoreau’s influence as a naturalist
on children, as an informal education in nature. Thoreau’s characteriza-
tion in terms of childhood has been celebrated frequently, and Alcott con-
tinues this in her depiction of him as ‘this large-hearted child’; further, the
Transcendentalist link between childhood and nature explored in such
works as Emerson’s Nature, ‘Threnody’, and other works is also present:
the natural and wild places ‘haunted’ are ‘fit mates for this large-hearted
child’.35 This textual Thoreau is both child but separated from other chil-
dren, different in his status as ‘large-hearted’, in such a way that appears to
position him as more fit to be a friend of Nature than they. Childhood
therefore belongs with nature, but also must be qualified by such a quality.
154 K. WEST
In his status as Pan, like the immortal Peter, the textual Thoreau is forever
child, but is set apart from other children as their leader and as the bucolic
god of an imagined pastoral Concord.
Like Thoreau, Emerson is name-checked throughout Alcott’s works:
the prefatory poem to her earliest book, Flower Fables, is taken from
Emerson’s ‘Wood-Notes’, a phrase also used in ‘Thoreau’s Flute’; the
‘non-committal Chaplain’ in Hospital Sketches reads Emerson and Carlyle’s
works; and in Jo’s Boys, Jo takes the example of the named Emerson and
Whittier in consigning certain fan letters to the waste-paper basket.
Emerson figures repeatedly in Alcott works for both adults and children,
often in negotiation about the suitability of his writings—and even as a
romantic interest—for the growing girl.36 Alcott’s relationship with
Emerson has often been read through ‘Recollections of My Childhood’,
particularly in terms of designating certain romantic characters as her
Concord neighbor; from her claim to a time when, as a romantic fifteen-
year-old, she sung Mignon’s song in bad German under his window and
left wildflowers on his doorstep, to her adult life when, she claimed:
Emerson remained my beloved ‘Master’ while he lived, doing more for me,
as for many another young soul, than he ever knew, by the simple beauty of
his life, the truth and wisdom of his books, the example of a good, great
man untempted and unspoiled by the world which he made nobler while in
it, and left the richer when he went.37
What interests me predominantly here in terms of this relationship between

Transcendentalism and Alcott’s portrayals of childhood is the claim to
inspiration not only for herself but for ‘many another young soul’, and
that the inspiration came not just from his writings but from his ‘life’. At
this late point of her life, Alcott both recalled Emerson’s life and works as
being educative for the young and as relevant to the readership of Youth’s
Companion for whom she was writing this sketch of her childhood. Buell,
in his introduction to this work, calls attention to the ambivalence in
Alcott’s portrayal of Emerson: ‘She idealizes Emerson and claims him as
her “Master”, but in the same breath calls her crush on him a “girlish
folly”.’ In writing of her ‘Master’ for Youth’s Companion, Alcott appears
to be constructing Emerson as relevant for an audience presumed to be
children; yet her ‘crush’, as Buell terms it, seems like something that
should be left behind, her own ‘wild oats’, perhaps. The ambivalence,
then, is situated here in Alcott’s views on the relevance of Transcendentalism
to children.
Perhaps it is no surprise, if we accept Buell’s claim to influence, that

both Emerson and Thoreau are referenced in Alcott’s fiction for children.
In Rose in Bloom, Rose is visiting the countryside with her adopted child
when Mac drops in for a visit. Mac, who has spent several weeks ‘tramp-
ing’ in the hills, is an advert for the delights of living in nature; and is
another suggested candidate for a textual representation of Thoreau. He
has brought several toys for Rose’s little orphan girl, but the toys are:
Neither picture books nor sweeties, but berries strung on long stems of
grass, acorns and pretty cones, bits of rock shining with mica, several blue-
birds’ feathers, and a nest of moss with white pebbles for eggs. “Dearest
Nature, strong and kind” knows what children love, and has plenty of such
playthings ready for them all, if one only knows how to find them.38
This scene, which immediately precedes the named introduction of both

Thoreau and Emerson to the text, constructs a view of childhood and
education that again positions childhood within a desired relationship
with nature, even if it is one that must be regulated by the domestic and
figured as a temporary stage. The inlaid quote, ‘Dearest Nature, strong
and kind’, is taken from the poem that precedes Emerson’s essay
‘Experience’, although Alcott has adapted the meaning: in Emerson’s
poem, it was to reconcile the child to his seeming lack of importance
‘Among the legs of his guardian tall’ and his role in the world of adult-
hood.39 Here, Nature is also a guide to children, but in the sense of creat-
ing a world expressly for them or as a representation of Alcott’s ideal or
idealized childhood, rather than considering their status against that of
adults as Emerson did.
Mac introduces his reading of Thoreau to Rose in this chapter, recom-
mending Thoreau as ‘good company’ and ‘a sane, simple, and sagacious
soul’, while Emerson is figured in terms of a guide and mentor for young
people.40 Mac is watching Rose, and wonders to himself
how many more leaves must unfold before the golden heart of this human
flower would lie open to the sun. He felt a curious desire to help in some
way, and could think of none better than to offer her what he had found
most helpful to himself.41
This help takes the form of Emerson’s essays: Rose reads from ‘Self-
Reliance’ and ‘Heroism’, while Mac also recommends ‘Love’ and
156 K. WEST
‘Friendship’ to her—foreshadowing his changing role by the end of the

text, he says, ‘Try them, and let me know how they suit’—and promises to
leave her the book to pursue her own reading.42 Emerson is positioned
here in terms of his writings and in aiding the transition from childhood
to adulthood: Mac has already received this help, and passes it onto Rose.
However, Rose worries that ‘Aunt Jessie may think I’m putting on airs if
I try Emerson’, thus constructing the writer in terms of some kind of
intellectual snobbery.43 This is the first mention of Emerson by name: his
works precede him and, unlike the claims to ‘with Thoreau’, ‘my Thoreau’,
and ‘best friend’, Emerson is that which must be tried: he is much less
accessible and an engagement with him and his works might lead to fail-
ure. Yet Mac rebuts this concern: ‘Why should she? He has done more to
set young men and women thinking than any man in this century at least.’
However, this positioning of Emerson as both inaccessible and beneficial
is only partly successful as the claim to a dignity, or even a standoffishness
in Emerson compared to Thoreau, is invoked later in the chapter, if for
comic purposes, when Rose ‘found the reader of Emerson up in the tree,
pelting and being pelted with green apples’.44 Under Alcott’s textual rep-
resentation of the two men here, Thoreau is for ‘company’, but Emerson—
while respected as a guide and a help for young people—is for education.
As such, Alcott constructs Transcendentalism as that which is not fixed,
showing the value of both Emerson and Thoreau for those negotiating the
space between her construction of child and adult, and cousin and roman-
tic interest, in that she admires their differences as much as their
similarities.
A textual or textualized Emerson also appears in Alcott’s short story,
‘Mountain-Laurel and Maiden-Hair’, again constructed in his role as a
poet rather than fictionalized as lover or any other relational role. City girl
Emily and country girl Becky are discussing poetry, when Becky comments:
“And this one I’ve been longing to read, though I guess I can’t understand
much of it. His ‘Bumble Bee’ was just lovely; with the grass and columbines
and the yellow breeches of the bee. I’m never tired of that;” and Becky’s face
woke up into something like beauty as she glanced hungrily at the Emerson
while she dusted the delicate cover that hid the treasures she coveted.45
Becky admits to a qualified understanding of Emerson—like Rose, she

feels that Emerson is not immediately accessible—yet the knowledge of his
poetry is something that she is hungry for, a hunger that is also
constructed as the desire for an understanding of nature, one that will

bring the student ‘something like beauty’. However, the hunger could
also be read to be for the man as much as his works: ‘she glanced hungrily
at the Emerson’, a named man rather than a book, the impersonal pro-
noun notwithstanding. Yet, as in Rose in Bloom, it needs a certain engage-
ment: these ‘treasures’ are ‘hid’, and need accessing beyond the power of
a glance, even one that confers a certain beauty as it ‘woke up’ under the
influence of Emerson’s poetry.
With Emily’s response, and the editorializing of her narrator, Alcott
appears to be addressing criticisms of Emerson’s poems from outside of
the text:
“I don’t care for him much, but Mama does. I like romantic poems, and
ballads, and songs; don’t like descriptions of clouds and fields, and bees and
farmers,” said Emily, showing plainly that even Emerson’s simplest poems
were far above her comprehension as yet, because she loved sentiment more
than Nature.46
Again, Emily is aligned with Rose in that Emerson is beyond her compre-
hension ‘as yet’, with the implication that time and maturity will bring her
greater understanding, troubling previous claims to the suitability of
Emerson for children and young men or women. Both girls, here, find
Emerson problematic in terms of accessibility, but the country girl with
her greater understanding of nature—or even ‘Nature’—is finding her way
before her city-bred friend; as in texts such as An Old-Fashioned Girl,
Alcott favors the country-bred child over the city girl in tandem with an
Emersonian belief in the superiority of an education in and of nature. The
endorsement of Emily’s mother, who claims Emerson as ‘my favorite
poet’, quoting from ‘Duty’ to educate her daughter, positions Emerson
more firmly in adulthood than does the previous text in her claim that
maturity will bring both understanding and love.47 As such, Alcott’s rep-
resentation of Emerson in this story both positions his works as suitable
for child readers but also as linked with an emotional and mental maturity:
she is recommending his works but with a caveat that they may take a
prolonged engagement that moves into adulthood to fully appreciate.
158 K. WEST
A Textual Transcendentalism
While Alcott’s representations of Transcendentalism and Transcendentalist
thinkers in her works for and about children may frequently result in criti-
cal readings that return to Alcott’s biography and are read as direct repre-
sentations or romantic imaginings of Concord’s philosophers, these works
also address childhood in Transcendentalist thought and provoke a con-
sideration of what it might mean to read a correlation between the two.
And as childhood is explored in many variations in these works, so too is
Transcendentalism: its peculiarities, its disappointments, its lessons, and its
inspiration. However, Transcendentalism could also be read to impact
Alcott’s works in other ways: in her veneration of Thoreau and Emerson,
but her dismissal of the vagaries of ‘the Over-Soul’; in her brutal assess-
ment of the Transcendentalist utopia, yet in her reimagining of it as a suc-
cess, one based on the Transcendentalist tenet of self-reliance and its later
moves toward building a more just and inclusive society. It could therefore
be argued that, in her rewriting of certain Transcendentalist incidents and
philosophies as successful in her works, Alcott is displaying that very rejec-
tion of ‘the sepulchers of our fathers’ that formed Emerson’s call to self-
reliance for each new generation—dismissing the impracticality and
failures of the Transcendentalist circle in which she was raised—while still
displaying her own self-reliance in reimagining and recreating the move-
ment to her own satisfaction.48
Notes
1. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1883) ‘The Transcendentalist’, Nature, Addresses,
and Lectures, Emerson’s Complete Works, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass:
Riverside Press, 1842), pp. 308–339, 310.
2. Joel Myerson, Sandra Herbert Petrulionis, Laura Dassow Walls, eds.
(2010) ‘Introduction’, The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. xxiii.
3. Harriet Reisen (2009) Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women
(New York: Picador).
4. Beverly Lyon Clark (2014) The Afterlife of Little Women (Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press), p. 26.
6. Buell, The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, p. 513. All fur-
ther references from this page.
7. This claim is made about much of Alcott’s work, with the phrase ‘semi-
autobiographical story’ most often used to cover all manner of sins.
8. Buell, pp. 513–519.
9. Alcott, ‘Transcendental Wild Oats: A Chapter from an Unwritten
Romance’ in The Portable Louisa May Alcott, ed. Elizabeth Lennox Keyser
(New York: Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 538–552, 544.
10. Reisen, p. 98.
11. Richard Francis (2010) Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for
Utopia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), various.
13. Alcott, ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’, p. 539.
15. Alcott, ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’, pp. 544, 547.
21. Francis, p. 151.
22. Francis, p. 213.
23. Elizabeth Lennox Keyser, Introduction to ‘Transcendental Wild Oats: A
Chapter from an Unwritten Romance’; p. 535.
25. I will discuss Plumfield further in Chap. 7 on education.
26. This section is taken, in part, from my paper on ‘Growing Tomorrow:
A Transcendentalist Education’, given at Orchard House Summer
Conversational Series in 2017. I also thank Christina Katopodis for our
conversation on ‘Thoreau’s Flute’ and her generous insights that have
helped to shape my thinking on this poem. This conversation can be found
at https://soundcloud.com/christina-katopodis/episode-3-on-thoreaus-
flute-with-dr-krissie-west?fbclid=IwAR2axAEcdL9cvEuY2663EQbchRxF
uyyuJIbk-WL2Spkmrih1xcgAQ28aDRA.
27. Alcott, ‘The Children’s Song’, https://allpoetry.com/poem/11281673-
The-Children-s-Song-by-Louisa-May-Alcott [accessed 10 January 2019].
28. Maria S. Porter (1892) ‘Recollections of Louisa May Alcott’, Alcott in Her
Own Time, ed. Daniel Shealy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005),
pp. 58–73.
29. Rioux, p. 45.
30. Laura Dassow Walls (2017) Henry David Thoreau: A Life (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press), p. 462.
31. Thoreau has also been suggested as the inspiration for David Sterling in
Work and as Dan’s mentor, the naturalist Mr. Hyde, in Little Men.
160 K. WEST
32. Walter Harding (1982) Thoreau and Children (Geneseo, New York: James
Brunner, 2010).
33. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1846) ‘Threnody’, Poems (Elibron Classics, 2006),
pp. 130–138.
34. The appellation ‘Pan’ had been applied to Thoreau before in terms of his
musicianship. According to Edward Emerson: ‘His friend Emerson writing
to another, whom he hoped to lure to Concord said: “If old Pan were here,
you would come: and we have young Pan here, under another name,
whom you shall see, and hear his reeds, if you tarry not.”’ Edward Emerson
similarly describes him as ‘like the “Pied Piper of Hamelin”, [who when
he] sounded his note in the hall, the children must needs come and hug his
knees’ and ‘In the reed-pipes of Pan slept the notes of enchantment for
him to wake at will’. Edward Emerson, pp. 84, 3, 88.
35. As with the reference to Pan, such claims about Thoreau have been made
both before and since. Edward Emerson calls him ‘this youthful cheery
figure’, while his father, Emerson, noted: ‘Henry is a good substantial
childe [sic], not encumbered with himself.’ Thoreau, it seems, saw himself
in similar terms: in a letter to the young Ellen Emerson, he claimed: ‘I sup-
pose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are
always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating
the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old’. Edward
Emerson, pp. 3, 106, 132.
36. Alcott (1863) Civil War Hospital Sketches (Mineola, NY: Dover
Publications, 2010), pp. 61–62; Alcott, Jo’s Boys, p. 300. With thanks to
Joel Myerson for his complete list of Emerson’s appearances in
Alcott’s works.
39. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1844) ‘Experience’, Essays: Second Series (New
York: John W. Lovell & Company), pp. 41–76, 41.
45. Alcott, ‘Mountain-Laurel and Maiden-Hair’, A Garland for Girls,
pp. 219–258, 225.
46. Alcott, ‘Mountain-Laurel and Maiden-Hair’, p. 226.
47. Alcott, ‘Mountain-Laurel and Maiden-Hair’, p. 245.
48. Emerson (1841) ‘The Over-Soul’, Essays First Series (New York: John
W. Lovell & Company), pp. 235–264.
CHAPTER 7
‘The Model Children’: Alcott’s Theories

of Education
A Transcendental Education
Education was a central focus for the Transcendentalist movement, with
Bronson Alcott one of its key innovators. While Alcott had a complex
relationship with Transcendentalism as already discussed, and little formal
schooling of her own, theories of education are considered in some depth
within her fiction for children. This chapter will analyze the education of
children in Alcott’s texts, including the Transcendental model of school-
ing; Alcott’s portrayals of school versus home education; and the role of
books as educational tools in Alcott’s texts. Finally, I consider what the
child is, or should become, under Alcott’s educational model.
In his essay on Transcendentalist theories of education, Wesley
Mott claims:
So fundamental to the Transcendentalists were teaching and learning—as

profession, calling, and trope—that the “movement” might just as fairly be
defined as an educational demonstration. Many of the leading figures were
teachers early in their careers, and several remained active in education
reform throughout long and productive lives. Transcendentalism left its
mark on American educational theory, pedagogy, and institutions from kin-
dergarten, elementary school, and Sunday school to college preparation,
college and university, and adult education.1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39025-9_7
162 K. WEST
From Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s contribution to the kindergarten move-

ment, to educators including Margaret Fuller, Emerson, and Thoreau,
many Transcendentalists had a stake in education for children—as well as
adults—at some point in their lives. As a key instigator of the
Transcendentalist educational movement, Bronson spent much of his life
considering Emerson’s question of ‘What is a child?’: through his observa-
tions of his own children and those he taught in several roles as schoolmas-
ter; through his Socratic methods of conversations with his pupils; through
his written reflections on and role as Concord Superintendent of Schools
from 1859 through 1864; and to his little-read poetry, childhood was a
subject that engrossed him for most of his life.2 Although few of his exten-
sive writings made it to print—Emerson famously advised him against
publishing his meditation on childhood Psyche on the grounds that it was
virtually unreadable—Bronson’s contribution to research on childhood is
recognized through the detailed observations he kept of his first two infant
daughters, Anna and Louisa; indeed, he felt observation and, later, con-
versation were key to understanding the child.3
As already discussed, reading both Alcott’s biography and claims to the
influence of Transcendentalism on her writing is problematic; yet critics
remain as keen to do so in the area of education as in any other. Christine
Doyle notes that Alcott’s ‘early educational experiences helped to shape
her educational ideal’, while Claudia Mills discusses claims on education in
Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom from critics such as Heidi Ann Heiner,
who notes that Alcott ‘incorporates Bronson Alcott’s attitudes about chil-
dren and education into Uncle Alec’s lessons’.4 Heiner’s claim presup-
poses that Bronson’s ‘attitudes about children’ were both fixed and
available to be understood as such both by critics and by Alcott herself,
and then incorporated into a particular work of fiction; although they are
never fully incorporated, as they are still read as ‘Bronson Alcott’s atti-
tudes’ rather than his daughter’s. However, as with any claim to a
Transcendentalism that is available to read in a text, one must consider the
issues of origin and intertextuality: Bronson’s ‘attitudes’ to education
were not, after all, unique to him or to the Transcendentalist movement
(in which there was only limited agreement to what education was or
should be), but were influenced by Swiss educator Johann Heinrich
Pestalozzi and by what he called a Socratic method of education; likewise,
Transcendentalism drew on classical, European, and Asian thought. Any
theory of Transcendental education is only ever, at best, mixed.
7 ‘THE MODEL CHILDREN’: ALCOTT’S THEORIES OF EDUCATION 163
Despite this critical deferral of Alcott’s educational theories to sources

outside of the text, education is a trope that she returns to time and again
in her works: from the ‘queer’ education of Rose across her two texts; to
Meg March, John Brooke, and Fredrich Bhaer as educators in Little
Women; and back to Alcott’s depiction of Plumfield and Laurence College
in Little Men and Jo’s Boys, the education of children was curiously preva-
lent for Alcott, who more than once stated her dislike for education as a
profession. In August 1850, her Journal entry read: ‘School is hard work,
and I feel as though I should like to run away from it. But my children get
on; so I travel up every day, and do my best.’5 In ‘Recollections of My
Childhood’, she claims:
My father’s school was the only one I ever went to, and when this was bro-
ken up because he introduced methods now all the fashion, our lessons went
on at home, for he was always sure of four little pupils who firmly believed
in their teacher, though they have not done him all the credit he deserved.
I never liked arithmetic or grammar, and dodged these branches on all occa-
sions; but reading, composition, history and geography I enjoyed, as well as
the stories read to us with a skill which made the dullest charming and useful.6
‘My father’s school’ is constructed here in terms of lack or deficit through-

out: it was the ‘only’ one that the narrator attended, and it was both of
short duration and left damaged or ‘broken up’; however, it survived in
that ‘our lessons went on at home’. Alcott therefore differentiates between
lessons at home and school, no matter that the teacher might be the same
and that he is constructed through both the familial relationship and as
‘teacher’. She also claims that education is subject to ‘fashion’—usually a
derogatory term in Alcott’s works—in that ‘my father’s’ educational
methods were ahead of their time but, at the time of writing, were in fash-
ion; problematic in that, by the very nature of Alcott’s portrayals of fash-
ion, the adoption of such methods in schools is unlikely to be of long
duration. Although it seems that fashion itself is the problem here, it may
also constitute a claim that Bronson’s Transcendentalist educational meth-
ods were not lasting; a claim that might be reiterated by Alcott’s statement
that, although they believed in him, his ‘four little pupils’ did not give him
sufficient credit, even if it was ‘deserved’. Education, in this short state-
ment and as in ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’, is something that Alcott con-
structs in term of ‘branches’, offshoots of a central stem, but branches that
can be ‘dodged’ according to the pupil’s enjoyment levels. She also
164 K. WEST
discusses the role of ‘stories’ and, in that they were ‘read to us’, books. As
will be discussed later in this chapter, Alcott’s views on books in terms of
education were always dependent on mediation: here, a skill in reading
transforms books from an innate and known dullness into being ‘charm-
ing and useful’, statuses that are linked, here, but not the same.
In Little Men and Eight Cousins, two different methods of education
are explored that are read as influenced by Transcendentalist educational
thought by critics such as Mills: a boarding-school environment intended
largely for boys, and the home education of a single girl. In Eight Cousins,
Rose’s education takes place in a home and a familial environment, with
her Uncle Alec as teacher. Rose’s education is a holistic one: rather than
simply the ‘branches’ outlined by Alcott above, Rose learns how to dress
simply; to replace coffee with milk and to eat for the nourishment of her
body; to take exercise and to develop her body without the use of restric-
tive corsets; and to replace books with fresh air and company. Only once
these lessons are learned can she return to a more formal education and to
books, but again she learns what will be useful to her in life: household
skills, physiology, and managing the fortune that will become hers. So
how might we read the portrayal of Rose’s education to be informed by
Transcendentalist philosophies? In Alcott’s depiction of her textual child’s
Transcendentalist learning in ‘Recollections of My Childhood’, education
takes place solely within the bounds of lessons and books, and does not
achieve its desired results; unlike that of Rose, which is deemed a success.
Yet both the holistic nature and simplicity of Rose’s education owe much
to Transcendentalist educational thought, and to practices that Bronson
utilized in both home and school. In his ‘Order of In-door Duties for
Children’, for example, the document advocates early rising and bathing,
followed by ‘Housewifery’ and recreation before ‘Study Hours’, ‘Sewing,
Conversation, and Reading’, and music in the evening.7 Many of these
activities were to take place under the supervision of various adults:
‘Mother’, ‘Miss Foord’, ‘Father’, and ‘Mr. Lane’. While Rose’s education
is by no means as controlled as that of the Alcott children, according to
this document in which ‘Labor Hours’, ‘Play Hours’, ‘Eating Hours’, and
‘Sleeping Hours’ are all tightly-regimented, this family-run educational
system also aims to educate the whole child, with exercise and time to play
as key to a holistic Transcendental education and lifestyle. While it is dif-
ficult to avoid the return of biography in referring to such a document, it
is still only in the reading itself that it can be positioned as Transcendentalist.
Yet the common ground between the two texts is that they each aim to
create an ideal and adult-regulated childhood in that they are predicated

on the value of adult direction; yet neither assumes an end-goal, a particu-
lar desired child as their result; rather, the intent is education and regula-
tion in and of themselves. As such, the Transcendental child is both created
by and escapes this direction in that it should change, but into what is
uncertain.
Alcott’s depiction of Plumfield has already been discussed in terms of
its status as utopian Transcendental fantasy; however, I want to consider it
further in terms of its educational purposes and results to see how they
both reiterate and trouble claims to the textual institution as reflective of
Transcendentalist educational thought. Alcott’s fictional school aims for a
model of education that is deemed unrealistic from the outset: while Jo
hopes to take in boys from poor backgrounds, she admits that she must
begin with rich children in order to make the school a social success.
Bronson’s Temple School was not constructed on such altruistic grounds,
but the same issue needed to be addressed: it had to pay. Like Bronson,
Alcott’s school took in a child of color; yet while Bronson’s decision forced
the already-inevitable closure of his school as the other parents took their
children away, Alcott’s ‘quadroon’ disappears quietly between the end of
Little Women and the beginning of Little Men. Thus far, it could be argued
that Alcott is reflecting the criticism of impracticality that many
Transcendentalists—and Bronson in particular—faced. However, as Buell
argues, the educational system at Plumfield ‘pays a certain homage’ to
Bronson’s educational methods, and those of other Transcendentalist
thinkers and educators. Education at Plumfield rarely revolves around the
‘branches’ set out by Alcott earlier; rather, lessons such as honesty, respect,
domestic arts, and the need for a healthy body to support an active mind
dominate. Meg’s son, Demi, illustrates the success of such a method:
Demi was one of the children who show plainly the effect of intelligent love
and care, for soul and body worked harmoniously together. […] [H]is
mother had cherished an innocent and loving heart in him; his father […]
kept the little body straight and strong on wholesome food and exercise and
sleep, while Grandpa March cultivated the little mind.8
While Demi’s balanced nature is constructed here as the effects of ‘love

and care’ rather than education, Alcott rarely splits the two in her portray-
als of a successful education. She makes it clear that Demi cannot come to
these attributes by himself, although ‘cherished’ and ‘kept’ assume a
166 K. WEST
degree of prior existence; instead, he must be led to them by the family-

based education of parents and elders that Alcott advocates most strongly
as Demi’s attributes are an ‘effect’ of ‘love and care’ rather than the
achievement or natural state of the child.
Plumfield’s pupils, like Rose at home, are encouraged to take a course
of both arts and sciences, independent of gender and in accordance with
suitability to their natures. While fond of music, Rose prefers lessons in
physiology and housekeeping, whereas Phebe’s education trains her voice
so she can secure her own future. The cousins each pursue the ‘branches’
that they prefer too: the twins are delighted with military school; Mac
trains as a doctor before moving into poetry; while Charlie’s dabbling in a
little of everything—and being permitted by lax parents to do so—is
reflective of the weakness of his character and of theirs. At Plumfield, Nat’s
music is encouraged and less tangible skills are praised as part of a holistic
education as Bhaer tells Nat: ‘[Y]ou can keep your temper, and Jack, who
is quick at numbers, cannot. […] But, best of all, Nat, you really care to
learn something, and that is half the battle’.9 Likewise, Dan’s interest in
the natural world—encouraged by the Thoreauvian Mr. Hyde—is praised,
and the taming that forms a large part of his education is both predicated
and reflected through his own taming of Laurie’s colt, rather than learning
from lectures, books, and lessons. As such, it might be argued that each of
these children receives a Transcendentalist education: one that balances
mind, body, and soul, but also promotes their own particular talents for
both their own satisfaction and to suggest a future trade; a notion of self-
reliance that both draws on the theories of Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and
Thoreau, but also derives from Alcott’s own practical self-reliance. At
Plumfield, in particular, both poor and rich children need to make their
own way in world. As Jo says: ‘This place is made for all sorts of boys to
have a good time in, and to learn how to help themselves and be useful
men, I hope’.10 Jo’s concept of self-reliance is less about a Thoreauvian
removal from the world or an Emersonian personal relationship with the
universe than a practical need to help oneself and to be ‘useful’ to others.
However, the teaching of self-reliance, even in a practical rather than phil-
osophical sense, does not come without its problems: surely any need to
teach self-reliance reinstates the ‘sepulchers of our fathers’ that Emerson
spoke so strongly against in that such teaching comes from outside the
child and therefore precludes the ‘individual relationship’ that he advo-
cates? However, in reading Transcendentalism either into or from Alcott’s
writings on education, it could also be argued that, as a philosophy, it
could only ever succeed in part: after all, the Alcottian child might take in
the lessons of their elders, but they are just as likely to resist, to try their
own way; in short, to demonstrate a Transcendentalist self-reliance that
was more Alcott’s hallmark than any advocacy of her father’s beliefs.
A Place to Learn
The divide between the schoolroom and the home-school was a central
trope in Alcott’s works, with little—if any—approbation for formal meth-
ods and places of schooling beyond the utopian Plumfield. The experi-
ences of Little Women’s Amy in the classroom of Mr. Davies explores some
of the issues Alcott sees in nineteenth-century American education, such
as the corporal punishment of Amy in the affair of the pickled limes, which
results in her departure from the formal educational system. As Strickland
comments:
Harshness had no more place in the treatment of children than neglect [in
Alcott’s works]. One of the rare occasions in Little Women when Marmee is
shown losing her temper is occasioned by a schoolmaster who whips little
Amy on the hand. […] Even where boys are concerned, Alcott arranged for
their education to proceed without spur of the rod, and, in Little Men,
Professor Bhaer makes clear his disapproval of whipping by reversing the
normal order of punishment. When one of his orphan boys is caught in a lie,
Professor Bhaer orders [Nat] to strike him, a bizarre punishment invented
by Bronson in his Temple School days.11
Yet such disagreement with corporal punishment of children was not nec-
essarily a Transcendentalist philosophy or, at least, practice. Bronson was
not above corporal punishment in the home, at least: he recorded instances
of his striking Louisa for educational purposes in his ‘Researches on
Childhood’.12 Further, as the novel begins, Amy is the only March girl still
in formal education: Meg and Jo are working to bring in money for the
family, and Beth ‘was too bashful to go to school; it had been tried, but
she suffered so much that it was given up, and she did her lessons at home,
with her father’.13 As such, Alcott’s formal school is a place that does not
cater to vulnerable children, and does not offer emotional as well as aca-
demic support. That said, although Beth ‘did her lessons at home, with
father’, Alcott does not portray this home-schooling in any depth; partly,
perhaps, because Mr. March is already absent at the start of the book, so
the home-school is ‘broken up’, but also because Beth’s education does
168 K. WEST
not need to fit her for a wider world that she will never enter. However,
Amy’s school experience troubles the value of school-based education fur-
ther, especially for girls. Alcott’s narrator claims:
Boys are trying enough to human patience, goodness knows! but girls are
infinitely more so, especially to nervous gentlemen with tyrannical tempers,
and no more talent for teaching than [Dickens’ Dombey and Son character]
“Mr. Blimber.” Mr. Davis knew any quantity of Greek, Latin, algebra, and
ologies of all sorts, so he was called a fine teacher; and manners, morals, feel-
ings, and examples were not considered of any particular importance.14
Alcott explores the issue of a gendered education here, one that separates
girls from boys in terms of physical space but also in approach; but her
main point is that a career in teaching is not suitable for everyone, and that
a holistic approach—rather than one confined to the ‘branches’—needs to
be taken for a teacher to be ‘fine’ rather than simply be ‘called’ so. Further,
in her dismissal of ‘ologies of all sorts’, Alcott highlights what she con-
structs as the difference between knowledge and education, in which the
acquisition of academic knowledge does not necessarily fit one for either
its transferal to others or address the need for a wider education in the
world than that offered by Classics and Math. As Doyle argues, Amy’s true
education begins at home, after she is whipped for disobedience:
Mrs. March launches immediately into a lecture to Amy on disobedience

and conceit; she educates the whole child. Unlike the schoolteacher’s “les-
son”, Mrs. March’s lecture does produce results: Amy listens to her mother,
and replies “thoughtfully” that she now understands that “it’s nice to have
accomplishments, and be elegant; but not to show off, or get perked up”.
Thus Alcott repositions the school in the home as the site of learning early
in Little Women, not only for the very young, but for older children as well.15
According to Doyle, Marmee’s methods of teaching are little different to

those of the formal school in that both lesson and lecture address the
child; however, Amy has the right to reply to her mother and to show
what she has learned. Neither is this depiction of ‘the school in the home’
that of the patriarchal Uncle Alec, as discussed below, but exists rather as
a female-centered education in which lessons are learned through reflec-
tion, conversation, and the opportunity to draw one’s own conclusions.
As with Amy, Rose’s education within the family—not always the same
concept as home-schooling in Alcott’s works—comes as a result of the
perceived failure of a schoolroom education. Although Rose’s education
began with her father, his death sent her to Miss Power’s school, where ‘I
declare my head used to be such a jumble of French and German, history
and arithmetic, grammar and music, I used to feel sometimes as if it would
split.’16 Rose’s comments presage Uncle Alec’s denunciation of such an
education, but as in Little Women, this is in contrast to the common view
that ‘it is considered as excellent’. He continues: ‘It is the fault with most
American schools, and the poor little heads will go on aching till we learn
better.’ Alcott therefore constructs education as necessary for both chil-
dren and adults, but an education that avoids the hothouse method she so
often condemns and one that can be adopted in ‘most American schools’,
if only the elders would realize its benefits. As previously discussed, both
Rose and Uncle Alec are constructed as ‘queer’ throughout the two texts;
their ability to see what Alcott considers as the failings of modern educa-
tion continue to set them apart from the normalized adult society that
deems this form of education to be laudable.
In her critique of American educational practices, Alcott occasionally
shows a teacher who follows a model of which she approves. After a young
life in the circus, Under the Lilacs’ Ben Brown goes to school for the first
time at age ‘nearly thirteen’, keeping up with his class at reading and writ-
ing, but having to ‘begin almost at the beginning’ in arithmetic and geog-
raphy.17 Despite his struggles:
Teacher praised him all she honestly could, and corrected his many blunders
so quietly that he soon ceased to be a deep, distressful red during recitation,
and tugged away so manfully that no one could help respecting him for his
efforts, and trying to make light of his failures.18
While this passage soon moves on to the issue of bullying—one that this
teacher seems incapable of managing—Alcott pictures a teacher here who
supports learning at an individual’s own pace rather than insisting on
learning by rote, and who praises rather than resorts to the corporal pun-
ishment endured by Amy. According to Alcott, praise, patience, and quiet
correction work best, not just in imparting information but in construct-
ing the best conditions in which a child can learn. In dealing with the
child’s emotional status and sense of himself as failure, this teacher creates
170 K. WEST
a school environment in which effort is as deserving of respect as acquisi-

tion of academic knowledge.
Despite Alcott’s clear preference for home-schooling, the only version
she truly champions is one that takes place within the family, with formal
home-schooling little better than its school-based counterpart. In Little
Women, for example, Meg’s charges are difficult and she does not enjoy
her work; neither does she win much praise for it, especially from the
English visitors. To Meg’s statement that she is a governess, Laurie’s
friend, Miss Kate, replies, ‘“Oh, indeed!” […] but she might as well have
said, “Dear me, how dreadful!” for her tone implied it.’19 Despite John
Brooke’s comfort and assertion that this is a classed English prejudice
against the workers of the world rather than governesses in particular,
Meg never learns to enjoy her work. Doyle comments: ‘Meg educates her
pupils in their home, but clearly it is not home to her, nor does she feel
affection toward her charges. These facts render the education she pro-
vides deficient in essential family community’.20 Neither does John Brooke
fare much better with Laurie: in the hot weather, ‘he had shirked his stud-
ies [and] tried Mr. Brooke’s patience to the utmost’.21 Brooke may teach
Laurie enough to send him to Harvard, but it is the education offered at
different points by Jo and Amy that leads him to renounce his ‘lazy
Laurence’ persona for a more focused adult future, rather than learning
from the more formal education offered by his tutor. While such home-
schooling is explored primarily through the figure of the governess/tutor
rather via than its impact on the pupils, neither Meg’s pupils nor Laurie
seem to benefit from such an education; though it could also be argued
that it is the excesses of riches and fashionable society that are at fault in
each case. It is therefore a holistic, family-based education that fares best
in Alcott’s works. Even in ‘Recollections of My Childhood’, it is the com-
bination of father’s school and mother’s wisdom in prompting an educa-
tion in nature that is successful. As Little Men and Jo’s Boys show, however,
this success can be reproduced in an educational environment, but it must
be one that acts as an extension to the core family unit.
Books and Education: Reading the Canon

Despite her writing of what many still consider to be didactic texts, Alcott
questions the role of books as an educational tool for children and young
adults in many of her works. Rousseau argues in Émile that reading is ‘the
plague of childhood’ because it introduces the child to society before he is
able to make informed judgments for himself, with language subject to the
same concerns. Further, Rousseau’s narrator claims: ‘I hate books; they
only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.’22 Leaving
aside the evident irony of a book militating against its own form, Rousseau
argues that books act as a buffer between the child and the world, prevent-
ing him from seeing the world through his own eyes. Under this theory of
education, the child needs to think for himself, to see and then to inter-
pret, with language acquired only slowly in case words take on erroneous
meanings of which the child is not aware, thus positioning language as
something that should be stable but can still be misread, particularly with-
out appropriate adult guidance.23
Alcott’s short story, ‘May Flowers’, addresses the relation between
books and education via an assumed canonicity of some works as opposed
to others. The story begins with a group of ‘girls’, aged eighteen or so,
who form a club for sewing and reading ‘well-chosen books’.24 Their
choice of reading material—at eighteen, books are not controlled by par-
ents or parental figures—is informed by their desire for texts that ‘will
show us something to do’.25 Just as critics have stressed the relationship
between readers and Little Women, particularly in terms of education and
example, so Alcott’s heroines in this story look for books to direct and
change their lives and, through them, the lives of others. This appeal to
canonicity is about a known educational value, even before the books are
read, as opposed to the assumed frivolity of novels from which little of
worth can be gained. As the girls put into practice their desire to do good
and to help others, problematic as this often is in this story as discussed in
my previous reading of raced children, reading both informs and is over-
taken by their endeavors. By the time of their May meeting, when they
report back on their philanthropic efforts, work is replacing reading, or
even becoming canonical reading itself: ‘We need not choose a book for
our reading to-day, as each of us is to contribute an original history of her
winter’s work.’26 The ‘need’ for a book has been replaced by their own
moves toward a useful adult life. This text both troubles previous critical
claims to childhood, in that these eighteen-year-olds are constructed by
the text as ‘girls’ still, while also reflecting critics’ dismissals of many Alcott
short stories for their didacticism.
In considering the canonicity in and of Alcott’s texts, the issue of class
might impact a reading of a textual childhood. As Hager points out with
regard to Betsy Ray, in reading novels that belong to the hired girl, Betsy
is betraying not only the canonicity endorsed by her mother, but her social
172 K. WEST
status too, in a move that is described as ‘the shameful secret of Betsy’s

reading habits’.27 Class, reading, and canonicity are intertwined in Hager’s
reading of this text, and this can also be seen in critical readings of Alcott’s
texts. In ‘May Flowers’, one of the girls chooses to help shop girls in ways
that include ‘reading papers’ to them, thus constructed a relationship
between reading and the poor that is in need of mediation, a choice, and
a filtering from the rich, and then only for those poor who already show
claims to respectability, who are ‘obliging and patient’.28 The stories of
Dickens are invoked in this text too; but with their canonicity both
unquestioned and troubled through the need for mediation between rich
and poor, and their application to a poor barber who was so ‘very like
[Martin Chuzzlewit’s] Poll Sweedlepipes’ that her brother and his friend
had to run away because ‘they couldn’t keep sober’.29 In this story, at least,
Alcott creates a default middle-class childhood to whom reading belongs;
poor children are other to their richer counterparts, and both cannot and
should not read canonical texts for themselves. As such, Alcott also trou-
bles an educational relationship in which the adult educates and the child
learns, positioning the poor within a default childhood that they are never
able to escape, as will be discussed in more depth later in this chapter.
Alcott’s view of a holistic education as the utopian ideal also troubles a
reliance on books for childhood education; however, it depends again on
which books are read and on who is doing the reading. ‘Pansies’, another
short story from A Garland for Girls, explores a range of societal con-
structions of storytelling, books, and education for young people. Three
young girls are reading in the library of ‘a delightful old lady’ with whom
they are spending some weeks of the summer, and debate the merits of
their respective reading material of choice.30 Alcott constructs different
approaches to literature in terms of value, looking at the benefits of both
amusement and improvement through the example of popular nineteenth-
century texts, from Warner’s The Wide, Wide World to George Eliot’s
Daniel Deronda and The Mill on the Floss, on which each of the girls
espouses a different argument. Alice comments: ‘We should read to
improve our minds, and that rubbish is only a waste of time’; Carrie
retorts: ‘I don’t wish to improve my mind, thanks: I read for amusement
in vacation time, and don’t want to see any moral works till next autumn’.31
Carrie reads for her own entertainment rather than any loftier ideals of
education, and the two are constructed as incompatible both in her stated
opinion and in her choice of reading material. Alice comments: ‘Now I’m
eighteen I prefer stronger novels, and books by great men and women,
because these are always talked about by cultivated people’: although

Alcott separates books for children from those for adults, in an appeal to a
sudden shift in status depending on age (if not those ages suggested by
Zelizer and Macleod), Alice’s aim is to impress by knowledge gleaned
from books rather than life, and for others to tell her ‘what to admire’.32
While Alcott frequently lauds adult guidance in terms of reading mate-
rial—and does so again here—Alice’s motivations are subject to criticism
in that she is unwilling or unable to learn for herself, and that her motiva-
tion is to impress rather than for self-improvement. Eva, in contrast, was
‘a modest, common-sense little body, full of innocent fancies and the
mildest sort of romance’: she prefers the family sagas of Mrs. Yonge to
either of the two binaries characterized by the other girls, and offers a
non-harmful approach to literature, one that Alcott constructs as appro-
priate to her ‘innocent’ character and stage of life. As such, Alcott both
questions and reiterates the canon: books that are educational rather than
simply entertaining should be chosen, but they must be appropriate to the
reader’s age and station in order to teach effectively and to avoid harming
the reader, and they should be chosen for an authorially-endorsed correct
reason. As such, Alcott returns to a construction of the sentimental, inno-
cent child, but expands it to these liminally-situated ‘little women’ who
are still looking for and in need of guidance from their elders.
It takes the intervention of their older hostess, who overhears the con-
versation, to set each of these girls on a normatively correct reading path
and to settle the ‘battle of the books’.33 Mrs. Warburton offers to ‘talk a
little’, ‘share the discussion’ and ‘[c]ompare tastes in literature’.34 As such,
she does not set herself up as an authority; rather, she positions reading as
something that can be shared equally and that would benefit from discus-
sion. However, she also takes the opportunity to introduce a lesson par-
ticular to each girl, and the comments are understood as such: like Marmee
with Amy, the lecture comes first. Neither is this a conversation in the
sense of each member contributing; rather, Mrs. Warburton’s comments
silence the voice of each girl, and each responds to her subtle direction by
renouncing her previous views in actions rather than words. For example,
‘Alice smiled and pushed away four of the eight books she had selected, as
if afraid she had been greedy, and now felt it was best to wait a little’.35 As
such, a hierarchical educational structure is reiterated and the eighteen-
year-old ‘girls’ are infantilized within this relationship: Mrs. Warburton’s
intervention is necessary as they are unable to reach the correct educa-
tional improvements without her help. The girls thank ‘the old lady’ with
174 K. WEST
an acknowledgment of the ‘lesson’, and a promise to remember it.36 Yet,

it is not the lesson of which books they should read, and when, that is so
remembered, but a story their hostess tells them about her own life and
the role a copy of Wordsworth’s poems played in gaining her a husband.
As such, this story ends by positioning books as objects: they contain no
lesson in and of themselves, or even as a result of the girls’ reading, but
rather they provide the opportunity of a lesson via the telling—rather than
an own reading—of a story, and through adult intervention and conversa-
tion. Books, despite any claim to canonicity, cannot teach alone but must
be translated for the adult-directed lesson to be learned.
The book as an educational tool is also problematized in Eight Cousins
and Rose in Bloom, although its contents are more important than in
‘Pansies’. Each of the two texts contains a chapter that confronts the evils
of reading simply for pleasure, and the reading of non-canonical books
that, as Mrs. Jessie complains,
intend to do good, I have no doubt, but it seems to me they fail because

their motto is, ‘Be smart, and you will be rich,’ instead of ‘Be honest, and
you will be happy’. […] I find a great deal to condemn in them, and other
parents say the same when I ask them.37
This scene, in which Mrs. Jessie complains about her teenage sons’ read-
ing choices, is echoed in Rose in Bloom when Rose confesses to Uncle Alec
her reading of a French novel. In contrast to ‘Pansies’, books are divided
in these texts into those that are ‘wholesome’ and those that—intention-
ally or otherwise—are ‘bad’. Yet, as with ‘Pansies’, this is a knowledge that
children are either unable to come to themselves, or regarding which
adults feel they must provide guidance. For this badness, once consumed,
cannot be taken back: as Uncle Alec says to Rose: ‘[I]f the fine phrases
won’t bear putting into honest English, the thoughts they express won’t
bear putting into your innocent mind!’38 At issue here is both language
and an assumed innocence of childhood that can be destroyed by reading
certain books and words, and the resultant ‘thoughts’ that can be placed
into the mind of the reader without their full knowledge, consent, or
understanding. As with Rousseau’s Émile, this also troubles language as
having an innate ‘honesty’, or otherwise, as Rose, while attempting to
read her book aloud to Uncle Alec in ‘her purest English’, finds that some
phrases ‘are not amiss in French, but sound coarse and bad in our blunt
English’.39 The issue of translatability both assumes an innate meaning to
words and troubles its own claims with a ‘sounding’ that must be subject
to the hearer’s interpretation. Language in these texts can therefore be
read as that which both creates meaning and escapes it.
Mrs. Jessie, too, objects to both phraseology and the impact it might
have: ‘[M]y sons are neither boot-blacks nor newsboys, and I object to
them hearing words such as “screamer”, “bully”, and “buster”’, a claim
that written and spoken language cannot be separated, at least in these
books: like Rose, the cousins are ‘hearing’ language that, it is assumed,
will have a negative impact.40 However, such a claim also returns to the
issue of classed education and language, in that Mrs. Jessie finds certain
words unsuitable for her middle-class boys, but acceptable for working
boys, despite her caveat that:
I fail to see the advantage of writing books about such people unless it is
done in a very different way. I cannot think they will help to refine the raga-
muffins if they read them, and I’m sure they do no good to the better class
of boys.41
This is a surprising speech from the only aunt of whom Alcott’s narrator
approves in Mrs. Jessie’s division of children in terms of class, especially
with the derogatory term ‘ragamuffins’; although this type of book—and
language—cannot be good for either in her view. There is a certain irony
here in that Alcott’s grammar in her works was often subject to complaints
by critics and editorial revision for reasons of grammatical inconsistency
and slang.42 Mrs. Jessie also subscribes to a gendered view of literature:
these works are for boys only, no matter their class, while Rose’s French
novels, although not desirable for anyone in this didactic view of what
literature is or should be, are only read by girls. Finally, there is a return to
the issue of age: again, the assumed innocence of childhood can be spoilt
by the reading of such texts, but as Uncle Alec claims, they may do little
or no harm to someone older. Despite claims to a fixed and inescapable
meaning, language is therefore subject to interpretation across perceived
age boundaries as well as those of class; Alcott’s attempts to construct
‘good’ and ‘bad’ literature as fixed and known crumble under the condi-
tions that unfix language and its meaning still further.
However, the relationship between poverty and books, at least, is trou-
bled in other works. Alcott’s short story, ‘Eli’s Education’, commonly
read as telling a tale of her father’s early years and experiences, describes
the self-education of a young man for whom books were his only entry
176 K. WEST
point, with a largely unsupportive family and no money for a formal edu-
cation.43 This model of education is not dependent on adult guidance or
intervention, or on the schoolroom, as in many of Alcott’s other works;
rather, the education of the poor-but-determined Eli stems from books
and hard work, but also from experience. Eli begins his self-education
with ‘a Webster’s Spelling-book, Dilworth’s New Guide to the English
Tongue, Daboll’s Arithmetic, and the American Preceptor [which] stood
on the chimney-piece over his head, with the Assembly Catechism and
New Testament in the place of honor’; however, when going out into the
world, ‘travel taught him geography and history’, and he ‘met pleasant
people, whose fine speech and manners he carefully copied; read excellent
books wherever he could find them, and observed, remembered, and
stored away all that he saw, heard, and learned, to help and adorn his later
life’.44 Even for poor children without the desirable family support, books
should be just starting point and still must be chosen with care, while
experience supplies what books cannot.
The relationship between books and education is explored further in
Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom through the character of Mac, known as
‘the bookworm’ or ‘Worm’ by his brother and male cousins. In Mac’s
case, therefore, a love of reading makes him both less human and less than
manly, as quietness and a love of reading are shown to be incompatible
with socially-approved ideas of masculinity: when Mac’s eyesight is threat-
ened by illness and reading in poor light, he makes up his mind to bear the
inability to study, and no one had ‘suspected such manliness in the quiet
Worm’.45 Reading—even the reading of canonical or educational texts—is
subject to a need for moderation in this book, one that Mac himself knows
he lacks, claiming that ‘there are many sorts of intemperance, and a library
is as irresistible to me as a barroom to a toper’.46 This ‘intemperance’ is
solved by Rose’s idea to write rather than to read, and by the socially-
sanctioned success of Mac’s first book of poems; however, it is also
redeemed by Mac’s own use of books as an educational tool for Rose. In
his descriptions of the works of Thoreau and Emerson, Mac quotes some
of Thoreau’s varying perspectives on books: ‘Read the best books first, or
you may not have a chance to read them at all’; ‘We do not learn much
from learned books, but from sincere human books: frank, honest biogra-
phies’; and ‘At least let us have healthy books’.47 Books are therefore sub-
ject to individual interpretation, but can also be privileged over other
books—as Thoreau’s are privileged over others by Mac—to offer an edu-
cation into how to read those books; how, therefore, to educate oneself
with books. As such, Mac’s perspective on Thoreau’s works, and the works
themselves, go unquestioned, compared to other books which need guid-
ance to be read effectively.
A Mutual Education
As the debate on canonicity has shown, the established order of educa-
tional matters for Alcott was that adults teach children, no matter how
unsettled those terms might be: in schoolroom settings, in the home, and
through the censorship of reading material deemed inappropriate for their
age and/or class and its replacement with ‘wholesome’ books, with educa-
tion complete at childhood’s end. However, this assumed order is unset-
tled in some works in which children teach each other and teach adults,
although the order is often resumed by the end of the text. As such, Alcott
questions the status of a hierarchical education and assigns value to a wider
range of methods.
One such example is Rose’s attempt to educate Phebe. In Eight Cousins,
in contrast to Alcott’s portrayal of poverty and self-education in ‘Eli’s
Education’, Phebe’s attempts to teach herself are constructed primarily in
terms of what they lack: ‘the poor contrivances she was trying to work
with […] A broken slate […] an inch or two of pencil […] an old almanac
[…] several bits of brown or yellow paper […] a small bottle of ink and a
rusty pen’48 Each item—collectively referred to by Phebe as ‘queer’—is
contrasted with what it should be. Alcott also explores the class difficulty
in self-education as Phebe attempts to improve her spoken language, but
is criticized by cook Dolly, who ‘called her “a stuck-up piece who didn’t
know her place”’.49 Phebe is therefore unable to gain the benefits of edu-
cation alone, and this is positioned as an absence, as what should be avail-
able to all children but is not. Rose’s response, like her earlier solution to
Phebe’s poverty through her ‘adoption’, is to solve what she perceives as
the problem of Phebe’s education herself. However, as in Uncle Alec’s
approval of Phebe in comparison to Rose herself earlier in the text, Rose
finds that while she is ahead in some ‘branches’, reading and spelling in
particular, her pupil challenges her knowledge in others: ‘When the arith-
metic came, the little teacher was surprised to find her scholar quicker in
some things than herself’.50 As such, Phebe challenges her ‘sister’ to keep
up ‘with great pleasure and profit to all concerned; for the pupil proved a
bright one, and came to her lessons as to a feast, while the young teacher
did her best to be worthy the high opinion held of her’.51 Rose learns too:
178 K. WEST
not just to improve her arithmetic, but that poverty need not mean a lack
of education, and that formal education is not always necessary if one
learns by experience. However, this mutual education comes to a prema-
ture end when Uncle Alec finds out and decides to send Phebe to a formal
school, despite this approach not being good enough for his niece; the
patriarchal and class order is therefore restored and this mutual education
is brought to an end.
A similar process occurs in ‘The Children’s Joke’ in which parents and
children reverse roles in order for the parents to improve their parenting
skills. One of the lessons learned is the failings of formal education, even
one that takes place within the family, but this is only a lesson for Harry’s
father: neither daughter nor mother are expected or allowed to partici-
pate. Alcott reverses her trope of a happy familial home-schooling thus:
Harry was tutoring his father in the study, and putting that poor gentleman
through a course of questions that nearly drove him distracted; for Harry
got out the hardest books he could find, and selected the most puzzling
subjects. A dusty old history was rummaged out also, and classical researches
followed, in which papa’s memory played him false more than once, calling
forth rebukes from his severe young tutor. But he came to open disgrace
over his mathematics, for he had no head for figures, and, not being a busi-
ness man, had not troubled himself about the matter; so Harry, who was in
fine practice, utterly routed him in mental arithmetic by giving him regular
puzzlers, and when he got stuck offered no help, but shook his head and
called him a stupid fellow.52
Alcott therefore explores a negative portrayal of home-schooling within

the family, one in which this particular parent-teacher is unfit for purpose,
particularly in his young son’s reflection of his abilities when he ‘offered
no help’ but called him ‘a stupid fellow’; such an educational approach, for
Alcott, was counterintuitive in that no knowledge is transferred and the
child is subject to emotional bullying. Yet this role-reversal, in which chil-
dren both tutor and teach adults the error of their ways, is only ‘an educa-
tional frolic’ and is reversed at the end of the text with no guarantee of
success.53 The hierarchical order is therefore restored without question,
whatever the impact of the educational experiment and the success of the
children’s methods (even those suggested by another adult) compared to
those of their parents.
A more successful approach to a shared educational experience between

adults and children, and between children and children, is explored
through Little Men, in which Professor Bhaer states: ‘They teach us quite
as much as we teach them’.54 Similarly, he claims that the improvement in
his spoken English is because ‘the boys did it’.55 This mutual education is
also fostered among the boys themselves, particularly by Professor Bhaer:
Thinking that a lesson in learning to help one another was better than arith-
metic just then, Mr. Bhaer told them about Nat, making such an interesting
and touching story out of it that the good-hearted lads all promised to lend
him a hand, and felt quite honored to be called upon to impart their stores
of wisdom to the chap who fiddled so capitally. This appeal established the
right feeling among them, and Nat had few hindrances to struggle against,
for every one was glad to give him a “boost” up the ladder of learning.56
Alcott creates here an idealized version of the Transcendentalist Consociate

family in which everyone helps the others, and she also explores further
the power of storytelling in education. However, the normative adult-
child educational order still returns in that this mutual teaching is a taught
skill rather than one the boys know or can come to by themselves; it takes
the intervention of Bhaer and his telling of Nat’s story to appeal to ‘the
right feeling’ that encourages them to help Nat with his education.
Perhaps the most effective example of such consociate teaching is in An
Old-Fashioned Girl, in which Polly teaches the adults of her host family,
particularly Mr. Shaw, the simplicity and value of an old-fashioned
approach compared to their lives as a fashionable family, and teaches Fan,
Tom, and Maud similar values, plus a proper respect for their parents. This
kind of education—one not at all concerned with formal schooling and
Alcott’s ‘branches’—is perhaps constructed as the most valuable in all of
Alcott’s narration on the subject. She does consider formal education in
this text, and both portrays a gendered approach to education and trou-
bles it: for example, Polly claims that ‘I studied with Jimmy, and kept up
with him, for father let us be together in our lessons’.57 Alcott admires the
values of coeducation, but this still can only take place under patriarchal
permission and control. Of more value is her portrayal of Polly and Tom
learning together and teaching each other, sharing their respective skills in
Latin and Algebra for the other’s benefit. And while Polly learns too, both
through helping others and through her own mistakes, such as in the
temptation of the bronze boots and its impact on her ability to buy gifts
180 K. WEST
for her family, it is in her self-effacing and perhaps sentimental education

of others that she is valued. For example, ‘[p]oor Mr. Shaw […] had not
found time to teach his children to love him’, but Polly acts as a replace-
ment child to show him how to relate to his own children.58 Similarly,
when the family hits financial troubles that necessitate a major lifestyle
change away from other fashionable and rich families, Polly teaches both
parents and children how to cope with their new status and how to com-
fort and support each other. Yet all this necessitates a sacrifice from Polly
and from her own family, who exist conveniently off-stage for much of the
text. Mr. Shaw tells her: ‘They must lend you for a little while, because you
do us all good, and we need you.’59 Like Jill’s value to Mrs. Minot, it is
only in her self-abnegation that Polly can both educate and be of value to
others, and the needs of the middle-class family overtake those of the
natural, but poor, parents.
The Educated Child

Perhaps enough has been said at other points of this text about an educa-
tion that is in and of nature, and about methods of educating the child
that are both gendered and gendering in their approach. To conclude this
chapter, then, I want to consider the goal of Alcott’s educational methods,
both in terms of what the textual child is and what a child should be as a
result of the educational process. Alcott tells two versions of a story, in
‘Recollections of My Childhood’ and in Little Men, about the occasional
clash between educational goals and their results.60 In the essay, Alcott
tells of a visit to her parents from Emerson and Margaret Fuller, in which,
‘the conversation having turned to the ever-interesting subject of educa-
tion, Miss Fuller said: “Well, Mr. Alcott, you have been able to carry out
your methods in your own family, and I should like to see your model
children.”’ Alcott recounts the by-now familiar story of the appearance of
the four girls in ‘a wild uproar’, playing respectively the roles of queen,
horse, dog, and driver,
wild with fun which, however, came to a sudden end when we espied the
stately group before us, for my foot tripped, and down we all went in a
laughing heap, while my mother put a climax to the joke by saying with a
dramatic wave of the hand: “Here are the model children, Miss Fuller.”61
In this text, education is subject to the ‘methods’ questioned by Miss

Fuller, and methods that can and should be evident in those to whom they
have been applied, in that the children’s status as ‘model’ is something she
expects to ‘see’. But these children are not the models that Fuller expects:
twice, they are characterized by Alcott as ‘wild’, although this is a wildness
that is additional to the child rather than an innate or natural characteris-
tic: they are ‘wild with fun’ and in ‘a wild uproar’, with wildness therefore
something that can be chosen or discarded, and that depends on external
stimuli. Of course, this is a humorous story with a punchline, but it also
illustrates the difficulties with theories of education and expectations of
children, both in Alcott and elsewhere: their outcomes can only be pre-
dicted and worked toward, while the children retain a degree of indepen-
dence in how they interpret the material which they are given, with the
free will to ignore it entirely, at least on occasion.
What, then, is the goal of education for Alcott’s children? What is the
‘model’ child, and what does the above-illustrated failure—if one can read
it as such—therefore mean? As in my discussion of disability in Chap. 5, it
might be argued that the goal of Alcott’s theories is not the model child
at all, but the model adult. After all, as Strickland points out, there is no
model child in Alcott:
It should be remembered that it was Bronson, not Louisa, who subscribed

to the notion that children are saintly. […] Her portrayal of youngsters—
both male and female—made clear her belief that children are as capable as
adults of anger, jealousy, and pride. They must be brought, by ‘gentle mea-
sures’ to be sure, to the place where they can conquer their little sins through
strength of will.62
In Strickland’s reading of Alcott’s ‘portrayal’, however, neither children

nor adults are perfect, and the sins are the same; yet he believes that it is
this bringing—by, one assumes, the imperfect adults—of children to a
‘strength of will’ that allows them to conquer what adults have deemed as
their sins. There may well be no ‘model’ child in Alcott—although Polly
comes close enough for Alcott to issue a denial that this is the case—but
the model, or ‘tamed’, adult is also a problem. Jill may fulfill this role at
the end of her text in her marriage into the middle-classes before disap-
pearing for good, but Dan, Jo, and many others subvert it, and Alcott’s
182 K. WEST
model adult is as much a fiction as her model child, despite her portrayals
of anti-models such as the Moffats and the Shaws from fashionable fami-
lies, both of whom, Alcott implies, are in need of a continuing education
despite having passed what is deemed as its appropriate stage of child-
hood. Perhaps, then, the goal of education is education itself; to be, as in
‘Eli’s Education’, both a lifelong learner, ‘still learning as he went, still
loving books’, and to pass that learning—whatever it might be—onto the
next generation of children, who will teach the educator, each other, and
later children in their turn.63
Notes
1. Wesley Mott (2010) ‘Education’, The Oxford Handbook of
Transcendentalism, pp. 153–171, 153.
2. See bibliography for a list of Bronson’s works on childhood.
3. ‘I have just closed a very irksome piece of work namely a faithful criticism
of Psyche which I send home to Mr. Alcott tomorrow.’ Ralph Waldo
Emerson, ‘To Margaret Fuller, June 28, 1838’, ed. Joel Myerson (1997),
The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Columbia
University Press), p. 184. However, as Buell has argued, Bronson’s meth-
odologies are too often read in terms of failure: one school after another
was closed down due to his radical methods, with his final school—the
Temple School in Boston—forced to close after the publication of his con-
troversial work, Conversations with Children on the Gospels, and his admis-
sion of a black pupil, Susan Robinson, to his class. Bronson himself also
found that his attempts to educate a child under the Transcendentalist
model were a failure by his own standards, particularly in the case of Alcott
herself and due to his inability to comprehend that one method does not
fit all and that children are not the tabula rasa claimed by Locke.
4. Christine Doyle (1999) ‘Transatlantic Translations: Communities of
Education in Alcott and Bronte’, Little Women and the Feminist
Imagination, pp. 261–284, 267; Claudia Mills (2006) ‘“The Canary and
the Nightingale”: Performance and Virtue in Eight Cousins and Rose in
Bloom’, Children’s Literature, Vol. 34, pp. 109–138, 113.
5. Ednah D. Cheney (1889) Louisa May Alcott: Life, Letters and Journals
(Elibron Classics, 2005), pp. 58–59.
7. Bronson Alcott and (possibly) Charles Lane (1846) ‘Order of In-door
Duties for Children’, on display at Orchard House, Concord, Mass.

12. Bronson recorded the following interchange with a young Louisa: ‘I called
Louisa to me and said, “Louisa, Anna said that you took hold of her hair
so” pulling it (while she looked into my face with a prying curiosity to
discover whether I was punishing her or merely showing her, being
somewhat dubious from the tone of my voice, and the expression of
my countenance) “and”, continued I, “that you pinched her cheek so”—
(pinching it.)
She hesitated a moment whether to mind the pain or not: at last the
fortitude prevailed and she said, “Father, I was naughty to hurt
Anna so.”
“Yes, Louisa, and what has Father been doing to you?”
“Hurting me,” said she
“What did father hurt you for?”
“Because I was naughty.”
“And did you hurt sister because she was naughty?”
“No,” said she, perceiving the object of my question.
“No, father hurt Louisa to show her how she made Anna feel when she
pulled her hair, and pinched her cheek. Did you know that you hurt her
so, when you pulled and pinched?” [Emphases within text]
Bronson Alcott, Researches on Childhood, MS Am 1130.9-1130.12, MS
Am 1130.10, (6), Houghton Library, Harvard University, pp. 123–124.
15. Doyle, p. 271.
16. Alcott, Eight Cousins, pp. 64–65.
20. Doyle, p. 269.
22. Rousseau, Émile, p. 158.
23. The gendering of the child as male is Rousseau’s.
27. Hager, p. 107.
184 K. WEST
28. Alcott, ‘May Flowers’, pp. 11, 10.

30. Alcott (1888) ‘Pansies’, A Garland for Girls, p. 31.
31. Alcott, ‘Pansies’, p. 30.
37. Alcott, Eight Cousins, pp. 146–147.
42. The editors of the Norton Critical edition of Little Women state that the
revised 1880 Robert’s Brothers edition of the text included revisions of
punctuation and spelling, and ‘alteration of diction and phrasing, includ-
ing the elimination of slang’. These ‘result in a more polished, conven-
tional, middle-class narrative’. Philips and Eiselein, ‘A Note on the Text,
Little Women, p. 381.
43. Alcott (1884) ‘Eli’s Education’, Spinning-Wheel Stories (Boston: Roberts
Brothers, 1898), pp. 47–70. According to Joel Myerson, ‘Eli’s Education’
originally formed part of Alcott’s now-lost manuscript novel dealing with
Fruitlands, called ‘The Cost of an Idea’, of which ‘Transcendental Wild
Oats’ is the only other remaining part. Joel Myerson (1984) ‘“Our
Children Are Our Best Works”: Bronson and Louisa May Alcott’, Critical
Essays on Louisa May Alcott, pp. 261–264, 262.
44. Alcott, ‘Eli’s Education’, pp. 48, 61.

61. Alcott, ‘Recollections of My Childhood’, pp. 516–517.
63. Alcott, ‘Eli’s Education’, p. 70.
CHAPTER 8
Retelling Alcott in the Twenty-First Century
Reading Fan Fiction

In considering Alcott’s portrayals of childhood and how we might read
them with the benefits of hindsight, it is also of interest to read forward;
that is, to consider not only how we are reading Alcott in the twenty-first
century, but how the engagement between reader and text is resulting
both in a greater variety of critical interpretations and in a new life for her
work in the form of rewrites and adaptations across a variety of media.
This concluding chapter will therefore look at a selection of recent adapta-
tions of Alcott’s texts about childhood to consider how they are being
repeatedly rewritten to appeal to new audiences and to take advantage of
the new forms of media now available. It will consider what is at stake in
both writing and reading these different modes of narrative, and prob-
lematize the divisions between such genres that are frequently assumed. In
doing so, I also want to analyze how these works might reinforce or trou-
ble readings of an Alcottian childhood across her own texts. Due to the
nature of this research, the greatest focus will be placed on Little Women;
very few adaptations of Alcott’s wider field have been created, for reasons
already discussed in the Introduction. However, where possible, I will dis-
cuss adaptations—largely fan fiction—of Rose in Bloom, Jack and Jill, and
other Alcott children’s works.1
In looking at these works and their adaptations, I particularly want
to consider what the term ‘fan fiction’ might mean, and analyze some of

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39025-9_8
188 K. WEST
the problems around how it is categorized in academic criticism. The term

‘fan’, of course, is derived from ‘fanatic’; but this is a kind of fanaticism
that is endorsed by society. After all, fandom pays: it pays for football tick-
ets, movie releases, merchandise; and some talented and fortunate authors
also inspire fandom, although in most cases, the financial rewards are
much smaller. But without this societal and commercial endorsement, fan
fiction lives on the margins of what is deemed widely acceptable, despite
its popularity and a growing—if still niche—critical interest in the writing
and reading of fan fiction as a form of literature. The writing of fiction
based on the works of others is not a new response to the freedoms of the
internet, however: it once existed in small-circulation print, particularly
through interest in science fiction. According to J.E. Reich’s ‘Fanspeak:
the Brief Origins of Fanfiction’: ‘the actual term “fanfiction” was coined
in 1939 by the sci-fi community as a derogatory term to differentiate
between crude, amateur sci-fi fiction and professional fiction, or “pro fic-
tion”’, a practice still often evident even now.2 With the decline of print
and the rise of the internet, fan fiction now largely exists as an online phe-
nomenon, through sites such as fanfiction.net, archiveofourown.org, and
Livejournal.com, plus those dedicated to individual fandoms. As Elise
Barker claims in her essay on Little Women, in addition to the stories gen-
erally accepted as online fan fiction, fans also discuss their ideas for how
stories might have been developed—or should have been written, in some
cases—on forums such as Goodreads.com, not rewriting or continuing
the story as such, but rather expressing their feelings about certain events;
a more nebulous form of fan fiction.3 This fan engagement extends to
include other social media platforms: Alcott’s work has inspired the cre-
ation of its own Facebook discussion group, with some 400 members,
who post responses to screen adaptations, discuss thoughts on the sesqui-
centennial of Little Women, and share links to articles, both popular and
academic.4 As is the case with most forums, responses are moderated; the
content of dedicated fan fiction sites is less so, although certain legal stric-
tures apply and reader response can result in later amendments to stories.
After all, as Lauren Rizutto points out in her essay on fan fiction and
Little Women: ‘Fan fiction is a form of writing, but it is also a way of read-
ing’; consumers and readers of fan fiction are often one and the same.5
However, her claim at this point to ‘a way of reading’ might be considered
problematic; after all, can reading, even of a particular genre, be reduced
to a singular known? I therefore want to consider what it means to claim
reading as fandom, and how reading the ‘original’ text might differ from
8 RETELLING ALCOTT IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 189
reading the fan fiction. The reading in this case might be about response,
in that fan fiction readers often interact with the writer of the fan fiction,
agreeing or disagreeing with their take or their canonicity, or giving posi-
tive feedback. Yet this is the case with professional authors too: from the
letters received by Alcott, praising her work or calling for the marriage of
Jo and Laurie; to online feedback to authors, through Goodreads, Amazon
ratings, and Twitter interactions in near real time. What, therefore, is the
difference between the two?
The Value of Fan Fiction

As discussed in some academic criticism, one reading of fan fiction as a
separate genre to fiction is its lack of commerciality: the unpaid status of
fan fiction writers is constructed as a lack that simultaneously condemns
the genre and provokes concern about its validity, while also informing the
relative claim to (a lack of) value. Monica Flegel and Jenny Roth focus on
‘[t]he “free” nature of fan fiction’ which, they claim, ‘far from assuaging
concerns of creative producers, instead lies at the very heart of their anxi-
ety, for the fan fiction writer is the abject double of the paid creative pro-
ducer’.6 Fan fiction—at least, at its point of origin—is apparently ‘free’:
both in the sense of being available to all without financial cost, and in that
it earns no money for its writers. But any claim to freedom is problematic:
while fan fiction’s status as commercially free allows critics to dismiss it in
terms of value, to position it as derivative and not worth paying for, it
simultaneously troubles the status of the professional writer. At a time
when creative workers are constantly having to fight for a claim to com-
mercial value—earnings from writing in the UK fell 15 percent from 2013
to 2018—and paid-for journalism is struggling to survive as everyone with
a Twitter account and a smartphone is ready and able to break news, the
‘abject double’ of the fan writer has become a threat.7 As Flegel and Roth
report, a number of authors have taken issue with the idea that fan
fiction—particularly fan fiction of their own work—can claim to have any
value, with language suggesting repeatedly that professional writers
work, while fan fiction writers merely play.8 While Alcott’s response to the
relatively recent phenomenon of fan fiction cannot ever be known, her
focus on the commercial aspect of her work is documented: her journals
and letters record payment for each story, novel, and article, and often
what the proceeds paid for as she became more commercially successful.9
As her letters show, however, she also encouraged young fans to stage
190 K. WEST
adaptations of Little Women with no expectation of commercial recom-

pense, in an apparent endorsement of non-professional adaptation.10 As
such, it can be argued that Alcott herself began the tide of unpaid revision
and adaptation of this text over the subsequent 150 years.
After all, not all authors damn the fan fiction of their work and its pro-
ducers: J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series which has gener-
ated one of the largest fan fictions oeuvres to date, appears (or has been
claimed) to regard it as a collaborative process.11 Much has been written
on what Bronwen Thomas, among others, calls the ‘participatory process’
of fan fiction; Thomas’ essay discusses ‘Rowling’s declared interest in the
fanfiction produced by her readers’ which, Thomas claims, ‘has led to all
sorts of rumors about the extent to which the direction of the series may
have been influenced by ideas generated on these sites’.12 Yet the appeal to
‘all sorts of rumors’ calls the ‘participatory process’ and the origin of fic-
tional texts into question: if such a claim is subject to ‘rumor’, then the
implication is of something underhand, something to be whispered about
in the idea that a professional author might draw inspiration for their texts
from the work of others, or from anywhere other than their own heads.
Influence must and should be one way only, from fan fiction author to
‘original’ author, and copyright laws exist to protect the rights of the
‘original’ authors solely to gain profit from their works: fan fiction can
only exist under the legally-dubious disclaimer as to rights to the original
work that begins each fan fiction offering. This again raises the question of
the commercial value of fiction and its equivalent value in society.
Not all fan fiction retains its status as unpaid, however. E.L. James’ Fifty
Shades of Grey series began its life as Twilight fan fiction, under the pen-
name Snowqueens Icedragon; and her rise to fame and commercial value,
what Reich calls a ‘notorious’ story, is the stuff of legend: but does its
transition to paid-for light pornography therefore mitigate that status as
fan fiction, given that it derives so much from the Twilight texts?13 While
I do not intend to debate the legal issues here, this example draws atten-
tion to the problematic division between fan fiction and intertextuality.
Intertextuality is frequently read as playing an acceptable part in profes-
sionally written texts, as long as copyright laws are observed and full cita-
tion is given; yet fan fiction, even with citations in place, exists in a dubious
legal space. However, both this division and the necessary citations that
protect authors’ copyright only exist as a fairly recent phenomenon. Classic
texts from the early twentieth century—Montgomery’s Anne of Green
Gables series springs to mind within children’s literature—quote freely
from sources which are sometimes acknowledged (if not fully credited),
but often are not.14 And the Anne series itself appears to draw significantly
on Little Women, with textual similarities including the naming of Patty’s
Place, which is also the name of an Alcott short story; the cake-making
scene in which Anne forgets some ingredients and adds others, as Jo does
when preparing strawberries in Little Women; and the necessity of having
her hair cut short. Again, I will not entangle myself in legal arguments;
however, there appears to be a difference in the rules at play here. Authors
such as Montgomery have ‘literary affiliations’; fan fiction writers, as
Henry Jenkins famously claimed in the title of his eponymous work, are
‘textual poachers’.15 Value and commerciality are inextricably entwined,
although this in turn troubles how culture privileges origin, in that ‘poach-
ing’ is acceptable, but only for fiction that sells.16
This issue of commercial value is not just for academic debate: Alcott
considers textual value in Little Women and elsewhere in her children’s fic-
tion, asking, what gives a text value? On the publication of Jo’s first story,
in Little Women, ‘the family’ asks: ‘“When did it come?” “How much did
you get for it?” “What will father say?” “Won’t Laurie laugh?”’17 ‘The
family’ speaks with one voice, but also multiple, each question separated
by its own set of speech marks, but not attributed to any single family
member; the question, ‘How much did you get for it?’, second in the
order of questions, is therefore both familial and anonymous. Yet it is the
only one Jo answers directly, with the rest encompassed and dismissed in
‘Having told how she disposed of her tales’. Jo’s pride is situated in the
fact that the publisher will pay for future stories, because ‘I may be able to
support myself and help the girls’, of which Jo is not a part here. Alcott
therefore endorses the financial value of literature both within the text and
in terms of her own work.
Value is also addressed in the story of Jo’s publications for the Weekly
Volcano. In Part Two, Jo is caught between morality and money when Mr.
Dashwood pays, and ‘Jo rashly took a plunge into the frothy sea of sensa-
tional literature’. The narrator’s disapproval is evident from the start, with
the sleazy character of Dashwood who ‘didn’t suit [Jo] at all’; yet the
attraction is there as Jo ‘quieted all pricks of conscience by anticipations of
the happy minute when she should show her earnings and laugh over her
well-kept secret’.18 It takes the patriarchal intervention of Frederich Bhaer
to show Jo that money is not the only consideration when writing, saying:
‘I would rather give my boys gunpowder to play with than this bad trash.’19
And he damns her writing practices further with: ‘If the respectable people
192 K. WEST
knew what they did, they would not feel that the living was honest.’20 This
has a major impact on Jo, who has to choose between money and values.
However, she finds the other extreme—in which she bases her writing on
that of others—no better:
[Jo] took a course of Mrs. Sherwood, Miss Edgeworth, and Hannah More;
and then produced a tale which might have been more properly called an
essay or a sermon, so intensely moral was it. […] She sent this didactic gem
to several markets, but it found no purchaser; and she was inclined to agree
with Mr. Dashwood, that morals didn’t sell.’21
At this stage of the text, Jo remains caught between what Alcott con-
structs as the binaries of commercial success and literary (or moral) value,
despite the tongue-in-cheek reference to ‘the didactic gem’, a medium
that Alcott exploited successfully herself despite her subsequent drawing
on the sentimental tradition. Jo discovers further, as have many writers
since, that fan fiction does not pay. Interestingly, at this stage in the text,
Alcott also debates the value—commercial and otherwise—of children’s
fiction: ‘Then [Jo] tried a child’s story, which she could easily have dis-
posed of if she had not been mercenary enough to demand filthy lucre for
it.’22 Jo, like so many authors before and after her, finds that commerciality
and childhood are incompatible in the public mind, with childhood—as
Lesnik-Oberstein argues and as discussed in Chap. 1—and, by default,
children’s literature, ‘too pure’ to be tainted by the innate dirtiness of
money; while the female author’s status as worthy of payment is also ques-
tioned. After all, the commerciality of literature is not described in terms
such as ‘filthy’ at any other point.
Returning to fan fiction, it has been claimed by critics such as Catherine
Tosenberger that such work is often unpublishable, although she cites a
number of reasons other than commercial value to make this the case;
indeed, she celebrates ‘the pleasures of unpublishability’.23 But what does
it mean for fan fiction to be unpublishable, when what constitutes claims
to publication in the twenty-first century is so unsettled? In Alcott’s own
time, publication often existed between professional, paid, print publica-
tion, and self-publication, what is often referred to now as the vanity press
despite more frequent recourse to online publishers such as Amazon
removing some of the associated stigma. When Bronson Alcott first
attempted to publish his controversial work, Conversations with Children
on the Gospels, he turned to Emerson to help him to pay the associated
costs. Likewise, the publication of Thoreau’s 1849 work, A Week on the

Concord and Merrimack Rivers, had to be paid for: Ticknor and Company
would only take A Week if Thoreau paid the $450 printing costs up front.24
In the nineteenth century, and often today too, publishing is read to con-
fer value; yet it does not necessarily reflect an innate quality in the text, but
rather the likelihood that it will make money for the publishers, if not
always the author. As such, the status of fan fiction as unpublished or
unpublishable does not necessarily equate to a lack of value.
Children’s Literature and Fan Fiction

Relatively little has been written on fan fiction in conjunction with chil-
dren’s literature, except through focus on the extensive Harry Potter fan-
dom. In one of the few works to focus on this angle exclusively, ‘Mature
Poets Steal: Children’s Literature and the Unpublishability of Fanfiction’,
Tosenberger discusses the status of the fan fiction writer. In common with
many academic and popular articles on the subject, Tosenberger writes
‘fanfiction’ as all one word throughout: the fandom and the writing of the
fiction are therefore indistinguishable from each other, with fandom about
the writing and also its fictive nature; in a sense, this challenges the defini-
tion of ‘fan’ as ‘fanatic’ as the fandom itself becomes implicated in the
fiction it ostensibly produces. Rizutto considers fan fiction’s status as
genre further in her essay on Little Women and fan fiction, discussing ‘fan
fiction’s niche between usual forms of fandom and professionally-produced
literary and critical texts’.25 In positioning fan fiction as separate from
‘usual forms of fandom’, Rizutto situates the writing and/or reading of
fan fiction as other to the ‘usual’. She also positions it in terms of a liminal
status, as ‘between’ form and text; neither one nor the other, but defined
in its relation to both. However, this can also work to trouble the binaries
between which Rizutto argues fan fiction sits. For example, in her claim to
‘usual forms of fandom’: is, or can, fandom and its plural forms ever be
‘usual’, and in what sense? Her claim also links critical and literary texts as
professional in comparison to fan fiction; but are they? After all, academic
texts are rarely paid for in the same way as literary texts: ‘professionally-
produced’ might read as produced by professionals, but the allocation of
that status is under some doubt when ‘critical’ can include early career
researchers in academia working without contracts and for little or no
financial recompense. The claim to ‘professionally-produced’ as a link
between the two genres is problematic, when modes of publishing and
194 K. WEST
author recompense differ so widely, and when practices differ between

publishers and authors in both academic and literary publishing. Even
with this ambivalence, however, fan fiction’s status as between, as neither
one thing nor the other, seems apt: it is not sanctioned by anyone.
Tosenberger considers online discussion board claims to two main cat-
egories of fan fiction: ‘affirmational’ or ‘transformational’. Affirmational
fandom is defined by ‘media fan’ Obsession_Inc., as quoted in
Tosenberger’s text, as that in which ‘the source material is restated. The
author’s purpose divined to the community’s satisfaction, rules established
on how the characters are and how the universe works’. She explains:
‘Authority is invested entirely in the creators/authors of the canon’ with a
quest for ‘clues to the author’s ultimate meaning’. The term ‘canon’ both
ratifies and troubles earlier discussions of its meaning in that its relation to
fan fiction is to claim a reflection of the author’s own work and characters;
yet to do so would assume a singular and agreed reading of any text that
all can recognize as such. Disagreements about the canonicity of fan fic-
tion stories highlight the difficulties with any such claim. As Tosenberger
quotes further from Obsession_Inc, the second claimed category of trans-
formational fandom is: ‘all about laying hands upon the source and twist-
ing it to the fans’ own purpose’. This may involve fixing something fans
find disappointing, such as ‘a distinct lack of sex-having between two char-
acters’ or going further to ‘spin outward into nutty chaos’.26 In this sense,
then, transformational fandom, as defined here, moves away from the
community created by fan fiction, in which the fan fiction ‘canon’ of what
readers understand as the original author’s plot and characters is reestab-
lished, to allow fan authors their own interpretation and reinterpretation
of the source text.
Little Women as Origin

Since the publication of Part One and Part Two of the Little Women series,
there have been stage adaptations, film and TV productions, ballets,
operas, and novels based on Alcott’s story; there have also been stamps,
cartoons, dolls, and much more, with an appeal to commercial value based
on Alcott’s own fandom.27 But perhaps one of the most famous instances
of fan fiction based on the reader’s experience of Little Women is from the
1958 work, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, in which Simone de Beauvoir
writes of her identification with Jo: ‘[Jo] wrote: in order to imitate her
more completely, I composed two or three short stories […] I invented all
kinds of romantic intrigues that were full of obstacles and setbacks for the
heroine.’28 Imitation, of course, remains the key driver for those fan fiction
stories considered to be within the fan fiction canon. And regarding the Jo
and Laurie romance, de Beauvoir writes: ‘I had no doubt they would
marry each other’; but she later took Jo as a role model to assume that she
would not marry like her prettier sisters and cousins because, like Jo, ‘she
was marked by fate’, ‘not like other girls’ but superior due to ‘her passion
for knowledge and the vigor of her thinking’. In this sense, imitation took
de Beauvoir beyond fiction and into her own life as she moved into wom-
anhood herself; just as Alcott scholars advise, or assume, that modern
readers do.
However, one issue that crops up in relation to fandom as imitational is
that of origin; or, who owns the text? After all, this is one of the principal
problems that critics of all kinds have with fan fiction, and that informs the
academic snobbery which still sometimes pervades studies of this phe-
nomenon. Jenkins, in Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory
Culture, both troubles and celebrates the links between fan writing and its
derivative nature, considering claims that the text does not belong to the
readers, that any fan fiction stories are not original, that they are based on
the work of the author and are therefore without value, and so on. Rizutto
also argues that ‘fan fiction does not need to follow the exact plot of its
source text, though it is rooted in the original work’.29 Yet in looking at
Little Women, I would argue that the text is never wholly owned by the
author, at any point in its progress. After all, and as already discussed at
some length, most criticism assumes that Little Women had a life prior to
the text, resulting in an autobiographical reading in which a substantial
part of the interlinked stories that form its narrative and the characters
which inhabit it are claimed to be drawn from the author’s own life.
However, origin can also be traced beyond Alcott’s family life to Thomas
Niles, Alcott’s publisher, who asked her for a girls’ story, thus presuppos-
ing girls’ stories as an existing genre, into which Little Women, if problem-
atically, ‘fits’. At each point, therefore, any claim to the origin of the text
is deferred to something that is not text, that is prior to the text, thus
destabilizing fan fiction claims to Little Women as the original work.
In addition, fan fiction is arguably built into Alcott’s own work. Little
Women is structurally based on John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a quote
from which begins the novel, and which informs much of Alcott’s text
from plot points to chapter titles. As Rizutto points out, Alcott’s charac-
ters—Jo in particular—also indulge in some fan fiction of their own with
196 K. WEST
the creation of the Pickwick Society and its paper, ‘The Pickwick Portfolio’,
in which the sisters each play a role from Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers. She
comments: ‘Many readers will remember the Pickwick Club’s reappear-
ance in Little Women, a […] way to further the March sisters’ literary tal-
ents in the company and criticism of each other’.30 However, this too has
been claimed by scholars, such as Madelon Bedell, as based on the Alcott
sisters’ own literary newspaper, The Olive Leaf.31 This chain of reference
and imitation took on a life of its own, with fan fiction based on fan fiction
as regular Alcott correspondents, the Lukens sisters, also modeled their
own paper on the scene in Little Women, resulting in fan fiction ‘criticism’,
if one can call it that, in some of the letters that were exchanged between
sisters and author about the publication.32 As Rizutto argues further: ‘[B]y
putting Alcott’s real-life fanfic alongside the fictional representation of the
Pickwick Club, we can see how fan fiction in the nineteenth century blurs
the lines between author and authority, writer and reader, just as it does in
twenty-first-century Little Women fanfic.’33 Although, of course, Rizutto
blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality herself via this claim: if
this is a ‘fictional representation’, was the Pickwick Club somehow more
‘real’ in Dickens work? This reading of fan fiction in Little Women can be
taken even further: Alcott draws on the works of Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, Maria Edgeworth, Dickens, Shakespeare, and Emerson and
Thoreau, among many others, in her text. She also takes inspiration from
her own previous work, claiming her own 1852 short story, ‘The Masked
Marriage’, as Meg’s in the Pickwick Portfolio.34 Further, her 1856 story,
‘The Sisters’ Trial’, could be read as a precursor to Little Women, with its
story of four sisters including one who is a writer, one an artist, and one
keen on music, beginning at a Christmas which is marked by poverty. My
point here is that Little Women could be claimed to be as derivative, in
some senses, as the fan fiction which stems from it: again, begging the
question, at what point does intertextuality become fan fiction?
Little Women also sits within the genre of series fiction, with three/four
books in the series, depending on the place of publication.35 As with Harry
Potter, the structure of such a series could be argued to encourage fans to
‘fill in the gaps’ as it were; with Little Women in particular, a three-year gap
between Parts One and Two offers ample opportunity for writers to spec-
ulate on what might have happened in these ‘missing’ years. Further, as
Marlowe Daly-Galeano claims:
The [first] volume ends with a statement that highlights readers’ involve-
ment in the production of the sequel. Directly acknowledging structures of
supply and demand, Alcott closed the first volume with the words, “The
curtain falls upon Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. Whether it ever rises again,
depends on the reception given to the first act of the domestic drama called
Little Women”.36
Despite the problem inherent in Alcott’s claim to ‘the first act’—already

assuming a second act to come, at least—series fiction can be claimed as a
chain of author-fan collaboration that problematizes ideas of ‘traditional’
publishing. Additional claims to the text of Little Women Part Two as
influenced by the dictates of fans can be read in Alcott’s letters. It may
seem otherwise, as she wrote: ‘I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please any-
one’, thus apparently rejecting the demands of her fans. But she still claims
an influence, as she wrote in a letter to Elizabeth Powell in May 1869:
‘“Jo” should have remained a literary spinster but so many enthusiastic
young ladies wrote me clamorously demanding that she should marry
Laurie, or somebody, that I didnt dare refuse & out of perversity went &
made a funny match for her.’37 In the claim that the match was made ‘out
of perversity’, Alcott shows an influence from her fans, in taking her per-
verse approach but also in marrying Jo to ‘somebody’. And it appears that
Niles, too, demanded that Jo marry: Alcott wrote in the same letter: ‘pub-
lishers wont let authors finish up as they like but insist on having people
married off in a wholesale manner’. As Emerson wrote: ‘If your verse has
not a necessary and autobiographic basis, though under whatever gay,
poetic veils, it shall not waste my time’; a lesson she appears to have taken
to heart, and one that questions further her writing as the origin on which
fan fiction is said to be based.38
Another issue in considering who the text belongs to is that, in a sense,
an ‘original’ text for Little Women does not exist. As with any text, it has
been subject to revisions, alterations, editing, and abridgments as well as
adaptation, fan fiction rewritings, and sequels. The most commonly read
version of the text is from 1880; the initial printed version, from 1868 to
1869, was edited to remove grammatical inconsistencies and slang, in
what became significant revisions.39 However, beyond even this editorial-
izing, Alcott’s handwritten pages of Little Women in the archives of the
Concord Free Public Library show that Alcott, as most authors do, made
her own amendments in the course of writing, with crossings-out and
insertions showing changes in her thoughts.40 It can therefore be argued
that there is no single text of Little Women that can be claimed as origin.
198 K. WEST
Alcott Adaptations
In reading Alcott adaptations and fan fiction, I wish to consider the con-
struction and reconstruction of the textual child from the claimed origin
of Alcott’s texts to their rewriting and reimagining by her twenty-first-
century fans. Where such reconstructions might be read as ‘affirmational’,
that is, reflecting what the fanfic writer sees as Alcott’s own characters and
intentions, then what reading of childhood are they endorsing? And when
the fan fiction text appears to change the narrative as what might be read
as a ‘transformational’ text, is there a certain assumed construction of
childhood that is being subverted? In considering Alcott fan fiction, there-
fore, this section will ask: is the textual child fixed and available as such to
all, or is it only ever a reading that troubles fan fiction claims to a canonicity?
Little Women has had a long and fruitful life on stage and screen.
Professional and amateur stage productions of the novel continue to be
shown, while the text continues to inspire movies and television mini-
series across the world. It has also been suggested that Little Women has
inspired—or, at least, informed—less obvious productions, particularly
sister stories. Take HBO’s Sex and the City series, in which four women
enjoy a close friendship, discussing life and love, and occasionally falling
out among themselves. And even Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical,
Hamilton, pays a debt to the Alcott model of sister stories. While this
production claims its own historical sources, the presentation of the
Schuyler sisters has some parallels with that of the March girls. Angelica
(strong, literary, outspoken) and Eliza (domestic, keen to be married)
dominate; the third sister is given few very lines, the most famous being
‘and Peggy’, which has spawned a whole fandom for the overlooked
youngest sister; Amy springs to mind with the subtitle of Little Women as
‘Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy’ [my emphasis]. Similarly, romantic anti-hero
Hamilton marries one sister but is in love with the other. Calling either of
these adaptations would be a step too far; yet they are reflective of the
continued interest in sister stories that certainly owes a debt to the popu-
larity of Little Women.41 This section will therefore discuss several such
adaptations, including novel, memoir, and several popular tropes within
Little Women fan fiction—the Jo/Laurie relationship, Beth’s death, and
the reconsideration of gender for the novel’s characters—to consider fur-
ther the questions of origin and value in Alcott fan fiction. The following
sections will also consider readings and representations of an Alcottian
childhood in the twenty-first century via adaptation and fan fiction. After
all, what should we expect from such works in terms of reading childhood?
As in the disclaimer from publishers McAllister Editions discussed in
Chap. 5, might we expect different representations of race, or gender, or
sexuality than in Alcott’s work and, if so, can we read this as due to the
time of writing with any expectation of stability? With this in mind, I also
want to consider what it might mean to read the characters in Alcott
adaptations and fan fiction as being within the fan fiction canon—that is,
as reflective of Alcott’s own constructions—or as subversive of it.
Although the genre of sister stories is just as popular in textual form as
on stage and screen, direct adaptations—those that reference Alcott’s
texts—are more common, although they often take different approaches
to their source material. One recent example of a sequel text is Gabrielle
Donnelly’s modern-day rewriting of Little Women: the 2011 novel, The
Little Women Letters, subtitled ‘A New Generation of Sisters’.42 This text
tells two stories: what became of Jo and her sisters both during and after
the lifetime of the Little Women book series, and one set in modern-day
London focusing on three sisters and their ‘Marmee’ who are directly
descended from Jo herself. The ‘new’ sisters—Emma, Lulu, and Sophie
Atwater—share many of the qualities of their fictional ancestors; while
Lulu, the sister most closely resembling Jo, brings (Donnelly’s recreation
of) Jo into the text with her via a reading of Jo’s letters, to continue her
story after Little Women and to link it to the present day. Despite its
professional status as paid-for and published, this novel seems to fit the
claim to an ‘affirmational’ fan fiction: Donnelly retains the principal
characteristics of Alcott’s text as she understands it, and both fills in what
she constructs as the gaps and offers a reading of its completion in the
modern day in which the characters remain largely the same.
As such, Donnelly retextualizes Alcott’s characters and representations
of childhood in her own work. However, it is worth noting that this novel
is neither marketed for, nor ostensibly about, children; Donnelly’s inter-
pretation of Alcott’s work could therefore be argued to aim for the nostal-
gia market: adults who read Little Women as children rather than potential
or recent child readers of Alcott’s text. Yet she retains a certain concern
with childhood: the story begins with the birth of Jo’s third baby, a girl
who is to be the great-grandmother of the novel’s young female charac-
ters. Likewise, despite the ages of the main characters varying across their
early twenties, and Lulu’s concerns about getting old before her time, the
novel centers on the relationships between the sisters and their mother far
more than on their adult romantic relationships. And finally, though much
200 K. WEST
more could be said about representations of childhood in this text,

Donnelly still positions her characters as ‘little women’, evolving and
maturing toward a life-stage that is positioned as maturity but that has still
not been reached. As such, it might be argued that Donnelly represents
the twenty-first-century extension of childhood compared to Alcott’s
nineteenth century, showing the ‘littleness’ of womanhood to be about a
transition that is less about biological age, as argued by critics such as
MacLeod and Zelizer, and more about both life decisions—such as career
and marriage—and emotional maturity. Childhood, according to Donnelly,
is at least as variable and unfixed as in Alcott’s own representations; only
the context is different.
The Little Women horror mash-up was perhaps inevitable once the
genre took its brief, but popular, hold on the public imagination.43 Little
Vampire Women (2010) by Alcott and Lynn Messina, and Little Women
and Werewolves (2010) by Alcott and Porter Grand, form the genre’s
interaction with Alcott’s texts.44 As with their more famous counterparts,
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility
and Sea Monsters, Alcott’s ‘shared’ authors have taken a classic text and
rewritten it with a horror twist. Large parts of the text remain the same,
and the basic story does not change, but certain horror elements are
inserted. As argued by Marlowe Daly-Galeano in her 2018 American
Literature Association conference paper, ‘The Newness of Little Women
and the Ephemeral Horror Mash-Up’, a large part of the attraction of
these rewrites is in the unique moments of horror in contrast to the quiet
domesticity of the texts; although, I would argue, that it is a text claimed
to be for or about children that offers the most subversive reading, with
childhood a trope common in many horror stories and films that disturb
that sentimental notion of childhood innocence. Much of the horror,
however, spills over into comedy; as the blurb from Little Vampire Women
claims: ‘This horrifying—and hilarious—retelling of a timeless classic will
leave readers craving the bloodthirsty drama’. The texts therefore cross
genres of literature as much as fan fiction stories do. However, Little
Vampire Women appears to operate as more than just Alcott fan fiction
with the March family constructed as ‘good’ vampires and ‘humanitarians’
who only eat animals, Messina has given more than a nod to the Twilight
series, which (as already discussed) itself inspired fan fiction in the form of
the Fifty Shades of Grey series. In a departure from Alcott’s text, Jo is
divested of her writing to train as a ‘defender’ of the vampires, her creativ-
ity swapped for a reactionary role. However, her love for reading remains
undiminished, and Messina plays with Little Women’s literary allusions in

the notes to each chapter, the majority of which refer to other, apparently
‘real’, vampire texts. Beth remains the same ‘shy, domestically inclined
sister’ as in Little Women, but her qualities of love and kindness have very
different outcomes.45 For example, Jo’s line: ‘My sister Beth loves kittens’
means something else entirely when the kittens are actually dinner.46 And
Beth’s relationship with Mr. Laurence takes a surprising turn when, after
the gift of a piano, her love for him overflows into feeding on his blood
and turning him into a vampire.47 This representation of Beth therefore
retains Alcott’s sentimental construction of her character, while repurpos-
ing her love to subvert any readings of sentimental death.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Little Vampire Women is its self-
awareness as a form of fan fiction. Beyond the Twilight-esque positioning
of the good March vampires, Messina also takes Little Women’s own inter-
textuality—its playing out of other texts through drama and through writ-
ing—and moves it up a notch. For example, Chap. 1 of Alcott’s text sees
the sisters, on Marmee’s advice, decide to ‘play’ Pilgrim’s Progress as a
guide to their own lives, as they did when they were younger. In Messina’s
text, a note explains that the text they are following is Vilgrim’s Progress by
William Swinton: ‘John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is largely thought
to be an almost verbatim rip-off of the book, although defenders have
argued it is a pastiche.’48 This tongue-in-cheek comment on the argu-
ments for and against fan fiction, including the horror mash-up, lends a
self-conscious and parodic tone to a text that never takes itself too seriously.
Reading Alcott Fan Fiction

The Little Women series does not have quite the numbers of the Harry
Potter fan fiction phenomenon, but it does have a presence: there are 355
stories on fanfiction.net; 163 on Archiveofourown; and Wattpad claims
7600 via its search engine (although many of these do not seem to be
related to Alcott’s work in any way).49 There are also crossover fictions,
such as Harry Potter/Little Women in which Beth March has a relation-
ship with Sirius Black, in addition to crossovers with other seemingly
unlikely sources, such as The Lord of the Rings, Doctor Who, and M∗A∗S∗H,
along with more likely crossovers in that they sit within what is considered
as children’s literature and the novel form, including Anne of Green Gables,
Twilight, and Inkheart.50 There are also fanfic stories on a number of other
Alcott texts, including Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom, Jack and Jill, and
202 K. WEST
An Old-Fashioned Girl, but with much lower numbers than those based
on Little Women.51
De Beauvoir’s identification with Jo through writing her own derivative
fiction aids a consideration of what is invested in writing fan fiction on
Little Women and other Alcott children’s works; not in terms of trying to
discover authorial intent, but rather to track common tropes in these
works. The most popular form of Little Women stories is that of rewriting
Jo and Laurie, in which their relationship is revisited and results in its
sexual and/or romantic consummation. As Rizutto claims: ‘Of all the
Little Women fan fiction published on the sites Fanfiction.net,
Archiveofourown.org, and Livejournal.com, over half center upon titillating
narratives of unrequited love. Most of those pick up where Alcott left off,
or, rather, what Alcott left out: the unconsummated romance between Jo
and Laurie.’52 However, this claim—and a later comment on ‘Jo and
Laurie’s failed love story’—presupposes that the romance was already
there in order to be ‘left out’, begging the question: in what sense was it
there, unless in the reading of its ‘fans’?53 This also further troubles the
origin of fan fiction in the ‘original work’, or even the very possibility of
origin. While the desire for Jo and Laurie to marry is not confined to
recent times—after the publication of Part One, Louisa was inundated
with requests from young fans for the happy event to take place in Part
Two, to which Louisa responded in her journal that ‘I won’t marry Jo to
Laurie to please anyone’—the desire for marriage has shifted as times have
progressed, and there is a certain amount of variation in the realization of
this romance within Little Women fan fiction.54
‘Mending Our Mistakes’, written by HarmonyLover, revisits Jo after
her rejection of Laurie followed by Beth’s death.55 She is not coping well,
and writes to her ‘Teddy’: ‘The only thing that seems real in all of this
coldness is you. Please come home to us.’ He does so, after visiting Amy,
who is repositioned as ‘his remaining little sister’. On returning to Jo, she
falls into Laurie’s arms, and his comfort of her turns into romance, with
some helpful words from Marmee to move things along their way. They
kiss, and the text ends: ‘Everything was finally right with the world’. This
claim seems to be the apotheosis of this kind of fan fiction narrative:
‘HarmonyLover’ does indeed love harmony, and sees themselves as right-
ing—or writing—a wrong in Alcott’s text: as in Rizutto’s reading, Jo and
Laurie must end up together to correct a balance, assumed to pre-exist
Little Women, that has therefore been lost in Alcott’s text. As such, this
writer rejects the criticism of too much ‘lovering’ for the assumed reader
age group for Alcott’s text, with a correction that adds still more.
The Jo/Laurie story is also considered in ‘the morning after’ by seven-
foxes.56 Mr. March has been killed in an unspecified war, and the March
family are living on the Laurence estate as staff, although still also as
friends. Laurie becomes a fixture in the March household with a particular
friendship with Jo, whose job is looking after the horses. Eventually, the
two share a sexual relationship, before Laurie goes to Harvard and Jo to
Columbia, leaving Laurie feeling betrayed. Beth is killed by a drunken
driver, and Laurie flees to Amy for consolation. The story finishes as Jo
publishes her first novel and, in memory of an old promise, mails a first
edition copy to Laurie. This story is both more conservative and more
radical than ‘Mending Our Mistakes’: while the first story changed Alcott’s
text, bringing Jo and Laurie together, this second story follows the same
relationship trajectory as Little Women. However, in sexualizing Jo and
Laurie’s relationship, and leaving Jo single to pursue a successful writing
career, this writer offers a take that might be considered as a feminist
rewriting, or even just a reflection of the sexual and career freedoms that
young twenty-first-century women enjoy compared to those of the nine-
teenth century, again troubling any fixed and sentimental notions of child-
hood innocence and the suitability of sex for Alcott’s readers. If the fan
fiction categories discussed in Tosenberg’s essay are applied to these sto-
ries, ‘the morning after’ is both affirmational and transformational;
whereas ‘Mending Our Mistakes’ is more transformational in its out-
comes—particularly in that it begs the question of whose ‘mistakes’ are
being mended and who is doing the mending—yet it still exists within the
outcomes of the world created by Alcott.
A further popular trope in Little Women fan fiction is a reimagining of
Beth’s death. This appears, as a trope, to be classic transformational writ-
ing in that Beth often survives; yet different stories achieve this in different
ways. ‘Seven Unlived Stories for Beth March’, by Beth Harker, troubles
the affirmational/transformational dichotomy in various ways.57 Rather
than trying to make the world right, as do other stories with a transforma-
tional element, this story is not a singular solution but a multiplicity of
possibilities: Beth’s future, if she had lived, is not certain, but could evolve
in a number of different directions. The author has also constructed their
own ‘saving’ of Beth in terms of an Emersonian theory of compensation:
if Beth lives, another sister must be sacrificed to take her place; and the
sister chosen for this dubious honor is Jo.58 In ‘Seven Unlived Stories’,
204 K. WEST
Beth and Jo retain elements of their characters and lives as read from Little
Women—Jo is a writer, hot-headed, determined; Beth is shy, and cannot
see the value she brings to the family—but several elements are swapped
between the sisters. It is Beth who takes Jo’s stories to the publisher; who
persuades Laurie to propose to Jo; and who—after Jo’s death—marries
Laurie herself. In keeping with this theory of compensation, Jo is writing
a story about ‘Louisa’, basing the character on herself. But the story is
unfinished; it falls to Beth to complete it and, again, send it off to publish-
ers, while she waits for hers and Laurie’s baby to be born. In this story,
Beth’s resurrection achieves very little in terms of a transformational nar-
rative—Laurie still marries and has children with a March sister; Jo still
publishes her writings—but a metamorphosis has taken place in which the
two sisters are interchanged. Beth may live, but it is to fulfill a destiny she
sees as Jo’s; her own agency increases very little and her character is aligned
with the writer’s canonical reading of Little Women. The story finishes:
‘She liked to think that in the future, that girls would read about Jo.
Maybe they would feel inspired. Maybe they would care, and make up new
stories in their own hearts, giving Jo life and strength again.’ As what
appears to be transformational fan fiction with Beth’s survival, this owes a
great debt to the affirmational side of fan fiction writing: the character of
Beth retains its sentimental self-abnegation, if not the annihilation of any
adult possibilities. This Beth can survive a sentimental childhood and
function as an adult woman, even if one based on her sister’s life as Alcott’s
Jo attempts to assume Beth’s role in her text.
‘The Seashore, and What Came of It’ operates as series fiction: it has
nine chapters (as at 16 April 2018), and is by Bookwork 1978.59 This
series of short chapters links the story of Beth and Jo’s visit to the seashore
prior to Beth’s final illness with that of Rose at the time of Rose in Bloom.
Sitting on the seashore, about to eat lunch, Jo and Beth are joined by a
bearded man, who introduces himself as Dr. Alex [sic] Campbell. Jo writes
home to Marmee to tell her about the encounter, revealing that Dr. Alex
has invited the two girls to move into their house for a time to allow him
to help Beth, who he sees initially as subject to the same problems experi-
enced by Rose in Eight Cousins. Aunties Peace and Plenty, along with
Phebe and Rose herself, make the ‘little women’ feel at home. The two
texts are brought together in many ways: Beth sees Aunt Plenty as an older
Meg, or even an older Marmee; Beth is invited to join Phebe in her music
lessons; and Charlie, Beth writes to Marmee, is much like Laurie while
Archie is like John. This adaptation works differently to many others in
that the writer has taken Alcott’s world as a reality in and of itself to pro-
duce this hybrid reconstruction of Little Women and Rose in Bloom. In
doing so, they have stayed true to the fan fiction canon of Alcott’s events
and characters, but have also subverted them to rethink Beth’s illness to
(perhaps) grant her a reprieve; although the series remains unfinished and
Beth’s initial improvement is fading in the most recent post.
After all, Beth does not always survive in Little Women fan fiction. In
‘Shadows’, again by Beth Harker, Beth has a ‘strange friend’.60 Based on a
German language musical called ‘Elisabeth’ in which an Empress falls in
love with Death, Beth’s friend is the personification of death as an attrac-
tive young boy, one who speaks little and who has been with her since her
scarlet fever ‘wanderings’. He brings her to a knowledge of her fate, and
allows Jo—in the seashore scene—to see what Beth had been unable to
put into words. This story, unlike many of the others thus far, appears to
fall firmly into the affirmational category. Nothing changes from Alcott’s
plot, but the process of Beth’s death is given a face, a voice, and provides
a comfort to the sisters; reinforcing readings of Beth as the sentimental
dying child. It ends back with Little Women, in a known scene. And, we
are left to assume, Beth’s death continues as Alcott had written it, with
this story working as an expansion rather than a replacement or subversion
of the writer’s canonical reading of Alcott’s text.
The final trope I want to consider is one that is common to fan fiction,
including children’s literature fanfic. In fan fiction, many micro-fandoms
have formed around possible romantic pairings, known as ‘ships’, short for
‘relationships’. In children’s literature fan fiction, particularly in the Harry
Potter series as Tosenberger discusses in her article, possibilities abound;
and many of these concern either same-sex pairings (‘slash’ fan fiction) or
the troubling of gender of one or more characters prior to the beginning
of a relationship. Rizutto argues: ‘As they slash unlikely pairs—say, in a
love story between Meg March and Sally Moffat—fans offer fresh, queer
readings of a presumably heteronormative text’.61 Yet, as discussed in
Chap. 4, much criticism exists on Alcott’s problematizing of heterosexual,
gender-normative relationships in Little Women, and while Meg and Sally
do not engage in a love story in Alcott’s text, the assumption of a ‘presum-
ably heteronormative text’ that exists to be ‘queered’ by fan fiction writers
is troubled.
Returning to the Jo/Laurie relationship, ‘Boyish’, by innie, constructs
a perspective that questions a normatively-gendered construction of the
two characters.62 The story’s summary reads: ‘Laurie’s preference for
206 K. WEST
boyishness, manifesting itself as an infatuation with John Brooke and then

love for Jo’. The story is told from Laurie’s point of view through a third-
person narrative, and describes his sexual and romantic feelings for his
tutor, which result in his bad grades for Latin and Math. But then ‘The
Marches swept in like their namesake month’s winds, disrupting the idyll,
the private Eden’, and Jo ‘gave him a new name; as Teddy, he could romp
and frolic to his heart’s content’ in comparison to the restrictions he had
put on himself around John Brooke. As in my own reading of Little Women
in Chap. 3, the naming of and as Teddy frees him here. Yet it is Jo’s very
boyishness that allows his passion to flourish: when she cuts her hair, ‘[i]t
was like a spark to tinder’. The narrator observes, through Laurie’s eyes,
that ‘her touch would be rougher than her sister’s; her cloak is ‘the rough-
est of the five hanging by the door’; and alarm animates ‘every line of her
boyish figure’. The relationship is consummated with a kiss at the end of
this short story, but the status of the relationship as heterosexual is under
question as it is Jo’s very boyishness that is the attraction. Again, this story
seems to defy the categories of affirmational and transformational: Jo
retains her boyishness rather than submitting to a nineteenth-century
female fate in her marriage to Fredrich Bhaer; but Laurie, although not
permitted to stray so far as to have a homosexual relationship with John
Brooke, still retains a problematically-gendered sexual desire in his rela-
tionship with Jo.
‘The Magic of Girl Pirates’, by jellybean_thief, returns to Jo’s sojourn
in New York to consider the gendering of its characters.63 At Mrs. Kirke’s
boarding house, Fredrich Bhaer is finding the house too quiet, until ‘all
chaos was unleashed’. The children kidnap Bhaer, and blindfold him: his
impressions of ‘Pirate Jo’ are therefore, in the first instance, auditory: he
hears ‘a lighter, happier laugh—the sound of a boyish heart’. When she
pulls away his blindfold, he sees: ‘Miss March, whose skirts were rigged to
approximate swashbuckling pants’; to continue the fight, she invites him
to join her side, to which he replies: ‘I need a sword’, and ‘and Miss March
quickly thrust the dowel from her own hand into his’. And the title of this
story is taken from Jo’s line within this text: ‘That’s the magic of girl
pirates—no one ever expects them.’ Gender, in this story, as in Alcott’s
own work, is not stable: under the perspective of Bhaer’s gaze, Jo’s heart
is ‘boyish’, and her skirts are rearranged to resemble—but never to be—
‘pants’. But Bhaer still must assert his own manhood in taking her sword,
his need for a performative masculinity overtaking hers; although in
offering her phallic sword to him, the question of patriarchal authority in

this scene is challenged as his manhood must be given, rather than claimed
as a right. Jo is still ‘a girl pirate’, but one that is ‘unexpected’ and that
challenges the conventions of nineteenth-century femininity to carve out
a new and unsettled place for itself.
Alcott fan fiction also destabilizes fan fiction canonical readings of sexu-
ality in other works. ‘The Artist’s Model’, by mayhap, takes Jack and Jill
as inspiration in its story of a nascent sexual relationship between Jack
Minot and Ralph Evans.64 In comparison to the previous fan fiction sto-
ries, gender remains untroubled; but in offering himself as a model for
Ralph’s sculptures, Jack exposes his body to a gaze that is already sexual-
ized by the ‘different sort of shame’ Ralph feels in looking at the male
nudes in his book on the Italian Renaissance. The pictures, it is claimed,
also bring Jack to a recognition of his own sexuality: ‘I wanted to pose like
that boy from the book. There’s something about him that just makes you
want to keep looking at him.’ The story focuses largely on the transforma-
tive powers of the male homosexual gaze, with both Ralph and Jack sexu-
ally inexperienced until the gaze of each effects its transformation. While
few Alcott fan fiction stories describe homosexual relationships, ‘The
Artist’s Model’ exposes an underlying unwillingness to mess too much
with what is read as Alcott’s non-sexual canon. mayhap may revel in it,
writing: ‘I also wrote a treat, because I could not resist the siren song of
debauching extremely wholesome children’s literature!’, thus construct-
ing a reading of Jack and Jill as inherently ‘wholesome’, with such a claim
related to the suitability of any sexuality within a text labeled as ‘children’s
literature’. Yet while others list ships of Alcott characters that they would
like to see, divided into sub-categories of rare ships including ‘LMA-
spinning-in-her-grave-ships’, thereby assuming Little Women and other
texts as innocent of any child sexuality through the intent of the author,
very few of these are fulfilled in online-published stories; and traditionally-
published adaptations and sequels stay well away.65
In focusing on these common tropes in Alcott fan fiction—the sexual-
izing and fulfillment of the Jo/Laurie relationship, the survival of Beth,
the questioning of gender and sexuality—one aspect, at least, of fan fiction
becomes apparent: that of desire. After all, what is the purpose of fan fic-
tion, if not a desire to reengage with the characters of a text? That such a
desire often spills over into the sexual and the rejection of death is not
such a surprise.
208 K. WEST
‘Everything Was Finally Right with the World’

The purpose of reading each of these stories is not just to test it against the
categories of ‘transformational’ and ‘affirmational’, as read in Tosenberger’s
essay, but rather to consider what is at stake in the writing of fan fiction
based on Alcott’s works and to analyze how the child is represented in
such works; such categories, however, remain useful in this consideration.
After all, how can we read a fan fiction subversion if we claim that there is
no original text to subvert? The reading of fan fiction highlights the impos-
sible, ghostly, and retrospective idea of the whole that texts such as Little
Women are often read to embody. Alcott’s characters are not contained
within the pages of her texts, but continue, in some sense, to live: within
screen and stage adaptations, within novels based on her work, and in the
fan fiction that is free to take far more liberties with its subject than profes-
sional, paid, writers—even and often the writers of the claimed source
text—can do.
And as the characters and plots of these texts are mobilized to differing
ends, any claim to textual origin fragments. After all, what is a character?
What is a ‘Jo’, for example? Jo is never Jo: she is the author, she is the
reader, she is feminist icon or disappointment; she is child, she is mad-
woman, she is girl and boy; she is the times as they change, she is society
itself, but she is never that which is stable and can be known as such. In
this absence of stability and troubling of origin, in Alcott’s repeated sub-
version of innocence, gender, sentimentality, class, race, and disability in
her works—a subversion under which a construction of the norm always
returns—the child is constantly constructed and reconstructed through-
out Alcott’s oeuvre and its fan fiction; yet in the ongoing tide of adapta-
tion and reimagining, the value of Alcott’s work is retained and assured.
Notes
1. Some sections of this chapter are earlier versions of sections of my article,
‘Who Owns Little Women? Adapting Alcott in the 21st Century’, Women’s
Studies, Vol. 28, No. 4, 2019. Used by permission and with thanks.
2. J. E. Reich (2015) ‘Fanspeak: The Brief Origins of Fanfiction’, The Tech
Times, 23 July 2015, https://www.techtimes.com/articles/70108/
20150723/fan-fiction-star-trek-harry-potter-history-of-fan-fiction-shake-
speare-roman-mythology-greek-mythology-sherlock-holmes.htm
[accessed 21 August 2018].
3. Elise Baker (2015) ‘Alcott’s “Funny Match” for Jo’, Critical Insights:
Little Women, ed. Gregory Eiselein and Anne Phillips (Ipswich:
Salem Press).
4. Louisa May Alcott: A Group for Fans, Readers, and Scholars, www.face-
book.com/groups/133575067326419/about/ [accessed 9 July 2018].
5. Lauren Rizutto, ‘“Jo March is Pregnant and Laurie’s The Father”:
Re-Visioning Little Women in Fan Fiction’, Critical Insights: Little Women,
pp. 204–218, 204.
6. Monica Flegel and Jenny Roth (2014) ‘Legitimacy, Validity, and Writing
for Free: Fan Fiction, Gender, and the Limits of (Unpaid) Creative Labor’,
The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 47, No. 6, pp. 1092–1108;
pp. 1092–1093.
7. Porter Anderson, ‘How much do writers earn in the UK?’ https://pub-
lishingperspectives.com/2018/06/writers-income-alcs-uk-sur vey-
2010-publishers-association/ [accessed 10 July 2018].
8. Flegel and Roth, pp. 1095–1096.
9. For example, Alcott, Journals, pp. 197–198.
11. As of 2 July 2018, there were 608 thousand Harry Potter fan stories on
fanfiction.net alone; it also has its own site, at harrypotterfanfiction.com;
and many thousands more on other sites.
12. Bronwen Thomas (2011) ‘“Update Soon!” Harry Potter Fanfiction and
Narrative as a Participatory Process’, in New Narratives: Stories and
Storytelling in the Digital Age, ed. Ruth Page and Bronwen Thomas
(Nebraska: UNP), pp. 205–219, 206.
13. Reich.
14. See Trinner S. Frever (2005) ‘Anne Shirley, Storyteller: Orality and Anne
of Green Gables’, Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 30, No. 2, for more
on intertextuality in the Anne series.
15. Henry Jenkins (1992) Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory
Culture (London: Routledge).
16. See Flegel and Roth for further discussion of the legal and copyright impli-
cations of fan fiction.
23. Catherine Tosenberger (2014) ‘Mature Poets Steal: Children’s Literature
and the Unpublishability of Fanfiction’, Children’s Literature Association
Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 4–27; p. 5.
210 K. WEST
24. Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, p. 263.

25. Rizutto, p. 204.
26. Tosenberger, p. 7; all quotes in this paragraph.
27. Alcott, Little Women, p. ix.
28. Simone de Beauvoir (1958) Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (New York:
Harper Perennial Modern Classics), p. 90.
31. Bedell, The Alcotts, p. 297.
35. LuElla D’Amico argues that girls’ series fiction had its origin in the mid-
nineteenth century; so Alcott may have both contributed to and helped to
establish the genre. Further, according to D’Amico, Nina Baym argues for
the beginning of girls’ fiction in 1868, the publication year of Little Women.
LuElla D’Amico, ed. (2016) ‘Introduction’, Girls’ Series Fiction and
American Popular Culture (Lanham: Lexington Books), pp. vii, ix.
36. Marlowe Daly-Galeano (2016) ‘Louisa May Alcott’s Theater of Time’,
Girls’ Series Fiction, pp. 1–22, 1.
38. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872) ‘Poetry and Imagination’, Letters and Social
Aims in The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume III (London, George
Bell and Sons, 1904), pp. 181–222.
39. See the Norton Critical Edition for the 1868–1869 text, plus a list of all
revisions.
40. Louisa May Alcott papers 1847–1887 Folder 1, first manuscript pages of
Little Women, Concord Free Public Library Archive Collection [accessed
14 July 2017].
41. This is not to claim that Alcott invented the genre of ‘sister stories’; rather
to consider the investment in her work from generations of readers and in
the creation of adaptations.
42. Gabrielle Donnelly (2011) The Little Women Letters: A New Generation of
Sisters (New York: Simon & Schuster).
43. With thanks to Marlowe Daly-Galeano for introducing me to these adapta-
tions with her paper, ‘Little Women and the Ephemeral Horror Mash-Up’,
given at the American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco,
May 2018.
44. Alcott and Lynn Messina (2010) Little Vampire Women (London:
HarperCollins); Alcott and Porter Grand (2010) Little Women and
Werewolves (New York: Random House USA).
45. Little Vampire Women, p. 3.

49. Statistics as of 2 July 2018.
50. https://www.fanfiction.net/crossovers/Little-Women/2663/ [accessed
9 July 2018].
51. The Eight Cousins series has fourteen entries on Archiveofourown.org;
Jack and Jill has three; An Old-Fashioned Girl has two on fanfiction.net;
[accessed 9 July 2018].
55. HarmonyLover, ‘Mending Our Mistakes’, https://www.fanfiction.
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Index1
A Psyche, or The Breath of Childhood,

Absence, 34, 37, 42, 82, 85, 86, 93, 141, 162
109, 119, 126, 134, 177, 208 Researches on Childhood, 141, 167
Adaptation, 5, 6, 21, 187, 188, 190, Alcott, Anna Pratt, 32, 34, 151
194, 197–201, 204, 207, 208, Alcott, Elizabeth Sewall, 34, 40
210n41, 210n43 Alcott, Louisa May, 1–21, 25, 38–42,
Adoption, 52, 65, 111, 113, 51, 79, 105–135, 139,
136n17, 177 161–182, 187–208
Alberghene, Janice M., 7 Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag, 7, 9, 30, 105,
Alcott, Abigail May, 34, 145 106, 121, 124
Alcott, Amos Bronson, 20, 32, 108, autobiography, 26, 28–30, 33,
139, 141–145, 149, 151, 161–167, 34, 43, 47
181, 182n3, 183n12, 192 ‘Back Windows,’ 59, 61, 62
Conversations with Children on the ‘The Blind Lark,’ 54, 116, 122
Gospels, 141, 182n3, 192 ‘The Children’s Joke,’ 61, 62, 178
Observations on the Principles and ‘The Children’s Song,’ 151
Methods of Infant ‘Cockyloo,’ 127, 128, 133
Instruction, 141 Eight Cousins, 7, 8, 10, 13, 18, 35,
Observations on the Spiritual 51, 64, 65, 69, 74, 82, 84, 98,
Nurture of My Children, 141 109, 111, 122, 130, 131,
‘Order of In-door Duties for 137n46, 162, 164, 174, 176,
Children,’ 164 177, 201, 204, 211n51
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39025-9
222 INDEX
Alcott, Louisa May (cont.) ‘My Boys,’ 30, 31, 35

‘Eli’s Education,’ 175, 177, ‘My Mysterious Mademoiselle,’ 97
182, 184n43 An Old-Fashioned Girl, 4, 8–11, 13,
‘Enigmas,’ 97 16, 27, 37, 53, 58, 63, 69, 81,
Flower Fables, 8, 9, 105, 154 99, 114, 126, 141, 157, 179,
‘A Garland for Girls,’ 172 202, 211n51
‘A Hole in the Wall,’ 116 ‘Pansies,’ 172, 174
Hospital Sketches, 31, 125, 154 ‘Philosophers sit in their sylvan
‘How They Ran Away,’ 71 hall,’ 151
‘In the Garret,’ 38, 39 ‘Recollections of My Childhood,’
Jack and Jill, 7, 9, 17, 20, 36, 37, 20, 31, 70, 71, 131, 142, 145,
54, 74, 87, 94, 116, 117, 119, 154, 163, 164, 170, 180
130, 187, 201, 207, 211n51 The Rose Family, 9, 23n34, 105
Jamie’s Wonder Book, 9 Rose in Bloom, 7, 9, 13, 82, 84,
Jo’s Boys, 18, 69, 73, 74, 113, 121, 109–111, 130, 131, 138n87,
128, 141, 149, 150, 154, 170 145, 155, 157, 162, 174, 176,
Journals, 23n27, 26, 27, 36, 81, 124, 187, 201, 204, 205
125, 134, 144, 151, 163, 189 ‘Shadow Children,’ 96
Letters, 26, 27, 38, 44, 125, 144, ‘The Sisters’ Trial,’ 196
151, 189, 197 Spinning-Wheel Stories, 9
‘Little Gulliver,’ 132, 134 ‘Thoreau’s Flute,’ 7, 153,
Little Men, 16, 34, 54, 56, 60, 67, 154, 159n26
69, 73, 74, 81, 87, 112, 114, ‘Transcendental Wild Oats,’ 20, 67,
116, 119, 128, 131, 149, 150, 144, 146, 148, 150,
163–165, 167, 170, 179 163, 184n43
Little Women, 1, 4–10, 12–16, 19, Under the Lilacs, 9, 53, 63, 65,
21, 25, 27, 29–41, 43–47, 73, 87, 169
53–56, 61, 65–68, 71, 79, 81, ‘Will’s Wonder Book,’ 9
86–91, 93, 97, 108, 109, 111, Alice in Wonderland, 43–46
112, 114, 119, 121, 126, 128, Angel in the house, 40, 41, 55, 56,
130, 139, 143, 145, 149–151, 67, 68, 137n46
163, 165, 167–171, 184n42, Archives, 19, 27, 29, 38–43, 197
187, 188, 190, 191, 193–208 Armstrong, Nancy, 86
A Long, Fatal Love Chase, 89 The Atlantic, 51, 87, 125
Lulu’s Library, 7, 9, 32, 71 Auerbach, Nina, 56, 109
‘The Masked Marriage,’ 196 Autobiography, 19, 25–47, 107,
‘May Flowers,’ 11, 17, 89, 171, 172 131, 139
Moods, 51
Morning-Glories and Other Stories,
9, 105, 132 B
‘Mountain-Laurel and Maiden- Barker, Elise, 188
Hair,’ 156 Barrie, J. M., 43
‘Music and Macaroni,’ 72 Baum, L. Frank, 70
INDEX 223
Bedell, Madelon, 33, 34, 196 Consociate family, 67, 77n52, 144,
Bernstein, Robin, 126, 128, 133 147, 149, 179
Blake, William, 53 Coolidge, Susan, 117–119
Bookwork 1978, 204 Cross-dressing, 20, 79, 97–101
‘The Seashore, and What Came of
It,’ 204
Bruhm, Stephen, 54, 57, 79, 80, 89 D
Buell, Lawrence, 32, 142–144, 154, Daly-Galeano, Marlowe, 196,
155, 165 200, 210n43
Bull, Ephraim, 151 D’Amico, Luella, 210n35
Bunyan, John, 14, 69, 195, 201 De Beauvoir, Simone, 194,
Burman, Erica, 115–117, 119, 135 195, 202
Butler, Judith, 3, 97, 101, 106, 133 De Man, Paul, 19, 26, 27
Death, 4, 7, 11, 18, 32, 36, 38, 41,
54–57, 63, 90, 91, 95, 97, 109,
C 113, 122, 123, 126–128, 153,
Canon, the, 13–16, 170–177, 198, 169, 198, 201–205, 207
199, 205, 207 Derrida, Jacques, 29, 41, 42, 68
Carroll, Lewis, 43, 44 Devens, Ellsworth, 36
Cavitch, Max, 54 Dickens, Charles, 14, 16, 53, 55, 63,
Charity, 18, 68, 109, 112, 115, 123, 130 121, 168, 172, 196
Cheney, Ednah, 10 Disability, 17, 18, 20, 65, 74, 75,
Childhood, 1–21, 25, 27, 32, 38, 39, 105–135, 181, 208
42–46, 52–58, 63, 69, 70, 72, Domesticity, 7, 58, 59, 68,
73, 79, 80, 83, 86, 89, 91, 70, 71, 200
93–95, 101, 105, 107, 108, 114, Donnelly, Gabrielle, 199, 200
117–119, 121–127, 133, 135, Douglas, Ann, 29, 30, 108, 142
139–158, 162, 165, 170–172, Doyle, Christine, 162, 168, 170
174, 175, 177, 182, 187, 192, Dusinberre, Juliet, 44, 54
198–200, 203, 204
American childhood, 7–13, 32
wild children, 16, 17, 41, 52, 60, E
70–74, 95, 96, 118, 180, 181 Edgeworth, Maria, 14, 192, 196
Clark, Beverly Lyon, 7, 14, Education, 6, 7, 11, 20, 21, 62, 70,
86, 87, 142 73–75, 96, 117–119, 121,
The Afterlife of Little Women, 158n4 139–141, 147, 150, 153,
Kiddie Lit, 14, 27, 45, 86 155–157, 161–182
Class, 17, 20, 69, 90, 92–94, Eiselein, Gregory, 10, 184n42
105–135, 169, 171, 172, 175, Elbert, Sarah, 125
177, 178, 180, 208 Eliot, George, 42, 172
Cocks, Neil, 46, 107, 135 Emerson, Edward, 27,
Concord, Mass., 8, 31, 37, 51, 69, 160n34, 160n35
139, 144, 154, 158, 197 Emerson, Ellen, 8, 160n35
224 INDEX
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 8, 13, 14, 187–189, 193, 195, 196, 199,
24n46, 32, 37, 140, 141, 200, 210n35, 210n41
151–158, 162, 166, 176, 180, Gilbert, Sandra M., 55, 67
182n3, 192, 196, 197, 203 Grammar, 163, 169, 175,
‘Domestic Life,’ 141 184n42, 197
‘Experience,’ 141 Gubar, Susan, 55, 67
‘Nature,’ 141, 153
in Rose in Bloom, 155
‘Self-Reliance,’ 155 H
‘The Sphinx,’ 141 Hager, Kelly, 13, 14, 24n47, 171,
‘Threnody,’ 141, 153 172, 183n27
‘The Transcendentalist,’ 140 Hamilton, 198
Harding, Walter, 152
Harker, Beth, 203, 205
F ‘Seven Unlived Stories for Beth
Family, 5, 8, 10, 16, 17, 20, 25, 27, March,’ 203
29, 32–37, 43, 52, 53, 55, 56, ‘Shadows,’ 205
59, 61–69, 72–74, 77n56, 82, Harper’s, 87
88–98, 108–111, 113–115, 117, Harry Potter, 63, 190, 193, 196, 201,
123, 124, 127, 128, 130, 132, 205, 209n11
133, 139, 141, 143–145, Hawthorne, Julian, 27
148–150, 167, 169, 170, 173, Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 51, 77n57
176, 178–180, 191, 195, 200, Horror mash-up, 21, 200, 201
203, 204 Hurley, Natasha, 55, 57,
Fan fiction, 21, 187–208 79, 80, 89
Fetterley, Judith, 55
Fielder, Leslie, 55
Fite, Keren, 68 I
The Flag of Our Union, 39 Innie, 205
Flegel, Monica, 189 ‘Boyish,’ 205
Francis, Richard, 149 Innocence, 3, 13, 32, 53–57, 68, 73,
Fruitlands, 20, 139, 145, 147–150 79, 87, 89, 90, 93, 120, 121,
Fuller, Margaret, 7, 140, 162, 180, 126–128, 133, 144, 149, 174,
181, 182n3 175, 200, 203, 208
Intertextuality, 85, 162, 190,
196, 201
G
Gender, 6, 7, 19, 20, 55–57, 60, 61,
67, 69, 71, 73, 79, 82, 84, 88, J
90–101, 105, 106, 134, 166, James, E. L., 190, 200, 201
168, 175, 183n23, 198, James, Henry, 10, 51, 52, 85
199, 205–208 Jellybean_thief, 206
Genre, 20, 21, 25–27, 29–35, 45, 47, ‘The Magic of Girl Pirates,’ 206
51, 63, 69, 125, 142, 143, 145, Jenkins, Henry, 191, 195
INDEX 225
K Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 162

Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox, 149 Performativity, 11, 16, 28,
37, 42, 71, 90, 91,
96–101, 206
L Peter Pan, 43–45, 93
LaPlante, Eve, 33 Philanthropy, 64, 65, 111–113, 115
Lesnik-Oberstein, Karín, 1, 9, 42, 45, Phillips, Anne, 10
101, 192 Plath, Sylvia, 28, 29, 44
Levander, Caroline F., 2, 3, 11, 17 Plotz, Judith, 54
Locke, John, 126, 182n3 Poverty, 17, 18, 20, 65, 69, 90, 95,
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 59 106, 108–116, 122, 123, 127,
Lovelace, Maud Hart, 13 130, 134, 138n82, 141, 172,
175–178, 196
M
MacLeod, Anne Scott, 4, 5, 10–13, Q
32, 52, 173, 200 Queer, 8, 20, 65, 79–86, 90,
Matteson, John, 5, 33 91, 93–97, 101, 106, 107,
May, Samuel Joseph, 34–35 120, 124, 163, 169,
Mayhap, 207 177, 205
‘The Artist’s Model,’ 207
Merry’s Museum, 7, 17
Messina, Lynn, 200, 201 R
Montgomery, L. M., 13, 14, 63–65, Race, 7, 17, 18, 20, 71,
190, 191, 201 105–135, 138n82,
Myerson, Joel, 10, 160n36, 138n87, 138n88,
182n3, 184n43 165, 182n3, 199, 208
Reich, J. E., 188, 190
Reimer, Mavis, 52
N Reisen, Harriet, 97, 142
Nature, 53, 70 Rich, Adrienne, 134
The New Yorker, 25 Rioux, Anne Boyd, 5, 108, 151
Niles, Thomas, 7, 8, 23n45, 195, 197 Rizutto, Lauren, 188, 193, 195, 196,
202, 205
Romanticism, 3, 4, 13, 44, 53, 55–57,
O 60, 68, 121, 126, 140
Orchard House, 69 Rose, Jacqueline, 1, 9, 18, 19, 28, 30,
Orphans, 17, 52, 53, 56, 63–66, 72, 32, 44, 47, 86
73, 112, 113 The Case of Peter Pan, 23n35
On Not Being Able to Sleep, 28
Roth, Jenny, 189
P Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 53, 101, 170,
Parille, Ken, 92 171, 174
Patmore, Coventry, 40 Rowling, J. K., 190
226 INDEX
S U
Sanders, Joe Sutliff, 63, 64 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 54, 63, 126
Sedgwick, Eve Kofosky, 85 Utopia, 57, 69, 107, 112,
Sentimental domestic, 19, 51–53, 55, 121, 128, 134–135,
56, 58–60, 63, 66, 69, 73 139, 144–150, 158,
Series fiction, 196, 197, 204, 210n35 165, 167, 172
Sex and sexuality, 2, 19, 20, 44, 54, 55, Utopia, 134–135
57, 61, 66, 79–81, 84–95, 101,
105, 106, 199, 203, 206, 207
Sexton, Anne, 28, 30, 44 W
Shealy, Daniel, 46, 130, Walls, Laura Dassow, 151, 152
138n82, 138n90 Walsh, Susan, 135n3
Singley, Carol J., 2, 3, 11, 17 Whitman, Alfred, 34, 35
Sisterhood, 5, 88, 111 The Wide, Wide World, 54, 63, 172
Slater, Peter Gregg, 54 Wisniewski, Ladislas (Laddie),
Stadler, Gustavus, 68 31, 34
Stern, Madeleine B., 9, 39 Women, 6, 8, 14, 17, 27, 28, 31, 35,
Stimpson, Catherine, 15 46, 51, 56, 58, 66, 67, 72–74,
Stoneley, Peter, 106, 114, 124 84–88, 92, 99, 100, 111, 112,
Strickland, Charles, 3, 18, 53, 57, 122, 124, 125, 140, 141, 144,
73–75, 89, 90, 94, 167, 181 148, 150, 156, 157, 172, 203
Susina, Jan, 93 Woolf, Virginia, 40, 44
Wordsworth, William, 13, 44, 53,
140, 174
T Work, 6, 29, 54, 56, 59, 63, 65, 67,
Thomas, Bronwen, 190 72, 90, 92, 94–96, 110, 117,
Thoreau, Henry David, 14, 48n40, 130, 134, 141, 142, 147, 148,
138n82, 151–158, 159n31, 150, 163, 169–171, 176, 177,
160n34, 160n35, 162, 166, 176, 182n3, 189, 190, 194, 195,
177, 193, 196 202, 208
Tolkein, J. R. R., 70
Tosenberger, Catherine, 192–194,
205, 208 Y
Transcendentalism, 3, 7, 8, 20, 32, 36, Yonge, Charlotte, 173
114, 123, 126, 139–146, 148–154, The Youth’s Companion, 32
156, 158, 161, 162, 164–167, 179
Trites, Roberta Seelinger, 90, 91
Tuck, Donna-Marie, 88, 89, 102n26 Z
Twain, Mark, 14 Zelizer, Viviana A., 11, 12, 45, 53, 54,
Twilight, 190, 200, 201 65, 173, 200

Louisa May Alcott and The Textual Child A Critical Theory Approach by Kristina West

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CRITICAL APPROACHES TO CHILDREN‘S LITERATURE

Louisa May Alcott

More information about this series at

Louisa May Alcott

Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature

1 Reading Alcott’s Textual Childhood 1

2 ‘We Really Lived Most of It’: The Trouble with

3 Subverting the Sentimental Domestic 51

4 Queering the Child 79

5 Race, Disability, and Class: Alcott’s Peripheral Children105

6 A Transcendental Childhood139

7 ‘The Model Children’: Alcott’s Theories of Education161

8 Retelling Alcott in the Twenty-First Century187

Reading Alcott’s Textual Childhood

Childhood and Literature

© The Author(s) 2020 1

The assumption—or bestowal—of childhood’s status as a ‘field’ positions

that representation. In Levander and Singley’s reading, what gives the

In reading ‘child’, ‘childhood’, and other related constructions, and in

The Little Women Legacy9

or as a basis for comparison with the more successful Little Women. So

Writing an American Childhood

Aunt-Hill (1875), Rose in Bloom: A Sequel to ‘Eight Cousins’ (1876),

The very title, Little Women, is indicative: to Alcott, as to most Americans of

Alcott and the Canon

In the realm of children’s literature, trade publishers happily turn to chil-

that we grind children under our heels.’51 In revaluing Alcott as a canoni-

flowers’ in an effort to be charitable, and to get rid of them, gives them

Alcott’s texts, particularly in relation to education as self-reliance and as a

‘We Really Lived Most of It’: The Trouble

© The Author(s) 2020 25

readings of other texts: biographies, critical studies, and/or Alcott’s family

One of these problems is the attempt to define and to treat autobiography

Genre is something that is imposed, de Man argues, a method of classifica-

claim to reality is deemed necessary to provide value, despite the troubling

In her consideration of ‘the passage between’ private and public, Rose

living as well as writing, Douglas problematizes critical appeals to the ori-

The Trouble with ‘I’

Feeling that I have been unusually fortunate in my knowledge of a choice

The narrator’s claims to ‘knowledge’ and ‘record’, the appeal to ‘other

Retrieving the Real

Transcendentalist circle in which Alcott was raised. Furthermore, the jour-

Alcott and the Archives

A woman in a lonely home,

The Houghton MS reads:

A woman musing here alone,

Another archival read (though this, too, is available in published form)

Jo meantime devoted herself to literature and Beth, who remained delicate

Derrida’s claim is that of the ‘beyond’, the unreachable even by exhaustive

be known. After all, famously uncomfortable with fame, Alcott burned

Real Child, Real Author: Jo, Peter, Alice

[T]his text about childhood is judged to be successful because it is seen as

In this sense, a text deemed to be ‘about childhood’ is frequently read by

something that crosses or exceeds such generic classification? In construct-

Negotiating the ‘Counter-Flow’

Although Shealy’s picture of adolescence ‘then and now’ may be argued

41. Alcott, Letters, ‘To Mary Mapes Doge’, p. 237.

64. Neil Cocks (2014) The Peripheral Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Subverting the Sentimental Domestic

Positioning the Textual Child

© The Author(s) 2020 51

within an assumed reality is troubled by James’ approach to the relative

In this argument, there is no ‘natural’ connection between home and child

1 Reading Alcott’s Textual Childhood 1

2 ‘We Really Lived Most of It’: The Trouble with

3 Subverting the Sentimental Domestic 51

4 Queering the Child 79

5 Race, Disability, and Class: Alcott’s Peripheral Children105

6 A Transcendental Childhood139

7 ‘The Model Children’: Alcott’s Theories of Education161

8 Retelling Alcott in the Twenty-First Century187

standard young man Archie is queering an assumption of age-