Alcott and the “Woman Cult”
1830s
• Home as haven: cult of domesticity
• Way of pacifying separate but equal
1850s-1860s
• Novels and stories the reflected the dominant ideology of woman’s culture: veneration of motherhood, intense mother-daughter bonds, intimate female friendships
• By 1850s: women writers producing most of the best selling fiction—Brontes, Susan Warner, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and George Sand.
• Quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne (1855): “America is now given over to a damned mob of scribbling women and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.”
Woman Culture
• Artifacts, spaces, and images of 19th Century American culture: Kitchen, mother’s garden
• Matriarchal critique of patriarchal institutions—from slavery to Christianity
• Advocated mothering influence—gentle, nurturing, sweet control, educating power
• Writing as profession, as work—not art
End of the 19th Century
• Woman’s culture breaking down
• 1870s: relationships between mothers and daughters were strained as daughters pressed for education, work, mobility, sexual autonomy, and power outside female sphere
Louisa May Alcott
1. Little Women, 1868
• Tension between female identity and artistic freedom (Jo)
• Patriarchal model of literary career
• Girl’s story: moralistic—bridge between schoolroom and drawing room
• Recommend docility marriage, obedience, used Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to explore women’s experience
• Based on training, experimentation, professionalism, and self-fulfillment
• Model of egalitarian marriage
2. Work, 1873
• Woman’s experience at work: extols very different virtues than Little Women
• Shows range of careers for women
• Challenge to “the canon”
• Does a “muted” culture have a literature of its own, or must it always revise the conventions of the dominant? What do women write about? –concern for social reform, women not to be exploited
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.