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theses

Louisa May Alcott’s domestic fiction and romances portray a complicated relationship between objects and nineteenth-century American womanhood. In both genres, virtuous or “real” women produce homemade objects that are invested with sacred meaning; because they represent woman’s ability to produce from nothing, they serve as a metaphor for maternity and motherhood. In contrast, those of Alcott’s characters who don artificial accouterments or fashion objects are always “fallen”; she denies these characters, as artificial women, the redemptive and reproductive powers afforded her “real” ones. I argue that Alcott’s distrust of materialism originates in the fact that these objects inhabit the male sphere: money and property are only relevant because men make them so. Indeed, Alcott’s subtexts argue that mercenary women are no more than prostitutes. Further, because fashionable artifices are simply constraints of woman’s “real” nature created by the Pygmalionesque fantasies of the patriarchy, women who associate with them are “dolls,” or uncanny automatons. This thesis examines Alcott’s distrust of materialism in three genres: short romances—“Pauline’s Passion and Punishment”, “Behind a Mask”, and “Fate in a Fan”—published under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard in 1863, 1866, and 1869, respectively; an 1877 romance that reinterprets Goethe’s Faust titled A Modern Mephistopheles; and her enduring 1868-69 domestic novel, Little Women. The short romances compare mercenary women to prostitutes and impotent automatons. A Modern Mephistopheles reimagines the fallen Margaret from Goethe’s Faust as a Real Woman who resists the temptations of luxuriant wealth and is, unlike the original, able to redeem Alcott’s Faustus before she dies. Finally, in Little Women, Alcott offers a feminine utopia in which women are self-sufficient. I read in this progression Alcott’s displeasure with the fashionable objects and artifices emerging from the rapidly industrializing social landscape of nineteenth-century America, her alignment with the Ideal of Real Womanhood, and her offering of a matriarchal feminine utopia as a solution to the fallen status materialism holds in store for girls and women.

ETD_4847

M.A.

Includes bibliographical references

by Maribeth Paige Shaffer

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10005600001.ETD.000068636

doi:10.7282/T3DB80F4

ETD graduate

The author owns the copyright to this work.