"My Spirit Was Rebellious Still"

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2013-02-20T13:36:16Z
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Louisa May Alcott also belonged to the group of those woman writers, who recognized the possibility offered by the cult of domesticity and true womanhood, and through writing pieces complying with the public's taste, she succeeded in achieving fame and supporting her family with the help of her writings. The range of genres written by her is very wide, as she went through several phases during her writing career. From the children-book Flower Fables throughout sentimental works like the Little Women series, she wrote sensational stories such as Pauline's Passion and Punishment, and created Gothic fiction like The Marble Woman. Writing little women she managed to find her “True style,” (Fetterley 371) and with time elapsing she arrived at “the tedious sentimentality of A Rose in Bloom or the unrelieved flatness of Under the Lilacs.” (Fetterley 371) She was such a writer, who fought seemingly on both sides of that particular literary battle – anonymously and using pseudonyms on the one side, and assuming her real name on the other. Her Gothic short stories expressed her feminist ideas and her disapproval of the strict constraints inflicted on gender roles, while her sentimental pieces brought her huge popularity. Namely, we cannot by no means talk about any uncertainty or some kind of a radical change of mind she went through, and which resulted in such a contradictory literary work. Alcott rebelled basically against domestic ideology, and starting from the Gothic and finally settling down in the safe realm of the sentimental genre, she never laid her protest aside, which manifests explicitly or implicitly in her several works independently from genres. Through the analysis of Whisper in the Dark, V.V., and Little Women in a chronological order, I am to demonstrate that though all of these works meet the expectations of their genre, they reflect the basic tension between domestic ideology and Alcott's feminist point of view.

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domestic ideology, cult of true womanhood
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