Honors Theses

Document Type

Thesis

Date of Completion

5-2024

Academic Year

2023-2024

Department

English

Academic Major

English

Faculty Advisor

Amy Qualls, Ph.D.

Faculty Advisor

Russell Keck, Ph.D.

Abstract

Since the advent of the cult of domesticity, the stakes for female characters in domestic literature have been notoriously high. There was no room for flaws, rebellious decisions, and certainly no room for mistakes—whether of the woman’s own accord, or simply as collateral damage of a male character’s immorality. In this shallowly Calvinist domain, women were never more than one broken guardrail away from social ruin or death. In writing Little Women, Louisa May Alcott breaks these molds through unflinching kindness to her female characters from childhood to adulthood, even unto death. Alcott achieves this quietly feminist feat by allowing women to learn and grow through emotions and mistakes that in a different novel may have been dehumanizing; providing them the agency to choose whether to work inside or outside of the home, with equal dignity given to either choice; and providing female characters the agency to choose their life partners and the ability to enjoy egalitarian marriages. Alcott also provides a female authority figure in religion who is both wise and lovingly maternal; and the humanity for her female characters to live and die as regular people, rather than angels or whores.

Little Women has been studied extensively for how it approaches Protestant domestic values, egalitarianism in marriage, the reality of female anger and anxiety, and its complicated sisterly relationships in the midst of other noted domestic works of the same time period. The novel has been both praised and critiqued for how it handles all of these subjects. This thesis seeks to broaden focus and celebrate Little Women as a revolutionary and positive landmark in the history of the genre and depiction of female characters.

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