Uprooting Normative Whiteness: Gender and Race Politics in Louisa May Alcott’s Work

Kerstin Rudolph

Louisa May Alcott’s Work: A Story of Experience (1873) referenced three major components typically found in Alcott’s fictional oeuvre: a firm belief in abolition, an investment in women’s rights – expressed thematically in many of her fictions – and an aesthetic adherence to the sentimental genre, best articulated in her famous Little Women (1868). Despite Work’s treatment of the three crucial touchstones of Alcott’s literary career, I argue that this particular novel departs from at least one of them, redefining the other two in the process. Instead of repeating the formula of sentimental fiction with its key element of sentimental sympathy, I claim that Work manipulated this genre and its historically hierarchical relationship between black and white women. Inverting the logic of sympathetic identification also changed Alcott’s interpretation of abolitionist cross-racial female alliances, because she invested her African American characters with the verisimilitude previously assigned only to white femininity. Her historical affinity to abolition and her contemporary political association with women’s rights emerged in Work as a critique uprooting the center of whiteness at the core of dominant understandings of gender and race. Reading Alcott’s novel in this light points to a larger critique of fictions about sentimentality and to a reassessment of the significance of black womanhood in postbellum literature that attempts to define American womanhood.