Alcott, Louisa May - Elizabeth Keyser (essay date 1986)
Elizabeth Keyser (essay date 1986)
SOURCE: "'Playing Puckerage': Alcott's Plot in 'Cupid and Chow-chow'," in Children's Literature, Vol. 14, 1986, pp. 105-21.
[In the following essay, Keyser finds a radical feminist subtext in Alcott's children's story "Cupid and Chow-chow. "]
Louisa May Alcott, despite the critical attention that she has recently received, remains underrated as a literary artist and misunderstood as a feminist. Eugenia Kaledin, although she puts the case more strongly than most Alcott critics, speaks for many when she deplores the fact that Alcott's "acceptance of the creed of womanly self-denial . . . aborted the promise of her art and led her to betray her most deeply felt values" [Women's Studies, Vol. 5, 1978]. Like Kaledin, Judith Fetterley believes that Alcott preserved her artistic and moral integrity only in her anonymous and pseudonymous sensational stories. According to Fetterley, "What these stories . ....
[The entire page is 5973 words long]
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