SOURCE: "'Playing Puckerage': Alcott's Plot in 'Cupid and Chow-chow'," in Children's Literature, Vol. 14, 1986, pp. 105-21.

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 . . . make clear is the amount of rage and intelligence Alcott had to suppress in order to attain her 'true style' and write Little Women." Unlike Kaledin and Fetterley, Elizabeth Langland reads the adult novel Work as a successful "feminist romance" that affirms "the possibility of growth in female community," but just as Fetterley sees Alcott's rage suppressed in Little Women, so Langland sees suppressed "the model of female development Alcott wanted to propose" [The Voyage In, 1983].

Those who do find a consistent feminist vision in Alcott's fiction—whether sensational, adult realistic, or children's—see that vision as only moderately progressive. Ruth K. MacDonald [in Louisa May Alcott, 1983] and Sarah Elbert [in A Hunger for Home, 1984] for example, view Alcott as advocating feminism in both her adult and her children's fiction. MacDonald, however, feels Alcott's feminism is compromised by her emphasis on domesticity and the doctrine of feminine influence: "As independent and strongminded as Alcott would like women to be, she still finds that they are the moral guardians of the world, standing high on the pedestal where Victorian men had placed them, and caring for men who are obviously unable to care for themselves." Elbert, on the other hand, believes that domesticity was a necessary precondition for Alcott's feminism. Thus Alcott's heroine Jo March attains "the final stage of true womanhood" by accepting "maternal responsibility for the whole world." In answer to Elbert, I would argue that Alcott, while apparently portraying a fulfilled woman in Jo March, subtly presents us with the "sorrow of self-denial" that Kaledin attributes to Alcott herself. And in contrast to all of these critics, much as I have learned from them, I would argue that Alcott is consistently subversive of traditional values for women—even in what appear to be the simplest and most sentimental of her children's stories.

Even those critics who praise Little Women ignore or, like MacDonald, dismiss the children's stories as mere potboilers. As far as I know Joy A. Marsella [in The Promise of Destiny, 1983] is the only critic to have found these stories worth examining, and she admits that in them Alcott was hampered by constricting formulas and a simplistic moral code. Although Marsella is more sympathetic with Alcott as a writer for children than is Kaledin, she ultimately agrees that Alcott "to reach an audience" made "so many concessions that she inhibited her art." These stories, then, present a challenge to those who would defend Alcott's artistic integrity, and a particularly interesting test case is provided by the 1872 story "Cupid and Chow-chow." Kaledin reads it as an "outspokenly hostile argument against the Woman's Suffrage Movement." Marsella reads it as suggesting "cautious approval and acceptance of change; it assumes for women significant roles . . . and yet it affirms the traditional roles and values of 'woman's sphere'." Thus both those who see Alcott as a failed or frustrated feminist and those who see her as a domestic feminist find the story a clear, even outspoken expression of her views.

However, in looking only at the surface of the story, these critics forget that the art of writing for children can—and probably should—involve duplicity. As contemporary children's author Penelope Lively has written [in Horn Book Magazine, Vol. 54, 1978]: "I am not.. . entirely open with my reader. I am keeping something back, I am trying to construct a story for children like an iceberg. Only the tip is showing—the other seven-eighths is invisible, but without it the whole thing would sink or capsize. Because if the visible tip of it is the story . . . the other seven-eighths is the substance, the product of all that adult experience and preoccupation that I am trying to share with the child without his ever being aware of it." In exposing the invisible seven-eighths of "Cupid and Chow-chow," I hope to show that the substance is Alcott's radical feminism.

The visible tip involves parallels between contrasting pairs: Cupid and Chow-chow; their mothers, Mrs. Ellen and Mrs. Susan; and their mothers' marriages. The story begins with the first meeting of two cousins—a gentle, loving, but rather vain little boy named Cupid and a rough, fiercely independent little girl named Chow-chow. Cupid, with his golden lovelocks and velvet suit, expects Chow-chow to return his cousinly embrace, but Chow-chow, much affronted, wards him off by throwing stones at him. Later her father, Mr. George, apologizes to Cupid's parents by explaining that his wife, Mrs. Susan, has raised her "according to the new lights,—with contempt for dress and all frivolous pursuits; to make her hardy, independent, and quite above caring for such trifles as love, domestic life, or the feminine accomplishments we used to find so charming." To illustrate, he has Chow-chow deliver a tirade he has taught her on "Free speech, free love, free soil, free everything; and Woman's Puckerage for ever!" All laugh, "for it was delivered with such vigor that the speaker would have fallen on her nose if she had not been sustained by a strong arm," but after the laughter subsides, Cupid, puzzled, asks his mother what it all means. When she responds that it is "only fun," Chow-chow's mother upbraids Cupid's mother, Mrs. Ellen, for not preparing him "to take a nobler part in the coming struggle"; Mrs. Ellen answers that, if she raises him to be as good a man as his father, "no woman will suffer wrong at his hands." By the end of this first episode the lines between the suffragist, Mrs. Susan, and the "true woman," Mrs. Ellen, are clearly drawn.

The weight of these parallel contrasts seems to favor Cupid, his mother, and her traditional marriage. Mrs. Ellen's reduction of the suffrage movement to childish fun, her refusal to violate the sanctity of childhood happiness with disturbing ideas, and her faith in the power of feminine influence to produce just men—all appeal to sentiment and reinforce conventional views. At the same time, Mr. George's catalogue of all that the suffragists are willing to forgo, including love, together with Chow-chow's unconscious parody of all that they are fighting for, including free love, tends to confirm suspicions of the women's movement. Chow-chow's mispronunciation of the word "suffrage" so that it comes out "puckerage" serves to equate the demand for suffrage with baby talk or babble. Further, Chow-chow's dependence upon the "strong arm" of her father, whom we are told she loves best, implies that the suffrage movement would collapse were it not for the tolerance and good will of men. Finally, the baleful looks exchanged by Mr. George and Mrs. Susan, especially in contrast to the understanding looks exchanged by Cupid's parents, imply that demands for suffrage disrupt family peace and harmony.

Chow-chow's rude, unwomanly behavior, which her father attributes to his wife's involvement in the suffrage movement, continues in the next two episodes. First Chow-chow, by accusing Cupid of being a "dandy-prat," shames him into giving up his velvet suit, cutting off his golden lovelocks, and sticking court-plaster on his attractive dimple. Then, after calling Cupid a "fraid-cat," Chow-chow dares him to place his finger in a "hay-cutting machine," where she accidentally crushes it. In both episodes Cupid is praised by the narrator and adult characters for the courage with which he bears indignity and pain. After the accident to Cupid's finger Chow-chow is chastened, and the narrator comments that, in performing "small labors of love, she learned a little lesson that did her more good than many of mamma's lectures." And her unwonted gentleness prompts her father to remark to Cupid's mother, "I have hopes of her yet, for all the woman is not taken out of her, in spite of the new lights." Although Mrs. Susan stubbornly insists that nursing Cupid is simply preparation for Chow-chow's medical career, Cupid's mother calls it a "good lesson in loving and serving others for love's sake, as all women must learn to do soon or late." Ostensibly, the haircutting and "hay-cutting machine" episodes demonstrate that Cupid is neither a "dandy-prat" nor a "fraid-cat" but a true man and that Chow-chow, were it not for her mother's faulty teaching and bad example, would be a true woman.

Chow-chow's softening during Cupid's convalescence anticipates her own and her mother's change of heart. But first Alcott strengthens the negative parallel between mother and daughter by having Chow-chow agree to "marry" Cupid and then add "certain worldly conditions which she had heard discussed by mamma and her friends." Once again, the narrator, Mr. George, and Mrs. Ellen deplore Chow-chow's unreasonableness. Mr. George, when appealed to, calls her "a little goose" and suggests that such materialism had kept him and his wife from enjoying "love's young dream." Mrs. Ellen tries to help by buying flowers from Cupid's garden and by teaching Chow-chow "sundry feminine arts . . . for Mrs. Susan was so busy hearing lectures, reading reports, and attending to the education of other people's children that her own ran wild." But when she and Cupid finally play house, Chow-chow quickly tires of the domestic role; instead, she insists on attending a "puckerage lecture" and stubbornly refuses to share a pie. Mrs. Susan, who eavesdrops with the other adults, is embarrassed by this parody of her marriage. And when Chow-chow walks out, leaving Cupid to care for their doll family, Mrs. Susan tacitly admits her own fault by acknowledging that Chow-chow is in the wrong.

Chow-chow's own conversion is accompanied by a litany of praise for womanly women and of blame for those who make unreasonable demands. Following the breakup of her "marriage," Chow-chow amuses herself by delivering "the droll preachment her father had taught her in ridicule of mamma's hobby." The remorseful Mrs. Susan begs her husband to stop it, calling it "so absurd." Mrs. Ellen, having gained the victory, tries to be conciliatory and consoling: "There is some sense in it, and I have no doubt the real and true will come to pass when we women learn how far to go, and how to fit ourselves for the new duties by doing the old ones well." The narrator adds that Mrs. Ellen "kept herself so womanly sweet and strong that no one could deny her any right she chose to claim." Mr. George, not quite so magnanimous as Mrs. Ellen, cannot resist giving a little lecture of his own: "She is like so many of those who mount your hobby, Susan, and ride away into confusions of all sorts, leaving empty homes behind them. The happy, womanly woman will have the most influence after all, and do the most to help the bitter, sour, discontented ones." As though to demonstrate still further her mother's folly, Chow-chow "burst into a tremendous harangue . . . as if her wrongs had upset her wits." After the secretary on which Chow-chow is standing falls out from under her and Cupid saves her from injury, Mr, George warns against shaky platforms, but by now both Chow-chow and her mother are ready to renounce the "puckerage" cause. The narrator tells us that Chow-chow "like a true woman, though she demanded impossibilities at first, yet when her heart was won . . . asked nothing but love, and was content with a saucepan." The story ends with both Chow-chow and her mother sealing their surrenders with "a kiss of peace" after vowing never to "play that nasty old puckerage any more."

How are we to reconcile such a vow with Alcott's consistent defense of suffragism? In Alcott's Work, published a year after "Cupid and Chow-chow," Christie Devon, a widowed mother, finds her calling as a public speaker for women's rights. Characterizing herself as "'strong-minded,' a radical, and a reformer," Christie feels that "this new task seems to offer me the chance of being among the pioneers, to do the hard work, share the persecution, and help lay the foundation of a new emancipation." In an 1875 letter to the Woman's Journal Alcott compared women's protests to the shot "heard round the world"; that same year she attended the Woman's Congress where she approvingly noted young women "getting ready to play their parts on the wider stage." Alcott actually defended the suffragists against the false stereotype she herself seems to have created in Mrs. Susan, for she wrote to the Woman's Journal in 1883 that "the assertion that suffragists do not care for children, and prefer notoriety to the joys of maternity, is so fully contradicted by the lives of the women who are trying to make the world a safer and better place for both sons and daughters, that no defense is needed." Finally, in 1885, Alcott wrote to the American Woman Suffrage Association that it was impossible for her to "ever 'go back' on woman suffrage." She added that "I should be a traitor to all I most love, honor and desire to imitate if I did not covet a place among those who are giving their lives to the emancipation of the white slaves of America" and professed herself "willing to bear ridicule and reproach for the truth's sake."

Although Chow-chow and Mrs. Susan betray their cause, Alcott in describing their betrayal does not, for from the beginning of the story she undercuts the sentimental views of both the "true woman," Mrs. Ellen, and the narrator. The story's opening words—"Mamma began it by calling her rosy, dimpled, year-old baby Cupid"—are significantly ambiguous, for to what does the "it" refer? The rest of the paragraph allows us to deduce what the narrator means by "it": Cupid's ability to love everybody and make everybody love him. But the rest of the story reveals what the author means by "it": nothing less than the whole trouble between Cupid and Chow-chow, which as we have seen, represents the whole trouble between the sexes.

In the first episode, for example, Cupid's assumption that Chow-chow "must love him," an assumption encouraged by Mrs. Ellen, leads to amorous aggression. Slipping up behind Chow-chow, this "contented young peacock" embraces her so that, when she looks up, she sees "two red lips suggestively puckered for a hearty kiss." When the indignant Chow-chow struggles to free herself, Cupid's "velvet arms pressed her firmly," and his kisses "lit upon her nose, chin, top-knot, and ear; for, having begun, Cupid did not know when to leave off." In fact, this attempt to "do the honors of his pleasant home like a gentleman" reads something like a rape. And if read in this way, Cupid's "puckered" lips are indeed "suggestive"—suggestive of a connection between male "puckerage" or sexual aggression and the demand for female "puckerage" or political power. Moreover, the definition of a "pucker" as a "ridge" or "wrinkle," its affinity with such words as "pocket" or "purse," and Chow-chow's innocent association of "free love" with "Woman's Puckerage" all suggest the story's concern with exploring women's sexual nature and men's sexual tyranny.

Alcott underscores the need to restrain male and explore female "puckerage" in the haircutting and "hay-cutting machine" episodes. In the first of these Alcott's allusions to the story of Samson imply that Cupid, rather than establishing his masculine identity, is tricked by Chow-chow into surrendering it. At first glance the gentle Cupid, called an "effeminate boy" by Mrs. Susan, would seem to have little in common with the biblical hero: Samson's masculine strength is in his hair whereas Cupid's lovelocks seem signs of effeminate weakness; Samson betrays his secret in unmanly fashion whereas Cupid consents to cut his hair in an effort to prove his manhood. But in addition to his great physical strength, Samson is remembered for his cupidity—his desire for women—and his violence, the massacres he perpetrates after desire has led him to betray himself. As Phillips P. Elliott has written, Samson "is the incarnation of the kind of power which is out of control" [The Interpreter's Bible, 1953]. Cupid, in his initial assault on Chow-chow, demonstrates on a diminutive scale the unrestrained desire that, in Samson's case, leads to wanton destruction and eventual self-destruction. And in both cases enslavement to desire leads to more literal enslavement: Samson is taken prisoner by the Philistines, and the shorn Cupid is described as Chow-chow's "slave."

Just as the loss of Samson's hair precedes the loss of his eyes, so the loss of Cupid's hair precedes another symbolic castration—the near-loss of his finger. Chow-chow, challenging Cupid to prove his manliness still further, places his "plump forefinger between two wheels . . . gave a brisk turn to the handle, slipped in doing so, and brought the whole weight of the cruel cogs on the tender little finger, crushing the top quite flat." According to the narrator's sentimental interpretation, Chow-chow insists, as "penance," on watching the doctor "dress the 'smashed' finger" and flourish "the bright instruments." But what passes for "penance" could very well be pleasure. Like Jane Eyre after Rochester has been maimed and blinded (and Jane too is eager to cut his hair), Chow-chow now agrees to marriage. None of the adults so absorbed in observing the two children draws quite the right conclusion from these episodes, for rather than teaching manly courage and womanly compassion, they indicate that men's need to prove their masculinity, to meet social expectations of masculine behavior, actually unmans them—or prompts women to try to do so.

But Cupid, for all his masculine aggressiveness and desire to prove his manliness, is closer to the feminine stereotype, and Chow-chow, despite her feminine wiles in thwarting him, is closer to the masculine. In the opening paragraphs Cupid is described as if he were a little girl of the sugar-and-spice variety. In order to gain and preserve love, he takes great pains with his appearance and frequently consults his mirror. When Chow-chow chides him about his vanity, he allows her to cut his hair, after which he pleads pathetically, "Do you like me better now?" Thus Cupid's vanity and its reform derive from a single source: an overwhelming need for love and approval. And since Cupid's reform is other-directed rather than inner-directed, he is vulnerable to Chow-chow's capricious charge that he "ain't half so pretty" as he was before. Cupid, then, is the woman who must somehow cultivate her beauty while preserving her humility—or at least the appearance of it; Chow-chow is the man who derides feminine vanity while spurning the woman not vain enough to attend to her appearance. And once again Mrs. Ellen, by instilling in Cupid this excessive eagerness to please, can be said to have begun "it" or to be responsible for Cupid's vulnerability.

However, there is more to Chow-chow's behavior than masculine contempt for feminine vanity, as is suggested by her calling Cupid's attractive dimple an "ugly hole" and by her insisting that he refrain from "fingering it." The covering of the dimple with court-plaster and in the next episode the crushing and the "dressing" of the finger indicate men's ambivalence toward women's sexuality or "puckerage." With Cupid's dimple covered, Chow-chow, like Victorian men, is spared the reminder of women's sexual nature, and with both dimple and finger covered Cupid, like Victorian women, is denied the opportunity to explore, develop, and enjoy it. Yet, as we have seen, Chow-chow on one level represents conventional feminine thought and behavior, and on this level her fear of and revulsion at Cupid's dimple express female self-hatred as well as male misogyny. Just as Cupid sees Chow-chow as his "only mirror," so Chow-chow sees in Cupid a mirror of all that her male-dominated world has taught her to despise in herself.

Alcott's attack on masculine sexual tyranny and feminine emotional dependency is strengthened by parallels between "Cupid and Chow-chow" and two other works that contain haircutting scenes: "The Rape of the Lock" and The Mill on the Floss. In the most explicit of these allusions, her use of Pope's phrase "fatal shears," Alcott invites us to see the sexual significance of the children's behavior. For Belinda, who like Cupid is narcissistically vain about her curls, does not willingly sacrifice her hair and indeed regards the theft of a single curl as tantamount to rape. Thus this allusion sheds light on the contradictory situation of women, who are conditioned to excite male interest, as Belinda and Cupid do with their curls, but also to resent the aggressive interest they thereby excite, as Belinda and Chow-chow do their attempted "rapes." The way in which Alcott splits masculine and feminine characteristics between the two children is further suggested by their similarities with Eliot's Maggie Tulliver. Physically the unruly and rebellious Maggie resembles Chow-chow, and her contempt for her dainty cousin Lucy, like Chow-chow's contempt for Cupid, reveals ambivalence toward her own femininity. But though she possesses Chow-chow's wild black hair, Maggie resembles Cupid in her willingness to cut it in a vain attempt to win approval. Like Cupid, Maggie is a slave to those she loves and suffers countless rebuffs and insults from her brother Tom, whom she would do almost anything to please. In any conflict "the need of being loved, the strongest need in poor Maggie's nature, began to wrestle with her pride and soon threw it." Masculine tyranny, like Chow-chow's "love of power," feeds and grows on feminine dependency.

In the marriage sequence, however, Alcott shows that women's economic—as opposed to emotional—dependency enslaves both women and men. When Chow-chow unreasonably demands that Cupid earn the money on which to marry while she waits in idleness, she imitates her mother's pragmatic conservatism, not her radicalism. The insistence of both mother and daughter that their spouses be good providers seems less an expression of their mercenary natures than of their resentment at being excluded from the world of remunerative labor and at being relegated instead to the domestic sphere. And the brief paragraph describing Chow-chow's instruction in housewifely arts, which include hemming a tablecloth, dusting, and concocting "Coopy's favorite pudding," seems subtly designed to justify that resentment. The narrator deplores the fact that these "virtuous efforts soon flagged" and "ended in ennui," but the word sums up the effect of such efforts on any lively intelligence. By the standards of Mrs. Ellen and the narrator, Mrs. Susan's bad example has produced an unreasonable, unfeeling, and unfeminine daughter. But Alcott actually points up the absurdity of traditional sex roles: the male works himself to death so that the couple can afford to marry; the female bores herself to death while waiting until they can do so.

Cupid, by working to buy Chow-chow's acceptance, becomes a typical male martyr. But just as he earlier represented women's emotional dependence, here he also represents their economic dependence. Often considered unmarriageable unless able to make a financial contribution to the marriage, women were ill-equipped to do so by means of their own exertions. Cupid must rely on his charm in order to raise money: "Then he went about among his friends, and begged and borrowed small sums . . . pleading for a temporary accommodation so earnestly and prettily that no one could refuse." Even though he works in his garden, the reference to his injured hand suggests how handicapped he is for any economic endeavor, and his mother, by purchasing his nosegays at inflated prices, only fosters an illusion of self-sufficiency. As we have seen, Mrs. Ellen tries to provide Chow-chow with the domestic lessons that Mrs. Susan has neglected, but this episode better supports Mrs. Susan's charge: that Mrs. Ellen has not prepared Cupid "to take a nobler part in the coming struggle."

In the houseplaying scene Alcott continues to undermine what appears to be her antisuffrage statement by having Cupid and Chow-chow literally play the traditional roles. For example, Cupid "put on papa's hat, took a large book under his arm, and went away" to work, while Chow-chow "bestirred herself at home in a most energetic manner." In the evening Cupid wishes to relax after his day's labors, but Chow-chow, who has remained at home, craves the stimulation of her "puckerage" meeting. Even though Cupid objects at first to spending the evening at his club, once there he becomes thoroughly absorbed and does not return home until time for breakfast the next morning. When Chow-chow resents being taken for granted and walks out, Cupid suddenly finds himself helpless: "It was truly pathetic to see poor Mr. Cupid's efforts at housekeeping and baby-tending." Earlier Cupid's blissful "ride on the rocking-horse with his entire family about him" had ended in disaster, suggesting that the traditional marriage, with its sexual division of labor and recreation, is as dangerous a "hobby" as "puckerage."

Alcott further condemns the way in which traditional marriage restricts women to the private sphere by once again inverting sex roles. Although Chow-chow gets the meals and Cupid goes to work, she gives the orders, makes the decisions, and, by refusing Cupid his share of the pie, ends the game. It is she who, in her craving for action and excitement, rocks carelessly, upsetting their doll family, and it is she who walks out, "rejoicing in her freedom," leaving Cupid to experience the trials of a single parent. After the deaths of their children, he tries to amuse himself, but "these wanderings always ended near the ruins of his home." Chow-chow, on the other hand, "bustled up" to give her "puckerage" lecture and so forget her private cares in public activity. One surmises that, were it not for her untimely accident, Chow-chow would have recovered from the loss of domestic happiness, whereas Cupid, who lacks her resources, gives every sign of remaining inconsolable. Although it is Chow-chow who, after her accident, is described as asking "nothing but love," it is Cupid who throughout the story makes one sacrifice after another in order to obtain it and seems utterly dependent upon it. And, as we have seen, his sacrifices earn him a condescending acceptance, not love.

Cupid's injuries, humiliations, and utter helplessness when Chow-chow deserts him should enable us to discern the ironic distance between Alcott and those who have been taken as representing her views: the sentimental narrator, the sardonic Mr. George, and, especially, the "true woman," Mrs. Ellen. From the story's opening words, Alcott implies that it is Mrs. Ellen who is responsible for Cupid's physical and psychic vulnerability. By naming him "Cupid," after the diminutive version of Eros, she seems determined to infantilize him. As Mrs. Ellen tells Mrs. Susan, she does not "care to disturb his happy childhood with quarrels beyond his comprehension," but she also begrudges him those experiences that would move him beyond childhood. Significantly, when Cupid and Chow-chow quarrel, Mrs. Ellen predicts and even hopes that Cupid will soon give in even though the other three adults believe that Chow-chow is in the wrong. And instead of letting Cupid fight his own battles, Mrs. Ellen wants to intervene and "help the dears bridge over their little trouble." But perhaps most important, Mrs. Ellen, by naming her son Cupid and by prizing the lovelocks that contribute to his sexual ambiguity, seems intent on denying his sexual nature and the nature of Eros, or adult passion, itself. Cupid and Chow-chow achieve a truce when, under Mrs. Ellen's influence, both surrender their "puckerage"—their potential for adult sexual passion and political participation—and instead become little man and little woman. The chaste kiss that Mr. George and Mrs. Susan exchange in imitation of the child couple suggests that Mrs. Susan's unilateral surrender of her "puckerage" has not made their relationship more mature but has actually reduced them both to the level of children.

Yet Mrs. Ellen's doctrine of womanly influence seems supported when at the end of the story Cupid divides the pie "with masculine justice" while invoking Mamma's teaching: "The fairest way is to cut it 'zactly in halves, and each have a piece. Mamma says that's the right thing to do always." According to Mrs. Ellen, a woman appeals to masculine justice with her sweetness and insures the efficacy of that appeal by raising her sons to be just men. But Alcott's linking of feminine influence with masculine justice in the division of the pie actually undermines this doctrine, for she suggests that while women like Mrs. Ellen can inculcate and appeal to the principle of justice, they must rely on men to enact it. And by allowing men to determine what constitutes equality, they perpetuate the "separate but equal" spheres that are not really equal at all. Similarly, the narrator's sentimental notion that no one can deny the claims of a "womanly woman" seems at first to be supported, for Cupid gives Chow-chow much more of the pie than she asks for. But Alcott, by having Chow-chow ask for a mere taste when half the pie belongs to her, implies that the "womanly woman" can be depended upon never to claim her rightful share.

Finally, Mrs. Ellen's faith in feminine influence as the means of insuring masculine justice seems undercut by another parallel with The Mill on the Floss. Tom Tulliver, not content with masculine justice, exercises masculine magnanimity by allowing Maggie the more desirable piece of jam puff. Like the chastened Chow-chow, who wants just a "tiny bit" of the pie, Maggie at first is reluctant to eat her share. But finally at Tom's urging she devours it, only to have him condemn her as greedy and cruelly abandon her. Maggie's lesson, then, is that masculine justice and even magnanimity may exact a heavy toll in female suffering.

Thus the doctrine of Mrs. Ellen, the doctrine that Alcott seems at first to endorse, involves women in a self-defeating circle. Like Cupid, Mrs. Ellen, and the chastened Chow-chow, they rely on sweetness to earn as rewards those rights that should be theirs regardless of their power—or lack of it—to please and inspire love. And because they are dependent upon that power, they must be careful not to offend or alienate men, as Mrs. Susan and the suffragists do, by insisting upon those rights. In short, women, because they are conditioned to believe that their welfare depends upon their power to elicit love, refuse to risk its loss even to gain the political power that would make them independent of it. Alcott, by showing us how Chow-chow and her mother "go back" on suffrage, is not betraying her own feminist values Rather she is demonstrating women's need for political power and, in the story of Cupid's disappointments, exposing the inadequacy of feminine influence.

True, feminine influence does seem to triumph in the sense that Cupid, by patiently enduring his injuries and humiliations, succeeds in transforming the lives of those around him, whereas Mrs. Susan, by railing against her injuries, accomplishes nothing. However, Mrs. Susan's failure is illuminated by her husband's warning against shaky platforms, meaning of course the platforms of the suffragists. At first Alcott seems to imply that only by gaining the support of men can women earn their rights, for Chow-chow when she used "Papa's knee" as a platform was "sustained by a strong arm" and did not fall. Yet perhaps it is the precarious perch on papa's knee that makes the sustaining arm necessary. In fact the platform of Chow-chow and her mother proves treacherous not because they lack masculine support but because they are too dependent, both emotionally and economically, upon it. In another sense, then, it is masculine power that triumphs. Chow-chow's platform collapses in the final scene only after Mrs. Ellen, her father, and even her mother have denounced it. As her father predicts that "the happy, womanly women will have the most influence after all," Chow-chow "burst into a tremendous harangue .. . as if her wrongs had upset her wits. All of a sudden the whole secretary lurched forward . . . and the marble slab came sliding after, as if to silence the irrepressible little orator forever." Betrayed by her mother to the equivalent of the Philistines, Chow-chow responds, like Samson, by almost burying herself beneath the ruins of her rage. Thus feminine influence conspires with masculine power to madden those indignant at their wrongs and silence the demand for their redress.

Unlike Eugenia Kaledin I do not wonder that "Louisa did nothing to try to keep 'Cupid and Chow-chow' out of the story anthology Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag" and that she made it a title story, for rather than betraying her feminist values it conveys them in a remarkably compressed form. And as though she wanted at least a few of her readers to discern the shape of her entire fictional iceberg, Alcott included in the same volume a story entitled "Mamma's Plot" In this story a little girl named Kitty is disturbed because her boarding school headmistress insists on reading the girls' letters home and correcting them as though they were compositions. Kitty's mamma, although she does not approve of this repressive policy, feels that her daughter should submit to it—or at least appear to do so. However, mamma enables Kitty to circumvent the policy by providing her with notepaper of different colors, each of which conveys a covert message. By adopting this strategy Kitty can indicate her desperate loneliness while writing that "our meeting will be the more delightful for this separation." "Mamma's Plot," it seems clear, is a paradigm for Alcott's "plot" in "Cupid and Chow-chow" and other of her neglected children's stories. Although the action of the story, like Kitty's words, would seem to indicate submission and conformity, its ironic reversals, juxtapositions, word play, and allusions conspire, like the color of Kitty's paper, to tell another story.

Madeleine B. Stern has argued on the basis of Alcott's feminist letters to the Woman's Journal that "her feminism was the feminism of a human being impatient with indifference, apathy, and intolerance. Neither humorless nor merely aggressive, hers was a firm and convincing advocacy that advanced a cause while it enriched a life." In "Cupid and Chow-chow" Alcott does not abandon this advocacy but simply conceals it for what Penelope Lively calls "the best possible motive." Writes Lively, "It is not that I am sugaring the pill or disguising instruction as something else but simply that I am refusing to abandon the things that interest me on the grounds that they may be too complex for someone of ten or twelve." The tip of Alcott's fictional iceberg may present Chow-chow playing and abandoning the game of puckerage, but her concealed seven-eighths is serious—not only about suffrage but about the need for far more radical reform.