Domesticating the School Story, Regendering a Genre: Alcott's Little Men

One of the signs that children’s literature is gaining respectability is the increasing attention paid to Louisa May Alcott in prestigious venues, as feminists negotiate between an early love for her work and subsequent misgivings. Since 1990, articles on Alcott have appeared in Signs, American Literature, and New Literary History. In the latter, Catharine R. Stimpson explores her passionate admiration for Little Women in the framework of theorizing the paracanon, works that (some) people love, the children’s canon becoming the adults’ paracanon (in a move that simultaneously creates space for children’s literature and reinscribes it as subordinate). ¹ So far, however, very little attention has been paid to Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys (1871), where Alcott has shifted her focus from family to school—shifted to a setting where a greater measure of rebelliousness was possible, certainly not altogether out of the question. Furthermore, in writing this school story, and in crossing both genders and generations, Alcott destabilized the conventional codes—deconstructing and regendering, even re-generating, the genre.

The norms for the genre had been established in 1857 by Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the norms for what is too often considered “the” school story—to the extent that divergent stories, both earlier and later ones, have been rendered invisible. ² In a canonical story, set at a British boys’ public school, we would see the arrival of an ordinary good-natured boy, his awe of the older boys, and the larks and scrapes of his early years; we would see him rise through the ranks to the sixth form and become a creature of awe himself. We would witness our hero’s prowess at rugby or cricket, perhaps his valiant attempt to defeat the school bully, perhaps his suffering a wrongful accusation but staunchly bearing the blame. Competition (sports, the fight with the bully) is thus balanced against peer solidarity (sports, not telling tales). Other commentators have underscored the connection of these stories with the imperial project ³ but not the gender connection—how the exclusion of females undergirds the genre.

For the canonical school story emerges when society separates “public” from “private,” “public” schooling from “private” family. The school story symbolically carves out a realm where a boy could move from a private to a more public arena. ⁴ And it does so by eliminating females. Excluding mothers and girls—boys were even chary of admitting that they had sisters—lent the boys authority, an authority enacted in, for instance, the code against telling tales to adults.

These late-nineteenth-, early-twentieth-century stories were written mostly by men. One of the three books on the genre, Isabel Quigly’s The Heirs of Tom Brown, devotes only one short chapter to girls’ books and mentions hardly any women authors of boys’ school stories. The other two critics give even shorter shrift to women authors—these men are, like schoolboys, chary of admitting to sisters. Yet a woman writing about boys is especially well positioned to illuminate the dialectics of the genre and to explore its positioning with respect to gender—and with respect to generations.

As a woman writing across gender (writing about males) and across generations (writing about children), Alcott can probe the instabilities of these two bifurcating, socially constructed categories, especially in a genre as gender marked as the school story (and age marked too, like all children’s literature). Her work becomes a site for mediating conflicting codes and ideologies—here the ideologies associated with adulthood and childhood as they intersect with those of gender and, in passing, those of class.

When women write a boys’ school story they may, for instance, tentatively adopt an accepted code, such as the schoolboy code against talebearing. But perhaps not having fully internalized the code, they at times proceed to contradict it, or are at pains to justify and contextualize it, or maybe (if they are Alcott) transform it. These activities are much less likely—indeed I have found virtually no evidence of them—in writers for whom the code...