(En)lightening Louisa

On the dust jacket of Whispers in the Dark, a nineteenth-century engraving depicts a young woman’s desperate attempt to break through the locked door of the madhouse in which she is imprisoned. The cover, frontispiece, and division pages between chapters, all cast in ominous black, further accentuate the mood of gloom and terror. All signs point to yet another treatise in which Louisa May Alcott appears as a dismal and repressed Victorian woman, trapped and desperate as her heroine—a viable enough thesis certainly, but one that has been worked and reworked since Madeleine Stern, Joel Myerson, and Daniel Shealy’s reprintings of Alcott’s sensation tales of the 1860s. Happily, there is much more dimension to Elizabeth Keyser’s new treatment of Louisa May Alcott than its physical design might suggest. She approaches her subject from a frankly feminist stance and argues for the coexistence of the conventional and the subversive in Alcott’s work; yet Keyser reshapes and expands upon what has become a newly conventional casting of Alcott as the “children’s friend” on the outside, seething feminist on the inside, and in doing so demonstrates the thoughtfulness of 10 years’ consideration of her subject.

Whispers in the Dark significantly extends Alcott research in two ways that Keyser herself suggests in her introductory remarks: “I see a longer trajectory [than do many other scholars] for Alcott’s career as a richly suggestive artist” (xiv). First, it looks at the entire scope of her literary career, not merely how the sensation tales relate to the novels, or the novels to the children’s stories. Second, in the process, Keyser insightfully considers Alcott the artist: she traces some of Alcott’s recurring motifs; she also suggests some of the ways her writing relates to that of her contemporaries such as Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Charlotte Brontë, as well as to writers who followed her.

Keyser asserts that Alcott’s “longer trajectory” does not take a sudden downturn characterized by inferior writing and abandonment of women’s issues beginning with Little Women, as many recent scholars have argued, but that Alcott artfully continues her critique of society even as she turns increasingly to conventional characters, plots, and narrators. In exploring how Alcott’s conventional structures actually support her subversive subtext, Keyser brings forward Alcott’s literary talents, demonstrating that the textual eruptions some have attributed to uncontrolled rage and frustration are, on the contrary, evidence of Alcott’s artistic control and ideological consistency.

Keyser examines the interaction between conventionality and subversiveness in 10 chapters, each of which extensively discusses one of Alcott’s novels, children’s stories, or sensation stories. Included in the first category are Moods, Work, Diana and Persis, and A Modern Mephistopheles (although the author herself did not seem to consider the last in the same light as the first three—she sent it off to her publisher with the comment in her journal, “Long to write a novel, but cannot get time enough” [Journals 204]). Besides the title piece, she treats the sensation works A Marble Woman, or The Mysterious Model and Behind a Mask or A Woman’s Power. Each novel in the March trilogy is discussed at length, with commentaries on two much lesser known children’s stories, “Patty’s Patchwork” and “Fancy’s Friend” forming the bookends of Introduction and Epilogue. Since Alcott’s sensation tales have been republished, the tendency has been to use them to devalue her accomplishments as a children’s writer. Keyser’s selection and organization values Alcott’s children’s writings in a way that most contemporary scholarship does not.

The strengths of Keyser’s volume are many. The depth and breadth of the discussions, both in terms of the works analyzed and in the scholarship they encompass, make this book valuable to any reader wishing to attain an overall grasp of Alcott’s work. Especially welcome are the scholarly treatments of some of Alcott’s lesser-known works, as in her sophisticated assessment of A...