Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years

9. The Veiled, the Masked, and the Civil War Woman: Louisa May Alcott and the Madwoman Allegory

170 9 The Veiled, the Masked, and the Civil War Woman Louisa May Alcott and the Madwoman Allegory Keren Fite Though written thirty years ago, The Madwoman in the Attic is still a highly influential text in feminist discussions of the woman writer’s authority . In her discussion of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s feminist poetics, Rita Felski suggests that the madwoman has become a significant allegory of female authorship, “yoking together spatial imagery, psychological diagnosis, and linguistic analysis . . . creat[ing] new ways of seeing, casting familiar works of literature in a startling yet compelling light.”1 Felski points out the construct of the feminist literary critic embedded in the madwoman allegory: the critic is portrayed as either a diligent archeologist or as an avid detective, “burrowing through the layers of language to uncover muffled traces of female identity and desire . . . decipher[ing] the covert marks of the female psyche.”2 Feminist literary criticism of the works of Louisa May Alcott is highly influenced by Gilbert and Gubar’s allegory of the madwoman. In their attempt to “uncover muffled traces of female identity,” feminist critics of Alcott’s literary works either focus on her gothic thrillers as courageous manifestations of female rebelliousness or stress the subterranean gothic elements in her domestic works. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism: “‘To Keep Bright the Devil’s Door Knobs’: Louisa May Alcott’s Revision of the Transcendental Poet Genius Ideal,” Montreal , August 16, 2005. The Veiled, the Masked, and the Civil War Woman 171 This essay will point out the narrow perspective the madwoman allegory imposes on Louisa May Alcott’s literary corpus. The first section will discuss the prevalent metaphors feminist critics “uncover” in Alcott’s works and point out the various ways these metaphors echo the madwoman allegory. This section will also explore Gilbert and Gubar’s explicit construction of the woman artist according to the Romantic male model of authorship and will point out the ways this construct limits the scope of the feminist discussion of Alcott’s literary corpus. The second section will present Louisa May Alcott’s revision of the transcendental poet-genius ideal, an ideal that was highly influenced by the Romantic male model of authorship. Focusing on Henry David Thoreau’s Walden in conjuncture with Louisa May Alcott ’s Little Women, the second section points out the ways in which Alcott criticizes and revises the transcendental poet-genius ideal, and suggests a broader perspective on Alcott’s concept of the artist in general and the artist heroine in particular. The Madwoman Allegory and Louisa May Alcott’s Authorial Image In “Little Women: Alcott’s Civil War,” Judith Fetterley points to the discrepancy between Alcott’s domestic works and her gothic thrillers, arguing that it is “hard to reconcile the authorial image inherent in Little Women with the personality capable of the sensational Behind A Mask.”3 Trying to reconcile the disparity between the children’s friend and the creator of the lurid, Fetterley invokes the Civil War as a metaphor to illustrate an internal conflict between overt domestic values and covert gothic rebelliousness. The Civil War metaphor echoes Gilbert and Gubar’s allegory of the madwoman: the socially conventional narrative that defines a girl’s process of maturation and progress in terms of matrimony and motherhood is condemned as overt “little womanhood,” while the alternative rebellious narrative of a tomboy growing into a creative woman writer who dares to imagine sensational stories , financial independence, and a life of happy spinsterhood is the covert, subversive narrative. Fetterley points out that “Jo’s rebellion is neutralized . . . [she is taken] out of her boots and doublet and her misguided maleidentification . . . into her role as a future Marmee,” consequently arguing that as a writer, Alcott betrayed her own values in compromising her vision of Jo as a rebellious creative female. Fetterley seems to expect Jo to represent Alcott’s personal choice not to marry and finds merit only in what she terms Little Women’s covert rebelliousness against a conventional, nineteenth-century domestic script: “it is to Alcott’s credit that at least covertly if not overtly she recognized that the sugar plum was the poison.”4 172 Keren Fite Also baffled by the incongruence between Alcott’s domestic and gothic works, Angela M. Estes and Kathleen Margaret Lant wonder...