Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott (review)

240Reviews with others by male authors of their day—as in her discussion of Harriet Jacobs and Harriet E. Wilson versus Martin Delany. Another of Peterson's approaches is to emphasize a specific text's place in social history. Thus, she situates several of Harper's Reconstruction-era writings within the multiple contexts of the women's rights movement, calls for African-American racial uplift, and education reform efforts. And perhaps most strikingly, "Doers of the Word" examines the Sea Island diary-writing of Charlotte Forten as a (semi)public performance whereby Forten explores issues of transculturation while critiquing her own position of cultural alterity poised between black and white worlds. The cumulative effect of all these readings is to reinforce a central element in Peterson's argument (p. 3)—that the African-American women writers she studies were indeed doers of the word, for whom "speaking and writing constituted a form of doing, of social action continuous with their social, political, and cultural work." Sarah RobbinsKennesaw State University Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox. Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction ofLouisa May Alcott. Knoxville: The Univ. ofTennessee Press, 1993. 228 pages. Paper: $17.00. Now available in paperback, Elizabeth Lennox Keyser's Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction ofLouisa May Alcott brings together in one study readings of the multiple genres of Alcott's fiction. Keyser's series of sharp close readings enables readers to locate among Alcott's early and later work similarities in narrative technique and feminist concerns, thereby suggesting that Alcott's later fiction is not necessarily a radical departure from her early, more radically feminist work. By surveying in chronological order the early anonymously and psuedonymously published thrillers, Alcott's childrens' fiction, and the adult novels, Keyser credits Alcott with more "ideological consistency and artistic control" than is usually recognized by critics (p. xv). Most critics agree that Little Women (1 868-69) marks Alcott "turning to the conventional and formulaic and turning from the darker or more problematic aspects of human, especially female, experience" (p. xiv). Reading across time and genres, however, Keyser attempts to create a "longer trajectory " for Alcott's work (p. xiv). By resisting the impulse to sever in two Alcott's career, Keyser can demonstrate that the subversive quality of the thrillers persists right up through Alcott's final completed novel, Jo's Boys (1886). Keyser argues that "beneath the placid surface [of the domestic fiction ] ... the passions, antagonisms, and power struggles that complicate gender relations in the sensation fiction continue unabated and threaten to erupt" (p. xiv). Thus, for Keyser, Little Women is not a turning point, but Studies in American Fiction241 rather part of a continuum of Alcott's writing. Keyser is not trying to recast Alcott as an author who was consistently and deliberately subversive. Instead she wants to show that, consciously or unconsciously, Alcott always implanted within her text the means for an "oppositional reading" (p. xv). She is careful to state that she "creditfs] Alcott's imagination, ifnot always her conscious intent" with "consistently supply[ing] the means of dismantling the system of values that her more or less conventional plots, characters, and narrators appear to support" (p. xv). The close readings that follow support Keyser's thesis by demonstrating the potentially subversive quality of the "intertextuality and self-referentiality" in Alcott's fiction (p. xv). Keyser's particular focus is the "play within a play" throughout Alcott's work. The plays, stories, tableaux vivants, paintings, and sculptures created by characters, she argues, encode within the larger fictions narratives that challenge the works' apparently happy resolutions. Keyser's reading of the thriller A Marble Woman or The Mysterious Model (1865), which seems to endorse a more or less traditional marriage, points out that the presence throughout the story of a cold marble statue of Psyche, for which the heroine has posed, invokes the myth of Armor and Psyche, the Pygmalion story, and, Hawthorne's The Marble Faun. The story therefore suggests a critique of the way in which the sexually maturing heroine is molded and subdued by her guardian/husband. This and similar readings ofthe early work prepare the reader for Keyser's discussion of the subversive possibilities...