This thesis will examine the stretching of gender expectations in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) and her sensational story “V.V. or Plots and Counterplots”(1865). On the basis of her...Show moreThis thesis will examine the stretching of gender expectations in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) and her sensational story “V.V. or Plots and Counterplots”(1865). On the basis of her writing, Louisa May Alcott seems to have understood before her time that gender is not merely physiological, but also a performance within a social context that has socially-constructed expectations of men and women. Alcott’s characters negotiate their awareness of the need to fulfill society’s expectations in order to be accepted whilst seemingly being aware of the ‘performance’ aspect of gender. Although Alcott’s female protagonists cross the boundaries of the socially-constructed ideals of behavior befitting women, and in some ways could be described as ‘liberated,’ they seek to be a man’s “little woman” and so seek to conform to some aspects of the social expectations befitting their gender. Instead it is Jo, the protagonist of her novel Little Women who deliberately tries to stretch the traditional boundaries of gender construction, desiring the liberties that only men in the mid-nineteenth century had.Show less
