Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

"Playing Puckerage": Alcott's Plot in "Cupid and Chow-chow"

1986; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chl.0.0282

1543-3374

Elizabeth Lennox Keyser,

Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research

"Playing Puckerage":Alcott's Plot in "Cupid and Chow-chow" Elizabeth Keyser (bio) Louisa May Alcott, despite the critical attention that she has recently received, remains underrated as a literary artist and misunderstood as a feminist. Eugenia Kaledin, although she puts the case more strongly than most Alcott critics, speaks for many when she deplores the fact that Alcott's "acceptance of the creed of womanly self-denial . . . aborted the promise of her art and led her to betray her most deeply felt values" (251). Like Kaledin, Judith Fetterley believes that Alcott preserved her artistic and moral integrity only in her anonymous and pseudonymous sensational stories. According to Fetterley, "What these stories . . . make clear is the amount of rage and intelligence Alcott had to suppress in order to attain her 'true style' and write Little Women" ("War" 370).1 Unlike Kaledin and Fetterley, Elizabeth Langland reads the adult novel Work as a successful "feminist romance" that affirms "the possibility of growth in female community," but just as Fetterley sees Alcott's rage suppressed in Little Women, so Langland sees suppressed "the model of female development Alcott wanted to propose" (113, 117). Those who do find a consistent feminist vision in Alcott's fiction—whether sensational, adult realistic, or children's—see that vision as only moderately progressive. Ruth K. MacDonald and Sarah Elbert, for example, view Alcott as advocating feminism in both her adult and her children's fiction. MacDonald, however, feels Alcott's feminism is compromised by her emphasis on domesticity and the doctrine of feminine influence: "As independent and strong-minded as Alcott would like women to be, she still finds that they are the moral guardians of the world, standing high on the pedestal where Victorian men had placed them, and caring for men who are obviously unable to care for themselves" (55). Elbert, on the other hand, believes that domesticity was a necessary precondition for Alcott's [End Page 105] feminism. Thus Alcott's heroine Jo March attains "the final stage of true womanhood" by accepting "maternal responsibility for the whole world" (166). In answer to Elbert, I would argue that Alcott, while apparently portraying a fulfilled woman in Jo March, subtly presents us with the "sorrow of self-denial" that Kaledin attributes to Alcott herself.2 And in contrast to all of these critics, much as I have learned from them, I would argue that Alcott is consistently subversive of traditional values for women—even in what appear to be the simplest and most sentimental of her children's stories. Even those critics who praise Little Women ignore or, like MacDonald, dismiss the children's stories as mere potboilers.3 As far as I know Joy A. Marsella is the only critic to have found these stories worth examining, and she admits that in them Alcott was hampered by constricting formulas and a simplistic moral code. Although Marsella is more sympathetic with Alcott as a writer for children than is Kaledin, she ultimately agrees that Alcott "to reach an audience" made "so many concessions that she inhibited her art" (138). These stories, then, present a challenge to those who would defend Alcott's artistic integrity, and a particularly interesting test case is provided by the 1872 story "Cupid and Chow-chow." Kaledin reads it as an "outspokenly hostile argument against the Woman's Suffrage Movement" (256). Marsella reads it as suggesting "cautious approval and acceptance of change; it assumes for women significant roles . . . and yet it affirms the traditional roles and values of 'woman's sphere' " (99). Thus both those who see Alcott as a failed or frustrated feminist and those who see her as a domestic feminist find the story a clear, even outspoken expression of her views. However, in looking only at the surface of the story, these critics forget that the art of writing for children can—and probably should—involve duplicity. As contemporary children's author Penelope Lively has written: "I am not . . . entirely open with my reader. I am keeping something back, I am trying to construct a story for children like an iceberg. Only the tip is showing—the other seven-eighths is invisible, but without it the whole...