“A Woman Could (Not) Do It” – Role-Play as a Strategy of ‘Feminine’ Self-Empowerment in L.M. Alcott’s “Behind a Mask,” “La Jeune,” and “A Marble Woman”
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Isabell Klaiber
Abstract
Alcott’s sensational stories about actresses and female artists provide the perfect field for experiments with alternative gender roles as women of these professions do not seem to fulfill ordinary female roles in the first place. While literary scholars generally agree on the emancipating use of disguises in Alcott’s sensational fiction, the various purposes gender roles are exploited for have not yet been investigated in any detail. This essay shows that, through their subversive play with established gender categories, some of Alcott’s female characters determine their own social identities as women. Their ‘unfeminine’ deceptions of others explicitly serve their ‘feminine’ virtues and, thus, eventually help to empower these figures as ‘true women.’ In these morally hybrid and sensational female characters, Alcott expands the established repertoire of oppositional female types such as the ‘true woman’ and the femme fatale by introducing the alternative, more complex and individualistic gender category of a ‘feminine femme fatale.’
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- INHALT
- EDITORIAL
- “A Woman Could (Not) Do It” – Role-Play as a Strategy of ‘Feminine’ Self-Empowerment in L.M. Alcott’s “Behind a Mask,” “La Jeune,” and “A Marble Woman”
- The Darker Islam within the American Gothic: Sufi Motifs in the Stories of H.P. Lovecraft
- Irish Tradition or Postdramatic Innovation? Storytelling in Contemporary Irish Plays
- Reconciling Humans with Nature through Aesthetic Experience: The Green Dimension in Australian Poetry
- ‘Putting Things up against Each Other’: Media History and Modernization in Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton
- ‘History is about to crack wide open’: Identity and Historiography in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- INHALT
- EDITORIAL
- “A Woman Could (Not) Do It” – Role-Play as a Strategy of ‘Feminine’ Self-Empowerment in L.M. Alcott’s “Behind a Mask,” “La Jeune,” and “A Marble Woman”
- The Darker Islam within the American Gothic: Sufi Motifs in the Stories of H.P. Lovecraft
- Irish Tradition or Postdramatic Innovation? Storytelling in Contemporary Irish Plays
- Reconciling Humans with Nature through Aesthetic Experience: The Green Dimension in Australian Poetry
- ‘Putting Things up against Each Other’: Media History and Modernization in Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton
- ‘History is about to crack wide open’: Identity and Historiography in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
