Title: “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”
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.’
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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