Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

Abraham Lincoln is quoted as saying, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe for the first time. The book that the former president is referring to is Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a 1850s book about the moral wrongs of slavery. It has been said to be the most influential anti-slavery book that has ever been written. Harriet Beecher Stowe is an effective author. She uses numerous literary devices such as facile characters, character foils, and symbolism to highlight her abolitionist views and constructs a persuasive argument against slavery.

Louisa May Alcott’s “My Contraband” explores the controversial aspects of gender roles, interracial relationships, sexual desires, and political imagination during the climax of the American Civil War. Alcott’s viewpoint and argument is framed by utilizing main characters that would have been considered stereotypically inferior peoples at the time: Faith Dane (a female nurse) and Robert (a mixed “mulatto” and freed slave). The author daringly challenges views held by a majority of the U.S. population during this time period and presents Faith and Robert as characters that have seemingly transgressed their respective social spheres. In doing so, Alcott’s writing serves as a “safe” site for the further articulation and exploration of gender, race, class, and sexual conventions already in place. This story effectively reasserts white womanhood as the center of social and political thought while at the same time relegates “blackness” – and everything it stands for in the work – to the margin of its emancipating and hopeful narrative. The foremost notion to understand from Alcott’s “My Contraband” is that the employed moments of white and black interaction, in the form of a white woman and racially mixed black man, allow for the examination of the possibilities and results of transgressing heavily defended racial, gender, and sexual boundaries that were in place in the 19th century.

Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl allows Harriet Jacobs, speaking through the narrator, Linda Brent, to reveal her reasons for making public her personal story of enslavement, degradation, and sexual exploitation. Although originally ignored by critics, who often dismissed Jacobs ' story as a fictional account of slavery, today it is reported as the first novel narrative by an ex-slave that reveals the unique brutalities inflicted on enslaved women. Gabby Reyes

George Washington once said, “I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality”. While America has yet to reach an era where injustice is nearly or completely eradicated, we have most definitely progressed from the Great Depression in the 1930s and World War II. In World War II there was a black American fighter pilot group, named the Tuskegee Airmen, who suffered the racial prejudices of America despite fighting for America. Similarly, injustice is widespread in Maycomb County, a fictional town set in the Great Depression of the 1930s. In Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird characters, like Scout and Atticus, face injustices that they must overcome. Similarly, in the Achieve 3000 article “America Says

One thing that people seem to forget is that people seem to become desensitized after a certain amount of time. Accomplishing the things that Alcott did during her time of the Civil war, allowed her to become a better person, more mature. Fortunately, Louisa desired to know life in all its uncertainties, being given an opportunity to experience life in “all its true variety”. As a nurse, she saw and bandaged thousands of wounded soldiers, little did she know that maybe she fell in love with one man in

Louisa May Alcott is an American Novelist best known as the author of the novel “Little Women”. Louisa was born in November 1982, grew up in Germantown- Washington D.C and was known to be an abolitionist, feminist and also a naturalist. Being a naturalist meant that she believed that nothing existed beyond the natural earth i.e. no such thing as spirituality or the supernatural. Her family suffered from financial difficulties and so Alcott had to work to support her family in an early age. She penned the story “My Contraband” (1869) which was formerly known as “The Brothers” (1863). Contraband was a black slave who escaped to or was brought within union lines (Alcott 759). In “My Contraband”, Louisa

The Civil War affected both England and France, economically by taking out a trading partner of both countries, by challenging their morals because neither wanted to support slavery, and politically because England and France wanted a weaker United States.

Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl uses clear detail, except when talking about her sexual history, to fully describe what it is like to be a slave. Jacobs says that Northerners only think of slavery as perpetual bondage; they don 't know the depth of degradation there is to that word. She believes that no one could truly understand how slavery really is unless they have gone through it. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl do not only tell about the physical pains and hard labor that she went through. It mostly concentrates on the emotional viewpoints on it and what it did to shape who she is. When writing her story, Jacobs had a clear motive. Her motive was one of a political taking. She writes through her experiences and sufferings to make it clear to people, mainly the Northerners, and more specifically white women in the North, how slavery really is. She does not want sympathy, however, she does want "to arouse the women in the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women of the South, still in bondage" (2). Jacobs wants people to take action in antislavery efforts. Jacobs in telling her story uses many techniques to make it effective. Some of the techniques that she uses are dealing with the use of her language, her selections of incidents and details, and her method of addressing an audience.

These men would look out for Louisa and her three sisters, keeping the girls from going hungry and cold in the harsh New England winters. The men’s kindness and direct influence on Louisa as she grew up would add to the influence reform movements had on Louisa May Alcott.

Anna Alcott was the model for Meg March. Both these characters shared common life events. They both married a man called “John” and both gave birth to twins. They were both the eldest in the family. Louisa’s little sister, May, was the model for Amy. They were both graceful and poised at a young age and very materialistic. The youngest of the Alcott girls, Elizabeth was the model for Beth in the novel. Not only did they share the same namesake as the youngest March character Beth; they both shared a childhood death due to scarlet fever. They both died at a very young age. Evidently, Alcott was the model for Jo. They were both tempestuous and of wild nature. They were both females living in the Victorian Era who defied the norms of their times. At the age of fifteen, she wrote in her diary, “I will do something by and by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write anything to help the family and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t” (Laire 10). Women of that time did not normally focus on getting jobs; they left it to their male counterparts to bring home the income. Alcott and her sister both took on teaching jobs, though her dream was to become an actress. By the age of twenty, she knew her real talent was to write. To please the readers, she quickly understood the reading market and started experimenting with different writing styles. This gave her

Little Women is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), the title of the book was meant to highlight the inferiority of women as compared to men, or, alternatively, describe the lives of simple people, "unimportant" in the social sense. This novel was written in New England during and after the American

"Four women, taught by weal and woe To love and labor in their prime. Four sisters, parted for an hour, None lost, one only gone..." (365-366). Jo wrote these lines in a poem, after Beth died. This is the most significant struggle for Jo. Jo and Beth are the two middle sisters in the classic novel, Little Women (1869) written by Louisa May Alcott. This is a classic novel about an American family of four daughters, a father who is off at war and a mother who works for the food. Jo and Beth are best friends and Jo sets the example for Beth.

Louisa Alcott’s novel Little Women is posed during the Civil War. There are four girls: Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. They live with their mother while their father is away fighting in the war. Little Women displays many themes. However, feminism is one of the important themes displayed. During the Civil War, women were expected to get married, and while Jo portrays feminism, she gets married in the end of the novel. This aspect demonstrates that even though someone wants to change the way something is, it cannot be completely changed because of society’s ideals. In Alcott’s novel Little Women, the author uses Jo to demonstrate femininity through the use of dialogue, imagery, and behavior.

Louisa May Alcott, best known as the author of Little Women, was an advocate of women’s rights and temperance. Published in 1868, Little Women follows the lives, loves and tribulations of three sisters growing up during American civil war. The independence of women is a major theme in Little Women. Since its publication the novel has constantly been read and remembered for its feminist spirit. Little Women examines the place of women in society by presenting the portraits of several very different but equally praiseworthy women. We experience their multifarious interpretations of femininity and we see a range of diverse possibilities for integrating women into the society.

In the book Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, it is evident that the main character, Clarissa Dalloway, double persona is Septimus Smith. While Clarissa proves to be more rational, Septimus is irrational. Clarissa shows optimism with her life and finding her true identity while Septimus is someone who experiencing insanity and madness. Although she never meets him and their lives are vastly different, the two characters actually mirror each other. Clarissa and Septimus share many characteristics and think in similar manners. Septimus serves as a contrast between the veteran working class and upper class. Throughout the book, Septimus’ thoughts parallel Clarissa’s and can be seen as an echo in some ways. This illustrates how the line between sanity and insanity can become blurred. Both characters have similar experiences, but how they go about interpreting them and finding deeper meaning about it differ because of their different personalities and experiences.