Louisa May Alcott in My Contraband Essay

When do we overlook malicious behavior? Is our emotional appeal to like a person enough for us to look past deliberate cruelty? Bound up in the play A Streetcar Named Desire is the fundamental question of how the characters are dialectically cruel and the ways they justify their desires. By means of a theme of cruelty when whiteness is evoked, author Tennessee Williams displays when we justify the actions of others to reinforce gender identities, and the emotions which act as a vehicle for judgments.

McKay emphasizes that his deep hatred for the “White City” is due to the oppression he receives from white-skinned people for being African American; however this hatred is hidden from the world as he is perceived as an isolated minority in this “White City”. The intensity of McKay’s hatred is displayed in the personification of the “dark Passion that fills [his] every mood”(6). The first letter in the diction “Passion” is capitalized, thus personifying it to be representation of the

" ‘I want something to do…' ‘Write a book,' Qouth the author of my being. ‘Don't know enough, sir. First live, then write.' ‘Try teaching again,' suggested my mother. ‘No thank you, ma'am, ten years of that is enough.' ‘Take a husband like my Darby, and fulfill your mission,' said sister Joan. ‘Can't afford expensive luxuries, Mrs. Coobiddy.' ‘Go nurse the soldiers,' said my young brother, Tom. ‘I will!' (Harper 14)." This is a dialog of Louisa May Alcott with her relatives. Miss Alcott, like many other African American women, helped serve in the Civil War. During the Civil War, Miss Alcott held a variety of jobs. Mainly working as a writer, she held positions as a nurse, teacher, and volunteered in

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.

As stated by intellectual Joseph Wong, “influence is our inner ability to lift people up to our perspectives” (Young Ch. 6). Throughout history, numerous writers have utilized their ability to impact their readers to encourage their audience to follow the author’s principles and beliefs. Louisa May Alcott, born in Pennsylvania in 1832, was the type of writer to use her power to influence her lectors’ views on the topics and issues that she was passionate about. Alcott’s father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was a writer, lecturer, and educator, and her mother, Abba May, was a strong-willed and independent woman and bright educator. Her brilliant parents helped Alcott grow to be an intellectual, an independent female, and, as mentioned by Clark Moreland in one of his lectures, “…a dark headed, volatile, and energetic child” (“Lecture 3.4…”). After her parents fell into deep debt, Alcott began to work to support her family. She served as a seamstress, teacher, and, of course, a writer. As an open-minded individual, Alcott was an advocate of many causes and policies, and, through her compositions, she shared her beliefs to guide her readers towards integrating her ideals into their lives. For instance, in 1863, Alcott released her work “My Contraband,” first titled “The Brothers.” The piece featured a Civil War nurse, Faith Dane, in the Union side who was in charge of caring for a captured, dying Confederate captain and

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it”. Discuss this quote from Atticus in relation to 3 characters from the novel.

In the novel To Kill A Mockingbird a major theme is the loss of innocence. Whether from emotional abuse, racial prejudice or learning, Boo, Tom, and Scout all lose their innocence in one sense or another. The prejudice that each character endures leads to their loss. Through the responses of Boo, Tom, and Scout, Harper Lee shows how each character responded differently to their loss of innocence.

Harriet Jacobs, in her narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, was born into slavery in the south. While her youth contained “six years of happy childhood,” a few tragedies and mistresses later, Jacobs spent many years in pain under the possession of her cruel five-year-old mistress, Emily Flint, and Emily’s father, Dr. Flint. Once able to obtain freedom, Jacobs spent most of her life working for the Anti-Slavery office in New York, in hope that one day she could make a difference in the world. “She sought to win the respect and admiration of her readers for the courage with which she forestalled abuse and for the independence with which she chose a lover rather than having one forced on her” (Jacobs 921). Linda Brett, the pseudonym that Jacobs uses to narrate her life story, endures the harsh behavior women slaves were treated with in the south during the nineteenth century. The dominant theme of the corruptive power and psychological abuse of slavery, along with symbolism of good and evil, is demonstrated throughout her narrative to create a story that exposes the terrible captivity woman slaves suffered. The reality of slavery in the past, versus slavery today is used to reveal how the world has changed and grown in the idea of racism and neglect.

Louisa Mae is a very strong willer individual, she never lets anyone walk all over her not even a boy. I myself can relate to her, that is why I also chose her. Louisa Mae when they moved in with her grandma struggled when she had to move schools because she was a Yankee they called her. When they called her this she did not like it. The quote in the book that relates to this is “His look triumph was short-lived because it ran smack into Lou’s bony right fist. Billy joined Oz on the ground, blood spurting from his nose. Lou was straddling Billy before the boy could take a breath, both her fists pound away. Billy, howling like a whipped dog, swung his arms wildly back. One blow caught Lou on the lip, but she kept slugging until Billy finally stopped swinging and just covered his face. (Baldacci,118-119).” This incident prove to me that she was the strong women that was not going to let any person especially a male walk all over her or her family. Even though she got in trouble for this she was not scared of him. Another thing that makes her a strong independent person is that she was telling the judge that she could take care of her brother and herself on her own at

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

The bibliographical information provided by the text that was given was “Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly (Boston; John P Jewett, 1852), 157”. From looking upon this document, one could tell Harriet Beecher Stowe published a book that on could tell by the image of the novel shown in the source and by the title showing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. This document is a fiction written account of how a slave lived and felt. This document maybe be a story by the way tom depicted of slavery life of such cruelty yet admitting one cannot buy his soul. The person who had created this source was Harriet Beecher Stowe whom may have been an abolitionist by the way the story was written of African Americans did not like being slaves and dealt with such harsh obstacles in life. I assume this due to the fact during this period the north was against slavery.

Life in the 1800s has taken on an almost idealistic quality in the minds of many Americans. The images linked to this era of our history are, on the surface, pleasurable to recall: one room school houses; severe self-reliance; steam-powered railroads and individual freedom.

Although we think of sexism as a situation that has been dealt with, we still

Alcott grew up being influenced by Emerson and Fuller’s understanding of self-reliance. This, as well as her father’s teaching, encouraged Alcott to grow into a woman who believed that she had great strength as an individual. However she was aware that beyond every individual sphere was an outer society that was hard to ignore. She had seen the effect of society when it opposed her father’s teaching methods and caused his school to close. Similarly, she felt it shutting down her chances of becoming a successful woman writer who sought to create works of genius. She noticed that with every individual idea, there was a chorus of society stopping it from

As stated by intellectual Joseph Wong, “influence is our inner ability to lift people up to our perspectives” (Young Ch. 6). Throughout history, numerous writers have utilized their ability to impact their readers to encourage their audience to follow the author’s principles and beliefs. Louisa May Alcott, born in Pennsylvania in 1832, was the type of writer to use her power to influence her lectors’ views on the topics and issues that she was passionate about. Alcott’s father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was a writer, lecturer, and educator, and her mother, Abba May, was a strong-willed and independent woman and bright educator. Her brilliant parents helped Alcott grow to be an intellectual, an independent female, and, as mentioned by Clark Moreland in one of his lectures, “…a dark headed, volatile, and energetic child” (“Lecture 3.4…”). After her parents fell into deep debt, Alcott began to work to support her family. She served as a seamstress, teacher, and, of course, a writer. As an open-minded individual, Alcott was an advocate of many causes and policies, and, through her compositions, she shared her beliefs to guide her readers towards integrating her ideals into their lives. For instance, in 1863, Alcott released her work “My Contraband,” first titled “The Brothers.” The piece featured a Civil War nurse, Faith Dane, in the Union side who was in charge of caring for a captured, dying Confederate captain and had a mulatto contraband, a slave who escaped to the Union side,