Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 285experienced debt and dependency as a child was determined to avoid them as an
adult; she was determined to save her family from them too. She completed her first
book, Flower Babies, when she was only 16, although it was not published until 1855.
Working as an army nurse during the Civil War, she used this experience as the basis
for Hospital Sketches (1863). During the remainder of her life, she produced over
three hundred titles. What she is mainly remembered for, however, are her domestic
novels written for children. The best known of these is Little Women: or, Meg, Jo, and
Amy. This novel was originally published in two parts: the first, Little Women,
appeared in 1868, the second part, Good Wives, was published the following year, and
in 1871 the two came out as a single volume, Little Women and Good Wives. Alcott
drew on her own life and family experiences in writing these and other domestic
tales: Jo March, for instance, one of the “little women,” is based on Alcott herself. But
the March family live in genteel poverty, whereas the Alcotts, when Louisa was
young, often suffered a fiercer deprivation. With the spectacular commercial success
of Little Women, however, the financial security of Alcott and her relatives was assured.
She continued to write domestic tales. But, before and after the publication of Little
Women, she also continued to try her hand at other forms. Between 1863 and 1869,
for instance, she published anonymous and pseudonymous Gothic romances and
thrilling tales with titles like “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment”; these were
eventually collected and published in 1975 as Behind a Mask. She wrote, under her
own name, Moods (1864), a grimly realistic account of adultery and divorce as
alternatives to unhappy marriage, and Transcendental Wild Oats (1873), a satirical
treatment of Fruitlands, the utopian community founded by her father. “Tired,” as
she put it, “of providing moral pap for the young,” she also produced a tale influenced
by Goethe called A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), in which an innocent young
woman resists seduction by the diabolic genius with whom her poet husband has
made a Faustian pact. And, in 1873, she published what is perhaps her most
interesting book, an autobiographical fiction that covers nearly twenty years in the
life of its heroine, Work: A Story of Experience.
Wo r k begins with Christie, its heroine who is 21, declaring her independence from
her guardian, Uncle Enos. It ends with her, at the age of 40, discovering her vocation
as a spokesperson for the rights of women. Christie is resolved, as she puts it, “not to
be a slave to anybody.” And, in pursuing that resolution, she takes jobs ranging from
sewing to acting. She is also helped and inspired by the companionship and the
stories of female friends, the women she meets after her declaration of independence:
among them, a runaway slave and many fellow women workers. The episode in
which Christie becomes an actress is typical of the narrative as a whole, in its cunning
mix of realism and melodrama, empirical detail and romantic allusion. “Feeling that
she had all the world before her where to choose,” like Eve after she is expelled from
the Garden of Eden, our heroine meets two boarders at her lodging house, “an old
lady and her pretty daughter.” They are both “actresses at a respectable theatre,” and
they help Christie to acquire the role of “Queen of the Amazons” in a “new spectacle.”
Christie is spurred on to take a role that clearly expresses her own sense of her power
as a female by the thought that Uncle Enos would disapprove. “Uncle Enos,” sheGGray_c03.indd 285ray_c 03 .indd 285 8 8/1/2011 7:54:23 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 23 AM