Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Elizabeth Keyser

Critical Essay by Elizabeth Keyser

SOURCE: "'Playing Puckerage': Alcott's Plot in 'Cupid and Chow-chow'," in Children's Literature, Vol. 14, 1986, pp. 105-21.

In the following essay, Keyser finds a radical feminist subtext in Alcott's children's story "Cupid and Chow-chow. "

Louisa May Alcott, despite the critical attention that she has recently received, remains underrated as a literary artist and misunderstood as a feminist. Eugenia Kaledin, although she puts the case more strongly than most Alcott critics, speaks for many when she deplores the fact that Alcott's "acceptance of the creed of womanly self-denial . . . aborted the promise of her art and led her to betray her most deeply felt values" [Women's Studies, Vol. 5, 1978]. Like Kaledin, Judith Fetterley believes that Alcott preserved her artistic and moral integrity only in her anonymous and pseudonymous sensational stories. According to Fetterley, "What these stories . . . make clear is the amount of rage and...
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