SOURCE: "The Seduction of Daughters' or The Sins of the Fathers': A Marble Woman or the Mysterious Model," in Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott, The University of Tennessee Press, 1993, pp. 32-45.

In the following essay, Keyser argues that "Alcott uses the Gothic machinery of a highly implausibleand melodramatic story to make a number of telling points about the nature of patriarchy."

"A Marble Woman or The Mysterious Model," like Moods, deals with a motherless adolescent girl involved in ambiguous relationships with two much older men. Like the earlier sensation story "A Whisper in the Dark," it offers a sustained critique of the patriarchal model of gender relations that mystifies and immobilizes women. And like Moods, though in more cryptic form, it advocates replacing that model with one more egalitarian and androgynous. Drawing upon the myth of Amor and Psyche, the story of Pygmalion...