SOURCE: Stoneley, Peter. “‘The Fashionable World Displayed’: Alcott and Social Power.” Studies in American Fiction 27, no. 1 (spring 1999): 21-36.

In the following essay, Stoneley considers the use of fashion in Louisa May Alcott's work as a consequence of her upbringing. He asserts that Alcott's treatment of fashion also reflects tensions concerning the nineteenth century's consumer-driven middle class.

Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtues. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is the hall of the Past.

—Emerson

Self-presentation was a source of both pleasure and anxiety for nineteenth-century American women. Louisa May Alcott often felt awkward about how she appeared, especially as she became an increasingly public figure. She knew that she needed to project an image that was “bright and comely,” but she also...