Meliora

God Save the Girl-child: Narratives of Juvenile Female Illness in Little Women and the Morgesons

2022-02-23T19:42:58+00:00

Everyone -- with the exception of Joey Tribbiani -- knows that in Louisa May Alcott's 1868 classic Little Women, Beth dies. Fewer are familiar with the fate of sickly Veronica Morgeson in Elizabeth Stoddard's underread The Morgesons, which tells the story of heroine Cassandra Morgeson's coming of age in 1860s New England, but both characters, Veronica and Beth, draw on a character type that most will, on some level, recognize. They are the ill child figure, spiritually overdeveloped and totally doomed, who occupies a poignant and pitiful space in the collective consciousness. Think of Tiny Tim. This paper invesigates Beth's and Veronica's roles as the ill child figure in their respective narratives, seeking to understand the ways in which they adhere to and diverge from type, and how such characterization affects and enriches the texts in which they appear, how powerfully they grip their narratives, despite their own physical feebleness.

"I am--I am a Chinese": The Death of Plural Identities in Mrs. Spring Fragrance

2022-02-23T19:53:43+00:00

Amidst the ubiquitous racist discourse of the 19^th century, Sui Sin Far emerged as a pioneering Asian American writer, dedicating her life to writing fiction, essays, and journalistic articles that combatted anti-Chinese sentiment. Situated at the complex nexus of racial, religious, and socio-economic tensions, her short story collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) illustrate the collision between Chinese efforts to preserve their cultural traditions and Western assimilatory forces. While few scholars have commented on the role of children in Mrs. Spring Fragrance, this essay draws attention to that neglected subject, arguing that Sui Sin Far represents children as malleable, organic sites for anti-Chinese authorities to reinforce constructions of singular identity. Within a nation that holds no place for the existence of the “un-American,” how do the malleable bodies of children fall victim to singularity? Coupled with Amartya Sen’s identity theory, this essay features the deconstruction of three short stories—“In the Land of the Free,” “Pat and Pan,” and “The Wavering Image”—and its characters’ complex grappling with divergent versus singular affiliations.

Fallen Castles in the Air: Marriage, Labor, and Suppression in Louisa May Alcott’s 'Little Women'

2022-02-23T19:49:27+00:00

Suppression of one’s emotions is defined as a shared experience among the March sisters in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and a large portion of women after the Civil War. Drawing on the failed careers of Jo and Amy and the struggling marriage of Meg, this essay argues that in learning how to suppress oneself and be seen as socially acceptable, the sisters lose their prospects for success and happiness. When the sisters stray from home, their flaws are exposed: Meg’s jealousy, Jo’s anger, and Amy’s greed. A return trip home and time completing labor provide them training for wifehood. Within this labor, each sister confronts their greatest desire, forcing them to contain their desires toward what they want in order to prevent another outburst. The domestic sphere becomes a place for them to come face-to-face with their largest flaw and use the home as a testing ground for how to suppress their true emotions and survive within the expectations of being a wife. In stifling their ambitions and desires outside the domestic sphere through suppression training, the March sisters lose the prospects for unhappy marriages with men that continuously inflame their flaws through belittling behavior and condemnation.

Feminist and Materialist Philosophies of History in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls

2022-02-23T20:00:31+00:00

The first act of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls does away with temporal boundaries, inviting women across historical periods, artistic masterworks, and literary epics to a dinner party. During the evening, the women share their life stories, interrupt each other, and attempt to be heard over the roar of their fellow guests. In some ways, it resembles an indecipherable oral history. What is history if not indecipherable? It is the role of the historian to wade through primary and secondary sources, cultural memories and forgotten artifacts, in order to construct a written, visual, or auditory historical narrative. Thus, a history as we consume it, although based in fact, necessarily relies on narrative structure. Top Girls reminds us that history is like any other narrative: shaped by social, political, and economic forces; made unintelligible, fantastical, and surreal at times, by representative modes and their failings. By playing with the notion of history, notably combining fictional and historical figures in the first act, Top Girls emphasizes the claim that history is, among other things, reliant on both factual and fictional elements, like concrete dates and narrative structures. Top Girls narrows in on two models of historical narratives: the feminist history and materialist history. In this play, there are only women onstage. Women picture, or reference, the men in their past and present—an alcoholic father, a lousy ex-husband, an insecure coworker, Rocky Mountain Jim, and the Emperor of Japan—but a man never sets foot on stage. Only women enter and exit, only women go to and from work, only women tell their histories, signaling Churchill’s dual interest in a Marxist philosophy of history and the notion of a feminist history, which emerged in the feminist movement in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Through the dramatic form, which provides a fantastical element, Churchill animates and complicates history as a feminist and socialist practice.