Meliora

Women Early Old

Juliet Bogan — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

With Little Women, Louisa May Alcott inspired generations of girls to declare, “I am a Jo.” The novel explores the stifling reality of girls becoming women in the nineteenth century, and the lessons the March sisters endure continue to resonate. I grew up rereading my massive copy of the novel and dreaming of ice skating on lakes; and rereading it as an adult, in the wake of a debilitating depressive episode, I cannot help but feel I have somehow grown alongside it. This paper does not attempt to remove me from my analysis. Using my experience with depression as a lens, I argue that in Little Women, maturing into womanhood is a process of becoming lonely. And, conversely, I treat the novel as a part of the personal archive which marks my coming of age, a miniature portrait of growing up and growing lonely. I work chronologically through the sisters’ imaginatively lush childhoods into their repressive and isolating adulthood, engaging with the novel’s portrayal of marriage, independence, creative expression, and death. And finally, I wonder about hope and solitude, a possible balm to the burden of loneliness.

Content Warning: This paper explores depression, disordered eating, and suicidal ideation.

Everywhere “Shoddy Gaud and Fraud”

Audrey Pettit — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Following Black men’s enfranchisement under the 15th Amendment, American poet, essayist, and journalist Walt Whitman authored Democratic Vistas—his 1871 treatise on democracy in post-Civil War America. The text has been canonized as required reading in democratic theory; political philosopher Cornel West deemed it a “landmark text in modern democratic thought” (quoted in Sollenberger 203). Indeed, some scholars argue that American civilization cannot be understood without Walt Whitman: he is “America’s poet,” modernist writer Ezra Pound claimed. “He is America” (Pound 13). Still, few have reckoned with Whitman’s response to Black suffrage. In Democratic Vistas, Whitman asserts that the soul of American democracy lies not in the faulty mechanisms of voting and political representation but in the purity of its cultural identity. The expansion of the franchise corrupted and confused this identity—heretofore based on whiteness and maleness—by eliminating the boundaries that separated enslaved and slaveholder, Black and white, voter and non-voter. Whitman thus interrogates whether these newly enfranchised men can ever become legitimate voters by engaging in a theatrical, written, and visual tradition that casts Black Americans as farcical, immoral, and fundamentally incapable of adopting the spiritual conditions of citizenship. In so doing, he lays the foundation for an aesthetic discourse that ontologically equates Black voters to frauds.

On Theft and Thunder: Genderfluid Comedy in Þrymskviða

Anna Olivia Sommer — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In The Elder Edda’s predominantly tragic collection of Old Norse poems, “Þrymskviða” (“The Lay of Thrym”) stands apart as a comedy centering on a gender-bending taboo: Thor crossdressing as the goddess Freya to retrieve his stolen hammer, Mjölnir. This paper investigates how the poem maintains its structural logic of comedy—as the inverse of tragedy—despite Thor risking accusations of ergi (unmanliness) and níð (social dishonor) by violating the 12th-century Grágás-laws that explicitly forbade crossdressing. Through analysis of both Old Norse and translated versions, I argue that the narrative carefully distinguishes between aesthetic transformation (crossdressing) and total transformation (shapeshifting). Thor’s bridal disguise remains superficial, with the narrative maintaining masculine pronouns and emphasizing the discrepancy between his feminine appearance and masculine behavior. Further, I examine how divine precedents, particularly Odin’s practice of seiðr (traditionally feminine magic) and Loki’s gender fluidity, establish that gods operate beyond human legal constraints. The poem’s resolution through extreme violence becomes essential to the comedic mode, transforming Mjölnir from a symbol of union back into an instrument of masculine dominance. Ultimately, “Þrymskviða” offers what the rest of The Elder Edda rarely does: hope that cosmic order can be restored, and that the anthropomorphic gods, as well as the people worshipping them, can retain agency over their fate.

Beyond the Plantationoscene: Envisioning New Human-Land Relationships through Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower

Ellie George — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines Earthseed, the religion in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and its potential to replicate the colonial and extractive patterns that constitute the Plantationocene. While Earthseed reflects rhetoric rooted in European and American settler colonial logics such as manifest destiny, this paper argues that Lauren Olamina’s new religion ultimately seeks to resist the extractive frameworks that define the Plantationocene. Through the community she names Acorn, Lauren envisions a transformed relationship between humanity and the land, one based on sustainability, growth, and renewal.