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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Introduction: The Sexual Body, Shelly J. Eversley, Jennifer L. Morgan
Introduction: The Sexual Body, Shelly J. Eversley, Jennifer L. Morgan
Publications and Research
Introduction to the special issue, "The Sexual Body," edited by Shelly Eversley and Jennifer L. Morgan.
"Unrighteous Compact": Louisa May Alcott's Resistance To Contracts And Promises In Moods, Nina Bannett
"Unrighteous Compact": Louisa May Alcott's Resistance To Contracts And Promises In Moods, Nina Bannett
Publications and Research
Alcott’s first adult novel, Moods, initially published in 1864, presents oral promises between women as extralegal alternatives to standard legal contracts between men and women. In the 1864 edition of Moods, Alcott's protagonist, Sylvia Yule, fails to understand the constraints of marriage as a type of contract, and the results are dramatic. In fact, Alcott undermines the idealized marriage plot so crucial to her later, wildly popular works like Little Women (1868-69). In the 1864 Moods, Alcott boldly questions both legal contracts and oral promises characteristic of nineteenth-century conceptions of romantic love and heterosexual friendship.
Cuban Femininity And National Unity In Louisa May Alcott's Moods And Elizabeth Stoddard's "Eros And Anteros", Nina Bannett
Cuban Femininity And National Unity In Louisa May Alcott's Moods And Elizabeth Stoddard's "Eros And Anteros", Nina Bannett
Publications and Research
This book chapter compares the depictions of Cuban women in Louisa May Alcott's first adult novel Moods (1864) and Elizabeth Stoddard's short story "Eros and Anteros" (1862). Both writers configure a love triangle between an Anglo man and two women, one Anglo and one Cuban. In both texts, the Cuban woman is rejected as an unsuitable choice for an Anglo man. Alcott’s and Stoddard’s decision to re-value the Anglo woman as the more appropriate choice can be read as a rejection of the popular nineteenth-century political doctrine of manifest destiny and, at least with Alcott, of the United States’s dependence …