Louisa May Alcott and Her Work Essay -- Biography Biographies Essays

Louisa May Alcott and Her Work      Ã‚   Louisa May Alcott was a great writer of her time and is the perfect example of how mixed messages during the American Renaissance affected the lives of young women everywhere. In the book Little Women Louisa gives Marmee the appearance and attitudes of her own mother, Abba Alcott. Her mother once wrote women should assert their, "right to think, feel, and live individually ·be something in yourself." In contrast, Louisaà ¢s father, Bronson Alcott, felt that Louisa was more of a challenge because she was willful like her mother and should be taught to control her impulses. The American Renaissance had a profound effect on Bronson Alcottà ¢s educational theories and this in turn affected the life and writingà ¢s of his daughter Louisa May Alcott.    Louisa May Alcott was born in 1832 to Bronson and Abba Alcott. Abba Alcott was the daughter of Colonel Joseph May who was a supporter of womenà ¢s rights and abolition. Louisa was somewhat spirited, and she came by it naturally, so her father blamed her mother for this. Her father was a transcendentalist, and he believed that his lighter coloring betokened a deeper spirituality and closer connection to divinity (Saxton 205). Bronson felt Louisa could not control herself because she was born with dark hair like her mother. He referred to her as the "possessed one" "pathetic" and "bound in chains ·which she could not break"(Sanderson 43). This somewhat clashed with his other belief that children were considered blank slates, or tablulae rasae. This theory simply states that the mind is in its hypothetical primary blank or empty state befo... ...ffered her much time to think about schooling and childrearing. So her book Little Women is almost an autobiographical account of her own life as well as a critical study of characters and events during the American Renaissance period.                      Works Cited:    Alcott,Louisa May. Little Women. New York: Signet, 1983.    Elbert,Sarah, A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott and Little Women (Philadelphia: Temple,1984), 86.    Russett, Cynthia Eagle. Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1989.    Sanderson, Rena. "A Modern Mephistopheles: Louisa May Alcottà ¢s Exorcism of Patriarchy." American Transcendental Quarterly 5 (1991): 41-55.    Saxton, Martha. Louisa May Alcott:A Modern Biography. New York: Noonday Press, 1995.