SOURCE: "'So Like Women!': Louisa May Alcott's Work and the Ideology of Relations," in Redefining the Political Novel: American Women Writers, 1797-1901, edited by Sharon M. Harris, University of Tennessee Press, 1995, pp. 109-27.

In the following essay, Rigsby emphasizes the political significance of Alcott's Work, arguing that the novel reveals Alcott's affiliation with "feminist transcendentalism " through a subversion of "powerful patriarchal images and narrative patterns. "

Critical reassessments of Louisa May Alcott's writings have proliferated in recent years, but the political nature of her fiction has yet to be explored in its complexity. In her novel Work: A Story of Experience (1873), for instance, Louisa May Alcott challenges the glorification of individualism and condemns practices of capitalism that thrive on it. She presents an ambitious political agenda that becomes especially evident when we read Work in the context of Alcott's affiliation with Margaret Fuller's feminist transcendentalism—a Utopian optimism...