Louisa May Alcott’s “Enigmas”: Trans Feeling in the Nineteenth Century

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ See, for example, Peter Boag, Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity and Sylvia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Jen Manion, Female Husbands (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

² Although I argue throughout the essay that Alcott personally articulated feelings throughout her life that she felt like a boy and later a man, I don’t feel comfortable changing her pronouns. For this reason I use conventional feminine pronouns – she/her/hers – to refer to Alcott.

³ Here I use “male” intentionally to signal the way mainstream understandings of gender identity – cissexist views – would conflate sex with gender identity with gender expression: so “male” is all you would need to know about an individual to also know the character is a man and masculine-presenting.

⁴ The one exception: Carolyn Kyler’s “Alcott’s ‘Enigmas’: Impersonation and Interpretation,” ATQ 7, no. 3 (September 1993): 229–245.

⁵ It has not literally disappeared – any database of nineteenth-century American newspapers that has Frank Leslie’s available in full text will have it.

⁶ Joan Acocella, in her recent essay in The New Yorker on the influence of the novel, provides an unusually varied list of the famous women authors who have name-checked its importance, either in interviews and/or woven it into their own work: Nora and Delia Ephron, Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler, Mary Gordon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Stephenie Meyer, Cynthia Ozick, Simone de Beauvoir, Ursula Le Guin, Susan Sontag. Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend even has her two child heroines share a copy of the novel until it falls apart from repeated readings. As Acocella puts it, “The book’s fans didn’t merely like it; it gave them a life.”

⁷ Prosser’s book is from 1998, a bit before “transgender” took over as the neutral term to describe individuals who identify as a gender different than the one assigned to them at birth; the distinction is important for Prosser in that he wants to distinguish between the broader umbrella term “transgender,” which might include folks like drag queens and butch women, versus individuals who seek out medical interventions with the goal of changing their bodies (for him, “transsexuals”).

⁸ It’s possible in our own time we would name this feeling “dysphoria,” but I’ve avoided that term in this essay not only because it would have been unfamiliar to Alcott but because the term itself is controversial. This is partially because it replaced “Gender Identity Disorder” in the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Some people see the term still as pathologizing and point out one is not required to feel dysphoria to be trans. The practical value of the continued presence of the term in the DSM is to assist individuals in getting health insurance to cover transgender-related health care. See the American Psychiatric Association, “What is Dysphoria?”

⁹ On the other hand, Freeman notes, “It’s a complete cliché for a lesbian to claim Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women as a key text in her self-understanding and relationship to the world. After all, who was Jo but our tomboy self, our ‘behind the mask’ self, our struggle against normative femininity?” (“Key Limes” n.p.).

¹⁰ “Sex” refers to a range of biological components, including but not limited to genitalia and their functioning, chromosomes and hormones. It’s important to note there is no medical test for sex. “Gender” refers to an internal sense of one’s gender which might be binary (“man” or “woman”) or fall outside the binary (e.g. “gender non-conforming”). “Gender expression” refers to how an individual expresses their gender using commonly understood cultural and social cues, like clothing, body language, and pronouns. “Sexual orientation” is whom someone desires erotically.

¹¹ These moves are not unique to Alcott scholarship, of course. One place to look would be Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed’s argument against honoring chosen names and pronouns in their response to Grace Lavery. For example, they acknowledge they might have something to learn from transgender scholars, but only to the extent that it might offer them a critical tool for their own field: “As historians of queer culture, we are intrigued by the way considerations of trans-identity might change conceptions of the past – not, we hasten to add, by somehow proving that ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ historical figures were ‘really trans,’ but by showing how gender and sexual identities have long been imbricated in complicated ways.”

¹² See, for example, the work of Fausto-Sterling, e.g. Sexing the Body.

¹³ Young cites the same line from Little Women that interests me (“I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy” and points out that Jo never participates in the war in the way Alcott did and has to settle for cutting off her hair, suggesting an analogy between Jo’s shorn head and the amputations so many male soldiers endured.

¹⁴ For a similar argument, see Renée Sentilles’ American Tomboys.

¹⁵ Jay Prosser brilliantly made a similar case against the reading of Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness as a lesbian novel; the difference is that Alcott is writing pre-sexology, and doesn’t have the diagnoses (and later tropes) of “inversion” to contend with. In literary history, perhaps Jo is the pre-sexology Stephen?

¹⁶ Abate’s book on tomboys actually opens by talking about Jo, who is apparently the American tomboy par excellence. This is also the case in the preface to Sentilles, American Tomboys, ix.

¹⁷ Although Elizabeth Freeman has written that “temporality is a mode of implantation through which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts” (160, GLQ), it’s usually nonsequential times that are characterized as queer, whereas in this case the denial of linear temporality occludes what might be a different way of seeing cause and effect in Alcott’s body of work across genres.

¹⁸ She won a $100 prize, for the story “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment.” Stern details the hair-raising plot: “A mysterious iron ring, drugged coffee, four violent deaths, and a viscount parading as a deaf-and-dumb Indian servant” (Behind a Mask xvii).

¹⁹ In addition to allowing Alcott to dodge the Civil War, the setting accomplishes two distinct goals: it puts to use the romance and optimism with which Americans saw the European revolutions of 1848 and it engages questions of racial identity by appropriating tropes from slave narratives. More specifically, one could argue Alcott appropriates tropes from William and Ellen Crafts’ Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) wherein Ellen Craft disguises herself by changing multiple aspects of her identity in order to escape, including dressing as a man.

²⁰ Given both the argument I’m making about Alcott’s own transgender feelings and the main character’s gender expression as both masculine and feminine in the story, I’ll refer to this character with the pronouns they/them/theirs.

²¹ This particular phrase recurs in her private writing when talking about her sensation stories and could be construed as speaking about genre rather than quality: “Wrote a little on poor old ‘Success’ [novel that became Work] but being tired of novels I soon dropped it and fell back on rubbishy tales, for they pay best & I cant [sic] afford to starve on praise, when sensation stories are written in half the time & keep the family cosy” (Journals 139).

²² And when Alcott thinks something she published is bad writing, she says so: “Sanborn asked for more contributions, & I gave him some of my old Mountain Letters vamped up. They were not good, & though they sold the paper I was heartily ashamed of them” (Journals 119).

²³ Our own historical moment makes it painfully easy to speculate, in fact, given recent federal pushes to deny restrooms and healthcare to those individuals who do not identify with the sex marked on their birth certificates.

²⁴ One entry in Alcott’s journal sums up the relationship of her writing to her economic condition nicely: “Worked off my stage fever in writing a story, and felt better; also a moral tale, and got twenty-five dollars, which pieced up our summer gowns and bonnets. The inside of my head can at least cover the outside” (Journals 90).

²⁵ There are several recurring themes in this story – especially the copying and translation of texts – that suggest other ways Alcott might have been using to think about gendered feeling and embodiment that deserve further attention but go beyond the scope of this essay.

²⁶ There are surely more complexities even just in the idea of copying itself as art. May Alcott, the model for Amy March, was a professional artist in Europe – often financially supported by Louisa – who made her name copying famous paintings. See Lauren Hehmeyer, “‘Let the World Know You Are Alive’: May Alcott Nieriker and Louisa May Alcott Confront Nineteenth-Century Ideas about Women’s Genius,” American Studies Journal, 66 (2019): 1–20.

²⁷ See Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna, “Toward a Theory of Gender.”

²⁸ Readers familiar with Little Women and Alcott’s own life will see a fantasy made real in this part of “Enigmas.” Alcott describes her attitude after Anna’s wedding as “bereaved” in Letters, 54. And in Little Women Jo declares, “I just wish I could marry Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family,” 225.

²⁹ Joy Ladin, “‘Split It Open and Count the Seeds’: Trans Identity, Trans Poetics, and Oliver Bendorf’s The Spectral Wilderness,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3, nos.3–4 (Nov 2016). 640.