“New Friendship Flourished like Grass in Spring”: Cross-Gender Friendship in Moods and Little Women

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the editors, anonymous reader, and Sabrina Black for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

¹ According to Victor Luftig, “Victorian narrative conventions were almost inherently inimical to ‘friendship’”; this is particularly true of novels since “as a form” they “almost always end[ed] in death, marriage, or some related alternative” (58).

² In surveying the scholarship on friendship, I use the terms “cross-gender,” “cross-sex,” “mixed-sex,” and “heterosocial” interchangeably to reflect the range of terminology I have encountered. In my own analysis, I opt for “cross-gender” because this term best maps onto identity categories as I understand Alcott to be articulating them— that is, as constructed, nonbinary, subject to creative self-expression, and potentially fluid.

³ On the revision history of Moods, see Deese 447–49.

⁴ For a reading of age-ambiguity and this scene’s “learning to love” discourse, see Wadsworth.

⁵ See, for example, Trites 152–53.

⁶ Luftig observes, “in the absence of … acknowledged sites at which heterosexual friendship could be enacted or represented convincingly, the term [“friendship”] … was … conceded to those who posed no bodily threat … ; extramarital friendship could be practiced convincingly only by children, the elderly, and ghosts” (24).