Louisa May Alcott's Androgyny in Hospital Sketches

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper examines that Louisa May Alcott’s androgynous imagination functions as a metaphor for gender and racial liberation in the novella Hospital Sketches published in 1863. Through her entire life, Alcott consistently identifies herself with an androgynous figure who has a “man’s soul” trapped in a woman’s body. This is epitomized in her statement that “I was born with a boy’s spirit under my bib and tucker.” The cross-gender identity within Alcott transcends the limits of the stereotyped womanhood of Victorian era. Remarkably, Hospital Sketches based on her nursing experience during the Civil War reflects the essence of Alcott’s androgynous imagination. Nursing her patients in the hospital as a military nurse, the heroine Tribulation Periwinkle who is Alcott’s alter ego displays her inherent androgyny. Using alternatively both military and domestic metaphors, Periwinkle performs her mission as a nurse-solider. In other words, Periwinkle not only performs her duty “manfully” by regarding each of her patients as a “brother” but also appears like a mother to them. Alcott’s portrayals of Periwinkle markedly break out of the stereotype of dichotomous gender identity by blurring the boundaries between male and female. In addition to Periwinkle, a variety of male characters including the dying soldier John in the novella are transformed into the feminized males. Alcott expands her androgynous imagination into lots of anonymous soldiers and surgeons by feminizing them. Particularly, the seemingly contradictory term “surgical seamstress” referring to the surgeon Dr. P sums up Alcott’s androgynous imagination because the occupations of “surgeon” and “seamstress” are undoubtedly gendered. Most of all, Alcott’s androgyny crosses the boundaries of race as well as gender. This is epitomized in the scene of Periwinkle’s act of hugging a black child and reprimanding a white female nurse who refuses to pick up the child. Ultimately, Alcott’s androgyny suggests her vision for a new United States in which the gender and racial boundaries no longer exist.