ヨーロッパを/から読み直すルイザ・メイ・オルコット

抄録

Louisa May Alcott (1832–88) is regarded as a quintessentially American writer, partly because she wrote Little Women (1868–69) which has become, according to Elaine Showalter, “the American female myth,” but principally because she produced a number of “domestic” novels. However, in light of the fact that she was an avid reader of such European authors as Brontë, Dickens, Goethe, Plutarch, and Schiller, it is not an exaggeration to say that Alcott’s “domestic” fiction was a product of both European and American cultures. In addition to her knowledge of Europe from books, Alcott travelled to Europe twice. Her first trip to Europe, as a ladies companion, lasted precisely a year (1865–66), and her second trip, with her sister May, lasted a year and two months (1870–71). It was between and after these two grand tours of Europe that Alcott finished such different types of novels as a sensational gothic thriller (A Long Fatal Love Chase 1866), a juvenile domestic novel (Little Women 1868–69) and a fictionalized travelogue (“Shawl-straps” 1878).

This paper examines how European culture and literature exerted influence upon Alcott’s work by analyzing the above three books. The paper also explores how she transformed her transatlantic knowledge and experience in her works. First, the paper examines “Shawl-straps” in order to show how different it is from other travel writings of the period. Travel writing was a very popular literary genre in America at that time. Written by such male authors as Henry James, their gaze produced an image of the innocent “international American girl.” Alcott’s international American girls, however, were depicted as spectators of European culture whose subjective gazes spared them from being absorbed in it. The paper points out Alcott’s use of military terms in “Shawl-straps,” which created the image of strong, independent, international American girls. At the end of the book, the heroines bring home “heads full of new and larger ideas” (“Shawl-straps” 307), which will make American women “the bravest, the happiest, and handsomest women in the world” (308). In other words, Alcott’s heroines domesticate European culture in order to create new and better American girls. The paper examines Alcott’s patriotic narrative in “Shawl-straps” and illustrates how she tried differentiating her book from contemporary travel writings.

Second, the paper analyzes the similarities between A Long Fatal Love Chase and Little Women by focusing on Alcott’s descriptions of European characters. Although the two novels belong to very different literary genres, they have very similar plots in which male characters’ European otherness “domesticated” by female characters. The paper further points out that the domestication of European otherness in these novels is achieved by the sacrifice of female characters’ freedom and independence.

In conclusion, the paper shows how Alcott re-shaped her knowledge and experience of European culture to create her novels and argues new light can be shed on Alcott’s literary achievement by reading her from/in transatlantic perspectives.