Off-campus UNL users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your NU ID and password. When you are done browsing please remember to return to this page and log out.
Non-UNL users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Women and children first: A comparative study of Louisa May Alcott and Sophie de Segur (Rostopchine)
Abstract
The purpose of this dissertation is to determine why Louisa May Alcott and Sophie de Segur, two prominent writers of children's literature of the nineteenth century, have been deleted from the canon by critics at large. I have used several approaches to analyze the art of Alcott and Segur. Studying biographical elements show how exceptional both women were in their own time. Each author was raised by parents who defied the established social order; each author battled with illness, grief, and isolation; each author maintained a very close yet antagonistic relationship with her own mother. The novels produced by Alcott and Segur reflect the events in their own life very closely; yet each one of these fictional testimonies also represent the definite will of the author to beat fate and to rework pain and drudgery into viable solutions. I have examined this specific vision in opposition to nineteenth century writers of the canon (Hawthorne, James, Eliot, Sand, Balzac, Flaubert, and others) and to twentieth century contemporary writers (Duras, Conde, Walker, Ehrdrich) and concluded Alcott and Segur have a more established kinship with very contemporary twentieth century women writers, especially minority writers, than to the male writers of the nineteenth century. The feature that Alcott and Segur have in common with each other and with contemporary women writers is the structure of their text, characterization, and vision according to a process I have called hypallage. This process is based on the reciprocity of influence between events, characters, and thoughts. It emphasizes realistically the fluidity of the fabric of life: one event influences another, a reaction which leads the second event to change the first one in turn. The dialogical and generative nature of this process stresses the non-finality of events. The process creates an open text which is very different from canonical texts where final solutions are the rule. Through this process, the authors are able to describe the probability of success as opposed to the certainty of failure. The literature it creates is then ideally suited to the audience of the young or the powerless, an audience with which the canon has not been truly concerned very often.
Subject Area
Comparative literature|Womens studies|American literature
Recommended Citation
Lac, Christine Marie Andree, "Women and children first: A comparative study of Louisa May Alcott and Sophie de Segur (Rostopchine)" (1988). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8911116.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8911116