소녀 예술가의 초상: 올콧의 『작은 아씨들』에 나타난 리터러시와 젠더
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl: Gendered Literacy in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women
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Children’s literature is primarily to improve children’s literacy—whether for simply reading and writing or for making significant meanings of one’s life in various ways. Ever since its modern birth in the mid-eighteenth century, children’s literature has often advocated literacy, but it also constructed childhood as the period in which literacy should be acquired and sufficiently commanded. Literacy thus contributed to the formation of a modern citizen and a modern child. And the citizens that it helped fashion are gendered citizens as literacy itself has nurtured gendered readers and writers. This essay analyzes Louisa May Alcott’s juvenile fiction, Little Women (1868-69) in order to show how gendered literacy is deployed by the “tomboy” character, Jo March. I argue that Little Women is the portrait of the artist as a young girl. Alcott’s Jo, as a girl artist, makes the best of gendered literacy. Jo’s playful physical, cultural, and literary cross-dressings are at once an act of rebellion and negotiation as a girl rather than a woman artist. I conclude that Jo’s (ad)venturing into and deployment of gendered literacy is an analogy of the wartime women’s literacy, which filled the lacuna in the world of male literacy during the American Civil War (1861-65).
Abstract
Children’s literature is primarily to improve children’s literacy—whether for simply reading and writing or for making significant meanings of one’s life in various ways. Ever since its modern birth in the mid-eighteenth century, children’s literature has often advocated literacy, but it also constructed childhood as the period in which literacy should be acquired and sufficiently commanded. Literacy thus contributed to the formation of a modern citizen and a modern child. And the citizens that it helped fashion are gendered citizens as literacy itself has nurtured gendered readers and writers. This essay analyzes Louisa May Alcott’s juvenile fiction, Little Women (1868-69) in order to show how gendered literacy is deployed by the “tomboy” character, Jo March. I argue that Little Women is the portrait of the artist as a young girl. Alcott’s Jo, as a girl artist, makes the best of gendered literacy. Jo’s playful physical, cultural, and literary cross-dressings are at once an act of rebellion and negotiation as a girl rather than a woman artist. I conclude that Jo’s (ad)venturing into and deployment of gendered literacy is an analogy of the wartime women’s literacy, which filled the lacuna in the world of male literacy during the American Civil War (1861-65).
참고문헌 (24)
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