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Writing and Little Women: Alcott's Rhetoric of Subversion

1993, ATQ: American Transcendental Quarterly

This critical study examines Alcott's writing as material process and subversive metaphor for the struggles she faced as a woman writer in the 19th century.

4/4/2018 EBSCOhost Record: 1 Title: Writing and little women: Alcott's rhetoric of subversion. Authors: Bernstein, Susan Naomi Source: ATQ. Mar1993, Vol. 7 Issue 1, p25. 19p. Document Type: Bibliography Subject Terms: *FEMINISM -- Bibliographies People: ALCOTT, Louisa May, 1832-1888 Abstract: Reports on Louisa May Alcott's feminist views as seen in her writing style. Aspects of womanhood; Comments and observations. Full Text Word Count: 8689 ISSN: 1078-3377 Accession Number: 9408030149 Database: Academic Search Premier WRITING AND LITTLE WOMEN: ALCOTT'S RHETORIC OF SUBVERSION Louisa May Alcott's literary career may be viewed as decidedly unconventional. Her most famous work, Little Women, (1868-69), seems to follow in the literary footsteps of such sentimental novels as Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, both of which Alcott refers to in Little Women as novels read and enjoyed by her main character, Jo March. Alcott, like Jo, also wrote "blood and thunder" tales, sensational stories in a Gothic mode that were published anonymously in the early and middle 1860s in such periodicals as Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (Stern, Mask xiv). It may be argued, however, that Alcott's career does not follow a strictly linear path. Indeed, literary styles seem to intermingle in the Alcott "canon" without regard to chronology. Besides juvenile fiction such as Little Women, Alcott also wrote autobiographical adult fiction (Hospital Sketches, 1863; Transcendental Wild Oats, 1873); an experimental adult novel (Moods, 1864); a sentimental adult novel (Work: A Story of Experience, 1873); sensation stories (such as Pauline's Passion and Punishment, 1862; and Behind a Mask, 1866); and a Gothic novel (A Modern Mephistopheles) published anonymously in the Roberts Brothers' No Name Series in 1877. Alcott's career, as Madeleine Stern argues, may be regarded as "a study in contrasts." "If it was in her role as anonymous spinner of sensational tales that Alcott indulged her recurrent passion for mind manipulation, power struggle, and implicit sexuality," Stern writes, "it was as Louisa May Alcott that she advanced her feminist convictions and feminist characters" (Mephistopheles 1). In this sense, Alcott's career poses a challenging interpretive question for the late twentieth-century critic: What are we to make of this apparent split in Alcott's fictive style? While Alcott was familiar with the sentimental writers of her time, she also was well versed in the works of writers such as Shakespeare, Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, and Hawthorne. Moreover, from her reading of feminist writers such as Wollstonecraft, Fuller, and Sand, we may conclude that Alcott was vitally interested in the feminist questions of her day, including the question of how a woman might create a literary career in her own right, given the many restrictions that patriarchy placed on women's lives (Stern, Mephistopheles xvi and Journal 13). In returning to Alcott's Little Women, and to the character of Jo in particular, we perhaps may begin our investigation most fruitfully. The story of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women continues to intrigue contemporary readers one hundred and twenty-four years after its initial publication and remains one of the most commercially successful novels of all time, Jo's "unromantic" fate notwithstanding.[1] While commercial success is not necessarily an indicator of "literary merit," I would like to argue that perhaps Jo is, after all, a more complicated case. That the reaction among feminists of our own time continues to be so strong indicates to me that there is something operating underneath the surface of Alcott's texts that implies that writing is not only, as Jo says, something to do for "the http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/ehost/delivery?sid=2a9b4881-bca9-4b2e-ba1b-739ac7be3e1f%40sessionmgr104&vid=2&ReturnUrl=http%3a%2f%2fweb.b.ebscoho 4/4/2018 EBSCOhost pleasure and the money" (271). Rather, in Little Women, writing becomes a subversive act. Yet instead of subverting women to accept the status quo (Vincent 222; Fetterley, "Civil War" 371; Murphy 563), writing becomes a way of escaping the strictures of the role of "little woman" in mid-nineteenth-century American society, a way of learning to become quietly free. If the act of composing a subversive text may be seen as a series of rhetorical moves, then an analysis of such a scheme in Little Women would indeed be appropriate (Harris 59). The contradictions in Alcott's text loom as enormous chasms, waiting for discovery of what lies within (Murphy 564). In fact, it is Jo March herself who introduces the idea of rupture in the text as she gauges the reaction of criticism to her first novel as "contradictory." Jo, "the perplexed authoress," comments to her family on such inconsistencies: This man says "An exquisite book, full of truth, beauty, and earnestness; all is sweet, pure, and healthy." . . . The next, "The theory of the book is bad,--full of morbid fancies, spiritualistic idea, and unnatural characters." Now, as I had no theory of any kind, don't believe in spiritualism, and copied my characters from life, I don't see how this critic can be right. . . Some make fun of it, some over-praise, and nearly all insist that I had a deep theory to expound when I wrote it for the pleasure and the money" (271) If Jo's account seems not unlike Alcott's experience with the first edition of her first novel Moods[2]--which included much revision and elimination of key chapters before it ever saw publication (Journal 138; 140)--we should also note that Henry James, Jr., insists, much as Jo does about her own writing, that Alcott's work contained "no theory of any kind." In an 1865 review of Moods, James writes: We have seen it asserted that her book claims to deal with the "doctrine of affinities." What the doctrine of affinities is we do not know, but we are inclined to think that our author has been somewhat maligned. Her book is, to our perception, innocent of any doctrine whatsoever. (69) However, I would like to assert that the denial of "theory" or "doctrine" seems to point to the likelihood of its presence. In making a case for Little Women as a subversive text, a text that portrays the act of writing as an act of subverting the conventions of patriarchal culture (Harris 56), the denial of theory seems to indicate a fissure in that text. Such a split may be perceived in Jo's conflicting desires to do "something splendid"something that "won't be forgotten long after I am dead" (Little Women 143)--and the more immediate plan to write for instant gratification, "the pleasure and the money." Furthermore, if the idea of theory were not important to Jo's literary adventures, then it seems curious that her protest regarding the absence of theory is so strong. Such protest inserts the idea of theory into the text, drawing attention to itself as an attribute that finally cannot be denied. If no text may be innocent of theory, by claiming that innocence, Jo's comments cannot help but strike the reader as' contradictory. Such contradiction becomes clearer when we examine the reviews that Little Women received upon its initial publication. While Alcott wrote Moods with an adult audience in mind, Little Women, of course, was conceived as a children's book. One reviewer, writing when the book was first published in 1868, states: "parents desiring a Christmas book for a girl from ten to sixteen years, cannot do better than to purchase this" (82). A book appropriate for such a benign and sentimental occasion cannot purport any "theory"--at least not overtly. While nineteenth-century American society appeared to sanction some education for women, woman's primary interest at that time was dictated as being chiefly in the domestic arts, of which woman's writing was to be a celebration (Welter 166-167). Little Women seems to fit perfectly into this category, as Marmee trains her four daughters in all the housewifely duties of home and family, and Jo appears to abandon her literary ambitions to the raising and educating of boys. In describing her new ambition at the close of Little Women, Jo explains: "But in spite of th[e] unromantic facts, I have nothing to complain of, and never was so jolly in my life." Marmee, in reply to this statement, reiterates the theme of much nineteenth- http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/ehost/delivery?sid=2a9b4881-bca9-4b2e-ba1b-739ac7be3e1f%40sessionmgr104&vid=2&ReturnUrl=http%3a%2f%2fweb.b.ebscoho 4/4/2018 EBSCOhost century advice to women on the advantages of leading a hardworking, home-centered life. Says Mrs. March, "Yes, Jo, I think your harvest will be a good one" (490). In spite of such seeming conformity to the assumed ideals of her reading public, I would like to argue for the subversiveness of such statements as Alcott's route to freedom of thought. If some reviewers found Little Women an appropriate Christmas gift, still others were not completely satisfied. The uneasy reactions to Little Women seem to echo the contradictory criticism that Jo complains about as she reflects on the reviews of her own novel. Among such criticism, we find these reviews: "Little Women, Part II by Louise M. Alcott, is rather a mature book for the little women, but a capital one for their elders" (83) and "they are not religious books, should not be read on Sunday, and are not appropriate for Sunday School" (Russ 100). Such criticism would seem to undermine the notion of Little Women as a pristine, uncompromisingly sentimental novel. Further, we might recall the decidedly mixed feelings of Little Women by feminist critics who cannot deny the novel's influence on their own literary ambitions. Such "contradictory criticism" points to a text that oscillates between its depiction of the "ideal" woman writer, and ultimately breaks down when Jo claims to be writing with "no theory of any kind." A continued close reading of the text can help to identify some of the oscillations and fractures that indicate how a rhetoric of subversion works in Little Women. In order to define a rhetoric of subversion I want to isolate those tropes that lead to confusion or contradiction, especially as such tropes relate to the idea of writing and writers. Writing in Little Women seems to function as a textual metaphor--a metaphor that frequently explodes and disrupts both narrative structure and the seeming transparency of the sentimental homilies in the text (Murphy 570). Writing, in other words, appears to signify more than Jo's mere avocation and recreation-something she does to keep herself out of trouble--for indeed, Jo's writing nearly always seems to cause her more trouble than it is worth. In Little Women, the reader continually is confronted with the seeming oppositions in Jo's account of herself as writer. There is the independent Jo who journeys alone from Concord to New York in order to discover herself as a writer; there is also the homebody Jo who believes that writing is best only if it supports the constructs of the family. As readers we find, in the breakdown of these oppositions, a rhetoric of subversion that seeks to circumvent the traditional values of nineteenth-century American patriarchal culture. In the second chapter of Little Women, the reader receives a first glimpse of Jo as a writer. As the highlight of a Christmas party, the March sisters perform an Operatic Tragedy, written by Jo for the amusement of her family and friends. In writing her own play, Jo is also able to create and perform in as many male roles as she pleases, since "no gentlemen were admitted" to the performance (16). In considering this "tomboy" aspect of Jo's character, Anne Douglas reminds us that "women writers in the early and mid-nineteenth century were in a sense tomboys poaching on male preserves" (96). Not only does Jo long to be a boy, but her literary passions often allow her to play that role. In chapter ten, Jo and her sisters compile a newspaper, inspired by their reading of Dickens' The Pickwick Papers. All of the sisters take on the pen names of Dickens' male characters: "Jo, being of a literary turn, [becomes] Augustus Shodgrass" (100). The reader's first impression of the purpose of Jo's writing is clearly linked, then, to Jo's ability both to entertain and to act out her desire to be a boy. Yet the text's intrusive narrator describes neither pleasure as unwholesome. Of the sisters' playacting she states: "It was excellent drill for their memories, a harmless amusement, and employed many hours which otherwise would have been idle, lonely, or spent in less profitable society" (17). With this commentary, the narrator draws the reader's attention away from Jo's "tomboy" demeanor and toward the idea of writing as a moral act, a means to keep the lively Jo March out of trouble. Writing here can be understood as a form of amusement, seemingly diverting the reader from the idea of writing as a means of role play for roles that might not be attained otherwise. Yet Jo's writing becomes a cause of serious family conflict in chapter eight. Jo's youngest sister Amy, in a fit of anger, burns Jo's unfinished manuscript of fair tales, causing Jo to fly into a blind rage at her sister. It is in this http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/ehost/delivery?sid=2a9b4881-bca9-4b2e-ba1b-739ac7be3e1f%40sessionmgr104&vid=2&ReturnUrl=http%3a%2f%2fweb.b.ebscoho 4/4/2018 EBSCOhost chapter, while illustrating Jo's pain, that Alcott also indicates how Jo constitutes herself as a writer: Jo's book was the pride of her heart, and was regarded by her family as a literary sprout of great promise. It was only a half dozen little fairy tales, but Jo had worked over them patiently, putting her whole heart into them, hoping to make something good enough to print. She had just copied them with great care, and had destroyed the old manuscript, so that Amy's bonfire had consumed the loving work of several years. It seemed a small loss to others, but to Jo it was a dreadful calamity, and she felt that it never could be made up to her. (75) If Jo's family believes that this "small loss" might be readily overcome, Jo identifies herself so strongly with her writing that it is as if she has lost something of her own being in the conflagration (LeGuin 213). Here Jo also despairs of the darkness of her angry moods, for Amy has almost died as a result of Jo's revenge: "It seems," Jo tells her mother, "as if I could do anything when I'm in a passion; I get so savage, I could hurt any one, and enjoy it" (79). Alcott uses this chapter to demonstrate one of Marmee's most famous homilies: ". . . don't let the sun go down on your anger" (76). Gilbert and Gubar read Marmee's commentary as a chance for Alcott to "preac[h] the benefits of feminine socialization" (483-484). However, it must be emphasized that Alcott, in this chapter, first introduces the pairing of the tropes of writing and uncontrollable passion. While passion in the form of anger is not to be encouraged, Alcott seems to state, nonetheless the connection has been drawn. Jo will continue to use writing as a means to channel her energies as Alcott will continue to use the idea of writing-the creative act--as a metaphor for the unknown, for what flies out of the pen, flies out of the writer's control into the Other. Early on in Little Women, writing and passion become linked to an understanding of Jo March's character. Yet this understanding, as Judith Fetterley warns us, remains incomplete without some knowledge of Alcott's sensation stories, especially Behind A Mask ("Impersonating" 2-3). In marking the stylistic contradictions between this sensation story which predates Little Women and Little Women itself, Fetterley claims that: "After reading Behind a Mask, how else are we to understand Little Women, save as an act of impersonation designed to save Alcott's psychological skin and ensure her economic survival?" and "Alcott's final truth is that she cannot tell the truth" ("Impersonating" 13-14). However, such claims seem to assume that language has a transparent quality--that a text is meant never to be read beyond its literal meaning. Certainly Behind A Mask as text, with Alcott's "shocking conclusion," contradicts the idea of exclusively literal means of interpretation. After carefully setting up an account of Jean Muir, the seemingly perfect governess, the narrative manages to unravel itself--by means of writing. Jean Muir's letters to a friend recount a story much different from the one originally put forth by the text. While that original story seems full of inexplicable contradictions, as Jean Muir's letters are revealed, so the transparency of the text of the original narrative is also displaced. The reader's disbelief is mirrored by the disbelief of the Coventry family, whom Jean Muir has so convincingly deceived in her successful attempt to marry the family patriarch for money. The much younger Ned Coventry, whose love the unmasked governess has spurned, discloses the new version of Jean's story to his family: To convince you, I'll read Jean's letters before I say more. They were written to an accomplice and were purchased by Sydney. There was a compact between the two women, that each should keep the other informed of all adventures, plots and plans, and share whatever good fortune fell to the lot of the other. Thus Jean wrote freely, as you shall judge. (97) In this "free" revision of Jean Muir's "plot and plans," Alcott has once again paired writing with passion, with what remains outside the bounds of reason and rationality. Rather than viewing Little Women as a literal "impersonation" then, we might therefore read that text for its figural use of language, for metaphors that appear to subvert its seeming transparent or sentimental surface. Indeed, if Alcott's sensation stories are not included in the text of Little Women itself, Alcott does in fact describe Jo's experience with writing and publishing such stories. Not only is Jo living in New York at the time http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/ehost/delivery?sid=2a9b4881-bca9-4b2e-ba1b-739ac7be3e1f%40sessionmgr104&vid=2&ReturnUrl=http%3a%2f%2fweb.b.ebscoho 4/4/2018 EBSCOhost of this experience, determined to make her own way, but the text is replete with signifiers that indicate that Alcott, as Stern argues, "turns out to be not simply 'The Children's Friend'" but a delver in darkness familiar with the passions of the mind (Plots 7-8). Jo has decided to submit her sensation stories to a publication called "The Weekly Volcano"--a name which immediately conjures images of explosive violence and disruption. Furthermore, in order to arrive at the office of the editor, Mr. Dashwood, Jo must make a brave journey into the world of the unknown, a journey into smoke and darkness: [Jo] had never read Sartor Resartus, but she had a womanly instinct that clothes possess an influence more powerful over many than the worth of character or the magic of manner. So she dressed herself in her best, and, trying to persuade herself that she was neither excited nor nervous, bravely climbed two pair of dark and dirty stairs to find herself in a disorderly room, a cloud of cigar smoke and the presence of three gentlemen sitting with their heels rather higher than their hats. . . . (346) In this passage, Alcott has created an odd juxtaposition of images: the ascent upward, given courage by her writing life, into a kind of Hell with devils dressed as men who refuse to take off their hats when a lady enters their smoke filled quarters (346). Adding to the fire and brimstone aspect of this passage is Alcott's brief, if ironic, reference to Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, which not only deals with the power of clothes but also with the exigencies of religious doubt. In the chapter on "Natural Supernaturalism," Carlyle holds forth as follows: Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick succeeding grandeur through the unknown Deep. Thus, like a Godcreated, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage: Can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive? (202) If such questions are not addressed explicitly in Little Women, no doubt the novel is informed by the Transcendentalist discussions that permeated the intellectual atmosphere of Alcott's childhood. Growing up on the margins of the literary circle that surrounded her father, Bronson Alcott, the future author of Little Women received her early education, in part, from such authors as Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Emerson (Showalter ix). Emerson, himself profoundly inspired by Thomas Carlyle, also exerted an enormous influence on the philosophy of both Bronson and Louisa May Alcott. Such influence was perhaps crucial to the latter's insistence on the anonymous publication of her sensation stories, an insistence that Alcott felt to be keeping within the bounds of decorum held by both Emerson and the society of Concord itself (Stern, Mask xxvi). In a similar move, Jo March also refuses to attach her name to her sensation stories, as "she had a feeling that father and mother would not approve,--and preferred to have her own way first, and beg pardon afterward" (Little Women 349). In this perilous passage to Jo's little womanhood, the writing of sensation stories is linked to the secretive, to what must be left unstated so that she might "have her own way first," a way that will lead her to explore what Carlyle calls "the unknown deep." Yet Carlyle ends his "Natural Supernaturalism" chapter with these optimistic lines from The Tempest: We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little Life Is rounded with a sleep! This quotation is a startling contrast from the "blood and thunder" images contained in the passage leading up to such a conclusion. That Alcott was also much influenced by The Tempest can be seen from her anonymously published short story "Ariel: A Legend of the Lighthouse, which first appeared in Frank Leslie s Chimney Corner in two parts in July of 1865, three years before the first volume of Little Women was published (Stern, Double 13-14). http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/ehost/delivery?sid=2a9b4881-bca9-4b2e-ba1b-739ac7be3e1f%40sessionmgr104&vid=2&ReturnUrl=http%3a%2f%2fweb.b.ebscoho 4/4/2018 EBSCOhost Much of "Ariel" takes place inside a "chasm" which "Bears likeness to that deeply cut fissure in the ledge near Magnolia, Massachusetts, known as Rafe's Chasm, a rockbound channel through which the sea rushes with tremendous force," a seascape with which Alcott was quite familiar (Stern, Double 28). It is the idea of the chasm as "fissure, as a hidden space, a place where magical, otherworldly events occur that is most interesting here. This chasm is described as follows: Wild vines, led by their instinct for the light, climbed along either wall and draped the cliff with green. Some careful hand had been at work, however, for a few hardy plants blossomed in the almost sunless nook; every niche held a delicate fern, every tiny basin was full of some rare old weed, and here and there a suspended shell contained a tuft of greenish moss, or birds eggs, or some curious treasure gathered from the deep. ("Ariel" 155) Here the poet Philip Southesk meets and falls in love with the young Ariel, who has grown up in the seclusion of this seemingly enchanted island where the chasm is located. Ariel seems not quite real and is at first mistaken by Philip for a mermaid. Spending a summer in the chasm together, the two read Shakespeare while Philip sketches Ariel and composes poetry about her. When Ariel is spirited off by her jealous father, with the aid of the Caliban-like lighthousekeeper, Stern, Philip finds comfort in the company of a woman named Helen, one of his many admirers. As Helen inadvertently carries Philip back to Ariel by convincing him to make a return visit to the island, Stern leads Philip back to the chasm and traps him in a cave. Ariel courageously saves Philip's life, and the lovers eventually marry, Philip finding fame as a poet, Ariel becoming "a happy wife." "Helen's life . . . [grows] serenely cheerful, though still solitary." Ariel's father is dead, while Stern has thrown himself into the sea, although he yet haunts the island [as] a wild and woeful phantom that wanders day and night among the cliffs and caverns by the sea. . . . But oftenest a shadow seen to flit into the chasm, wearing a look of human love and longing, as it vanishes in the soft gloom of Ariel's nest. (192-193) When this story is read alongside Little Women, we find an interesting piece of intertextual history. The two female characters of "Ariel" who vie for the right to be the poet Southesk's muse are named Ariel March and Helen Lawrence. March is of course the same last name as that of the family in Little Women, while Lawrence is only somewhat different from Laurence--Theodore Laurence who first falls in love with Jo, then marries her youngest sister Amy. Ariel and Amy have the same initials; Alcott also published under the nom-de-plume A.M. Barnard (Stern, Mask xix). These parallels are made even more obvious by the exchange that follows when Philip falls into the chasm and meets Ariel for the first time. Philip begins: "Where am I?" "In the chasm, but quite safe with me," replied a fresh young voice. "Who is this gentle 'me' whom I mistook for a mermaid, and whose pardon I ask for this rude intrusion?" "I'm Ariel, and I forgive you willingly." "Pretty name--is it really yours?" asked Southesk, feeling that his simplest manner was surest to win her confidence, for the girl spoke with the innocent freedom of a child. "I have no other, except March, and that is not pretty." "Then the 'A.M.' on [your] comb does not mean 'A mermaid' . . . (156-157) Philip, the poet, understands the power of language and also the passion. His "rude intrusion" into the "sunless nook" of Ariel's chasm is rife with erotic overtones, overtones reinforced by the powerful image of the sea rushing in and out of Ariel's private space as the tide rises and falls. http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/ehost/delivery?sid=2a9b4881-bca9-4b2e-ba1b-739ac7be3e1f%40sessionmgr104&vid=2&ReturnUrl=http%3a%2f%2fweb.b.ebscoho 4/4/2018 EBSCOhost This passage is marked not only by Philip's abrupt arrival into Ariel's rather foreboding cavern, but also by the ethereal Ariel's declaration that the name of March "is not pretty." When read in tandem with Little Women, perhaps the name of March implies a metaphorical rendering of a tempestuous month, a change of season from winter to spring, when storms are often and the first birds begin to return from their homes in the south. At the same time, March provides a rather austere image of bleak gray skies and still cold days, a split that renders the March women, Ariel and Jo, perhaps more similar than different. If Ariel spends her youth in passionate splendor by the sea, giving her life's spirit to be muse to a poet, Jo becomes the poet herself. knowing her passion primarily through her writing. Yet in her most passionate work, her sensation stories, Jo must refuse to include her name on the byline. If the name of March is "not pretty" for Jo as it is not for Ariel, throwing off that name as she publishes story after story in "The Weekly Volcano" allows Jo a freedom to continue to explore the passionate nature of her life as a writer, a life that is continually wrought by the conflict and confusion that "human love and longing" may bring. This pairing of writing with passion cannot help but be an undermining force in Jo's life as a writer, especially as she matures into young womanhood. For the adult Jo, writing becomes less of an amusement and more of a means of economic support for her family. Writing is also limited continually by Jo's consciousness of its consequences, consequences tied to the "passion" involved in writing "sensational stories." If she is able to make a living writing such stories, Jo is troubled also by the moral implications of her own work: I almost wish I hadn't any conscience, it's so inconvenient. If I didn't care about doing right, and didn't feel uncomfortable when doing wrong, I should get on capitally. I can't help wishing that father and mother hadn't been so dreadfully particular about these things. (356) If Jo's lament here seems to echo--or set the stage for--Huckleberry Finn's guilty conscience over helping Jim to escape slavery (Murphy 367), Huck, as narrator of his own text can afford to be rather more of a free spirit than Jo. In Little Women, the text's intrusive narrator admonishes Jo for such self-pity, emphasizing that the "principles which seem like prison walls to youth . . . will prove sure foundations to build character upon in womanhood" (356), a concession that Alcott obviously must make herself in the writing of Little Women. Nonetheless, as Jo contemplates these dark thoughts, she is at the same time a model of independent young womanhood, living in a rooming house in New York, having the adventures she dreamed of as a girl. That she inevitably must return to the safety of her father's house not only underscores the fragmentary nature of her independent existence, but also allows her to learn another lesson in her life as a mid-nineteenth-century American woman writer. If Jo's sensational stories are a failure, the moral stories that Jo tries to write subsequently fail to find a publisher. Disheartened, Jo despairs of ever writing again, until her mother suggests a new audience: ". . . write something for [your family], and never mind the rest of the world. Try it, dear; I'm sure it would do you good and please us very much" (436). In "never mind[ing]" the rest of the world, Jo's personal stories, to her puzzlement, at last succeed in finding both a publisher and a wider audience. Her father explains this seemingly odd situation: There is truth in [your work], Jo--that's the secret; humor and pathos make it alive, and you have found your style at last. You wrote with no thought of fame or money, and put your heart into it, my daughter; you have had your bitter, now comes the sweet; do your best, and grow happy as we are in your success. (436) Mr. March's moral lesson seems further to undermine Jo's independent life as a writer. Jo appears to be trapped by the nineteenth-century conventions of the spinster sister as caretaker of her father's house (Fetterley, "Civil War" 369). http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/ehost/delivery?sid=2a9b4881-bca9-4b2e-ba1b-739ac7be3e1f%40sessionmgr104&vid=2&ReturnUrl=http%3a%2f%2fweb.b.ebscoho 4/4/2018 EBSCOhost Nonetheless, the monolithic structure of Alcott's call to moral subservience seems to break apart in the text's most important link to passion and writing, a link made possible by Jo's residence in her father's home. Not needing to cope with the cares and worries of the outside world, Jo is able to throw herself into her writing with "entire abandon" (Le Guin 217). Alcott's description of Jo's writing process serves to announce the psychological complexity of her character in a way that seems to subvert nineteenth-century dictates of submissive womanhood: Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her [black] scribbling suit, and 'fall into a vortex,' as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace . . . when the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real to her as any in the flesh. Sleep forsook her, meals stood untasted, day and night were too short to enjoy these happy hours worth living, even if they bore no other fruit. (265-266) This "vortex" that Jo finds herself in is a celebration of the inner life, a contemplation of a world that, by necessity of convention, cannot stretch as far in reality as in imagination. Moreover, Jo's total absorption in the process of writing as a physical act seems to ancitipate late twentieth-century French feminist insights concerning writing as an act that constitutes both conscious and unconscious aspects of language production: writing as an act of writing one's own body. Helene Cixous describes how she, like Jo, also "fall[s] into a vortex." Cixous's own "vortex" is part of her process of writing for the theatre: It is like an effect of madness. First I am haunted by others. I am not myself. This leads to real fainting spells. The first time this happened to me, I was afraid. Now I am used to it, I do not care, I understand. But one is so much the other that it is a complete dispossession. (Interview 175) In both these descriptions of the writing process, writing becomes an act of experiencing the Other, of loosening the bonds that constitute the conscious self. This loosening of bonds, in both Alcott and Cixous, is also physical, manifesting itself as "fainting spells" in Cixous, or as diminished needs for sleep and food, as in Jo's case. Elsewhere, Cixous discusses the intellectual experience and necessity--of writing the Other: "Because it is not me, because it is me, because it is the world different from myself that makes me feel my/its difference" ("Scene" 17). It is a matter of discovering the experience of living as poetically constituted--then inscribing the text with signifiers of such experience. This movement through the personal to the metafictional is one that Alcott herself might well have understood, returning as she did to her own journal years after its original composition to add notes and commentary (Stern, Journal 38). One especially significant instance of Alcott's use of intertextuality between life and art occurs in her journal for April of 1855. Alcott was twenty-two years old at the time thirteen years before the publication of Little Women. The bracketed commentary is undated: I am in the garret with my papers round me, and a pile of apples to eat while 1 write my journal, plan stories, and enjoy the patter of rain on the roof, in peace and quiet. [Jo in the garret. L.M.A.] (73) If Jo can "find no peace" until her writing fit passes, beginning to write at the point of "peace and quiet" becomes an important precondition for entering into "complete dispossession." Submerging herself into an "unconscious" poetic mode of thought does not, for Jo, involve submission to the patriarchal order. In fact, in this garret of her own, Jo continues, in her writing life, to actively engage in creating a rhetoric of subversion. In asserting a woman's right to the freedom of an inner life, Alcott perhaps is hinting at the potentially subversive strengths of female-centered culture. As she describes Jo's writing life, Alcott chooses to include as http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/ehost/delivery?sid=2a9b4881-bca9-4b2e-ba1b-739ac7be3e1f%40sessionmgr104&vid=2&ReturnUrl=http%3a%2f%2fweb.b.ebscoho 4/4/2018 EBSCOhost examples of Jo's writing not the "sensation stories" with which Jo is able to contribute to the family finances; instead, Alcott invents "Jo's Journal" (Chapter 33), a series of letters that Jo writes from New York to Beth and Marmee at home in Concord. Jo fills these letters with news of her domestic activities and general observations as governess in Mrs. Kirke's large boarding house. However, unlike demonic governess Jean Muir (whose initials she shares), Jo March describes a world dedicated to the more conventional occupations of heart and hearth. "Yesterday was a quiet day," Jo writes, "spent in teaching, sewing, and writing" (337). As Alcott indicates here, Jo continues to work on both domestic and intellectual pursuits far away from the supportive bonds of family and home. "Jo's Journal" therefore seems to serve several purposes, the most immediate of which is for Jo to reassure Marmee and Beth that she feels as if she "was getting on a little in spite of my failures; for I am cheerful most of the time now, work with a will, and take more interest in people than I used to, which is satisfactory" (344). Furthermore, Alcott communicates to her readers the possibilities for woman's independence in the context of Victorian American society. One may live far from familiar surroundings of childhood life, Alcott seems to argue in this chapter, but the outcome need not be destructive. Instead, Jo's actions present the reader with a model of female independence, a "little woman" who is "getting on in spite of my many failures." Alcott also includes in Little Women several of Jo's poems about her sisters, poems that continue to celebrate the importance of women's culture. One of these poems, "My Beth," written for her dying sister after Jo returns home from New York, helps to communicate Jo's most profound feelings for and to Beth. As Beth reads the poem, she discovers what Jo has learned from Beth's experience of illness and suffering; Beth also comes to understand that her own young life has not been "wasted." Further, Beth is able to see, and later to directly address, Jo's vision of the future. Joe writes: For the touch of grief will render My wild nature more serene, Give to life new aspirations-A new trust in the unseen. (417-418) This poem emphasizes the strength of Jo and Beth's spiritual connection, even if in her response to Jo, Beth's advice remains conventional. Beth urges Jo to take Beth's place as "angel in the house," expressing the hope that Jo "will be happier in doing that than in writing splendid books or seeing all the world" (418). As Beth contemplates her own journey "across the river" (418), she advises Jo to reconsider her worldly commitments, in order that Jo may find the "new trust in the unseen" for which she is searching. Alcott here collapses the oppositions of character in Jo and Beth so that the two seem to become doubles of each other, united for the eternal journey that the sisters know so well from their reading of Pilgrim's Progress. However, Beth seems to demonstrate a contradictory impression of Jo's character and of her own relationship to Jo. In "Beth's Secret" (Chapter 36), Jo arranges for a holiday with Beth at the seashore, paid for with the money that Jo has earned writing sensation stories. As the sisters sit together listening to "the sigh of the wind and the lapping of the fide," Beth reveals her "secret": that she knows that she is dying. First, however, Beth describes the sea birds that surround her and Jo, birds that serve as metaphors for the spiritual attributes of each sister. Beth begins by pointing out to Jo "a gray-coated sand-bird [that] came tripping over the beach, 'peeping' softly to itself." Beth speaks as follows: Dear little bird! See, Jo, how tame it is. I like peeps better than gulls, they are not so wild and handsome, but they seem happy, confiding little things. I used to call them my birds, last summer; and mother said they reminded her of me--busy quaker-colored creatures, always near the shore, and always chirping that contented little song of theirs. You are the gull, Jo, strong and wild, fond of the storm and the wind, flying far out to sea, and happy all alone. (375) http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/ehost/delivery?sid=2a9b4881-bca9-4b2e-ba1b-739ac7be3e1f%40sessionmgr104&vid=2&ReturnUrl=http%3a%2f%2fweb.b.ebscoho 4/4/2018 EBSCOhost Beth indicates in this passage her understanding of Jo's otherness, of Jo's need to be "wild" and "alone." Yet this wildness is not altogether appealing for Beth who likes the tame little "peeps better than gulls," for these smaller, less imposing birds are more content to remain at home, as Beth herself is "always near the shore." Jo responds by ignoring the content of Beth's metaphor, but not its form: her younger sister now seems to "[think] aloud in a way quite unlike bashful Beth" (375). As Jo receives the gift of Beth's sudden coming to language, Jo also begins to understand that Beth indeed is dying: "Jo leaned down to kiss the tranquil face; and with that silent kiss, she dedicated herself soul and body to Beth" (375). Again, Alcott emphasizes the importance of spiritual life among women, as well as the great event of Beth's extended speech, a speech that carries some indications of Beth's contradictory feelings for Jo, who is "fond of the storm and the wind." After Beth dies, Jo experiences her own contradictory feelings of isolation and loneliness, pondering a dismal future for herself: "An old maid--that's what I'm to be. A literary spinster with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty years hence a morsel of fame, perhaps" (440). Alcott uses Jo's musings to expound on the importance of "cherishing" the "old Mai[d], no matter how poor and plain and prim"; yet later in this passage, Alcott also undermines her text, speaking directly to her audience of her own shortcomings as narrator of Little Women: "Jo must have fallen asleep (as I date say my reader has during this little homily)" (441). Alcott draws attention to this comment with parentheses, seeming deliberately to disrupt her own rhetoric to draw attention away from the apparently sobering consequences of Jo's earlier aspirations of literary fame and fortune. In the last of Jo's poems that Alcott includes in Little Women, the tone of the text shifts once more in regard to Jo's life as a "literary spinster." In the poem, "In the Garrret," Jo once again reflects with melancholy on the consequences of her actions as she examines the contents of an old chest containing relics of her childhood: Half-writ poems, stories wild, April letters, warm and cold, Diaries of wilful child, Hints of a woman early old; A woman in a lonely home, Hearing like a sad refrain,-'Be worthy love, and love will come,' In the falling summer rain. (477) In recalling her "stories wild," Alcott again associates Jo's writing with passion, and with Beth's description of Jo as the free seagull who is "strong and wild." Yet also in this passage, as Alcott draws attention to Jo's loneliness, the reader may remember Jo's fervent wish in her poem to Beth to make "my wild nature more serene." Jo's ambivalence is evident here, as she later comments that this poem is "very bad poetry, but I felt it when I wrote it one day when I was very lonely, and had a good cry on a rag-bag. I never thought it would go where it could tell tales" (479). Here Jo discovers that her writing, good or bad, wild or serene, has the power to exist beyond the world of her own consciousness. Professor Bhaer, a friend and unrequited love from Jo's New York days, in reading this poem in a "paper that paid for poetry" (476), decides to journey to Concord to propose marriage o Jo. Jo s reaction is to tear the poem into "fragments [that] fly away on the wind" and to accept Bhaer's proposal (479). Jo's future also seems to "fly away" with those fragments of her poem. Indeed, in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir has written that, although she admired the character of Bhaer because "he understood [Jo], consoled her, advised her, and in the end married her . . . all the same this intrusion [on Jo's independent life as a writer] upsets me" (111). Yet Bhaer's "intrusion" seems to be a deliberate rhetorical device on Alcott's part. Alcott confides to her journal as she continues the process of writing the second part of Little Women: http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/ehost/delivery?sid=2a9b4881-bca9-4b2e-ba1b-739ac7be3e1f%40sessionmgr104&vid=2&ReturnUrl=http%3a%2f%2fweb.b.ebscoho 4/4/2018 EBSCOhost A little success is so inspiring that now I find my "Marches" sober, nice people, and as I can launch into the future, my fancy has more play. Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman's life. I won't marry Jo to Laurie to please any one. (167) Yet the "play" of Alcott's "fancy" is still limited by rhetorical constraints. Inspired by the "success" of Part I of Little Women, Alcott, who chose to remain unmarried herself, need not marry Laurie, Jo's childhood companion in the "scrapes" and adventures of Part I, to the thoughtful, "early old" Jo (Stern, Journal 22-23). Laurie instead marries Amy, the sister who burned Jo's first manuscript in a fit of anger. In place of Laurie, Jo marries the older, more reserved "friend" from New York, who cautioned her against writing "sensation stories." In this act of marriage that banishes Jo from her "lonely" spinsterhood, Alcott appears to abandon Jo as the "wilful child," seeming to contradict her view that marriage need not be the "only aim and end of a woman's life." Nonetheless, Jo's poem "In the Garret" does continue to celebrate other aims and ends of the lives of her "little women," specifically the eternal bonds of sisterhood: Four women, taught by weal and woe, To love and labor in their prime. Four sisters, parted for an hour,-None lost, one only gone before, Made by love's immortal power, Nearest and dearest evermore. (478) Sisterhood, according to Jo's poem, exists in the realm of "love's immortal power"; if the sisters are separated in life by the death of one and the marriage of the others, to each other they remain, in this world and the one beyond, "nearest and dearest evermore." Death or marriage indeed seems to be the fate of Alcott's "little women." Yet if Alcott needed to make editorial concessions for her Victorian audience, Jo's poem demonstrates how the lives of four young women working together create a sisterhood that is more powerful than anything that can be dictated by earthly bounds. As Susan K. Harris argues: "Given the nature of the public discourse and the power it had in the market place, writers aiming for a popular audience had to observe, at least superficially, essentialist rules for inscribing female protagonists and for their narrators' attitudes towards their heroines' adventures" (47). Furthermore, we must as readers refuse to understand the text merely in terms of its transparent surface, but instead make note of its rhetorical strategies, including the use of metaphor. If we look for instances of how a text indicates its otherness, its threat to the platitudes of the dominant culture, it is possible to reread Little Women's contradictions in a different light. The celebration of sisterhood that Alcott provides in this passage demonstrates the very subversion that the patriarchy dreaded and sought to cut off (Dobson 404). As Barbara Welter writes in The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860": The very perfection of True Womanhood, moreover, carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. For if woman was so very little less than the angels, she should surely take a more active part in running the world, especially since men were making such a hash of things. (174) Writing in the post-Civil War world, Louisa May Alcott demonstrates how woman, though laboring under the constraints of convention, can indeed help to transform herself, and, inevitably her society. perhaps it is this "moral" that makes Little Women compelling, if controversial, reading in the last decade of the twentieth century. Indeed, in the last chapter of Little Women, Jo, who now with her husband runs an experimental school for boys and is also a happy wife and contented mother, can still confide to Marmee: "I haven't given up the hope that I may write a good book yet" (489). Given our knowledge of Alcott's extraordinary career, the http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/ehost/delivery?sid=2a9b4881-bca9-4b2e-ba1b-739ac7be3e1f%40sessionmgr104&vid=2&ReturnUrl=http%3a%2f%2fweb.b.ebscoho 4/4/2018 EBSCOhost reader may also hope for Jo, Louisa May Alcott's ingenious female heroine, who at the conclusion of Little Women, still dreams of doing "something splendid" and hopes not to "be forgotten long after I'm dead." Pennsylvania State University University Park, Pennsylvania Notes 1 Elaine Showalter, in her introduction to the recent Penguin edition of Little Women, catalogs women writers of several generations who have had to reckon with Little Women one way or another: everyone from Simone de Beauvoir, who began to write in order to imitate Jo, to Adrienne Rich, who believed it necessary to break away from Jo's fate in order to become successful as a woman writer. This fate include Jo's relationship to home and family which, in terms of recent popular psychology, seems more co-dependent than independent and is often, if mistakenly, conflated with Alcott's own life as Madeleine Stern suggests in her introduction to Alcott's collection of sensation stories, A Double Life: Newly Discovered Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Also see Ann B. Murphy for other recent feminist responses to Little Women. 2 Moods initially was published in 1864. This edition recently has been reissued with an introduction by Sarah Elbert that details the publication history of Alcott's text. Works Cited Alcott, Louisa May. "Ariel: A Legend of the Lighthouse." A Double Life: Newly Discovered Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine B. Stern. Boston: Little, Brown, 1988. 140-193. -----. Behind A Mask. Behind A Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine B. Stern. New York: Morrow, 1975. 1-104. -----. Hospital Sketches. Ed. Bessie Z. Jones. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. -----. The Journals of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. -----. Little Women. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Penguin, 1989. -----. A Modern Mephistopheles. A Modern Mephistopheles and Taming a Tartar. Ed. Madeleine Stern. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1987. 8-290. -----. Moods. Ed. Sarah Elbert. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991. -----. Pauline's Passion and Punishment. Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine Stern. New York: Morrow, 1975. 105-152. -----. Transcendental Wild Oats and Excerpts from the Fruitlands Diary. Ed. William Henry Harrison. Harvard, Massachusetts: Harvard Common Press, 1981. -----. Work: A Story of Experience. Ed. Gerda Lerner. Introduction. Sarah Elbert. New York: Schocken, 1977. Beauvoir, Simone de. Memoirs of A Dutiful Daughter. Trans. James Kirkup. Cleveland: World, 1959. Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh in Three Books. London: Chapman, 1907. Cixous, Helene. "Appendix: A Later Interview with Helene Cixous." Michele Lagny, Marie-Claire Ropars, and Pierre Sorlin, eds., Hors Cadre 8, "L"Etat d'auteur" (1990): 33-65. Rpt. in Helene Cixous: Writing the Feminine by Verena Conley. Trans. Verena Conley. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. 163-178. http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/ehost/delivery?sid=2a9b4881-bca9-4b2e-ba1b-739ac7be3e1f%40sessionmgr104&vid=2&ReturnUrl=http%3a%2f%2fweb.b.ebscoho 4/4/2018 EBSCOhost -----. "From the Scene of History to the Scene of the Unconscious." Trans. Deborah W. Carpenter. The Future of Literary Theory. Ed. Ralph Cohen. New York: Routledge, 1989. 118. Dobson, Joanne. "Portraits of the Lady: Imagining Women in Nineteenth-Century America." New Literary History 3 (1991). 396-404. Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1977. Elbert, Sarah. Introduction. Moods by Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Sarah Elbert. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991. xi-xlii. Fetterley, Judith. "Impersonating 'Little Women': The Radicalism of Alcott's Behind A Mask." Women's Studies 10 (1983). 1-14. -----. "Little Women: Alcott's Civil War." Feminist Studies 5 (1979). 367-383. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Halttunen, Karen. "The Domestic Drama of Louisa May Alcott." Feminist Studies 10 (1984). 233-254. Harris, Susan K. "But is it any good?: Evaluating Nineteenth-Century American Women's Fiction." American Literature 63 (1991). 43-61. James, Henry. Rev. of Moods. North American Review 101 (1865): 276-281. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine B. Stem. Boston: Hall, 1984.69-73. LeGuin, Ursula. "The Fisherwoman's Daughter." Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Harper, 1990. 212-237. Murphy, Ann B. "The Borders of Ethical, Erotic, and Artistic Possibilities in Little Women." Signs: Journals of Women in Culture and Society 15 (1990). 562-583. Myerson, Joel and Daniel Shealy, eds. The Journals of Louisa May Alcott. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. Rev. of Little Women, Part I. Arthur's Home Magazine 32 (1868): 375. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine B. Stem. Boston: Hall, 1984.81-82. Rev. of Little Women, Part II. Harper's New Monthly Magazine 39 (1869): 455-456. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine B. Stem. Boston: Hall, 1984.83. Russ, Lavinia. "Not To Be Read on Sunday." Horn Book Magazine 44 (1968): 521-526. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine B. Stern. Boston: Hall, 1984. 99-102. Showalter, Elaine. Introduction. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. New York: Penguin, 1989. Stern, Madeleine B. Introduction. Behind A Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine B. Stern. New York: Morrow, 1975. vii-xxxiii. -----. Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott. Boston: Hall, 1984. http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/ehost/delivery?sid=2a9b4881-bca9-4b2e-ba1b-739ac7be3e1f%40sessionmgr104&vid=2&ReturnUrl=http%3a%2f%2fweb.b.ebscoho 4/4/2018 EBSCOhost -----. Introduction. A Double Life: Newly Discovered Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine B. Stern. Boston: Little, Brown, 1988.3-32. -----. Introduction. A Modern Mephistopheles. A Modern Mephistopheles and Taming a Tartar. Ed. Madeleine Stern. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1987. vii-1. -----. Introduction. Plots and Counterplots: More Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine B. Stern. New York: Morrow, 1976. 7-25. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin Or, Life Among the Lowly. Ed. Ann Douglas. New York: Penguin, 1986. Vincent, Elizabeth. "Subversive Miss Alcott." The New Republic 40 (1924): 204. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott. Ed. Madeleine B. Stern. Boston: Hall, 1984.222-224. Welter, Barbara. "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860." American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151-174. Warner, Susan. The Wide, Wide World. Afterword. Jane Tompkins. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1987. ~~~~~~~~ By Susan Naomi Bernstein Copyright of ATQ is the property of University of Rhode Island and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/ehost/delivery?sid=2a9b4881-bca9-4b2e-ba1b-739ac7be3e1f%40sessionmgr104&vid=2&ReturnUrl=http%3a%2f%2fweb.b.ebscoho