루이자 메이 올컷의 대안적 돌봄공동체 연구: 『일: 경험 이야기』를 중심으로

Abstract

This paper examines Louisa May Alcott’s alternative care community envisioned in her 1872 novel Work: A Story of Experience. Critics have interpreted Work mostly as a story navigating possibilities of female self-fulfillment and financial independence through paid work in 19th century America. In addition, they have construed the progress of the heroine Christie from a job market to a domestic realm in the latter half of the novel as a kind of regression from a feminist point of view. This article challenges the prevailing tendency in the current literature, reevaluating the notion of “work” as caring labor; moreover, it looks afresh at Christie’s quest as an attempt to re-situate caring labor within the framework of anti-market and anti-patriarchal relations. Alcott’s major works published in the 1860s and 1870s highlight the value of care and envision various forms of care-providing communities beyond the domain of Victorian home sustained by unpaid female care service. In Work Alcott criticizes the reality of care in 19th century American society not only in terms of gender division but also in terms of market economy transforming care into alienated and low-paid wage labor. Far from being a regression from a search for an independence to a normative domesticity, the female commune that Christie creates at the end of Work embodies Alcott’s ideal of an alternative, non-exploitive care community. Some feminist scholars have been wary of discourses of care due to their association with the motherhood as the ultimate source of care labor. Nevertheless, Work and Alcott’s other stories delving into the question of care demonstrate the radical potentials of care discourses as the catalyst for reconfiguration of socioeconomic structure and gender hierarchy.