Gender Relations in Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches and “Behind a Mask”

Abstract

This article explores gender relations in Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863) alongside her sensational thriller “Behind a Mask: or, A Woman’s Power” (1866). During the mid-1860s Alcott authored a series of sensational stories and novellas portraying dynamic and sensationalist power struggles between male and female characters. Such conflicting gender dynamics, however, drastically change in Hospital Sketches, a fictionalized account of Alcott’s real-life experiences as a nurse during the Civil war. Despite having been written during the same period as her sensational fiction, the power struggle between masculinity and femininity in these sketches is drastically neutralized within the context of wartime conflict. This article examines the ways in which Alcott contrastingly employs melodramatic techniques to establish male-female relationships in these two texts. Both texts uniquely portray Alcott’s feminist ideals; femininity triumphs over masculinity in “Behind a Mask,” whereas femininity and masculinity are both embraced and transgressed in Hospital Sketches.