Race, Disability, and Class: Alcott’s Peripheral Children

Abstract

The gendering of childhood is not the only means by which children are constructed as other in literature. This chapter considers representations of race, class, and disability in Alcott’s works, and questions the assumption that classic texts hold views that differ from those of the twenty-first century. Via a reading of disability and race theories in children’s literature, West considers Alcott’s construction of those children who do not fit within her representation of an idealized childhood; those who can be redeemed into this model, and those who cannot. She also reads the nineteenth-century trope of disability as education, via a comparison between Jack and Jill and What Katy Did. Finally, this chapter considers how these children are rendered as peripheral in Alcott’s works.