The Anxiety of Daughterhood, or Using Bloom to Read Women Writers: The Cases of Louisa May Alcott and Virginia Woolf

Abstract

Abstract‘The process of literary influence is a battle between strong equals, father and sons.’ So wrote Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence. But what of literary daughters? Can Bloom's work offer insights into the dynamics of literary influence for daughters as well as sons? Louisa May Alcott and Virginia Woolf were writer‐daughters of writer‐fathers who anxiously negotiated familial patriarchy and patriarchal literary history in their texts. In examinations of the power of fathers over the words of daughters, moreover, critics of Alcott and Woolf allude explicitly or otherwise to the theories of Bloom, the ‘father’ of influence studies. What happens when we apply Bloom's ideas to women's writing? Alcott's Little Women and the so‐called ‘Thrillers’ that she published anonymously offer very different images of daughterhood. When read alongside Bloom, these contradictions suggest Alcott's anxious relation to the influence of her father Bronson, the education reformer and leading member of the Transcendentalist movement. Like Louisa Alcott, Virginia Woolf negotiated her father's personal and public legacy in complex ways. In her writing from ‘A Sketch of the Past’, to To the Lighthouse, Sir Leslie Stephen's characteristic academic and mountaineering tropes may be seen to surface repeatedly. Bloom's model of literary influence as an anxiety towards a father figure that is ‘achieved’ within the writing offers new insights into the works of both women: in their writing Alcott and Woolf confronted their fathers’ legacies. That the personal and public battleground for these confrontations between father and daughter was writing suggests both the usefulness and limitations of Bloom's model for understanding the dynamics of literary influence upon women writers, and points to a new area of study for scholars of writing women.