Un capitolo da un romanzo mai scritto': la testualità della voce materna in Transcendental Wild Oats (1873) di Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott’s satirical sketch Transcendental Wild Oats (1873), written thirty years after the author’s childhood experience at the alternative commune of Fruitlands with her family and other transcendental philosophers, is a semi-autobiographical account of the contradictory principles that regulated life at the farm. These principles directly impacted her mother, who, being the only woman of the group, was overworked by the task of taking care of all practical matters and saving the whole family from starvation and illness. The failure of Fruitlands, which was also due to divergent opinions among its members on family dynamics and kinship relations, resonates in Alcott’s memory as a deep critique of the separate spheres paradigm. The latter, though apparently challenged by the utopian intentions of the consociates, was actually reconfigured as a naturalized material and ideological space, where a woman’s incessant care and labor contained the effects of men’s inertia regarding concrete self-sustenance. This study examines how the narrative structure of Transcendental Wild Oats confronts these issues by exposing how the complex rendering of the character of Hope Lamb at Fruitlands, from her forced domesticization to the heroic reaffirmation of her moral and salvific power, is only apparently aligned with the sentimental literary tradition of the period. The metatextual strategies of the story subtly deflect the scripted gendered role of the mother, and aim at rehabilitating the utopian principles of Fruitlands through her voice, by creatively projecting bridges across characters and events. At the meta-discursive level, Alcott’s trans-historical recomposition of Fruitlands also frames the author’s mature stage of writing and her creative engagement with documenting the experience of women involved in the workforce in and out of domestic realms, thus reflecting the author’s fluid engagement with social activism and reformist endeavors in the American society of her time.