ABSTRACT
In August 1850, Louisa May Alcott wrote in her journal, “I used to imagine my mind a room in confusion, and I was to put it in order; so I swept out useless thoughts and dusted foolish fancies away, and furnished it with good resolutions and began again. . . . I’m not a good housekeeper, and never got my room in order” (rpt. Cheney 59). Alcott’s self-effacing description of her haphazard housekeeping’s “room[s] in confusion” denies the strategic interior designs of her fi ction. Alcott’s writings, considered alongside her personal housekeeping habits, participated in a much larger national conversation regarding women’s labor and reform on the community level. For a writer of domestic fi ction who unabashedly expressed a “hunger for home,” Alcott was surprisingly mobile. As an adult, she continually moved from place to place, mostly furnished rental properties, in an effort to write. This habit of frequent relocation dated back to her childhood, when her family moved numerous times to accommodate her father Bronson’s current reform ideals. However, it also refl ects Alcott’s peripatetic adult inclinations. Present in many discussions of nineteenth-century female domesticity-architectural, literary, and otherwise-are the politics and polemics of ownership; conversely, Alcott’s lack of home ownership was a form of spatial control.
