ABSTRACT
Louisa May was a very energetic and strong-willed child. As the thirteen-year old noted in her journal: “People think I’m wild and queer.”8 Her father preferred
her older sister Anna, because she was less wild and active. Indeed, he often found Louisa “demonic”9 and as “the demon of discord…[in his] vision of domestic harmony.”10 Very early on, Louisa perceived of herself as the demon of the family: “I was cross today, and I cried when I went to bed. I made good resolutions, and felt better in my heart. If I only kept all I make, I should be the best girl in the world. But I don’t, and so am very bad.”11 Forty years later, upon reading and commenting in her journal, Louisa May added: ”[Poor little sinner! She says the same at fifty.— L.M.A.].”12 Along with her father, she always doubted herself and perceived herself as a sinner and “cried over […her] bad tongue and temper.”13 Louisa always tried to please her father, but his love was conditional upon her behavior.14 Even if her behavior met his standards of domesticity, she still saw herself as “good on the surface but bad, angry, and unforgiving underneath.”15 As a result of her attempts to please her father and her internal conflict about her own nature, she could neither “rebel nor fully…accept the self-sacrificing feminine role” that her father and society expected her to assume. She was “left…a smoldering, resentful, emotionallydamaged woman.”16
