ABSTRACT
Every discussion of Louisa May Alcott’s sensationalist fiction, most of which was published in the 1860s, begins with reminding readers that Alcott’s writing is more diverse than Little Women. Ever since Barbara Welter’s influential essay “The Cult of True Womanhood”, “true womanhood,” represented by the four virtues piety, purity, submission, and domesticity, is understood as the dominant image of white, middle-class American femininity, propagated especially by women’s periodicals and sentimental culture. The “painted woman,” that is, “a woman of fashion, who poison polite society with deception and betrayal by dressing extravagantly and practicing the empty forms of false etiquette” was imagined as the antagonist to the “true woman.” For Alcott, female anger was an important tool in her sensational writing and feminist politics, because it allowed her characters to be rebellious and defying, whether in the private or the public.
