Journal Article

Frado, Linda, Ellen, and Iola

Sherrard-Johnson, Cherene

2019

Overview

While the March sisters are bemoaning how \"dreadful to be poor\" and a \"Christmas without any presents\" (11) in the midst of Civil War, Linda Brent's chapter \"Christmas Festivities\" describes enslaved women's attempts to \"gladden the hearts of their little ones\" despite the slave auction that presages \"the Slaves' New Year's Day\" (Jacobs 118, 15). Alcott's autobiographical novel set the standard for a decidedly American, New England girlhood, but nineteenth-century black women authors would deploy sentiment and sensation in their autobiographical fictions for a different objective. In their hands, Alcott's tropes (with influence from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child) became powerful tools of resistance, shining the spotlight on \"little women\" who were not allowed a true or intact childhood; whose plot trajectories forked not between artistic spinsterhood and marriage, but who became adolescent mothers confronted with a choice for freedom with or without their children; whose domestic labors served others, toiling like the unaffectionately nicknamed Frado as \"Nig\" under the constant threat of a beating; and whose adventures abroad involved stowing away on a ship (Linda Brent) or gendered and racial passing on a train (Ellen Craft).

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Subject: 19th century / African American literature / African Americans / Alcott, Louisa May (1832-1888) / Authorship / Child, Lydia Maria Francis (1802-1880) / Children / Craft, Ellen / Forum / Heroism & heroes / Literary characters / Literary devices / Literary influences / Literature / Morality / Narrative techniques / Novels / Perceptions / Plot (Narrative) / Rhetorical figures / Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1811-1896) / Women / Womens literature / Writers