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This article explores gender relations in Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863) alongside her sensational thriller “Behind a Mask: or, A Woman’s Power” (1866). During the mid-1980s Alcott authored a series of sensational stories and novellas portraying dynamic and sensationalist power struggles between male and female characters, in which male characters invariably succumb to the powerful, vengeful femininity of the heroine. Such conflicting gender dynamics, however, drastically change in Hospital Sketches, a fictionalized account of Alcott’s real-life experiences as a nurse during the Civil war. Despite having been written during the same period as her sensational fiction, the power struggle between masculinity and femininity in these sketches is drastically neutralized within the context of wartime conflict. This article examines the ways in which the wartime context develops and complicates Alcott’s feminist portrayal of gender relations and exploresthe ways in which the two texts contrastingly employ melodramatic techniques to establish male-female relationships. The article concludes that both texts uniquely portray Alcott’s feminist ideals; femininity triumphs over masculinity in “Behind a Mask,” whereas femininity and masculinity are both embraced and transgressed in Hospital Sketches.
