earticle

영어

Louisa May Alcott wrote journals for most of her lifetime. However, her journals as are left now are the outcome of an intentional revision made by the author herself. It is generally argued that Alcott might have wanted to keep her public image in the best possible way. Therefore, this paper aims to read Alcott’s journals as a semi-public record, a kind of autobiography. In this regard, this paper examined her journals as a rich resource for examining the crucial issues Alcott had to deal with as a woman writer of nineteenth-century America. First, Alcott’s journals show her continuous efforts to establish economic independence. She struggled to take care of the economy of the family as a main financial supporter. Also, she recorded the difficulties and hard efforts of finding out the cures for her disease with which she had been afflicted since she volunteered to be a nurse in the Civil War. Lastly, she expresses her difficulty of being a woman writer in her day, juggling between duties of a public figure and desires of a private woman. Alcott’s issues with economic independence, invalidism, and the conflict between a private woman and a public writer represent woman’s status of nineteenth-century America. In this vein, then, Alcott’s lifetime practice of journaling can be argued as a personal record turned into a public narrative of woman’s status in the cultural context of her day.