“One Weapon I Possessed”: Containing Desire and Claiming Authority in Louisa May Alcott’s Antislavery Stories

The rediscovery of Louisa May Alcott’s sensational thrillers under the pseudonym has led critics to reconsider her beyond the reputation of “The Children’s Friend,”often dividing her writings in two opposing modes that align sentimental fiction with moral propriety and sensational writing with transgression. Against this critical tendency, this paper reads three antislavery stories―“M.L.”(1863), “My Contraband”(1863), and “An Hour”(1864)―as sites where racial, moral, and generic oppositions are entangled rather than opposed. Examining their interracial relationships, it shows how Alcott negotiates these tensions to claim a public literary authority beyond the domestic sphere and to articulate, through engagements with genres such as transcendentalism, an ambitious and individualistic vision of domesticity distinct from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s.