Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

Character of Jean Muir in Alcott's Behind a Mask

This study will psychoanalyze the integrity of Jean Muir's happiness and success in Louisa May Alcott's novella Behind A Mask; or, A Woman's Power. The question is whether Jean surrenders all of her integrity, or even all of her true identity, in performing the various roles she plays as a governess, an actress, and an engaged woman, in order to achieve that success. The answer is that she may have lost some or much of her integrity, or even her identity in her reliance on the masks of her different roles, but in order to achieve success in the patriarchal, deception-ridden society in which she lives, she makes the choice to do whatever she has to do. This answer can only be appreciated if the reader accepts the world as portrayed by Alcott, and believes, as this reader does, that Alcott means Jean's tactics to be a sign of necessary strength, and not weakness.

An additional and related question is whether Jean is an hysteric. If she is in any meaningful way an hysteric, her hysteria is the most controlled and effective hysteria ever witnessed. Hysteria, to the patriarchal Freud, was largely confined to women suffering from an inability to express themselves (sometimes unto actual muteness) because of a real or imagined childhood sexual trauma (Kahane 281). No such trauma is reported by Alcott with respect to Jean. However, another aspect of hysteria introduces a fascinating possibility. Here Kahane relates hysteria and feminism;

Feminism, in its commitment to giving women public voice not only through suffrage but also through its use of the woman orator, seemed the mirror image of hysteria, in which the body spoke what the voice could not (Kahane 281).

Jean as a governess, as an actor, as a manipulator with words of the man she would marry, of her employers, is certainly an orator of sorts. Is there any circumstance in which her brilliant and successful plan to achieve wealth, status, power, and perhaps revenge, can be ...

Page 1 of 7 Next >

More on Character of Jean Muir in Alcott's Behind a Mask...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
Character of Jean Muir in Alcott's Behind a Mask. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 05:18, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1691210.html