Moral Pap and Male Mothers: The Political Subtexts of Louisa May Alcott's Eight Cousins or, The Aunt Hill

Through Aunt [Myra], Alcott disparages the sentimental interpretation of motherhood. Eva Cherniavsky, in That Pale Mother Rising (1995), notes that "sentimental narrative frequently figures the mother as either dead or dying" (44) Myra, at least in her own eyes, is always dying: she was "a capital patient, as she never died and never got well" ([Rose] in Bloom 54). As a surrogate mother, Myra imposes her morbid sentimentality on Rose and insists that Rose is "plainly marked for the tomb" (Eight Cousins 47). Girlhood, for Myra, then, is no more than an exercise in futility, an anticipation of death. Myra's association with stereotypical sentimental mothers is further emphasized by her resistance to intellectual pursuits. Brigid Brophy notes that "absence of intellectual content is the mark of the sentimental genre" (119). While this statement is rather extreme, for anti-intellectualism is not characteristic of all sentimental fiction. Myra certainly fits Brophy's stereotype of a sentimental woman; when she learns that Rose studies human physiology, her response betrays her limited idea of femininity and her conviction of female biological inferiority: "`Women don't need much of this sort of knowledge and are not fit for it'" (203). Although Myra's opinions of male education are never stated explicitly, men, presumably, need "this sort of knowledge," and, unlike their female counterparts, are "fit for it." But the comical caricature of Myra becomes explicit criticism when the narrator describes her, toward the end of the novel, as a "nervous, dyspeptic, unhappy old woman" due to her "ignorance and want of thought" (203). The criticism against Myra and the type of woman she represents becomes even more harsh in her failing as a mother. Not only does she create an unhappy family, by virtue of her own morbidity, but she indirectly causes the death of her daughter: in performing "perilous experiments" on "sainted Caroline," she implicitly "closed her darling to death" (48). That her approach to motherhood is vastly interior to Alec's needs no further emphasis. The prominent role [Alec] plays in the novel is rather unusual, given Alcott's tendency to confine men to the background. [Joy A. Marsella] notes that in Alcott's short fiction, "Men...play a minor role. They are two-dimensional characters at the fringes of the drama who take little part in it... It is easy to think of Alcott's short fiction without adult males entirely" (9). Eight Cousins is indeed except