Louisa May Alcott’s “Behind a Mask, or a Woman’s Power”: The Woman as an Actress, Femininity as a Mask

This essay discusses the ways in which Louisa May Alcott?s 1866 novella “Behind a Mask, or a Woman?s Power” expresses the author’s frustration with her familial, social, and cultural reality. It explains the numerous feminist implications of the Gothic tale, in which Alcott, more or less directly, tackles the issue of female labor in post Civil War America, mocks the basic assumptions of the sentimental revolution and challenges contemporary notions regarding femininity.