Alcott's Freaking of Boyhood: The Perplex of Gender and Disability in Under the Lilacs

Abstract

The author looks beneath the innocent veneer of one of Louisa May Alcott's lesser-known works for children and discovers a different kind of "poisoned sugarplum" than those penned by Jo March and A. M. Barnard, one in which the construction and staging of male disability becomes a critically informing impulse.