This essay explores how Alcott uses her gothic fiction to challenge the nineteenth-century belief that women were vulnerable to spiritual and mental compromise through their reading. While scholars have examined “A Whisper in the Dark” and A Modern Mephistopheles, no scholars have analyzed the two together, even though Roberts Brothers republished them in a single volume shortly after Alcott’s death. Both Alcott’s female protagonists, Sibyl and Gladys, are exposed to texts designed to compromise their religious values and mental state. But while popular writers argued that the female mind was too fragile to withstand textual manipulation, Alcott’s heroines resist mental compromise, and Gladys even becomes an active creator of narrative meaning. Although Sybil and Gladys resist the mental and spiritual seduction, these stories end with the women returning to the genre constraints and gender stereotypes they escaped. Both of Alcott’s stories deconstruct the discourse surrounding woman’s mental fragility, and while her endings place these characters back in conventional endings that no longer accommodate them, Alcott’s attempt to balance both subversion and accommodation allows her to depict the limits of conventional narrative endings for female characters and present readers with a glimmer of hope in the narrative possibilities that lie beyond these limits.