Against the backdrop of the Civil War and its aftermath, Alcott articulates a version of the female gothic that both represents the horrors of female captivity and offers creative conceptions of the power of the female “other.” During a productive five-year period prior to the publication of Little Women, Alcott produced sensational stories, sketches, novellas, and novels that reveal the constraints of mid-century female experience while challenging these strictures. Here Alcott positions the gothic in a new place, responding less to external horrors and more to the terrors of domestic experience. She and other American women writers invoked the conventions of the gothic to express female anxieties and desires. This is perhaps most visible in Moods (1864), which contains an important development in female writing about marriage: the double-proposal plot. In works ranging from Alcott’s Moods (1864) to Augusta Evans’s St. Elmo (1867) to Elizabeth Stuart Phelp’s Story of Avis (1877), the heroine refuses or rejects an initial proposal by the suitor, leading to a renegotiation of the terms of the relationship, contract, or narrative altogether that may involve alternative roles, plot lines, or degrees of engagement. The double-proposal plot does more than deliver the displacement by which the gothic operates, it demonstrates a willingness to wrestle with a husband, or the devil himself, to achieve alternate visions of female possibility.