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This essay explores Louisa May Alcott’s treatment of veterans in Hospital Sketches (1863), a compilation of four stories based on letters that Alcott sent home while volunteering as a nurse in Washington, D.C., during the American Civil War. Armbruster examines the sensible, straightforward, and sensitive manner in which Alcott, through her narrator, Tribulation Periwinkle, engages with the population of wounded and dying war victims. Rather than viewing her patients solely as a physically and emotionally damaged population, Alcott’s Periwinkle offers genuine concern, warmth, and love for those in her care, and provides them with new and much-needed avenues of self-actualization. Armbruster argues that Alcott’s emphasis on compassionate understanding for and acceptance of her trauma victims, including African Americans, provides an empathic model for individuals distressed by contemporary incidents of war.

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Louisa May Alcott’s Literary Activism: A Realist Reading of Hospital Sketches

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  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Elif S. Armbruster

摘要

This essay explores Louisa May Alcott’s treatment of veterans in Hospital Sketches (1863), a compilation of four stories based on letters that Alcott sent home while volunteering as a nurse in Washington, D.C., during the American Civil War. Armbruster examines the sensible, straightforward, and sensitive manner in which Alcott, through her narrator, Tribulation Periwinkle, engages with the population of wounded and dying war victims. Rather than viewing her patients solely as a physically and emotionally damaged population, Alcott’s Periwinkle offers genuine concern, warmth, and love for those in her care, and provides them with new and much-needed avenues of self-actualization. Armbruster argues that Alcott’s emphasis on compassionate understanding for and acceptance of her trauma victims, including African Americans, provides an empathic model for individuals distressed by contemporary incidents of war.