Optimism and pessimism: the duty and inevitability of the care professions as exhibited by Louisa May Alcott's Work: A story of experience

[Lousia May Alcott is a renown author and the subject of much scholarship; however, the purpose of the following paper is to analyze how her publication Work: A Story of Experience interacts with the idea of care labor and the reality of care laborers. Throughout the novel, Alcott utilizes hearth imagery to catalog the mentality of her protagonist, a care laborer named Christie determined to achieve independence of her own accord and secure a legacy of which she can be proud. Though Alcott is traditionally analyzed through a more feminist lens, Christie’s narrative in alignment with the hearth catalog additionally serves as an example for the treatment of the laborers within care professions, as well as the characterizations of the professions themselves. Her example specifically allows for a reader to understand the manner in which boundaryless professions and professions based in care labor affect the mindset of a laborer. Over the course of the paper, optimism as a duty of care laborer will be proven as well as the existence of various forms of optimism and the slow descent of that optimism into a pessimism that is shown to be inevitable, given the conditions faced by the care laborer, demonstrated by Christie. Though this paper focuses its attention on the analysis of Christie as an example of the experiences of care laborers, it draws insight from beyond Alcott scholars, citing academics with focuses on optimism, pessimism, boundarylessness, and various studies on the care professions themselves. This scholarship works together to prove Christie’s shifting mindset, the catalog of hearth imagery, and the relevance of care labor both within and beyond the original literature.]