Transcendental Wild Oats: A Satirical Insight into Utopian Experiment

Running Head: ENGLISH 1
Transcendental Wild Oats
Author's Name
Institutional Affiliation
Introduction

EDUCATION 2
“Transcendental Wild Oats” by Louisa May Alcott offers a satirical insight into her
family’s life when she was a little girl. The author writes from the perspectives of an older
woman, and her writing can be looked upon as feminist statements and revolutionary
philosophies. Alcott takes advantage of literary elements to set the tone and irony of the story
and the stereotyping of characters.
Alcott’s point-of-view is to make brutal and bitter ridicule of the society through the
fictional account of her father’s experimental society (Mills, 2007). She was a child when she
moved to the Fruitlands. She was never able to understand her father’s ideology and philosophy.
In her story, she makes a comic rendering of the six months she spent with her family in 1843 in
Fruitlands. The humor and satire in the story are both cutting and critical.
Alcott shares the resentment of her own family situation by creating a utopian setting.
She places her mother in a Fruitland Utopian community experiment that was set up by her
father and his colleagues (Wayne. 2005). Her mother Abigail May Alcott was a domestic drudge
in the Utopian experiment. Through “Transcendental Wild Oats,” the author tells the satirical
story of a group who is now living in farmland that resembles a pastoral utopia. The nineteenth-
century feminism is linked with Transcendentalism through the project of self-culture (Wayne.
2005). The core of Transcendental thought is a theology of self-culture and get closer to nature
and universe through education and reflection. The United States saw growth in Utopian
societies and communities during the early and mid- ninetieth century (Albinski, 1988). Many
women writers documented those domestic experiments in their writings, and those Utopian
lands saw a role reversal in the genders. However, Alcott’s record of her childhood experiences
at Fruitlands show great inequality in the gender roles (Petrulionis, 1995).