In her 1988 introduction to Alternative Alcott, Elaine Showalter notes “a striking physical metaphor” between Louisa May Alcott's self-taught ambidexterity and her “conflicting literary impulses,” which Showalter summarizes as tending toward the “genteel, domestic, and moralizing,” on one hand, and toward “passion, anger, and satirical wit” on the other (left) hand (ix). Showalter's immediate focus is on the generic differences among Alcott's various literary productions and the way in which the sensation fiction, in particular, points to a powerful “alternative” to the domestic novels for which Alcott is best known. This focus has turned out to be a dominant one in Alcott studies over the past several decades, with numerous studies taking generic alternatives as their critical starting point. Yet Alcott's ambidexterity is also a striking metaphor for the various authorial modes that Alcott could assume. Showalter concludes that Alcott was, in fact, never fully satisfied with the work produced by either hand, because “she never entirely got over her awe for the masculine literary community of American Transcendentalist philosophy which her father represented, nor forgave herself for failing to measure up to his moral and intellectual standards.” Showalter associates this masculine literary community, in turn, with the “godly inspiration” of genius, and she sees the masks that recur in Alcott's fiction as representing “her own perennial effort to conceal the deeper meanings of her work,” including its genius, “from herself, as well as from others” (xlii–xliii).