本文分析美國新英格蘭白人女作家愛兒珂特的三篇反蓄奴故事，以之來探討十九世紀白人家居女性的感性規訓計畫，以及該計畫的種族歧視暨帝國主義之面向。以凱普冷的家帝國主義為主要立論基礎，筆者指出在阿爾科特的故事中，北方白人女性的感性力量是不可或缺的，不但可用以教化有色他者，形塑感性化的男性氣概，更可創建新的家國，讓有色男性及前衛白人女性在其中扮演要角。但阿爾科特筆下由踰越的「小婦人」統領的理想國度證明是問題重重的；她的混血男角不但無法擁有真正的有色身體，更面戴「迷人但危險」的曖昧西班牙面具，她的白人女角對主流國家論述則呈現出既反動又支持的矛盾態度。

The present article discusses the white New England writer Louisa May Alcott’s three antislavery narratives in relation to the nineteenth-century sentimental disciplinary project of white womanhood and the racist, imperialist design embedded in this project. The main analysis builds upon Amy Kaplan’s thesis in “Manifest Domesticity,” which argues that gendered metaphors of domesticity could be used as a “civilizing” force to justify imperial relationships between the conqueror/discipliner and the conquered/ disciplined. Following Kaplan’s reasoning, the present article makes the case that in Alcott’s stories the sentimental power of northern white women plays an indispensable part in “civilizing” racialized others, in negotiating a different kind of sentimentalized, feminized manhood, and in imagining a new national household that accepts both the unorthodox white woman and the colored man as its legitimate members. Yet Alcott’s ideal of a color-blind, sentimentalized nation led by progressive “little women” is doomed to be problematic, not only because her mixed-race protagonists do not own “real” raced bodies and are ambivalently linked to “lovable yet dangerous” Spanishness, but also because her white heroines paradoxically oppose and affirm dominant national discourses at the same time.