Everywhere the Light Touches / Alice Through the Looking Glass: Exposing the History of a Well-Behaved Woman

Abstract

When history spotlights the man at the center, who is left in the shadows? Everywhere the Light Touches, a novel, reilluminates the life of pioneering businesswoman Alice Kay Whitney Hutchison, longtime secretary to George Eastman, founder of Kodak. Written in an experimental, epistolary form that blends omniscient and first-person narration, it imagines Alice’s response to Eastman’s suicide as she questions their life’s work in light of the compromises they made to protect their private selves. A lens of grief and memory invites readers to reconsider Alice’s role in the intersecting histories of photography, capitalism, and feminism at the turn of the twentieth century. The accompanying essay, “Alice Through the Looking Glass: Exposing the History of a Well-Behaved Woman,” draws on the work of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich to examine the politics of archival silence and the ethics of recovering “well-behaved” women from historical obscurity. Taken together, the two pieces offer a feminist reimagining of erased labor and overlooked lives, while probing the unstable boundaries between fact and fiction, past and present.