This thesis reframes Little Women as a Transcendental tragedy—an imagined feminine utopia that ultimately reveals the impossibility of women’s transcendence within a patriarchal world. Drawing on feminist theory, biographical criticism, and the ideological framework of Transcendentalism, it argues that Louisa May Alcott constructs a vision of artistic, moral, and intellectual fulfillment for women, only to show how that vision collapses under social and narrative pressures. For the March sisters, maturity demands self-repression rather than self-realization. Jo’s softened ambitions, Beth’s saintly death, and the domestic fates of all the sisters expose how personal desire is reshaped to meet cultural expectation. Rather than merely affirming domestic virtue, the novel critiques the gendered systems that foreclose feminine self-actualization both within its pages and in the broader literary and cultural context. In this way, Little Women reads not as a sentimental coming-of-age tale, but as a quietly radical meditation on thwarted potential.