Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  However, there was a curious wrinkle in Peabody’s personality that led her to prefer the second position. Despite her natural assertiveness, she had perhaps internalized some of her society’s bias in favor of male leadership. Although never humble or reluctant to express an opinion, she took satisfaction from locating men of unusual genius and idealism and offering her services as a faithful Sancho Panza. In attaching herself to Alcott, she not only accepted a subordinate position beneath her full capacities, but she volunteered to work for whatever wages Alcott might be capable of dispensing. She thus virtually assured herself of never being paid.

  In the spacious upstairs room of Boston’s Masonic Temple, Bronson Alcott and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody attempted to establish the ideal “School of Human Culture.”

  (Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University)

  In preparation for opening the school in September 1834, Alcott set about creating the optimal environment for learning. Bronson had recently written to Peabody that he found emblems—his word for what we would call “symbols”—“extremely attractive and instructive to children.” The modern age, he thought, had done education a grave disservice by stripping truth of its symbolic garments and making instruction “prosaic, literal, worldly.”6 With these thoughts in mind, he created a schoolroom rich in symbolic associations. The four-story Masonic Temple that housed the school was something of a symbol in itself. Completed only two years earlier, the temple hosted concerts, symposia, and other cultural events. In the eyes of Bostonians, it represented their city’s continuing place in the vanguard of America’s artistic and intellectual progress. The interior space of the Temple School was cavernous by comparison with that of virtually any other elementary school of its time. The main room was twenty yards long, and the high ceiling supplied an apt visual emblem for Alcott’s lofty ambitions. Sunlight streamed in through a large, ornate Gothic window, adding literal illumination to the figurative light that the teacher and his assistant daily cast on their young pupils.

  As to furnishings and decorations, Alcott spared no expense. Carefully chosen busts of Plato, Socrates, Shakespeare, and Sir Walter Scott stood on pedestals in the four corners of the room. As the students worked at their lessons, a portrait of Dr. Channing looked benignly down on them. Paintings, maps, assorted statuary, and a copious library added still more splendor. Alcott himself sat at an elegant desk, ten feet in length. Knowing that conversation was to be the backbone of his instructional work, he had had the desk specially made in the shape of a crescent so that the children might be encouraged to sit in a semicircle in front of him, an arrangement favorable to verbal exchanges. Perched atop a tall bookshelf behind the instructor’s chair was a larger-than-life bas-relief head of Jesus, positioned so that the instructor and the Savior were in the same line of sight. During a discussion of the Gospels, one of the young pupils told the schoolmaster, “I think you are a little like Jesus Christ.”7 Was it the teacher’s kindhearted wisdom or the face looming above his head that prompted the comparison?

  Alcott’s classroom was far from permissive. Indeed, Elizabeth Peabody went so far as to call him “autocratic.” However, Alcott was careful to give his authority the appearance of democratic sanction. The first day the school was in session, Alcott asked the children why they had come. “To learn,” came the obvious response. Ah, but to learn what? the schoolmaster pursued. This question was a bit harder, so Alcott slowed down. After a series of inquiries, the children agreed that they had come “to learn to feel rightly, to think rightly, and to act rightly.” They were there, Alcott implied, not so much to acquire facts as a reflective, useful state of mind. As the children came to this conclusion, Peabody wrote, “Every face was eager and interested.”8

  He also asked whether it might sometimes be necessary to punish them, and he did not proceed until the children admitted the reasonableness of this point. As a matter of both justice and personal honor, Alcott would not punish a child until the offender admitted the fairness of the punishment. During lessons, the children were strictly forbidden to talk among themselves. If this rule were breached by the slightest whisper, he would immediately stop the lesson and wait until order was restored. By pausing in this way, Alcott was, of course, taking time away from the good students as well, but he did this intentionally. He wanted to show everyone that moral transgression inevitably caused the good to suffer along with the bad, and he meant for the well-behaved children to realize that one must sometimes bear the burden of another’s wrongs, in order to bring them around to a sense of right.

  Alcott did not do away with all corporal punishment. Indeed, one visitor to the school expressed regret that Alcott still occasionally resorted to the ruler. However, Alcott inflicted pain only as a regretted last resort, and he always led the offender out of view of the other children to do so, to spare humiliation. Alcott’s most remarkable innovation, however, involved a startling reversal of normal practices. One day, when two boys had disobeyed in an especially offensive manner, Alcott reached for his ruler and called the two forward. However, instead of administering the expected blows on the hands, he announced his belief that it was far more terrible to inflict pain than to receive it. He extended his own hand and ordered the boys to strike him.

  Peabody recorded that “a profound and deep stillness” then descended on the classroom. The two boys protested, but Alcott would not be moved. At last the boys obeyed, but they struck only very lightly. Not satisfied, Alcott demanded whether they thought they deserved no more punishment than that. The boys now struck harder, as Alcott stoically bore their blows. For the boys, however, the act was unbearable. As they brought the ruler down on Alcott’s hand, they erupted into tears. A small moral revolution had occurred.9

  Curious intellectuals came to the school in a steady stream. The comfortable sofa that Alcott reserved for guests played host to Channing, Emerson, and a formidable Englishwoman named Harriet Martineau, who had come to the United States to write a book, later titled Society in America. Invited by Peabody to observe the school, Martineau was one of the few visitors who left unimpressed. She wrote acidly of Alcott, “The master presupposes his little pupils possessed of all truth; and that his business is to bring it out into expression…. Large exposures might be made of the mischief this gentleman is doing to his pupils by relaxing their bodies, pampering their imaginations, over-stimulating the consciences of some, and hardening those of others.”10 Martineau’s visit had two significant consequences. One was that Abba Alcott, perhaps sensing that Martineau would speak ill of her husband’s school, fiercely confronted Peabody and berated her for inviting such a person. Abba’s tirade, which was Peabody’s first taste of Abba’s infamous temper, marked the first rift in her association with the Alcotts. Secondly, Martineau brought back to England news of Alcott’s work. The eventual consequences of this publicity were, for the Alcotts, both unexpected and enormously far-reaching.

  Peabody, for her part, was elated by the students’ progress in command of language and self-control. She secured Bronson’s permission to keep a detailed journal of the school’s proceedings, which she meant to publish as a testimony to his ideas and methods. Peabody confined her record principally to Alcott’s lessons in language, in which the teacher transformed a spelling book into a treatise on practical ethics. “Look” gave rise to a discussion of inward reflections on the soul. “Veil” became a metaphor for the body’s concealment of the spirit, and the world itself was presented as a veil for the mind of God. Pausing over the word “nook,” Alcott asked his scholars if they had any hidden places in their minds. When some answered that they did, he expressed sorrow, stating that a perfect mind had no need of secret places.11

  Leading them in this way, Alcott gave his students a rich understanding of the metaphoric power of language. On the subject of symbols and parables, he told Elizabeth Peabody, “I could not teach without [them]. My own mind would suffer, were it not fed upon ideas in this form, and spiritual instruction cannot b
e imparted so well by any other means.”12 His future friend Emerson was soon to offer similar ideas in his great book Nature, which asserts that “the use of the outer creation [is] to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation. Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact…is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.”13 Not only did Alcott anticipate Emerson’s doctrine by two years, but he made it comprehensible to young children.

  During the early months of the Temple School’s existence, in late October 1834, Bronson resumed his diaries on Anna and Louisa, now combining their experiences in a single record, “Observations on the Spiritual Nurture of My Children.” Writing for only four weeks, he created a 260-page manuscript. After a monthlong hiatus, Bronson then added another 300 pages of observations, begun in January 1835, which he titled “Researches on Childhood.” Bound together into a single volume, the two manuscripts combine factual impressions with speculations about the best ways to improve the children’s behavior, supplemented as always by lengthy discourses on the nature of the human spirit. Never published, these observations are arguably Bronson’s greatest achievement in documenting child development.

  It has often been assumed that Bronson Alcott was an emotionally distant parent, more absorbed with philosophical abstraction than with the unglamorous work of raising children. A reading of Alcott’s own records from these months, however, tells a different story. As much as his work at the Temple School would permit him, Alcott was wholly immersed in the spiritual growth of his daughters. It troubled him that he could not be with the children around the clock. When he was obliged to rely on Abba’s reports of what Anna and Louisa had done in his absence, he felt that his records lost their freshness and “force of delineation.”14 He loved to walk with them, answering their questions and pointing out “objects calculated to excite pleasing and improving trains of thought.”15 Bronson also welcomed Anna and Louisa into his study. Sometimes he paused from his researches and meditations to trace the outlines of their hands or feet into his notebooks. Once, he helped them build an elaborate tower out of books, then carefully sketched it into his notes. He tucked them into bed at night, seldom leaving them without “something to make us laugh,” as his daughters put it. It was rare, however, for him to tell them anything for the mere sake of being funny. “The humorous, or the ludicrous, merely” held little value for him unless it was connected with “something highly ideal.”16 Bronson Alcott never understood the value of humor, either as a buffer against the shocks of life or as a teaching tool.

  Alcott could not express too strongly the importance of parental guidance in the awesome task of forming the juvenile mind. The influence of the parent must be supreme, and it was impossible to delegate. He was equally clear as to the one quality he thought necessary for doing this work well: “Love! Love! Includes both the art, and the results—the philosophy and the practice; and whosoever loveth, as becometh a parent, hath an art of Celestial Tuition.”17 If anything, Alcott’s approach erred on the side of involvement, not that of aloofness, as when he postulated:

  The world of the child should be the creation of the parents’ theory—the offspring of an enlightened mind, and a feeling heart, and of this world the parent should be the sole director…. The parent, like the divinity, should exert a special oversight over all the relations of the sphere in which he moves: he should be the Providence that fills, sustains, and protects, every member of his domestic creation.18

  In the care of Anna and Louisa, Bronson found pleasure and sacred duty hand in hand. Between the Temple School and his less visible work at home, he had found two occupations that filled him with interest and joy.

  Nevertheless, there were frustrations in the Alcott nursery. One of the greatest came from Alcott’s sense that, although his children were playing and learning directly under his eyes, the thing that he most wanted to see remained tantalizingly invisible. He wanted to observe his daughters with the eyes of both a parent and a scientist. He was convinced that there was a secret to the inner growth of children; and he had hoped that he might be the first to solve the riddle. He did not, of course, know precisely what he was looking for. He only knew, to his chronic disappointment, that he was not finding it. The soul remained inscrutable.

  How little of the spirit’s life enacts itself on the exteriour scene, through the instrumentality and media of the sense!…I look on these spirits that daily ply their energies within these bodies of flesh—I behold the myriad changes of the countenance, through which the inner life configurates itself—I watch the ever-varying pantomime of the out-going will…. And how little do I learn from all this toil of the spirit!!19

  Alcott found himself playing a game of psychological hide-and-seek, as the elfin souls of his children darted and fluttered before his eyes and then, with an innocent giggle, vanished from view. He was convinced that all children, not merely his own, were metaphysical, but his vision stopped at the blank wall of the flesh.

  With some regret, too, he had to concede that innate spiritual qualities and a carefully controlled home environment were not the sole ingredients in shaping character. Most significantly, he found he had underestimated the influence of his children’s physical condition on their emotional development. Anna, he discovered, was not as robust as Louisa, who had grown rapidly and was now routinely prevailing in their nursery-room clashes. Also, during the period of her father’s “Observations,” Anna was recovering from a severe foot sprain, and her injury had made her all the more passive. Bronson feared that Anna would fall into “the evils of indolence, imbecility of purpose, [and] extreme susceptibility of sentiment.” He saw her good qualities as “the virtues…of a sickly growth,” lacking “the sturdy, energetic, productive life that tells of maturity and perfection.”20 He noted in particular that Anna could not bear criticism. Fearful of discipline and desperate to maintain the good opinion of her parents, Anna would emphatically deny having done wrong even when her fault was obvious. In his records, Bronson had stern words for what he called Anna’s “moral cowardice,” but he ascribed this failing to her physical weakness and believed that punishing her would only weaken her further. Using the generic masculine pronoun, Bronson wrote out a spiritual prescription for such a child:

  He needs encouragement, rather than reproof—he should be raised from the dominion of his physical being, made strong by repeated trial, till fear of pain—mere animal pain, is removed; and hope, and faith, assume the rule of his spirit.21

  While he did not refrain from pointing out Anna’s shortcomings, Bronson was always careful not to crush her fragile feelings. He was soon pleased to report that, when properly addressed, Anna was perfectly docile and obedient.22

  Louisa was a more difficult case. Bronson felt a natural resonance with Anna’s nature. Being of a “more meditative cast” than her sister, Anna dwelt on sentiments, which she clothed “in imaginative drapings” and viewed “in the beautiful ideals of her own fancy.”23 Louisa, by contrast, cared more about things than concepts and ideals. Moreover, in vibrant contrast to Anna’s physical and emotional passivity, Louisa possessed what Bronson called “a high and excessive flow of the animal nature,” a quality that, he believed, made her liable to develop all the faults related to the will: “ferocity, ungovernable energy, [and] passionate obstinacy.”24

  Bronson saw Louisa as a younger version of her mother. Reflecting on Abba and Louisa, Bronson wrote, “They are more alike: the elements of their beings are similar: the will is the predominating power.”25 Before long, Bronson came to regard Anna and Louisa as opposites, and his observations of them became a sustained study in contrast. If, in Bronson’s view, Anna’s inclinations were epic, then Louisa’s were fundamentally dramatic. Whereas Anna shared her father’s preference for vegetables, Louisa relished animal food—an appetite that Bronson saw as both a cause and effect of her “untameable spirit.”26 Anna inclined toward theorizing and creativity; Louisa, intent solely on practice, continua
lly demolished Anna’s fantasies—and belongings—with the rude force of a Hun. “One builds; the other demolishes,” Bronson observed, “and between the struggle of contrary forces, their tranquility is disturbed.”27

  Bronson desperately wanted to cure Louisa’s seemingly innate violence. In his records, he fretted endlessly over her fierce will and volcanic temper. He anxiously observed:

  There is a self-corroding nature—a spirit not yet conformed to the conditions of enjoyment. She follows her impulses, and these are often against the stream of her spirit’s joy. Passion rages within; and Strife enacteth itself without…. The will has gathered around itself a breastwork of Inclinations, and bids defiance to every attack that ventures against its purpose. She retreats within the citadel of these, and braves every assault—yielding, if compelled, with sullen submission, or breaking out in querulous complainings.28

  Perhaps most damning in her father’s eyes, though hardly unusual in a two-year-old child, was Louisa’s utter immersion in her own wants and impulses. The very touchstone of Bronson Alcott’s moral creed was self-surrender. It was therefore with grave disappointment that he wrote of Louisa, “Self-sacrifice is an act beyond her present apprehension; she must be led to it, by symbols in actual life—through punishment and reward.”29 Bronson valued self-denial to the point of self-injury. This kind of discipline, of course, was beyond his daughter’s comprehension, and her instinctive pursuit of pleasure was to lead Bronson for many years to view Louisa as the most selfish of his children.