I am content with what I have,
Little be it or much,
And Lord! contentment still I crave
Becaus[e] thou savest such.
At the age of thirty-five, Louisa would use the same lines to end the penultimate chapter of Little Women, part 1. But quoting Bunyan did not greatly ease her burden. As she remembered later, it was during these months that she started to feel “the family cares and peculiar trials.” She had, as she later put it, taken up a cross for her family, and from that hour it began to grow.11
Bronson had conceived Fruitlands as an escape from the world’s depravity. Louisa craved an escape from Fruitlands. In secret ways, she found it, but not by physically running away. Her retreats were less obvious than they had once been, though they were evidently more necessary than ever. One was physical exercise; few things lifted her spirits better than a “splendid run,” and running remained a favorite recreation as long as her health allowed her to enjoy it.12 Her other preferred escapes gave her solace for the rest of her life. They were her imagination and her pen. In addition to her journal, Louisa kept an Imagination Book at Fruitlands. Now lost, it was, at the time, one of her most important possessions. One day after writing in it, she wrote in her journal, “Life is pleasanter than it used to be, and I don’t care about dying any more.” She also was writing poetry, “in a thin but copious stream,” as she later recollected.13 In her mind, in the word, and on the run, she was separate from the world and safe in a realm of light.
Meanwhile, Fruitlands was winding itself into paradox. The commune’s retreat from the world of iniquity had seemingly made denunciations of sin all the more necessary. The Alcotts, the Lanes, and their tiny band of followers had fled into nature, immersing themselves in a life that left no distance between themselves and the land and sky. Nature, they had thought, would cure them and set them free. At the same time, however, Alcott and Lane felt compelled to guard against one of the most natural of all impulses: the urge toward selfish pleasure. The wilderness into which the Fruitlanders had escaped was supposed to restore their authentic spirits and bring them closer to communion with God. Nevertheless, it was still potentially a place of temptation. If they allowed the wilderness to speak to the wildness within themselves, then the entire enterprise would be threatened with moral collapse. Alcott and Lane hoped to discover a nature in which it was unnatural to want to procreate or to caress one’s children. It is in no way surprising that they did not find it.
Around Independence Day, Emerson visited the farm. His first impressions were generally positive: “The sun & evening sky do not look calmer than Alcott & his family at Fruitlands. They seemed to have arrived at the fact, to have got rid of the show, & so to be serene.”14 Throughout his career, Emerson felt most comfortable with transcendentalism in his study and his parlor. He sincerely admired, but could never bring himself to imitate, men like Thoreau and Alcott who carried the doctrine into the field. For him, to see Alcott arrive at the fact was a thing of wonder. Nevertheless, Emerson seemed to know better than Alcott and Lane themselves the kinds of obstacles that lay ahead. For one thing, he already sensed that transcendentalism was a naturally introspective, solipsistic idea. One could practice it well enough as an individual, but converting it into a social philosophy was almost as great a miracle as changing water into wine. He added:
I will not prejudge them successful: They look well in July; we will see them in December. I know they are better for themselves than as partners. One can easily see that they have yet to settle several things. Their saying that things are clear & they sane, does not make them so. If they will in very deed be lovers & not selfish; if they will serve the town of Harvard, & make their neighbors feel them as benefactors, wherever they touch them; they are as safe as the sun.15
Emerson’s statement about seeing the Fruitlanders in December proved prophetic, but his most discerning insight came in his prediction that the community would stand or fall according to its capacity to “in very deed be lovers & not selfish” and to benefit their neighbors in Harvard “wherever they touch them.” Charles Lane stood staunchly for the idea that love, as people typically feel it toward spouses or children, was the epitome of selfishness. Moreover, the act of touching caused Lane profound discomfort. Alcott was imbibing similar notions. Emerson’s observations that love requires selflessness and that, to benefit the world, one must touch it, would seem obvious everywhere but at Fruitlands. At Fruitlands, however, the ability to observe the obvious was strangely wanting.
Thoreau, who had moved temporarily to Staten Island, never visited Fruitlands. Others did, though, in unexpected numbers. Throughout the summer and into the fall, the farm welcomed a stream of travelers who came to indulge their curiosity or to pay their respects, but almost never to stay. Abba recorded an impressive list of the visitors: George Ripley, having lately established the idealistic community of Brook Farm, had come to compare notes on utopian living; the poet Ellery Channing, the nephew of the great Unitarian minister, had come from Concord. Abba’s brother Samuel arrived with his whole family. William Russell, Bronson’s old teaching partner, brought greetings from Andover. Theodore Parker, the radical minister, also paid his respects. The visitors came from New York, Philadelphia, Ohio, even North Carolina. Abba wrote in amazement, “I did not think so much curiosity could have existed among our friends to see our new home.”16
But the attention was a mixed blessing. To be sure, it was flattering, and there was always the hope of recruiting some of the visitors. In reality, though, all the guests were draining the community’s resources. Struggling to feed themselves, the Fruitlanders were frequently obliged to lay extra places at the kitchen table. Already burdened with all the sewing, cleaning, and mending, Abba was also expected to see to the casual wants of outsiders. Abba came to a sobering realization:
The right people, with right motives, and holy purposes, do not come, and we are wearing ourselves out in the service of transient visitors, and ungrateful participants. This is a Hotel, where man and beast are entertained without pay, and at great expense.17
At Fruitlands, Alcott had dreamed of escaping the world. Ironically, however, the world had followed, and it had followed in the least useful manner—not with its hearts and minds, but only with its inquisitive eyes. Having sworn to use no work animals except when strictly necessary, Alcott now found himself feeding and watering the horses of strangers.
Meanwhile, it was on Abba’s shoulders that the running of the “Hotel” principally fell. Alcott had a far stronger sense of gender equality than most of his countrymen. At least occasionally, he helped with the cooking, and as always, he devoted more of himself to his children than almost any other man of his generation. Nevertheless, there is no record in the annals of Fruitlands of a man washing a dish or mending a tunic. For the first two months of Fruitlands’ existence, and for much of the time thereafter, poor, beleaguered Mrs. Alcott was the only adult female member of the community. Occasionally, she had assistance from her aunt Hannah Robie, whom Bronson deemed “a lady of great good sense and character” and who served Abba as “a loving and judicious counselor, a quiet, energetic friend.”18 However, Mrs. Robie had only so much time to donate. According to Louisa in “Transcendental Wild Oats,” a visitor once asked Abba if the Fruitlands farm possessed any beasts of burden. The witty but rueful reply was, “Only one woman.”19
Sometime in August, a modest amount of relief arrived from Providence, Rhode Island, in the buxom person of Miss Anna Page. Miss Page was brave enough to withstand the persiflage that no doubt followed a single woman who joined a wilderness community of freethinking men, even one that openly despised the pleasures of the flesh. No consistent portrait of her emerges. Louisa hated her, and she said so in her journal. In “Transcendental Wild Oats,” only Charles Lane is subjected to more scathing treatment. In the story, Miss Page becomes Miss Jane Gage, a plump, egocentric character whose chief contribution to the community is to scribble an endless
stack of inferior poems on lofty themes. Page attempted to teach the children their lessons, but since her method was different from Alcott’s and Lane’s, Louisa recalled that “the result was a chronic state of chaos in the minds of these much-afflicted innocents.” In other respects as well, Louisa considered Page worse than useless: “Sleep, food, and poetic musings were the desires of dear Jane’s life, and she shirked all duties as clogs upon her spiritual wings.”20 In Louisa’s fictionalized account, Miss Gage also provides the focus of the ripest moment of pure comedy, when her clandestine weakness for animal protein is called to the attention of the rigidly inflexible Timon Lion:
Unfortunately, the poor lady hankered after the flesh-pots, and endeavored to stay herself with private sips of milk, crackers, and cheese, and on one dire occasion she partook of fish at a neighbor’s table. One of the children reported this sad lapse from virtue, and poor Jane was publicly reprimanded by Timon. “I took only a bit of the tail,” sobbed the penitent poetess.
“Yes, but the whole fish had to be tortured and slain that you might tempt your carnal appetite with that one taste of the tail. Know ye not, consumers of flesh meat, that ye are nursing the wolf and tiger in your bosoms?”21
Following this incident in Louisa’s story, Miss Gage leaves the community in disgrace. The reasons for the real Anna Page’s departure are less clear, and whether or not the battle of the fish tail actually occurred cannot be proven. Perhaps the story is a bit of wish fulfillment on the part of the adult Louisa, using her pen to gain some belated redress for the condescension and uninspiring lessons Miss Page had visited on her so long ago.
In Louisa’s tale, Gage’s carnivorous foibles are exposed by one of the children, who, according to the text, experienced “the naughty satisfaction of [a] young detective.” It is worth supposing for a moment that the anecdote of the fish tail was at least partly founded on truth. It is easy to imagine the Alcott sisters, eager as always to please their father, appointing themselves the unofficial spies of the commune. It is entirely possible that Louisa, despising Miss Page as she did, played the role of detective in the episode, simultaneously advancing her father’s aims and undermining a perceived antagonist. The chance to do Miss Page a nasty turn in the name of upholding the community’s virtue may have been too tempting an opportunity to be missed, no matter how naughty Louisa knew she was being. At the age of ten, she seems to have known something about making foul seem fair.
A far different portrait of Anna Page, however, emerges from the journal of Abba, who was delighted to have her company and assistance. She described her new friend as “an amiable active woman whose kind word and gentle care-taking deed is [sic] very grateful to me.”22 Perhaps better than any other observer at the time, Page seems to have felt the difficulties of Abba’s position. Whereas Alcott received praise from some quarters for the purity of his vision, it was Abba’s unacknowledged toil that daily kept that vision from dissolving. Abba told her diary in late August:
Miss Page made a good remark, and true as good, that a woman may live a whole life of sacrifice, and at her death meekly says, “I die a woman.” A man passes a few years in experiments in self-denial and simple life, and he says, “Behold a God.”23
Given the free access the Alcotts had to one another’s journals, Abba’s quotation of Anna Page can be seen as a calculatedly rebellious act; she might as well have written it on her husband’s chalkboard. If Bronson had ever been a god in Abba’s eyes, he was not now. She had had a fair idea of her husband’s weaknesses before Fruitlands began, but she had hoped that, once the sordid world of the marketplace had been left behind, Bronson might flourish as he would never do so long as he was judged by worldly measures. Her hopes were not being rewarded.
Fish tail or no fish tail, Anna Page was gone from Fruitlands by late November. As summer turned to autumn, many of the other Fruitlanders were finding the rigors of consociate life harder to stomach, and not all the complaints concerned Charles Lane. For the first time in his life, Bronson Alcott was discovering what it was like to lead a group of adults in something more serious than a discussion, and he was bearing the responsibility uneasily. His task was complicated by the very philosophical ideals he was striving to uphold. At the heart of the transcendentalist impulse was the belief that one’s own conscience was sovereign and that all should live according to the dictates of their own spirit. How, then, could Alcott and Lane legitimately object if the inner dictates of one of their followers called for a taste of meat or fish?
Like Rousseau in his Social Contract, Alcott and Lane would have insisted that humankind, at times, “must be forced to be free.” They assumed that one could not develop one’s mind and spirit properly without first learning to discipline the wants of the body. The problem, however, was that the pilgrims who had made the journey to Fruitlands had left society precisely because they had found its rules unacceptably confining. Samuel Bower with his penchant for naturism and Joseph Palmer with his law-flouting facial hair had already proclaimed their hostility toward forcing of any kind. Each Fruitlander had a particular view of truth and righteousness. Together, they formed a bedlam of good intentions. Emerson offered his diagnosis in the lecture “New England Reformers,” which he delivered less than two months after the fall of Fruitlands.
They defied each other, like a congress of kings, each of whom had a realm to rule…. One apostle thought all men should go to farming; and another, that no man should buy or sell: that the use of money was the cardinal evil; another, that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and drink damnation…. Even the insect world was to be defended…and a society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitos was to be incorporated without delay.24
In these reform movements, Emerson quipped, “nothing was more remarkable than the discontent they begot in the movers.”25 It seemed that the phrase “transcendentalist community” was something of an oxymoron.
To prevent his own congress of kings from degenerating into utter chaos, Alcott could think of no other response than to pull tighter on the reins. Even Lane was astonished at Alcott’s rigor. He confided to his friend Oldham, “Mr. Alcott makes such high requirements of all persons that few are likely to stay, even of his own family, unless he can become more tolerant of defect. He is an artist in human character requiring every painter to be a Michael Angelo.”26 Robert Carter, a friend and business partner of James Russell Lowell, wrote that Alcott had become “very strict, rather despotic in his rule of the Community,” and that at least some of the members were able to stay the course only by defying his prohibitions in secret.27
Inevitably, Fruitlands witnessed rebellions against moral authority. At first, at least, they were small and furtive. Anna Alcott remembered that “when starving with the apple and bread diet, the disciples retired to drink milk in the barn.” These milk parties doubtlessly took place clandestinely, without the knowledge of Alcott or Lane. When those two moral monitors were present, all remained piously vegetarian. But when their work took them out of sight, or perhaps while they slept, exhausted by the day’s efforts, an odd, quiet procession made its way toward temptation. As time passed, though, the search for nourishment became less of a laughing matter. As the autumn drew on, clashes of wills became frequent, tearing at the community’s former serenity, and Abba began to fear that her children might starve before the coming winter had run its course.28
The high hopes with which seekers of peace and beauty came to Fruitlands—and the disappointment with which they one by one departed—are both typified in the experiences of young Isaac Hecker, the only adult rank-and-file member of the group who left a written record of his stay at the farm. Hecker was unusual among the Fruitlanders in that he had known success in the larger world. Along with his brothers, he owned an extensive baking and milling enterprise. Even today, a brand of flour bears his family’s name. Hecker pursued a deeper meaning in life by joining a succession of utopian projects. Before arriving at Fruitlands, Hecker had
been at Brook Farm, where he would have enjoyed the company of Margaret Fuller and a genteel writer-turned-pig-farmer named Nathaniel Hawthorne. At Brook Farm, Hecker had been pleased to find “refining amusements and cultivated persons,” and he had found himself growing deeply attached “to the company of those [he loved]” there.29 But, “called with a stronger voice” that urged him toward sterner self-denial, Hecker decided to try Fruitlands. Hecker had another, more private reason for leaving Brook Farm. In the journal he wrote there, Hecker confessed an attraction to “one who is too much for me to speak of.”30 The pronoun Hecker used to describe this “one” was first written as “her,” but then it was somewhat clumsily rewritten as “him.” Whether the object of his crush was male or female, Hecker was unable to face up to his emotions; they did not agree with his self-image as an ascetic worshipper of the spirit.
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