Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Though Louisa never wrote about her father’s emotional instability in the aftermath of Fruitlands, she must have been confused to find that Bronson, who had been so passionately involved in her early upbringing, now sometimes shrank from family contact and turned his gaze obsessively inward. At times, though, her father’s behavior was worse than perplexing. It was simply scary. She had always known her father as everyone else had known him, as a man of diffidence, calm, and surpassing self-control. Now, with his sleepless nights and unearthly visions, he must have seemed like someone she hardly knew. The steady, thoughtful man who had seemed to understand so much was now himself a bit beyond understanding.

  Bronson’s distancing from his children may have been due only in part to his inner turmoil. It may also have arisen from the fact that his girls were growing up. Bronson’s interest in children, even his own, was rooted primarily in his fascination with elementary education and preadolescent development. The older the child, and the more firmly fixed her character, the less intriguing he tended to find her. The changes Louisa was undergoing, as well as the transformation that he experienced, were making their separation more pronounced.

  Fortunately for Louisa, she was becoming less dependent on her father for her daily happiness. Although life as an Alcott would always mean being held to certain standards, she had reached an age at which her self-esteem no longer depended solely on her parents’ approval. In the months after Fruitlands, she began again to form attachments outside the family’s circle. As spring returned to Massachusetts, Louisa and her sisters quickly found friends among the children of Still River. With a girl named Annie Clark, Anna, Louisa, and Lizzie tossed a ball, jumped rope, and rolled hoops with carefree abandon. Abba, as Annie Clark remembered, was like a guardian angel to the merry band of girls, often sitting among them and smiling at their pranks and pretendings.

  That summer, Clark attended the birthday party of nine-year-old Lizzie, a somewhat more lavish and less stilted affair than it had been the previous year. The Lovejoys’ kitchen was bedecked with evergreens, and the table was laden with tiny cakes and luscious cherries, all surrounding a huge cake at the center. The evening was marked by singing and by one of the first Alcott family theatricals of which a description survives. Clark remembered Louisa as the star of the evening. Her face and arms tinted brown in imitation of a Native American and dressed in a costume that seemed all made of feathers, Louisa performed a song about an Indian girl, “bright Alfarata,” and declaimed a poem that denounced the depredations of Europeans in the New World. In character, she lamented the death of her people:

  I will weep for a season, on bitterness fed,

  For my kindred are gone to the hills of the dead;

  But they died not by hunger, or lingering decay;

  The steel of the white man hath swept them away.22

  For the Alcott girls, and for Anna and Louisa in particular, playacting in the home was to become a crucial form of self-expression. Not only did acting supply an acceptable outlet for feelings that they could not freely express otherwise, but it also was one of the first paths for Louisa’s literary imagination. It is noteworthy that, in this early performance, Louisa assumed the character of an outcast from whom both land and family had been brutally stolen: Louisa was capable of relating her own experiences of deprivation to the sufferings of others.

  That same month, Louisa also met Frederick Willis, a delicate boy of fourteen who had come from Boston to spend the summer in the country. When he wrote his reminiscences of her more than a half century later, he remembered her clear, olive-brown complexion, set off by brown hair and eyes. She had a life and a spirit to her that sometimes expressed itself in irritability and nervousness. Along with her moods and impulsiveness, he remembered above all her delight in motion. In his mind’s eye, he saw her running. She was like a gazelle, it seemed to him, the most beautiful girl runner he ever knew. She leaped fences and climbed the tallest trees, never giving the slightest thought to being ladylike or proper. Her second love was nature. She was still passionately fond of fields and forests, and Fred noticed the special harmony that she shared with animals, an affinity she had, of course, learned from Thoreau.23

  More surprisingly, Willis noticed in Louisa a great love of personal beauty. Whereas in Little Women all the interest in outward appearance is attributed to Meg and Amy, Louisa, too, had her childish vanities. Imagining that large eyes were a hallmark of beauty, she one day walked down Washington Street in Boston with her eyes unnaturally wide. She was at first gratified when her expression attracted the attention of passersby. However, when she returned home and assumed the same look in the mirror, she was aghast to see that she had been affecting the deranged stare of a madwoman.24

  Of Louisa’s many passions, none distinguished her more than her delight in fantasy. Exploring the environs of Still River with Fred and Anna, Louisa discovered a rocky glen full of moss and ferns. There, the three devised a mystical realm known as Spiderland, where Fred reigned as king, Anna as queen, and Louisa as princess royal. Interestingly, Fred recollected the spot as a “nook,” a telling word choice for those who know of Bronson’s decree at the Temple School that there should be no “nooks” or secret places in the youthful mind. At the ages of twelve and thirteen, Louisa and Anna were actively inventing nooks, both physical and mental, where no overly inquisitive parent or teacher could enter.25

  In the meantime, Bronson continued the battle to regain his peace of mind. Nevertheless, he could still be something of a morose presence. He accepted an invitation to speak at a Fourth of July church picnic but turned up his nose at the various delicacies that were served. When a plate of elaborately prepared cookies was passed his way, he was heard to mutter, well within the hearing of the pastor’s wife who had baked them, “Vanity, and worse than vanity!”26

  In October, the Alcotts came back to Concord, accepting the hospitality of Edmund Hosmer, who let them use half of his house while they searched for one of their own. Five months earlier, Abba had received word that her father’s estate had at last been settled. Abba’s legacy, some two thousand dollars, was more than enough to purchase a residence in or near the town. After all their seemingly endless wanderings, the family was to have a home. In addition to the six Alcotts, a seventh person was preparing to join the household, a young woman named Sophia Foord, who had consented to be the children’s tutor. The Alcotts hired her with the understanding that, in due time, Bronson would set up a village school at Hillside, where he and Foord would share the teaching. Louisa, hoping to add a touch of grandeur, called Foord her governess.

  It was Emerson who found the property they chose to buy: a 145-year-old structure that had recently belonged to a wheelwright named Horatio Cogswell. No one seemed to know much about the history of the house, although Thoreau recollected a story that it had once been occupied by a man who believed he would never die. It was rumored that his ghost still lived in the house. Another previous owner had kept pigs in the front yard. Thankfully, however, the pigs had long since gone off to the butcher, and the ghost was never seen. He may have preferred someplace quieter. The house was not large, and once the half dozen Alcotts and Miss Foord had crowded in, it seems unlikely that a ghost could be comfortably fitted in besides.

  Nevertheless, despite the lack of space, Bronson opened his home to others with a liberality that Louisa found irritating. In her 1845 journal she grumbled, “More people coming to live with us; I wish we could be together, and no one else. I don’t see who is to clothe and feed us all, when we are so poor now.”27 Though still intrigued by communal life, Bronson reluctantly accepted the task of caring only for his own family. “If a Holy Family is beyond us,” he said, “we may at least exclude much that annoys and renders uncomely the Households on which we cast our eyes wheresoever we turn.”28 By most measures other than financial, Bronson and Abba succeeded while at Hillside in doing just that.

  Bronson christened their home the Hillside, in reference to the
rather steep slope behind the structure. Seven years later, when Nathaniel Hawthorne bought the property, he changed its name to the Wayside, a name that he found “more morally suggestive.” The “Way” near which the house was situated was the old road to Lexington, remembered as the route by which the British forces advanced toward and later retreated from the battle of Concord Bridge. Before the Alcotts’ arrival, Hawthorne called the structure “a mean-looking affair [with] no suggestiveness about it.” Although it had passed through countless haphazard renovations, it had never acquired the stately quality—the “venerableness,” to use Hawthorne’s term—that houses of such an age are expected to achieve.29

  However, when the Alcotts moved into the house on April 1, 1845, Bronson was determined to look on the bright side. He loved the hosts of locust trees that covered the hillside and burst into fragrant bloom each summer. Among the locusts, young elms and white pines strove skyward, creating an ideal place for escaping the heat of the day. Almost always, a breeze was blowing, and the sunlight that sliced through the trembling leaves cast bright patterns on the ground. In such a bower, a dreaming man might quickly lose track of time, reflecting calmly on past errors and thinking hopefully of better days to come.

  In Bronson’s optimistic view, the house was not so small after all, and he invited his elderly mother and brother Junius to join them. Bronson’s motives in extending this offer were not entirely unselfish. The property included some six to eight acres of fertile soil, purchased with a five-hundred-dollar gift from Emerson, and Alcott did not think himself equal to the task of planting it all by himself. Initially, Junius temporized. In the end, he declined. It was probably for the best. The presence of another family would have placed a strain on Bronson’s resources, just when it seemed he might finally put his finances in order. A more ominous problem, however, lay with Junius himself, who it seemed was suffering from some form of mental imbalance that, as yet, no one was prepared to openly address.

  Bronson made extensive renovations to Hillside, giving the home “a modest picturesqueness.” The family’s years here correspond to the time described by Louisa in Little Women.

  (Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  Despite Junius’s refusal, however, Bronson quickly undertook the imposing task of renovating the property. He had soon moved the barn to a more advantageous spot and was having it repaired with a view to storing the season’s crops. As to the slope behind the house, he set about forming the lower portion into terraces, where he constructed arbors from the rough trunks and branches of trees “on a system of his own,” as Hawthorne remarked.30 He also had an ingenious plan for curing the lack of space in the house itself. With his carpenter friend Edmund Hosmer, Bronson cut an old wheelwright’s shop on the property in two and grafted the two halves onto opposite sides of the house, creating a piazza on each side. He also added a porch to the front of the house and a peak to the center of the roof. Once Bronson added some coats of paint—a rusty olive tone was chosen to complement the tones of the landscape—even the grim-mouthed Hawthorne had to admit that Hillside now exuded “a modest picturesqueness.”31 It was a place that people noticed and remembered for a while after passing it.

  At Hillside, Bronson and Abba welcomed a class of visitors who later remembered the house not because of its appearance but because it had offered them food and rest on the road to freedom. Dedicated to advancing the cause of African-Americans, the Alcotts offered Hillside as a station on the Underground Railroad. It is likely that the Alcotts sheltered more fugitives than there are records to prove; their work demanded secrecy. Bronson did, however, describe one fugitive who stayed a week with the family in 1847 before moving on toward Canada. The man was about thirty, “athletic, dextrous, sagacious, and self-relying.” Bronson saw in him many of the qualities of a hero and pointed to him as “an impressive lesson to my children, bringing before them the wrongs of the black man and his tale of woes.”32 Louisa took an interest in one of the men whom her parents sheltered, and she started to teach him how to write. When she found that he was awkward with a pen and pencil, she continued the lessons with a lump of charcoal on the hearth. She remembered him as a “black George Washington.”33

  Hillside signified a new kind of liberty in Louisa’s life as well, for it was here that, for the first time, both she and Anna acquired rooms of their own. Louisa had spent her preteen years with almost no experience of privacy. Understanding that some aspects of mind and character can be perfected only in solitude, Abba made Louisa’s room as appealing an oasis as possible. She positioned Louisa’s workbasket and desk by a window, and a steady perfume emanated from dried herbs kept in the closet. Perhaps best of all, the room had a door that opened directly onto the garden so that Louisa could slip off into the woods without being detected. “It does me good to be alone,” Louisa wrote, and she began to thrive emotionally as she acquired a sense of a self, flourishing in the absence of parental surveillance.34

  Hillside was a sanctuary for Bronson as well. He, too, found the refuge from critical observers that he desperately needed. The breakdown he had experienced after Fruitlands and the periods of delirium that followed had produced long-lasting effects on his spirit. In his journal soon after New Year’s Day 1846, he wrote, “There is a martyrdom of the mind no less than of the body.” Mentally, he was still on the cross. He asked himself who were the teachers of the age. After writing the names of Emerson, Garrison, and Carlyle, he at first wrote his own but then scratched it out, adding the notation, “no—for me the time is not quite ready.”35 Bronson thought it was time to wait, though just what he was waiting for, he himself could not have said.

  Taking his unfitness for public life as proof of his integrity, Bronson turned away from activity outside his gateposts. The notes that he took on his typical daily routine reveal that he was far from idle, but they also show that he was principally absorbed in perfecting life within his domestic sphere. He rose at five, lit the fires, and helped the children with their ablutions. Breakfast was accompanied by conversation and the reading of a hymn. He devoted much of the early morning to reading and study but reserved the hours between ten and noon for instructing his daughters. Between the midday meal and three o’clock, he worked in the garden. He filled the remaining hours before supper by reading aloud with Abba and the girls. His garden and his children were his two emblems of hope and promise. Within two years, Bronson’s almost single-handed labor transformed the neglected property into a place of rustic enchantment. He had planted a thriving orchard of two hundred apple and peach trees. The field that he cultivated on the other side of Lexington Road yielded abundant crops of beans, celery, cucumbers, spinach, potatoes, and other vegetables. A grapevine trailed near the piazza, and a fountain bubbled among well-tended flowerbeds. Hillside was, in a sense, a second Fruitlands without the complications of a consociate family. Although life at Hillside did not have the same experimental thrust of Fruitlands, life with Bronson Alcott was always something of an experiment.

  Children, of course, require more managing than bean plants, and it takes far longer to judge the success of their cultivation. Here too, however, Bronson was reasonably content with the results. From time to time, his daughters joined him in the garden. Louisa helped with the weeds as her father expounded on the virtues, both practical and symbolic, of the herbs he had planted.36 On the hill behind the house, the girls’ play fantasies bore the marks of their father’s reading; when the four clambered toward the summit, they consciously reenacted the journey of Bunyan’s Pilgrim toward the Celestial City. Bronson’s incessant need to instruct and enlighten continued at the dinner table. At mealtimes, Frederick Willis remembered, Bronson always simplified his language so that even the smallest listener would understand him. Holding an apple on his fork, Alcott might give a miniature lecture on its growth and development. Willis was fascinated by these performances and found Alcott’s language charmingly poetic.37 If nothing else, Bronson’s dinner-table h
omilies made his daughters more ardent apostles of vegetarianism. Once, a visitor to the Alcotts’ home arrived to discover the girls energetically shoveling coal into the cellar. They eagerly cried out to him, “See what vegetables will do? It’s all vegetables!”38

  By and large, the people of Concord smirked at Bronson’s philosophizing; a popular joke held that Emerson was a seer and Alcott was a seersucker.39 However, they could not deny that the quartet of girls he was raising were an asset to the community—“self-helpful, kindly, and bright” as Emerson’s son Edward put it.40 “I know not,” Bronson wrote, “that I am not serving mankind as greatly in these humble services—in setting trees and teaching my children, these human shoots—as in the noisier and seemingly more widely useful sphere of public activity.”41

  Another humble service Bronson gladly continued to perform was to act as a companion to Emerson and Thoreau. As the latter made ready to take up residence at Walden Pond, Alcott followed his friend’s preparations with interest. Alcott did not hesitate to lend his own efforts to Thoreau’s experiment in ideal living. He was on hand at the beginning of May for the raising of Thoreau’s house. Thoreau remarked that no man had ever been more honored by the character of his raisers than he was, and he trusted that they were destined to assist at the raising of loftier structures one day.42 Alcott was a frequent visitor to Thoreau’s hut on the pond, coming, as Thoreau put it, “through the village, through snow and rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the trees.”43 In Walden, Thoreau repaid Alcott’s companionship with a heartfelt tribute, hailing his neighbor as the man of the most faith of any alive. It mattered little, Thoreau implied, that Alcott had no current occupation, for when his day finally came, “laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and masters of families and rulers will come to him for advice.” Thoreau did not foresee that Alcott could ever die, for the simple reason that Nature could not spare him.44