Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Henry David Thoreau. Louisa never forgot his “power, intellect, and courage.”

  (Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery)

  Bronson’s attempts to please his other great friend, Emerson, had more mixed results. Emerson’s enthusiasm regarding Alcott had cooled somewhat. Certainly, he had been embarrassed on behalf of transcendentalism when Fruitlands fell apart. Much of Emerson’s diffidence, however, resulted from the content of his character, rather than from any particular failing on Alcott’s part. Something in Emerson’s Yankee individualism made it both difficult and unnecessary for him to form warm personal attachments. His ability to find companions suffered because of his innate high-mindedness; he expected from friendship a more powerful unity of spirits than could be provided by mere mortals. “The higher the style we demand of friendship,” he wrote, “of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood…. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables.”45 Alcott was probably better able than anyone else at working his way around the defenses that Emerson erected against social intimacy. Even so, there were now fewer meetings between them than Alcott would have wished, causing him to value the time they shared all the more. He wrote fondly of days in May and June when the two strolled to Walden Pond, trading observations that Alcott thought would make a pretty volume, if only he had the genius for transcribing them.46

  Bronson especially enjoyed entertaining Emerson in the rustic summer house he had built from willows on the grounds of Hillside. He considered himself the happiest of men to receive the poet under a canopy made by his own hands. His hospitality was to have a comic upshot. In the summer of 1847, Emerson made the mistake of admiring Bronson’s summer cottage a bit too enthusiastically. Alcott was eager to do a favor for his friend, and Emerson understood the importance of giving Alcott a chance to feel useful. Bronson was promptly enlisted to construct a similar bower on Emerson’s land. Alcott embraced the task with bold ambition, hoping both to reward his friend’s many acts of kindness and to try out a fantastic theory of architecture that had been germinating in his brain. Alcott called his new style of building “the Sylvan,” and through it he strove to free the structure from right angles and artificial forms. Rather, the building should look as if it had grown in autochthonous fashion from its natural surroundings.

  Bronson enlisted the help of Thoreau, who had just ended his stay at Walden, and was soon laying the first timbers in the August heat.47 He created nine arched entrances, to represent each of the ancient Muses. The roof dipped toward the center, but no one was sure whether this was an aspect of the design or a sign of imminent collapse. Day by day, the house took and changed shape, until it resembled the temple of some lost East Asian cult. Thoreau, who knew a few things about geometric relations and physical laws, began to be appalled. Generously, Emerson averred that a Palladio had been lost to the world when Alcott chose education and philosophy over architecture. Nevertheless, he confided to Margaret Fuller that he was becoming alarmed by the building’s dimensions and apparent lack of stability. He began to refer to the structure as “Tumbledown Hall.” His wife, Lidian, was terser. She called it “The Ruin.”48

  Inevitably, townspeople came by to gawk and snicker. Alcott comforted himself by recalling that people had also laughed at Michelangelo. In the end, Alcott’s judgment was somewhat vindicated, since the derided “Ruin” stood for fifteen years. When Tumbledown Hall was finished, Bronson had given his friend both a unique gift and a wonderful story to tell.

  However much Emerson meant to Bronson during this time, he meant still more to Louisa, who found in him both a literary idol and a sympathetic ear. Judging that the girl had some special merits, Emerson gave Louisa free access to his library. A brisk eight-minute walk separated Hillside from Emerson’s home. Louisa, in her perpetual hurry, probably covered the distance in less time. On one of her visits, Emerson offered Louisa a little-known book, Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child, consisting of a series of letters between the great German poet and a young woman named Bettine von Arnim. The idea of a young woman seeking wisdom from the elder sage appealed powerfully to Louisa. She wanted to be Emerson’s Bettine, and she soon found ample excuses to spend more time under her hero’s roof. Her attentions to him took on the form of an innocent, impossible courtship. She sang Mignon’s Song “in very bad German” under his window and picked bouquets of wildflowers to leave at his door. She wrote him letters in which she laid bare her soul but, she later thanked heaven, was too shy and prudent to send them. Imagining him at her side, she went for meandering walks at night and gazed at the moon from the strong branches of a cherry tree until the cries of the owls scared her to bed.49 Apparently, Emerson was either oblivious to the crush or politely ignored it. Louisa soon got over her passion, and she eventually burned the letters, but Emerson remained her “master,” doing more for her, she was sure, than he ever knew. After his death, she recalled with warmest gratitude “the simple beauty of his life, the truth and wisdom of his books, [and] the example of a good, great man untempted and unspoiled by the world.”50

  Louisa also came along on some of her father’s visits to Thoreau at the pond. In scholarly moods, Thoreau listened as the Alcott girls recited to him in French and German.51 A much better linguist than either Emerson or Alcott, Thoreau could have taught the Alcott sisters Latin and Greek, as well as some Native American languages, if he had been asked to. Instead, he gave them an easy, practical course on how to love the world.

  Back at Hillside, Abba typically took charge of the evening’s entertainment. Both Abba and Louisa were fond of whist, and they often invited neighborhood girls for an evening card party. As much as she enjoyed the game, it was sometimes nearly impossible to lure Louisa into the parlor if she had become engrossed in a good book. Other evenings, the Alcott girls would work at their sewing as one of them read aloud from Scott, Hawthorne, or Dickens. The last was a particular favorite, and the girls excelled in dramatizing scenes from his work. During her teen years, Louisa received essentially no formal schooling outside the home. However, reading Dickens with her family, poring over Goethe in Emerson’s library, and scrambling through the woods with Thoreau comprised a unique education in themselves.

  To Louisa’s undoubted relief, another of her father’s friends gradually withdrew from the Alcotts’ lives during the Hillside years. Not long after Bronson purchased the home—almost inexplicably, considering the pain and chaos he had previously inflicted on them—Charles Lane briefly lived at Hillside, supervising part of the children’s education. Lane tasked Louisa with writing out a list of her vices. Hoping to satisfy him, she produced a litany of nine, including those dreaded vipers of the soul “activity” and “love of cats.” Lane told her to define gentleness and asked her who possessed it. “Father and Anna” was the reply. Who meant to have it? he then demanded. The desired admission followed: “Louisa, if she can.”52 Louisa withstood Lane’s assaults on her dignity, but she understandably hated him. Not only did his icy moralisms take the fun out of learning, but he also seemed to ruin everything he touched in her father’s garden.53 Louisa must have rejoiced when, in October 1845, Lane left, never again to trouble her with his strikingly imperfect notions of perfection.

  Lane, however, was not the only source of discomfort in Louisa’s educational life. The sisters’ governess, Sophia Foord, was something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, some of her teaching methods were pleasingly similar to Thoreau’s. To teach botany, she took the girls into the woods. Louisa especially enjoyed a wading expedition to Flint’s Pond, where she and her sisters “ma[de] the fishes run like mad” as they sloshed through the shallow water, and from which they returned “bawling and singing like crazy folks.”54 On the other hand, the craziness of the Alcott girls was too pronounced for Foord. In a frank conversation with Abba, she called the children “indolent” and laid the blame on the permissive practices of Abba and Bronson, whom she pronounced “faulty specimens of parental impotence.”55


  Foord had other reasons for feeling frustrated with her situation. Bronson’s promised Hillside school and the money Foord expected to earn from it never materialized; Alcott’s radicalism had frightened off the parents of potential pupils. He was even denied permission to speak at a statewide convention of the Teachers Institute; rejecting his request, the famous public-school reformer Horace Mann explained that Alcott’s political opinions were unacceptably “hostile to the existence of the State.”56 Disappointed professionally, Foord was also unlucky in love. Infatuated with Thoreau, she wrote him a letter proposing marriage, and the naturalist replied with “as distinct a no as I have learned to pronounce.”57 Embarrassed, Foord left the Alcotts’ employ. They did not replace her.

  A happier influence on Louisa’s life continued to be the outdoors. She wrote a series of “flower fables” to amuse Emerson’s young daughter Ellen. In the fields, she played tag with her sisters and friends. In the orchards, she climbed apple trees, rattling her bones when she happened to fall. She wrote to a friend, “We are dreadfull [sic] wild people here in Concord, we do all the sinful things you can think of.”58 The sins were hardly serious, though some of them were amusing. On one of her rambles, Louisa encountered a crew of men who were chewing tobacco as they hoed potatoes. Ever curious, Louisa asked to try a quid. She chewed it so vigorously that its effects overpowered her, and she had to be carried home in a wheelbarrow.59

  But it was an intoxicating experience of another kind that most profoundly transformed her. As the sun rose on a Thursday in the summer or autumn of 1845—she did not record the date—Louisa went for a run. The dew was not yet off the grass, and the moss was like velvet. Pausing in the silent woods to get her breath, she beheld the sun, slowly ascending above the wide meadows and looking as she had never seen it before. In the hush of that perfect morning, something changed inside her, and she felt a stirring for which she could find only one name: God. It came to her not through scripture, not through The Pilgrim’s Progress, but through the power of the natural world. To Louisa, it was a “vital sense of His presence, tender and sustaining as a father’s arms.”60 She had never felt this way before, and she prayed that she might keep the sense of His nearness forever. Almost forty years later, she wrote with satisfaction that she always had. Through all life’s vicissitudes, she wrote, the feeling never changed, standing the test as she passed through “health & sickness, joy & sorrow, poverty & wealth.”61 Though she destroyed untold quantities of her early writings, Louisa always preserved the journal entry that told of this moment of conversion when reason and faith, in the guise of a morning sunbeam, shone into her heart.62

  The Alcotts remained at Hillside until November 1848. These three and a half years were the longest period the Alcott children ever spent in one house. These Hillside years correspond to the adolescence celebrated and fictionalized in Little Women. They are the years when Louisa began writing in earnest, and they were the time when she acquired her adult character and her permanent sense of individuality. At the same time that she was coming to a clear sense of self, however, Louisa would have been hard-pressed to define herself entirely apart from her sisters. Bronson, observing the strong, beautiful tie that united them, referred to his daughters collectively as “the golden band.”63

  As a group, the four could make a powerful impression, but not always the kind that their parents might have hoped. Once, a few years earlier, at Hosmer Cottage, the Alcotts had welcomed Emerson and Margaret Fuller. As the four adults stood by the door, the conversation turned predictably to education. Apparently, Bronson lamented the lack of a school in which to pursue his theories. Fuller remarked, “Well, Mr. Alcott, you have been able to carry out your methods in your own family, and I should like to see your model children.” In a few moments, she got her wish. The high-minded colloquy was interrupted by a chaotic uproar, and around the corner of the house came the heedless foursome. In a wheelbarrow, transformed by imagination into an ancient chariot, sat little Abby in the costume of a queen. Louisa, bitted, bridled, and harnessed to the royal car, was a horse, driven by Anna. Lizzie had taken the part of a dog, and she was barking as loudly as her gentle voice permitted. Louisa writes, “All were shouting and wild with fun, which, however, came to a sudden end as we espied the stately group before us.” Louisa stumbled, and her three sisters all fell on top of her in a laughing heap. Abba gestured impressively toward the pile, saying, “Here are the model children, Miss Fuller.”64

  When Bronson thought of Anna, he imagined “her beauty-loving eyes and sweet visions of graceful motions and golden hues and all fair and mystic shows and shapes.” She was the most even-tempered and amiable of the four. Her sense of humor was keen but without Louisa’s tartness. While she partook enthusiastically in the games of her friends and sisters, her zest was tempered with a sense of dignity. She was more beautiful in her graceful bearing than in her physical features. Skilled in learning languages and a thoughtful writer, she perhaps exceeded all her sisters in terms of her pure intellectual gifts. Anna, too, wrote stories.65 Unlike Louisa, however, she lacked the confidence to try to publish them. Her excellent mind was “shown more in the appreciation of others than in the expression of herself.”66 Years of experience with Louisa’s temper had taught Anna that it was most prudent to let her younger sister have her way, and by the time the family settled at Hillside, she had fully accepted her role as Louisa’s subordinate, an eager second but never a daring first. As a longtime friend remembered, “She loved to hide behind her gifted sister.”67

  Yet there was one ability that Anna did not hide. Almost everyone commented on her superior talents as an actress. In the family theatricals, it was she and Louisa who did almost all of the acting, each taking on five or six parts at once, sustaining the action amid a flurry of quick costume changes. As befitted their respective personalities, Anna played the sentimental roles, while Louisa inclined toward characters touched by the demonic or supernatural. Anna was, for a while, desirous of doing something in the world. Her grammar deserting her in the midst of her reverie, she once wrote, “I sometimes have strange feelings, a sort of longing after something I don’t know what it is.” She had “a foolish wish to do something great.” In 1850, Louisa wrote, “Anna wants to be an actress, and so do I.” However, Anna sensed that her dream of stardom would not come true. She felt in the back of her mind that she would likely “spend my life in a kitchen and die in the poor-house.”68 Acting professionally had just enough hint of scandal to cause a proper young woman like Anna to hesitate. Moreover, as years passed, Anna became prematurely hard of hearing, so that picking up stage cues at last grew difficult. Anna, always a true mother’s helper, at last confirmed the expectations of those who had considered her “the most domestic” member of the family.69

  Despite their differences, Anna and Louisa came to share a deep mutual regard. Anna’s blend of talent and humility suited well their father’s image of what a young woman should be. During the years at Hillside, she was sometimes Bronson’s only bulwark against despair.70 Although Bronson regarded his children as much more than subjects on which to test his theories of education, he may have thought of Anna as the experiment who turned out right.

  When Bronson painted his third daughter, Elizabeth, with words, he chose pastel shades. He wrote of “her quiet-loving disposition and serene thought, her happy gentleness and deep contentment.” Lizzie was the most enigmatic sister, a passive, quiet soul who generally felt much less creative passion than her sisters. Although friends often remarked on her love of the piano, which she played with skill and appreciation, one struggles to find instances in which Lizzie did anything bold or original. As Louisa writes of Lizzie’s counterpart Beth in Little Women, “she seemed to live in a world of her own, only venturing out to meet the few whom she trusted and loved.”71 Yet even among these she was noticeably guarded. Whereas the rest of the family made it a common practice to read aloud from their journals at the dinner table or around the fireside, Lizzie st
eadfastly declined to do so.

  In the family theatricals, Lizzie took modest parts. A page here, a messenger there, formed the core of her repertoire. Although Anna recalled that Lizzie enjoyed “constructing properties for stage adornment and transforming the frailest material into dazzling raiment,” her preferred place during a performance was in the audience.72 A number of spirited arguments with a young friend over the virtues of vegetarianism are virtually the only remembered instances in which she showed any heated emotion. While her parents entertained audacious schemes to save the world and her sisters began to conceive their private visions of wealth and success, little of their imaginative energy seems to have rubbed off on Lizzie. She seems never to have wanted more from life than a quiet, comfortable smallness. Yet Lizzie’s meekness charmed her father. He referred to her as his “Little Tranquility,” and it undoubtedly pleased him that her dreamy, quiet temperament was the very counterpart of his own. Like her father, as a playmate once observed, Lizzie was “all conscience.”73

  Abby May, with “her frolick joys and impetuous griefs…her fast falling footsteps, her sagacious eye and auburn locks,” was a bright contrast to Lizzie.74 The baby of the family, she was adroit at reaping the benefits that this status can entail. Born after the Temple School scandal, too young to have more than a dim recollection of Fruitlands, Abby escaped some of the greatest trials of being an Alcott daughter. She also had a quality that her forthright older sister Louisa often lacked: a subtle, prepossessing charm that made allies of people when she needed them most. When she reached adulthood, Abby decided that her first name was too babyish for her and started insisting that people call her May. Bronson lauded Abby May’s talents and good disposition. He was aware that, because of her late arrival in the family, her prospects in life were somewhat fairer than those of her elder sisters, “who, with gifts no less promising, [had] yet been defrauded of deserved opportunities for study and culture” by the cloud of social disapproval that hung over the family since the closing of the Temple School. Of all his children, Bronson was most certain that his youngest daughter would make her way in the world.75