Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Louisa, however, continued to inspire more perplexity than confidence. In Bronson’s mind, she conjured the image of a girl “with…quick and ready senses,…agile limbs, and boundless curiosity.” He thought, too, of “her penetrating mind and tear-shedding heart, alive to all moving breathing things.” Bronson admitted that she was a loving child, but her impulsiveness had continued to trouble him. He had always believed that if one approached a child with respect and openness, that child would eventually become a docile ally. However, Louisa’s attempts to master herself still tended to meet with frustration and self-condemnation. When Louisa was thirteen, Bronson wrote in his journal of a day when he checked the diaries of his three eldest daughters to see how regularly they were being kept. Both Anna and Elizabeth passed the inspection. Louisa, who had been “unfaithful,” was sent off to eat her dinner alone.76 Bronson had once believed that all minds in childhood were fundamentally alike, and that education had the power to shape them toward a common purpose and a shared standard of moral excellence. Over time, however, he had revised his view. It now seemed to him that character was “more of a nature than of acquirement, and that the most you can do by culture is to adorn and give external polish to natural gifts.”77 He believed that it was impossible to create or develop any spiritual qualities that were not inborn.

  Worst of all, the rift within the family that had begun to widen when Bronson took Anna to the Temple School and left Louisa with her mother was greater than ever. Whereas Bronson counted Anna and Elizabeth as his own, Louisa turned to Abba as her source of courage and confidence. Now entering her teens, Louisa was well aware of the awkwardness with which she tended to impress people. “I am old for my age,” she admitted, “and don’t care much for girls’ things. People think I’m wild and queer.”78 Yet Abba made her gangly second daughter at home with her strangeness. She believed that her daughter’s fitfulness was the sign of a spirit aspiring upward, of an energy that neither a sleepy Massachusetts town nor a teenaged body could easily contain. Abba slipped inspiring notes into Louisa’s journal, and, always, she encouraged her daughter to write, not just as a means of moral examination, as her father would have it, but as a means of creative self-expression. The following excerpt is typical:

  I am sure your life has many fine passages well worth recording, and to me they are always precious…. Do write a little each day, dear, if but a line, to show me how bravely you begin the battle, how patiently you wait for the rewards sure to come when the victory is nobly won.79

  Abba knew that, if Louisa had no way to express her “smothered sorrows” and smoldering emotions, they “might otherwise consume her young and tender heart.”80 But also she sensed that Louisa, so eager to be good and so utterly unfitted for self-restraint, had something marvelous to give the world. On the late November day when Louisa turned fourteen, Abba acknowledged Louisa’s adolescent loneliness, writing, “Your temperament is a peculiar one, and there are few who can really help you.” But she also wrote, “Lift up your soul…to meet the highest for that alone can satisfy your great yearning nature…. [B]elieve me you are capable of ranking among the best.” On that same birthday, Abba gave Louisa the first pen she could call her own, along with the hope that it might inspire her “when wrapt in pure poetic fire.”81 Louisa must have felt that the tools of greatness were now at her command.

  Unhappily, Bronson did not regard the bond between Abba and Louisa merely as one of love and loyalty; he saw in their alliance a threat to his authority and an implicit questioning of his principles. The same year he sent Louisa to eat alone for not seeing to her diary, Bronson wrote in his own journal, “Two devils, as yet, I am not quite divine enough to vanquish—the mother fiend and her daughter.”82

  Bronson rendered this judgment without identifying any specific quarrel or festering resentment that might have provoked him. No one disputes that Abba had a volatile temper. Even Louisa, ever her mother’s staunchest defender, appears to concede as much in Little Women, in which Abba’s counterpart Marmee asserts, “I am angry nearly every day of my life.” Marmee admits that she has been trying to subdue her temper for forty years and has succeeded only in controlling it.83 Yet if Abba was chronically angry, she had much to be angry about. In managing her frustrations as well as she did, she seems more saintly than demonic. It is sad to know that, despite all her loyalty and sacrifice, Bronson could still speak of her as a devil and a fiend. Bronson, certainly, was not always rational, and he was so convinced of his own moral excellence that he was prone to regard any criticism or resistance as a trial visited on him by some evil force. Thus, he was quick to exaggerate the evil of Abba’s and Louisa’s opposition.

  Nevertheless, Bronson felt that he could benefit from Abba’s and Louisa’s resistance. Thinking perhaps of Socrates and Xanthippe, Bronson saw them as challenging him to reach new levels of tolerance and benignity. He wrote, “Count thyself divinely tasked if in thy self or thy family thou hast a devil or two to plague and try thy prowess and give thee occasion for celebrating thy victories by ringing all the bells of joy within thee.”84 At the same time, where moral certainty was concerned, as well as the stubbornness that can go with it, Abba was every bit a match for her husband. Weeks after moving into Hillside, she had written to her brother Samuel, “Nothing makes one so indifferent to the sins and mosquito-thrusts of life as the consciousness of being morally invulnerable.”85 Two ethically intransigent people in the same marriage are likely to fight some memorable battles. It seems that a strong marriage need not be perpetually harmonious.

  One of the least appealing facets of Bronson Alcott’s social thinking interacted with his understanding of his family. He was strangely taken with an unpleasant form of pseudoscience which held that the inner natures of human beings could be deduced from their physical coloring. In self-serving fashion, he decided that blond-haired, blue-eyed persons were the most spiritually developed of human beings and that darker pigments connoted darker natures that were nocturnal, earthy, and slumberous. He praised the “impregnable Saxondom” of both Old and New England and wrote, without flinching, “Blood is a destiny.”86 Bronson’s racial categories alarmed even his most dedicated followers.87 On one occasion, when Bronson was discoursing on the attributes of darker peoples, his friend Ednah Cheney objected that Emanuel Swedenborg, a philosopher whom Alcott deeply respected, had called blacks the most beloved of all races. Alcott dismissed the objection with the condescending words, “That is very nice of Mr. Swedenborg.” In private conversation with Emerson, Alcott descended still lower, suggesting that male African Americans should be sterilized en masse.88

  Studying America in the nineteenth century, one becomes sadly accustomed to encountering the unpleasant racial thinking of persons whom one naively wishes had had the power to see beyond the narrow conventions of their times. In Bronson Alcott’s case, discovering this lack of understanding is especially disappointing since it seems so obviously to contradict the higher principles for which he daily sacrificed. Alcott despised slavery and, as has been seen, refused to use any product that slave labor had produced. He willingly bade farewell to the only career he ever loved because he would not dismiss a black child from his school. He risked prison by sheltering fugitive slaves in his house. As will be shown later, he exposed himself to being shot in a failed effort to win the release of another fugitive. Unlike some abolitionists who advocated the end of slavery but nothing more, Alcott advocated full political rights for freed slaves. At a time when the idea was far from popular, he supported the induction of black troops into the Union army. He was a sincere admirer of both John Brown and Frederick Douglass. How, then, could Alcott espouse a theory of race that consigned human beings, even his own family and friends, to categories of higher and lower? How could a man dedicated to the ideals of political equality and abolition find it so difficult to abolish his own enslavement to hierarchical thinking? Of all the contradictions that inhabited the mind of Bronson Alcott, not one is more baffling or disapp
ointing than this, and it requires some explanation, however unsatisfying that explanation may be.

  In his thinking about the organization of the universe, Alcott had conditioned himself to think about creation in vertical terms. He also thought that no aspect of the cosmos was morally neutral. He therefore found it almost impossible to observe differences of any kind without making moral judgments about them. He freely accepted the idea that some kinds of fruits and vegetables evinced greater moral excellence than others. Reasoning from flawed premises, he found moral and social significance in racial difference as well. Yet his theories did not blind him to cruelty of inequality and the horrors of slavery, nor did they hinder him from acting morally and honorably toward black people themselves.

  A parallel issue is the influence that Bronson’s racial theorizing had on his own home. It is easy to assume that Bronson used his theories of light and dark heredity to explain the rifts within his own family. Given his suppositions about angelic whiteness and devilish darkness, he could well have reasoned that, as a light-skinned Alcott, he would naturally be antagonized by his wife and second daughter, the hot-blooded products of the more Mediterranean May lineage. However, the facts will not entirely support a pigment-based explanation of Bronson’s opinions of his family. A principal weakness in such an analysis is that it fails to account for Bronson’s high regard for his eldest daughter, Anna. Daguerreotypes of Anna and Louisa reveal no great difference in their complexions or coloring. Lydia Hosmer Wood, a close friend of the Alcott family, wrote that Anna, not Louisa, was the darkest of the four Alcott children.89 An examination of locks of Anna’s and Louisa’s hair now preserved at the Fruitlands Museum also confirms that Louisa’s hair was a few shades lighter than Anna’s. Just as Louisa’s waywardness seemed to defy Bronson’s theories on rearing the ideal child, so too did his amiable eldest daughter contradict Bronson’s equation between darkness and deviltry.

  A father is the pivot on which the developing self-awareness of growing girls frequently turns.90 In striving to come to terms with the man who, above all others, influences one’s evolving understanding of authority, maleness, and patriarchal power, children arrive at one of the most complex and emotionally perilous identifications that life requires one to make. For Louisa, neither understanding her father nor defining herself in relation to him came easily. She sincerely desired to be “good,” as her father defined that word, and thus to win his approval. Yet to Bronson, goodness meant the repression of strong emotion and the extinction of selfish desire. If desires and emotions are essential parts of one’s character, then Louisa could satisfy her father only by being something other than herself.

  To Louisa’s great disadvantage, Bronson also knew only one way of looking at genius, and his narrowness long prevented him from setting her talents at their proper value. For him, genius was the ability to see the world as a seamless, transcendent unity. Regarding the process of his own thought, he wrote, “I cannot sit and seize the warm life-thought as it runs through my vitals; but am one with my thought…. My genius is epic.” He wished always to “hold inviolate the unity of my intuitions” and never “to dissolve the divine synthesis of my being.”91 A person who fits Bronson Alcott’s definition of genius might make a philosopher, but she will never make a novelist. To write compelling fiction, it is necessary to acknowledge desire and the obstacles to its fulfillment. From the earliest age, Louisa expressed passion. It was her form of genius to feel, to observe, and to understand emotional struggle. Her father believed that passion was not a pathway to knowledge but the most dangerous impediment to it. Bronson did not realize that the storm and stress he beheld in his daughter’s spirit were part of her own intense search for truth.

  With her volatile temper and fierce independence, Louisa was naturally disposed to rebel, but within the Alcott family the moral grounds for rebellion posed a problem. While there were abundant reasons for questioning Bronson’s judgment, there were few who now questioned his dedication to moral purity. Emerson called him an archangel, even if he did add the word “tedious” to his description.92 Alcott himself tried to live his life in self-conscious imitation of Christ. To rebel against a household Christ, to take up arms against an archangel, is to define oneself de facto as the Devil. When Louisa’s temper defied her efforts to soften it, when she felt frustration at the poverty that Bronson insisted was virtuous, or when he greeted her impulsiveness with cool disapproval or hapless incomprehension, she must have wondered whether she might not truly be a demon after all.

  In a family of remarkably close relationships, in which high degrees of affection and loyalty were essential if the parents and children were to endure the threats of poverty and the judgments of a sneering and skeptical world, Louisa found one of the most important ties extremely difficult to establish and maintain. In myriad ways, she was a misfit: a fighter in a pacifist family; a coveter of wealth in a transcendental temple; a girl who yearned for all things boyish; a dark presence in the household of a man who praised and worshipped light. She knew that she had much to be proud of and that within her lay unsuspected gifts that, with luck and effort, she might one day share with a grateful world. For now, however, winning the understanding and support of the one man who mattered most was a daunting challenge.

  A more formidable challenge for the family as a whole was economic. Abba tried to conceal the true extent of the family’s poverty from her children, but at least where Louisa was concerned, the effort was in vain. Louisa wrote, “Money is never plentiful in a philosopher’s house, and even the maternal pelican could not supply all our wants on the small income which was freely shared with every needy soul who asked for help.”93 To ease the financial burden, Abba tried expedient measures like taking in a mentally retarded girl, Eliza Stearns, as a boarder. In the end, however, these efforts were in vain. The idyllic life of Hillside could not be sustained. In May 1848, in an attempt to trim back the debts, Abba accepted an offer to travel to Waterford, Maine, to take a job as the matron of a water-cure house. The original proposal had included Bronson; the house was to employ him as a preacher and teacher. Bronson, however, had declined the position, declaring with an exasperating calm that anticipated Melville’s Bartleby, “I have [as] yet no clear call to any work beyond myself.”94 Abba took Abby May along with her, and at first, she tackled the job of matron with enthusiasm. However, finding that the proprietors of the spa had not made adequate provisions for her daughter, she was soon forced to send Abby back home. Not long after, missing her family and feeling guilty of deserting the children in exchange for mere money, she resigned her post and returned to Concord. The job in Maine might have saved the house, but only at the price of undermining the family. Some other solution was needed.

  On a gloomy November day, the Alcotts held a family council that was, in its way, every bit as devastating as the one at Fruitlands at which Bronson had proposed that he might leave the family. It appeared that the family could hope to make ends meet only if Abba and the girls found jobs, and the employment prospects in Concord were not promising. Therefore they decided to move back to Boston. Abba’s friends could find her a good salary as a missionary for the poor. Anna, seventeen, and Louisa, nearly sixteen, were now old enough to try their hands at teaching. Anna, indeed, had already had some slight experience in this line, having taught a handful of children during an extended visit to her cousin Lizzie Wells in Walpole, New Hampshire, the previous spring. As for Bronson, he felt that his three years of seclusion, introspection, and communion with nature had at last “restored him to hope and the service of mankind.” Heaven, he felt, had won him health from sickness and hope from defeat, and he believed himself “a richer, a stronger, [and] a wiser man” for the lessons he had learned. In his Micawber-like way, he felt confident that he could establish a school or “a reading room, a journal, a press, a club.”95 Once in Boston, he intended to deliver conversations for a modest fee, distilling some dollars from his years of contemplation.

  Af
ter the similarly wrenching meeting at Fruitlands, when she was only eleven, Louisa had cried and prayed. This time, she reacted differently. She took a brisk run over the hill and settled down for “a good think” in her favorite retreat, an old, abandoned cartwheel, lying half-hidden in the grass. Louisa had found it a good place to sit when struggling to work out her mathematics lessons, though she usually ended up scribbling poems and fairy tales instead of sums. The sky was a leaden gray, the trees bare, and the dry grass had surrendered to the frosty air. And yet, for all its gloom, the scene was not so different from the bare common, strewn with snow puddles, where her mentor Emerson experienced the moment of transcendence he had described in Nature. In such a place, one really could feel glad to the brink of fear. If the cold air touched her, it was only to stiffen her resolve:

  [T]he hopeful heart of fifteen beat warmly under the old red shawl, visions of success gave the gray clouds a silver lining, and I said defiantly, as I shook my fist at fate embodied in a crow cawing dismally on the fence near by,—

  “I will do something by-and-by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!”96

  As the old wheel creaked under Louisa’s shifting weight, it seemed to her as though it had begun to turn, “stirred by the intense desire of an ambitious girl to work for those she loved and to find some reward when the duty was done.”97 Louisa strode back to Hillside cold but resolute. Almost forty years later, it seemed to her that this was the day when she ceased to be a child. She was still young, sentimental, and impulsive. Her nerves and feelings were not yet fully ready for the hard, patient slog that might one day yield success. Yet she was equipped with the loving support of a strong, united family and a will that could not easily be broken. She had also learned a lesson familiar to all persons of courage: that the only direction in which life moves is forward.