Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Observed in the light of the author’s circumstances, The Inheritance is a fascinating piece of self-revelation. On the one hand, the story fiercely defends the virtue of loyalty and asserts a stout preference for family over fortune, very much in keeping with the Alcotts’ system of values. By the same token, however, Edith rebels against her father by scorning his “will” both literally and figuratively, rejecting his intentions in favor of her own higher moral sense. The Inheritance ingeniously argues a point that the stormy, self-willed Louisa would gladly have explained to her father: that one can both be loyal to family and virtue and defy one’s parents’ wishes at the same time. Like much of her later fiction, The Inheritance is a covert plea for understanding the difficult process by which both characters and author must work out the ambiguities of personality and right behavior.

  As Louisa made the first tentative steps toward her eventual career, her father, at fifty, faced the daunting task of resurrecting his own professional life. His name remained sufficiently notorious in Boston that he could not teach there. Therefore, he redoubled his efforts in the art he had first begun to craft in the 1830s. Beginning in December 1848, while still contending with his mental demons, he sought to earn a living by perfecting the art of public conversation.

  Almost by design, an Alcott conversation was evanescent. Like an improvised musical solo, it was produced in order to fill the air with a momentary pulsation, imparting a flash of insight before moving on to the next equally ephemeral spark. In 1868, in an article titled “An Evening with Alcott,” an anonymous news correspondent gave a description of the effect that Alcott created:

  Do you remember what he says? Most likely not, or only certain isolated but splendid phrases which shock you as especially out of the common orbit of thought—or, in the strict, not conventional sense of the word, eccentric. But you do not regret that no tangible opinions remain in your memory, like a mellow autumn day, or, like a soft, tender melody, you recall his conversation only as an ethereal and delicate influence.25

  Alcott’s conversations were intimate and personal. No one who ever saw him converse had the impression of seeing a great orator. “Standing and facing an audience,” wrote the newspaperman just quoted, “he is as much out of his place as an editor is out of his element in the pulpit.” Seated in an elegant parlor, however, among a circle of educated listeners, Alcott transformed himself. He became an unrivaled philosophical and aesthetic talker, “the sole and unique Master of the Arm-chair.”

  When Bronson spoke to an uninitiated audience, he explained to them that, in his definition, conversation was an endeavor to find points on which a company could sympathize in feeling. He thought it inappropriate for anyone to present his own individual views for the sake of argument or debate. Such assertiveness had its place among larger companies, but the leader of a conversation had a gentler task: to provide common ground. He aspired to “touching those fine chords in every heart which will inspire them to respond to one’s own experience.” When he did not do so, he failed. “Conversation,” Alcott insisted, “is not a comparison of opinions…. Conversation should be magnetism.”26

  For Alcott, conversation also meant improvisation. The advance publicity for a conversation typically announced nothing more than the general theme of the discussion, such as a literary figure like Aeschylus or Dante, or perhaps a virtue like civility. Alcott especially liked to explore an idea through a famous person who exemplified it: he conversed on Order as represented by Daniel Webster and Humanity as personified by William Ellery Channing. Although he prepared carefully, he seems never to have walked into the room with any prepared text. He had, it seems, the unusual gift of being able to offer a steady flow of impromptu observations on complicated matters without losing either his train of thought or a kind of dramatic tension. Of course, to preserve the conversational quality of the evening, Alcott also needed to respond to queries and observations from the audience; his conversational art form was not only performative but participatory, demanding flexibility as well as focus. In its aesthetic feel, an Alcott conversation might well be likened to the work of a jazz soloist.

  Evidently, it was in their participatory aspect that Alcott’s conversations were most likely to fall short of the mark. Few members of Alcott’s typical audience were up to the twin challenges of adding thoughtfully to the conversation while also keeping their partisan opinions and personal egotisms in check. As early as 1837, following a conversation on self-sacrifice, Alcott lamented in his journal that he had almost given up the idea “of pursuing a subject in its direct and obvious bearing, with persons whose minds seem quite unfitted to the effort.”27 Thirty years later, he had apparently not solved the problem. The author of “An Evening with Alcott” observed that the conversation he witnessed was not a conversation in any ordinary sense, for no one had conversed. Rather, “the old man eloquent has all the evening all to himself—for the scattered spray of talk at the close of his discourse bears about the same relation to [conversation] that coppers do to the regular currency.”28

  Alcott regarded his conversations as a distinct genre of communication, which he hoped eventually to raise to an art form. He wrote in his journal in 1856, “Alcott is making the Conversation,” just as he believed that Garrison had “made” the Convention, Greeley the Newspaper, and Emerson the Lecture. All these media, Alcott thought, were “purely American organs and institutions, which no country nor people besides ours can claim as we can.” The reporter who wrote “An Evening with Alcott” considered the conversation “a feature of social life peculiar to Massachusetts,” and was of the opinion that its flavor was “as essentially Yankee as…the Baldwin apple or the Concord grape.” Curiously, however, as the writer was obliged to admit, the conversation lacked the traits that one instinctively associated with New England thinking. Alcott’s conversations in particular were neither practical nor shrewd nor sharply definite in their opinions. They did not offer “common sense,” but only “uncommon sense.”29

  As Alcott was well aware, however, his conversations were not a potent recipe for making money. In the years from 1848 to 1853, they earned a total of $750—a living wage for about six months.30 In marked contrast to her father, Louisa became acutely conscious of the details of her personal finances. Beginning in 1850, at the age of eighteen, she kept a record in which she noted down to the dollar the amount of money that she took in every year. She was now keenly aware of the family’s financial straits and eager to do what she could to alleviate them.

  Alcott’s life nearly came to an end in the summer of 1850, when he and the rest of the family contracted smallpox from, as Louisa put it, “some poor immigrants whom Mother took into our garden and fed one day.”31 The girls caught the disease only slightly. Abba’s case was somewhat worse. Bronson became dangerously ill and, for several weeks, was too weakened to leave his bed. Thankfully, he recovered without suffering the facial scarring that often came with the disease. It was yet another instance, though hardly the last, of the price the family paid for its kindness to others.

  Meanwhile, the women of the family struggled to keep bodies and souls together. Louisa now taught a school on Suffolk Street, which her father wistfully visited, wishing that he could have a school again. Louisa would gladly have given him hers. The vocation that he adored left her utterly cold. After teaching for two years, she reached the unabashed conclusion that she hated it. Although necessity drove her back to the classroom a number of times, she never changed her mind. At the same time, however, the professions that she found most appealing—acting and writing—seemed beyond her reach. But idleness was unacceptable, and not only as a matter of family economy. It was essential to Louisa’s nature always to be doing or planning something. The question for her was not whether to be active, but how.

  Louisa believed that the honest work one did willingly for pay was always noble at its core. This conviction, coupled with a feeling that she would explode if she did not soon find some hard but rewar
ding task, led her during the winter of early 1851 to accept a job in Dedham, ostensibly as a lady’s companion. The position was offered by a ministerial-looking man who announced himself at Abba’s intelligence office as the Hon. James Richardson. With ornate turns of phrase, he stated that his sister, a nervous invalid, required someone to give her company and to see to the minor household tasks that had become too burdensome for her. The work, he assured Abba, would be quite nominal, and the person selected for the position would be “one of the family in all respects.”32

  Perhaps it was the promise of being a family member that captured Louisa’s fancy. When her mother asked whether she could suggest anyone for the job, Louisa responded “Only myself.” She miscalculated terribly. In Louisa’s mildly fictionalized telling of the story, Richardson’s home sounds like an unholy union between Miss Havisham’s estate and the House of Usher. The woman she was expected to befriend was a mousy, mentally feeble creature, who at the age of forty possessed the wits of a child. Mr. Richardson proved worst of all. He had conceived a paranoid delusion with regard to another servant, his elderly housekeeper, who he thought had attempted to poison him and whom he suspected of brewing further “nefarious plans.”33

  Yet Richardson’s irrational loathing may have been preferable to the attraction he conceived toward Louisa. Before she arrived, he wrote long letters to the eighteen-year-old, expressing the hope that she would allow him “to minister to [her] young and cheerful nature.” After she arrived, she soon discovered that her duties had more to do with Richardson himself than with his sister. Although her memoir of the episode contains no clear suggestion of sexual impropriety, her employer began to expect a kind of intimacy that was almost equally unsettling. One morning, he surreptitiously observed her as she prepared breakfast. When she discovered his presence, he begged her not to run away and remarked on the pleasure of seeing “something tasteful, young, and womanly” near him. At the end of each day, he compelled her to come to his study and listen as he read from crackbrained, abstruse texts. She became “a passive bucket, into which he was to pour all manner of philosophic, metaphysical, and sentimental rubbish.” She was “to serve his needs, soothe his sufferings, and sympathize with all his sorrows—be a galley slave, in fact.”34 Before much time passed, she told Richardson flatly that she would rather scrub floors than listen to his reading.

  Louisa’s candor was promptly punished; she was burdened with the hardest tasks of the household and, as a crowning insult, was expected to black her master’s boots. Seven weeks after her work in Dedham began, Louisa announced that she would be Richardson’s drudge no more. Making her way back to Boston on a bleak March afternoon, she opened the pocketbook he had given her containing her wages and found that he had paid her only four dollars. In the story she based on her time with the Richardsons, Louisa writes that her family indignantly sent the pittance back. In her account book, however, she counted the four dollars as part of the year’s income, suggesting that necessity may actually have triumphed over pride. Throughout her writing career, Louisa routinely transformed family tragedy into the stuff of comedy. Even twenty-three years after the fact, however, she was unable to perform such alchemy regarding her sojourn in Dedham; the tone of the piece she based on the episode is unmistakably bitter.

  Fortunately, not all the influences she felt during this period were so degrading. She grew attracted to the preaching of the extraordinary minister Theodore Parker, who had been a visitor to Fruitlands and a sometime attendee at Alcott’s conversations. His unorthodox opinions—he had been known to comment that Christianity would be better off without the Gospels—alienated many Bostonians, so much so that he was forced to preach at Boston’s Music Hall instead of a regular church.35 If Emerson represented the poetic aspect of transcendentalism and Alcott its educational side, then Theodore Parker was its political warrior. Parker’s steel blue eyes would look intensely through his gold-rimmed spectacles as he urged his listeners to fight for social change and take up arms for abolition and equality. Parker’s advocacy of women’s rights resonated strongly with Louisa, and he soon joined Emerson and Thoreau among the leading transcendentalists to whom she felt a filial, almost romantic attachment. She was looking, it seems, for figures to fill the place in her life that her own father did not perfectly occupy, and yet, interestingly, she gravitated toward men whose opinions and characters were not vastly different from Bronson’s. Instead of looking for an alternative to her father, she apparently craved a better version of him.

  Soon after her return to Boston, Louisa’s need to be up and doing was briefly enflamed, not by family concerns, but by a public controversy. On April 3, 1851, the escaped slave Thomas Sims was taken prisoner in Boston, giving the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts the chance to decide the constitutionality of the new federal Fugitive Slave Law. Two months earlier, to the embarrassment of the local authorities, a crowd of free blacks had burst into the courtroom and forcibly liberated another fugitive, known as Shadrach, as his case was being argued. To avoid another incident of that kind, the courthouse where Sims was imprisoned was promptly surrounded by chains and an armed guard. When Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw was obliged to stoop beneath the chains in order to enter the courthouse, the symbolism of justice bowing down to power and oppression was too blatant to be ignored. Bronson, normally slow to anger, reacted with shame and indignation. He observed, “The question ‘What has the North to do with slavery?’ is visibly answered…. Such disgrace to the country, to the State,…to humanity…cannot be long borne with, nor silently.” He promptly accepted a position on a vigilance committee, organized to protect other blacks from being arrested and, if possible, to rescue Sims. A few scenes like the spectacle in the courthouse square, he thought, would settle the nation’s destiny.36

  Louisa was as active on the slave’s behalf as a young woman could be. Her sympathies must have been moved all the more by the knowledge that Sims was only seventeen, a year younger than herself. With her father, she attended a large gathering at the Tremont Temple, where Horace Mann, Wendell Phillips, and a host of others decried the hated law and pled eloquently for liberty. As the great reformers of New England heaped abuse on Daniel Webster, whose speech to the Senate the previous year had all but assured the law’s passage, Louisa laid fanciful plans to liberate Sims from bondage. As a righteous sense of injustice mounted within her, she felt as if she were “ready to do anything,—fight or work, hoot or cry” to save the helpless young man she had never met.37 Similarly, all of Bronson’s waking moments were absorbed by the Sims crisis. When not attending meetings of his committee, he followed the forward press of events in person, first attending the court session where Sims’s lawyer argued against the constitutionality of the law, then hearing Parker denounce the sins of the republic before a packed house at the Music Hall, and finally standing amid an anxious throng outside the courthouse, awaiting the judgment that would determine Sims’s fate.

  The news, when it came, could not have been worse. Judge Shaw upheld the law, and Sims was returned to Savannah, Georgia, where he received a public whipping that nearly killed him.38 The trial of Sims, including the attendant security measures, had cost the city of Boston three thousand dollars. Bronson thought it would be a handsome piece of honor and justice if he and his antislavery compatriots would refuse to pay that amount in taxes and willingly go to prison for their noncompliance. His disillusion knew no bounds. Until April 1851, he had supposed that God had blessed him with a host of “beautiful properties”: a city, a civilization, Christianity, and a country. He now doubted whether any of these birthrights was truly his.39

  Bronson had long endured the knowledge that his country generally did not share his vision of reform. Yet the Sims affair had given him a renewed sense of the nation’s perfidy. The country not only lacked interest in improving itself; it seemed determined to make itself worse. “The devil’s claims are fairly admitted,” he grumbled, “and his right to be here and take part in mundane
affairs is unquestionable.”40 Though glad to play his part when the need arose, the ferment over Sims had reminded him of “the ultra-private person that I am, and how little in keeping with my habits is all that passes about me.”41 He could find no place that felt like his own.