Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Both she and her father wrote poems to help them come to terms with the loss. Louisa wrote hers some days before Lizzie’s death, and Bronson wrote his shortly after the end. He copied both of their lyrics into his journal. A decade later, Louisa rewrote her poem, with some revisions, into the text of Little Women. When she did so, however, she omitted the second stanza:

  Gentle pilgrim! First and fittest,

  Of our little household band;

  To journey trustfully before us

  Hence into the silent land.

  First, to teach us that love’s charm

  Grows stronger being riven;

  Fittest, to become the Angel

  That shall beckon us to heaven.17

  In this verse, Lizzie becomes what she never was in life: the leader of the family, the one who bravely goes ahead of the rest to prepare a place for all. Christ’s promise that the last shall be first lies just beneath the surface of these words. As Louisa reflected on Lizzie’s superior fitness to become an angel, she reflected as well on her own weaker qualifications. Thus, in the poem, Lizzie becomes not only a leader but a teacher, one whose remembered example will instill her older sister with the patience and courage that Louisa felt she so desperately lacked.

  Bronson’s poem was less sentimental and a good deal more frightening. Instead of focusing on the virtues of his lost daughter, he reflected guiltily on his inability, even in her last moments, to supply his child’s most urgent needs:

  “Ether,” she begged, “O Father give

  “With parting kiss my lips doth seal

  “Pure ether once, and let me live

  “Forgetful of this death I feel.”

  We had it not. Away she turns,

  Denied the boon she dying asks,

  Her kindling eye with rapture churns,

  Immortal goblet takes and quaffs.18

  Lizzie’s dying plea to have her pain extinguished, as well as her final turning away from him, haunted Bronson. He was not merely the cloud-borne, insouciant dreamer that his detractors said he was, and all his philosophical detachment could not insulate him from this loss.

  The day after the funeral was Anna’s twenty-seventh birthday, a welcome reminder that life would go on. In the morning, the family shared a somber breakfast, and that evening they exchanged “pleasing memories of the dear one.”19 Anna was given Lizzie’s desk as a present, a gesture that emphasized continuity instead of disjunction. The next day, a workman named McKee and his crew arrived to begin the renovation of Orchard House. At the beginning of April, in order to better supervise the construction, the family took up temporary residence next door in a wing of Hillside, which the Hawthornes, still in England, graciously provided for them.

  With the passing of Lizzie, who had taken comfort during her last days in gathering the family around her and murmuring, “All here,” a source of emotional cohesion was lost.20 Whereas Lizzie’s illness had brought the family closer together, her death temporarily had the opposite effect. May departed for Boston, and Anna went to stay with her friends the Pratts. Instinctively, they were seeking distance. Although Louisa averred that she did not miss Lizzie as much as she had expected, it was hard to deal with so many departures at once. Even her mother and father, though physically present, seemed distant, immersed as they were in other concerns—Abba in her memories and Bronson in the renovation. Whatever the many discomforts Louisa had known, loneliness had seldom been one of them. Now, it bore down on her with oppressive force.

  During these months at Hillside, Bronson sometimes strayed into the upstairs study that had once been his, where he experienced deep feelings of nostalgia. He took down some books from Hawthorne’s shelves and, to his surprise, discovered that their tastes barely overlapped. Everything in the room seemed both familiar and strange. Here, he had conversed with Fuller, Thoreau, and Emerson. Here, too, he had held sessions of discussion and discovery with his own children, in the only school the world could not deny him. The room also reminded him of Lizzie. “Then my dear departed child was here,” he lamented, “around whom so much of my home delights are gathered.”21 If the renovations of Orchard House had not kept him so busy, Bronson’s broodings about the past might have overwhelmed him. Already, he loved the house. “Standing quietly apart from the roadside,” leaving space “for the overshadowing elms to lend their dignity and beauty to the scene,” Orchard House delighted Bronson with its porches, gables, and chimney tops. It was more, he thought, than he deserved or would have dared to wish for.22

  The family had a much-needed reason to celebrate on April 7, when Anna joyfully announced her engagement to John Pratt. Objectively, Bronson and Louisa had every reason to share the couple’s delight. Pratt was, as Louisa freely confessed, “a model son and brother,—a true man,—full of fine possibilities.”23 But somehow the occasion was not entirely happy. The loss of Elizabeth was still fresh, and the shifting of emotional states could not occur without some internal friction. Bronson thought well of Pratt and did not question his fitness to marry his daughter. “Still,” he wrote, “the thought is more than I am ready for at this moment.”24 Louisa, as always, was more dramatic. “Another sister is gone,” she grieved in her journal.25 Louisa remembered these emotions ten years later when she wrote the first part of Little Women. After learning that John Brooke has taken a romantic interest in Meg, Jo glowers darkly at the young man and wishes that she herself could somehow marry her sister in order to keep her in the family. The mere presence of Brooke’s forgotten umbrella in the hallway is enough to elicit a shaken fist.26 Louisa moaned in private over the engagement and swore she would never forgive Pratt taking Anna away from her.27 No one seems to have regarded Louisa’s agitation over Anna’s engagement with any particular concern. However, she required more understanding than anyone realized.

  When the Alcotts finally moved into Orchard House in July, Louisa felt out of place. Bronson was delighted with his many improvement projects, and Abba was grateful to be resting under a new roof. The future Mrs. Pratt was absorbed in her fiancé, and May was busy painting. Louisa, however, found herself at least momentarily thwarted. She had received an offer in June to act in Thomas Barry’s theater in Boston, an opportunity that fanned her hopes of trying a new life. Unfortunately, Barry broke his leg and the plan was scrapped, but not before word of it leaked to the respectable relatives and caused a minor scandal.

  Louisa was in a potentially suffocating position. At various times in the past, she had referred to both Anna and Lizzie as “the angel of the house.” In nineteenth-century New England, it was not uncommon for one daughter to be chosen, by design or circumstance, to mind the house and care for the parents as they passed into old age. The logical candidate for this role among the Alcotts had always been Elizabeth. Now, with Elizabeth gone and Anna on her way to the altar, it was starting to look more and more as if Louisa had drawn the short straw. She had, one suspects, long wished to be the closest of the Alcott sisters to her parents. The wish was coming true in an undesired way.

  As the summer heat stretched over Concord, Louisa “simmered” plans for the future, as she put it, but sweeping, dusting, and dishpans took up much of her time.28 The fact that she had seriously considered a career in the theater revealed her nagging doubts about her chances as an author. She remained outwardly confident that her creative nature would find its expression, but her path was not clear. She sold a story that summer titled “Only an Actress,” which brought in enough money for some summer dresses and bonnets. She could sell tales with ease to the weekly magazines, but the work gave her only slight fulfillment. She was edging toward her personal Slough of Despond.

  After her parents’ new household was sufficiently settled, Louisa went to Boston to look for work. The family’s finances remained precarious, and they still needed a breadwinner more than a housekeeper. The hunt for work went badly, and it seemed to her that, in the busy, anxious swirl of Boston, no one cared whether Miss Alcott from Concord found a positio
n, or indeed, whether she lived at all. Her drive and determination abruptly deserted her. The family circle had lost two sisters. Perhaps it would be best for it to lose a third. She thought of jumping into the Charles River, and she could not banish the idea. Her feet led her to the Mill Dam, and she gazed hard into the water.

  What happened next is not entirely clear. She never mentioned the incident in her journal, or if she did, she destroyed the entry. After the crisis was past, she wrote of it in a letter to the family, but there, too, she offered few details. However, a very similar trial is endured by one of her fictional creations, Christie Devon, the autobiographical heroine of Work. After a series of abortive careers, in which she fails not because of incompetence but because of ill luck and the weaknesses and cruelties of others, Christie is reduced to taking in sewing. Unable to pay her bills and falsely accused of dishonesty by her landlady, Christie makes one last attempt to find work. Echoing Louisa’s loss of Anna to John Pratt, at the last house that Christie approaches before contemplating suicide, a wedding is underway. Reflecting on the new bride’s happiness, Christie cries out, “Oh, it isn’t fair, it isn’t right, that she should have so much and I so little!”29 Christie’s steps lead her to a bridge:

  [S]he watched with curious interest the black water rolling sluggishly below. She knew it was no place for her, yet no one waited for her, no one would care if she staid for ever, and, yielding to the perilous fascination that drew her there, she lingered with a heavy throbbing in her temples, and a troop of wild fancies whirling through her brain…. With an ominous chill creeping through her blood, and a growing tumult in her mind, she thought, “I must go,” but still stood motionless, leaning over the wide gulf…. Lower and lower she bent; looser and looser grew her hold on the pillar; faster and faster beat the pulses in her temples, and the rush of some blind impulse was swiftly coming on.30

  In Work, an old friend who happens to be passing by saves Christie from suicide. In her own moment of crisis, Louisa was saved by her own strength. As she wrote to her family, “[I]t seemed so mean to turn & run away before the battle was over that I went home, set my teeth & vowed I’d make things work in spite of the world, the flesh & the devil.” She resolved, she said, “to take Fate by the throat and shake a living out of her.”31

  Thus steeling herself, she launched herself on a new beginning by going to church. In the past, Theodore Parker had been a ready source of inspiration, and now she sought him out again. She was not disappointed. Though fighting his own grim battle with tuberculosis, Parker had not lost his galvanic powers as a preacher. Seeming to know just the words she needed to hear, Parker delivered a sermon on “Laborious Young Women,” in which he advised, “Don’t be too proud to ask, and accept the humblest work till you can find the task you want.”32 Louisa did not hesitate to take this advice. Although she did not feel that she knew Parker well, Louisa felt she must speak to him personally. When she presented herself at the Parkers’ door, the minister was not at home. However, his wife was moved. She told Louisa that she was sure her husband and his friend Hannah Stevenson would find something for her to do.

  The next day, Stevenson came with news of a less than inspiring position. Louisa was to go to the Reform School in Winchester and work as a seamstress, sewing for ten hours a day. “May I depend on you, and do you like sewing?” Miss Stevenson asked her. Louisa did not care for falsehood. She replied that she would be dependable as long as her health held out. As for liking it, Louisa said bluntly that her preferences were beside the point. She would be grateful for anything. Stevenson seemed satisfied and withdrew. The next day, she came back and announced that she had offered the sewing job as a ruse, “a little test of your earnestness.” In fact, she had found a place as a governess for only four hours a day. On hearing of her resolve to take the less attractive job, Theodore Parker exclaimed, “The girl has got true grit.” Proud of herself for having stared down adversity, Louisa wrote her family to tell them all that had happened. She did not omit to say that she had thought of killing herself.33

  A staunch enemy of slavery and a friend of the downtrodden, Theodore Parker helped to guide Louisa through her despair in 1858.

  (Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  How does one respond when a daughter announces that she has flirted with suicide? Beyond question, Louisa’s declaration altered Bronson’s thinking about her. He did not comment, either in his letters or his journal, about his precise reflections. However, he recognized that it was now vital to spend time with her. A month before Lizzie’s death, Bronson had written in his journal, “Perhaps this precious fruit must be plucked away that I may divine the better those living symbols spreading around me still, remaining and spared to gladden my heart and homestead.”34 It may be that reading Louisa’s letter made him realize that he had failed to learn this lesson well enough.

  On October 11, he welcomed Louisa home from Boston, when she arrived for a brief visit. Two days later, as he sat shelling beans, he talked with her about her plans for the winter and her overall prospects.35 Louisa returned to Boston on the fourteenth. Six days later, Bronson traveled to the city to be with her. He was at her side continually, escorting her to dinner, bringing her along to lectures as well as less formal philosophical discussions, and traveling together to Washington Street to look at a new bust of Emerson. He enjoyed this time with her; he wrote to Abba, “Louisa bore herself proudly and gave me great pleasure.”36 Near the end of the month, he looked around the city to find her a suitable apartment. On November 1, he wrote her a letter about a story she was writing. Although the letter has not been found, the evidence suggests that he was writing to encourage her to submit the manuscript to the prestigious Atlantic Monthly.37 Later, Bronson personally delivered the manuscript to the magazine’s editor, James Russell Lowell, with his own hands. Genuinely excited, Louisa wrote that, if her story was deemed good enough for The Atlantic, “I shall think I can do something.”38 Lowell eventually accepted the story, although it did not appear until March 1860.

  In the aftermath of Louisa’s darkest hour, her father tried to lead her back toward the light. The month after his visit, Louisa felt braver and more cheerful.39 Although she was abundantly aware of Bronson’s faults, she sympathized with him. According to Anna, she spoke of her father’s visit with great pleasure and said, “The Lord is on his side, & if his white head and meek old face don’t move people’s hearts, they haven’t got any.”40 If Louisa ever again came so close to despair, she never wrote about the experience.

  In December, Louisa had one more reason not to feel isolated. Her younger sister May, now eighteen and eager to start trying her luck in the world, came to Boston to study drawing at the School of Design. The sisters roomed together at a boardinghouse on Chestnut Street. Bronson was pleased to learn that May was aggressively pursuing her ambition to become an artist, and he was still more delighted to discover that May’s teacher was Salisbury Tuckerman, who had been one of Bronson’s pupils at the Temple School.41

  Louisa was highly conscious of the changes she was undergoing, and as she told her journal, she could see that Lizzie’s death and Anna’s betrothal had “taken a deep hold, and changed or developed me.” She believed that the soul of her dead sister was powerfully with her and was giving her the strength she had asked for in her memorial poem. “Lizzie helps me spiritually,” she wrote, “and a little success makes me more self-reliant.” Her recent trials had also brought her instinctively nearer to God. “When feeling most alone,” she declared, “I find refuge in the Almighty Friend. If this is experiencing religion I have done it.”42 Nevertheless, as was more than once the case, she was slow to acknowledge the human help that had benefited her. Shortly after Bronson returned to Concord, she wrote, “Now that Mother is too tired to be wearied with my moods, I have to manage them alone, and am learning that work of head and hand is my salvation when disappointment or weariness burden and darken my soul.”43 It is mildly ironic that Louisa
was to become an author who uniquely celebrated the sustaining and strengthening power of family. While it is almost impossible to consider her apart from her family, she often found it important to represent her personal triumphs as solitary achievements, whose critical motivation came from within. Undeniably, there was to be much truth in her self-perception as the family savior. Yet it is remarkable to observe the extent to which she preferred to give support than to receive it.

  Louisa’s story for The Atlantic, “Love and Self-Love,” can be read as veiled autobiography.44 Though narrated from the viewpoint of a man, Basil Ventnor, it is just as much the story of an orphaned sixteen-year-old named Effie Home. Rejected by a wealthy grandfather who did not approve of her parents’ marriage, Effie touches the charitable nature of Ventnor, a man twice her age. Persuaded that they are too close in age for him to adopt her without exciting scandal, Ventnor fulfills the last request of Effie’s dying guardian and marries the teenager. Effie falls in love with Ventnor. However, he is unable to return her love on an equal basis, partly because he sees his relationship to her as a matter of self-abnegating duty and partly because his heart belongs to a former lover, Agnes, who has thrown him over for another man. Moreover, Ventnor egotistically imagines that, because he has given Effie his name and protection, he owes her nothing more. The relationship becomes progressively unequal.

  Unexpectedly, Agnes returns, now widowed and seeking to rekindle her former romance. The intimacy of Ventnor and Agnes soon becomes too much for Effie to bear. One moonlit evening, as the three glide downstream in a rowboat and the two older lovers relive their romantic past, Effie impulsively plunges into the water. His conscience suddenly awakened, Ventnor plunges in and rescues her. Effie hovers near death for weeks. When she returns to health, Ventnor finds her nature fundamentally changed. As Alcott tells it, “The child Effie lay dead beneath the ripples of the river, but the woman rose up from that bed of suffering like one consecrated to life’s high duties by the bitter baptism of that dark hour.”45 She becomes a perfectly dutiful, if emotionally remote, spouse. Unable to love the girl, Ventnor gradually discovers that he reveres and admires the woman. Determined to give Effie her freedom, he sends her back to her grandfather and secretly prepares to dissolve their marriage. Before he can do so, however, he loses his fortune. Hearing of his distress, Effie comes back to him, and the two proclaim their mutual affection; each is now capable of both duty and passion. Effie reveals that her grandfather has died, leaving her his entire estate, and all ends blissfully.