Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Whereas Louisa most often wrote in response to financial pressure, Moods came from an authentic impulse to express and explain herself. She told her journal, “It has always seemed as if ‘Moods’ grew in spite of me, & that I had little to do with it except to put into words the thoughts that would not let me rest until I had.”54 That expression begins with the quotation from Emerson that serves as the epigraph to the 1864 edition of Moods: “Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.”55 Moods is indeed Alcott’s attempt to rewrite into fiction Emerson’s reflections on the life of the emotions. The epigraph comes, not from one of her mentor’s confident early works like Nature or “Self-Reliance,” but from the more skeptical later essay “Experience,” written after grief had taught Emerson to regard life as a maze of contingencies, in which we must continually ask, “Where do we find ourselves?” Moods is concerned less with the glories of the individual spirit than with its sometimes self-defeating contradictions and illogic.

  The book offers a compelling character in the person of Sylvia Yule, whose efforts to triumph over her impulsive nature and to discover inner tranquility closely resemble Alcott’s own. Like Alcott, Sylvia has absorbed “pride, intellect, and will” from her father, while inheriting from her mother “passion, imagination, and the fateful melancholy of a woman defrauded of her dearest hope.”56 Sylvia thus feels within her spirit two warring principles that she lacks the power to reconcile. She sees her own character as an unanswerable riddle, and she finds herself forever at the mercy of violently opposing impulses, or as the book’s title would have it, “moods.”

  As she was later to do in Little Women, Louisa chose not to assign equal prominence to each of her heroine’s parents. In Moods, however, it is the maternal figure who is thrust into the shadows. Sylvia’s mother has died in childbirth, and it is the Bronson-like father who, after years of emotional remoteness, becomes uniquely dear to his daughter. As Alcott describes it, “No one was so much to her as he; no one so fully entered her thoughts and feelings…. As man and woman they talked, as father and daughter they loved; and the beautiful relation became their truest solace and support.”57

  Initially, however, the more significant man in Sylvia’s life is Adam Warwick, a figure modeled on Thoreau. A “violently virtuous” man who “always takes the shortest way, no matter how rough it is,” Warwick sympathizes with Sylvia from the outset.58 His formidable integrity appears at first to offer Sylvia the balance she requires. However, his dedication to principle proves every bit as extreme as Sylvia’s emotional nature, and the mind preoccupied by ideas stands revealed as no more satisfactory than the heart absorbed by feeling.

  Eventually, Sylvia must choose between Warwick, who speaks compellingly to her romantic soul, and a representative of sober practicality. This safer choice is Geoffrey Moor. Moor appeals to Sylvia precisely because he inspires no passion. He has also just spent five years caring for a dying sister, a service that appears to qualify him to help Sylvia conquer her mental instability. She reaches out to him as a platonic friend, little imagining the difficulties of preventing their attachment from edging toward marriage, with all its daunting implications of sex and permanence. Incapable of understanding her intentions, Moor proposes. Sylvia at first rebuffs him, but in the mistaken belief that Warwick has left never to return, she consents. Warwick resurfaces soon after the two are married, and all three characters ruminate on the injustice of an institution that presumes to confer lifelong exclusive rights to another’s love and loyalty. Warwick argues that unhappy marriages will remain “the tragedies of our day…till we learn that there are truer laws to be obeyed than those custom sanctions.”59

  Although speeches like these prompted some to accuse Alcott of advocating free love, Moods retreats from the tantalizing possibilities of following such “truer laws.” Moor and Warwick sportingly consent to travel together to Europe for a yearlong sabbatical while Sylvia decides whether she can love her husband. While away, the two reconcile through literature, coauthoring a book to which Moor contributes poems and Warwick supplies essays. On the return voyage, their boat sinks, and Warwick heroically and conveniently drowns. In the 1864 text, Sylvia dies of consumption. However, in the 1882 version, inspired by the advice that “in making the joy of others we often find our own,” Sylvia gives up morbid self-contemplation in order to serve others. She dedicates herself first to her father and, after his death, to Moor.

  Sylvia, like the young Louisa, struggles to be good, but her mercurial temperament prevents her from keeping her repeated resolutions to be better. Her self-descriptions express frustration and plead for understanding: “I don’t try to be odd; I long to be quiet and satisfied, but I cannot; and when I do…wild things, it is not because I am thoughtless or idle, but because I am trying to be good and happy…. [S]ometimes I think I am a born disappointment.”60 Although the narrator suggests that many of Sylvia’s failings would be cured by the presence of “a wise and tender mother,” Sylvia herself makes no attempt to blame her volatile nature on external forces, insisting that her problems are her own: “I know I’m whimsical, and hard to please, and have no doubt the fault was in myself.”61 She understands that to deny responsibility for her condition would also be to forfeit her claim to autonomy.

  But Sylvia’s troubles cannot be cured by mere understanding. Sylvia confesses that she is “always in extremes,” and her brother observes despairingly that Sylvia is “either overflowing with unnatural spirits or melancholy enough to break one’s heart.”62 In one chapter, Sylvia is depicted lying abjectly in bed, “tired of everybody and everything.” A few chapters later, she impulsively rushes off in the direction of a wildfire and is nearly burned alive. In a later chapter, Sylvia thanks God that she has not had a child, to whom she might have passed on her “mental ills.”63 Sylvia’s abrupt oscillations between depression and euphoria, her seeking of pleasure through irresponsible behavior, and her intimation that her imbalance may be hereditary add up to a now-recognizable psychological profile. Although medical science had not yet found the modern terminology for Sylvia’s symptoms, Alcott created a persuasive portrait of a manic-depressive heroine.

  Louisa’s exposition of Sylvia’s personality is highly convincing, so much so that one has cause to consider whether the author’s knowledge of manic-depressive states came solely from observing others. The question demands to be posed: if Louisa May Alcott were alive today, might she herself have been diagnosed with some form of manic-depressive illness? Louisa’s evident interest in mood disorders, her own mercurial character, and her seemingly obsessive work habits all argue that the query should be raised. Certainly, modern research has supported the argument that writers and artists are substantially more prone to this illness than the general population; indeed, many lines of evidence indicate a strong relation between mood disorders and creative achievement.64

  Moreover, many of the diagnostic clues that can indicate a manic-depressive condition were present in Louisa’s life. Manic-depressive illness is hereditary. Louisa’s Uncle Junius engaged in erratic behavior that inflicted years of worry on the family until his death by suicide in 1852. More than once, Bronson’s own behavior raised questions about his mental stability. After Fruitlands dissolved, he nearly starved himself to death. Fourteen years later, Louisa had her own flirtation with suicide. Additionally, both she and Bronson experienced mental states consistent with mania. Mania is known to manifest itself in periods of high, indefatigable energy, racing thoughts, markedly decreased need for sleep, and sharp spikes in level of productivity, followed by sustained moods of lassitude and dejection, coupled with an inability to exercise one’s will. In this connection, one thinks not only of Bronson’s periods of visionary euphoria but also of Louisa’s “vortices.” No definitive interpretation of Louisa’s emotional condition has emerged. The brilliant Alcott biog
rapher Madeleine Stern maintains that Louisa’s vortices were simply part of her writing method and do not reflect any mental abnormality.65 However, Kay Redfield Jamison, a highly respected expert on manic-depressive illness, believes that the evidence, taken as a whole, “does not irrefutably show, but is consistent with, the strong likelihood that Louisa May Alcott suffered from a form of manic-depressive illness.”66

  In our own time, most educated persons understand the basic concepts of mental abnormality, and many accept as commonplace the likelihood of a connection between literary creativity and the symptoms of manic-depressive illness. If Louisa May Alcott, like many other writers, experienced such symptoms, perhaps few readers will find the news earth-shattering. What may be of greater interest is not Louisa’s mental condition itself, but her extraordinary experience of coping with it while living in the social and intellectual culture that defined her world, as well as in her particular family. Despite its insistence on the uniqueness of the individual, transcendentalism proceeded from the premise that the mental workings of all people were fundamentally similar. Emerson began his great Essays, First Series by asserting, “There is one mind common to all individual men…. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.”67 In Moods, Louisa confronted the possibility that the mind was anything but universal—that one’s thoughts and feelings can be so frustrated and touched by unseen agents that even the attempt to communicate them can become a source of anguish. Emerson famously wrote, “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius.”68 But to know that one’s thought and truth are not those of others and yet to manage to live a functioning life among them requires a kind of genius also.

  Louisa’s struggles with emotional control were a frequent source of profound distress to herself and her family during her years of growing up. Bronson’s response to all emotional discontents was to urge self-mastery and self-denial. He maintained that reason could always quell the passions and that anyone who really desired it could achieve a Christlike equanimity. There was no obvious place in Bronson’s theory of the mind for mental states that the individual could not control—no room for the idea that the roots of an unbalanced temperament might be medical instead of moral. Urged by her family to triumph over her recurrent bouts of temper and periods of dejection, and continually reassured that it was within her power to do so, Louisa felt troubled when even her best efforts fell short of success. On one level, the awareness that neither she nor anyone around her could fully understand her emotional volatility must have been horrible. Yet the clash between her personality and her family’s prescriptions of self-control may also have produced some positive effects. For one thing, Louisa seems to have discovered early on that one means of getting the family to accept her moods was to give them an artistic expression. Had her vortices produced nothing creative, her parents would likely have regarded them as episodes of pointless self-indulgence. Instead, because Louisa could channel her flights into literary art, they won for her a degree of latitude and acceptance. When genius burned on the second story of Orchard House, her family learned both to admire the impulse and to leave it alone.

  Louisa’s parents’ exhortations toward self-control may have helped her to withstand the emotional difficulties that she experienced. The grace and determination with which her parents bore their poverty, their long practice of self-denial, the forbearance that they displayed toward each other’s difficult personalities—all these argued the value of never giving in to hardship. Louisa may never have fully conquered her temper or her tempestuous mood swings, but Abba and Bronson always gave her reasons to keep trying. It has been suggested that the unyielding asceticism of Louisa’s parents was a harmful force in her personal development. However, it may be argued with equal good faith that the staunchness with which they encouraged her to confront her inner failings was precisely what kept her sane.

  Abba Alcott read her gift copy of Moods almost from cover to cover before going to bed on Christmas night. Bronson, too, devoured the book at once. Some time later, he was initially befuddled and then pleased when Henry James Sr., forgetting the name of Louisa’s novel, told him, “They are reading Dumps at home with great interest.”69 If, in fact, the novel was meant as a plea for understanding with regard to Louisa’s emotions, Bronson did not respond to this aspect of the work in writing. However, he did receive it as a highly promising work of art and social commentary. He wrote, “She has succeeded better in her treatment of the social problem [of marriage] than did Goethe or George Sand.” He felt that she had written a greater book than she realized, one that might open the way “to a career of wide usefulness, if not of permanent fame as a novelist and a woman.”70

  That same Christmas of 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman offered a gift to President Lincoln: the city of Savannah, Georgia. As the Alcotts rang in the year 1865, the end of the war was finally in sight. In February, Louisa worked awhile on “Success,” but finding that thrillers were half the work and paid better than serious fiction, she “soon dropped it & fell back on rubbishy tales.” Two months later, on Sunday, April 2, Grant’s army marched into Richmond. The night before, Louisa had been in Boston, watching Edwin Booth in a production of Hamlet. She called his performance the finest she had ever seen him give. In a Maryland rooming house, Edwin’s younger brother John was plotting a different spectacle.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  JOURNEYS EAST AND WEST

  “I am more desirous of seeing than of saying.”

  —A. BRONSON ALCOTT, Journals, February 9, 1866

  “Let’s be merry while we may.

  And lay up a bit for a rainy day.”

  —LOUISA MAY ALCOTT,

  “To Abigail May Alcott,” January 1, 1868

  LIKE MANY AMERICANS, BRONSON ALCOTT APPRECIATED Abraham Lincoln much more deeply after Booth’s bullet had been fired and Secretary of War Stanton had solemnly pronounced that his former chief “belong[ed] to the ages.” Although he had broken from his habitual abstention from the polls to vote for Lincoln in 1860, and again in 1864, Bronson had felt more enthusiasm for union and abolition than for the candidate who represented them. However, on April 15, 1865, when word came of the horror at Ford’s Theatre, Alcott’s estimate of Lincoln instantly transformed. He called the fallen president “a martyr to justice and republicanism” and a “cherished idol,” whose death had plunged the country into a woe in which “all men” took part. With reflexive optimism, however, Bronson predicted that Lincoln’s murder would “knit us in closer and more religious bonds to God and the right, and redound to the preservation of our national honor and glory.”1

  Like her father, Louisa was initially horrified to hear of the assassination, but her later reflections were complex. Although she had reveled in the fall of Richmond, she now wrote, “I am glad to have seen such a strange & sudden change in a nation’s feelings.”2 She did not explain just where this gladness came from. Perhaps her experience of life had made her more at home with bittersweet emotions than with pure jubilation. In much of Louisa’s writing, the emotional keynote is not unreflective joy, but the darker but more durable happiness that comes from hardships bravely shared. In the days of late April 1865, the nation collectively experienced feelings that were continually present in Louisa’s heart. For once, the world appeared to feel as she did. On the day of mourning, only one sight struck her as significant enough to record in her journal: the novel spectacle of a black man and a white man walking arm in arm. She “exulted thereat.”3 For the moment, there seemed to be every reason to suppose that a republic of freedom and equality was at hand.

  For Louisa and her family in general, there was less cause for sorrow than for celebration. Despite Louisa’s own misgivings about the book, Moods had already gone into a third printing.4 Her magazine potboilers, published under the name of A. M. Barnard, were selling briskly. On June
24, the day that would have marked Lizzie’s thirtieth birthday, Anna gave birth to her second son, John Sewall Pratt. The prospects seemed as glorious outdoors as in. Bronson told his journal that he had never known “such a series of bright, benign days…as if Nature, partaking of the temper of the country, had also begun her cycle of reconstruction to intimate her sympathy and delight in the brilliant prospects and peaceful reign of our new republic.”5 On Independence Day, he wrote, “the republic now begins to look sweet and beautiful, as if honest, patriotic citizens might walk upright without shame or apologies.”6 Before the war, Alcott had always known that his ideal republic was unattainable because of slavery. It now seemed to him that the country was free to enter an era of enlightenment and justice.

  Bronson hoped that the war would be only the first episode in a surging national movement toward deeper social reforms. He was mistaken. The reserves of American idealism were deep, but they had been drained low by four years of unspeakable violence. Relatively few Americans now took any interest in further moral crusades. It now seemed not only prudent but natural for people to start putting their own interests first. As the massive productive energies that had been mobilized to fight a war were converted to peaceful ends, per capita wealth and the availability of consumer goods soon reached unprecedented levels. No longer finding its heroes on the battlefields of Tennessee and Virginia, the nation took to measuring people by their audacious acquisition and lavish expenditure of money. Far from the golden age that Alcott anticipated, the nation instead entered a gilded one, soon to be derided by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their famous satire. America had learned, as Walt Whitman was to put it, “the lessons of the concrete.”7

  As far as the philosophical mood of the nation was concerned, Bronson Alcott’s moment seemed to have passed. Despite his highly capable performance, even his position as superintendent of the Concord schools was taken from him. The day before Lincoln’s assassination, Alcott learned that he was to be removed from office, evidently as a result of an obscure political deal.8 It was to people like his daughter Louisa, who was rapidly learning how to write for a commercial audience and who still carefully noted every dollar earned in her journals, that the postbellum age appeared to belong.