Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MIRACLES

  “Genius is infinite patience.”

  —LOUISA MAY ALCOTT,

  quoting Michelangelo in a letter to

  John Preston True, October 24, 1878

  IT WAS NEVER LOUISA’S PREFERENCE TO SIT STILL, NOT EVEN when she was engrossed in a writing vortex. Whereas Bronson was most comfortable in his study, surrounded by his books and journals and seated at his large mahogany table, his daughter often moved about restlessly, too stirred by her ideas to remain wholly stationary. On those occasions when she took up a position on the parlor sofa, the family approached at their own risk. It was not a pleasant experience to pose an innocent question to Louisa just when her mind was working through a delicate thought or a complex sentence. At some point, though, a system was developed. Next to her, Louisa would keep a bolster pillow, which acted like a tollgate for conversation. If the pillow stood on its end, the family was free to disturb her. If the pillow lay on its side, however, they should tread lightly and keep their interjections to themselves.

  For the most part, though, Louisa wrote in her bedroom at the desk that Bronson built for her. A wooden semicircle, painted white and attached to the southern wall, it is no more than two and a half feet wide. Apart from the graceful curving of the three supporting pieces underneath it, it is utterly plain. What matters about the desk is simply that it is there and that Bronson took the trouble to make it. It was then uncommon for women to be supplied with desks of their own. The desk was a gesture of Bronson’s confidence in Louisa and a mute assertion that he saw the value of what she was doing. The desk is situated between two windows that look out on Lexington Road, but one must turn in one’s chair to look out of these windows. Staring straight ahead, Louisa would have seen only the bare wall in front of her: the blank canvas of inspiration.

  Thomas Niles, Louisa’s editor at Roberts Brothers, found the first dozen chapters of Little Women “dull.” Then he showed them to his niece.

  (Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  For this book, however, inspiration was a thorny issue. If Louisa took pleasure in writing Little Women, she never said so. Giddy excitement and an innocent faith in her own genius had motivated Moods. The righteous cause of freedom had gotten her through Hospital Sketches. Now she began working as hastily as ever, but more with a view to filling Niles’s order than with any high ambition. Indeed, she later recalled intending to prove to him that she could not write a successful girls book.1 She partly hoped that Niles would see for himself that Little Women was an uninteresting hash and would leave her to her potboilers and Merry’s Museum. She came close to convincing him. In June, she sent him the first dozen chapters. He thought they were dull, and Louisa agreed, but she pressed onward.2

  As she worked, a word of encouragement came. Niles told her that he had shown the early chapters to his niece, Lillie Almy, who had laughed over them until she cried.3 Niles revised his earlier judgment; he had been reading with the eye of a literary editor, not the sensibilities of an adolescent girl. Seen by a reader whose viewpoint really mattered, the early chapters of Little Women had attractions he had failed to recognize. Louisa now pursued the project so single-mindedly that, from the day in June when she complained about the flatness of her first twelve chapters, she did not take time out to write a single entry in her journal until July 15, when she announced that the book, or more accurately, the portion now known as part 1, was complete. In two and a half months, she had written 402 manuscript pages.4

  The work, reluctantly begun, had eventually absorbed her. At the end of it, she had briefly broken down. Years later, she remembered her effort as “too much work for one young woman.”5 Considering the depth and duration of the creative vortex from which she now emerged, it is not surprising that Louisa was thoroughly exhausted, her head feeling like a great mass of pain.6 Her vortices had always been a combination of lavish creative self-indulgence and harsh physical self-denial. Now that Louisa was in her midthirties and prematurely frail, the experience of the vortex was more harrowing than gratifying. Nevertheless, Louisa knew only one way to write a novel. An iron will, rather than a poetic muse, seemed her strongest creative ally.

  She hoped, but could not be sure, that there would be a part 2. Niles, for his part, was now convinced that the book would “hit.” He showed the twenty-two-chapter manuscript to the daughters of some other families, who pronounced the story “splendid!” Hearing of their approval, Louisa wrote, “It is for them, they are the best critics, so I should be satisfied.”7 Niles had but one request; he wanted Louisa to add a twenty-third chapter with some teasing allusions that would open the way for a sequel. Louisa promptly obliged, concluding with this overt appeal:

  So grouped the curtain falls upon Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Whether it ever rises again, depends upon the reception given to the first act of the domestic drama, called “LITTLE WOMEN.”8

  On August 26, when the proofs of the book arrived, Louisa was pleased to find that Little Women, in her still-cautious judgment, was “better than I expected.”9

  With pleasure, Louisa observed that her story was “not a bit sensational, but simple and true, for we really lived most of it.” If the book did become popular, she thought, its success would be due to these qualities.10 Yet there was also a complexity to what she had written, deriving from the fact that her concept of the book evolved considerably between the writing of the first dozen “dull” chapters and those that followed. Her idea of the book was to change yet again as she worked her way through part 2. Starting as a mere job that lacked a clear plan of development, Little Women meta-morphosed into a carefully conceived whole, satisfying its readers even as it deliberately defied their wishes and expectations.

  Properly seen, Little Women is not one book but three, each with its peculiar strengths and curiosities. The first phase of the book’s development concerns the first dozen chapters that, on first reading, Alcott and Niles found lacking in interest. In retrospect, it seems odd that they thought so, since many of the most indelible moments of the novel occur in those first twelve chapters. To a reader who has smiled at the March sisters cheerfully surrendering their Christmas breakfast to a more needy family; who has shared Meg’s injured pride as she compares her shabby wardrobe to the finery of Annie Moffat; who has felt outrage when Amy burns Jo’s treasured manuscript, only to have that feeling yield to dismay when Jo’s retaliatory neglect causes Amy to fall through the ice—to such a reader, Louisa’s harsh preliminary judgment of these chapters can come only as a surprise. Not only are the anecdotes of these chapters rich and memorable, but the four girls are never more vivacious and entertaining. The very fact that they begin the novel so deeply flawed and prone to mishaps makes them in some ways more interesting than in the later portions of the novel, when they have gained more self-control.

  Nevertheless, Louisa’s judgment had some merit. In these early chapters, she was developing characters and spinning out a series of vignettes of family life, but she was not yet writing a novel. Each of the early chapters could almost stand as a short story in itself. The stronger thematic links needed to construct a larger framework have yet to appear. A certain flatness to her plot also derives from the fact that the March sisters’ motivations are all fundamentally similar. Each one has to overcome a particular defining vice: Meg struggles with her vanity; Jo with her temper; Beth her debilitating shyness; and Amy her selfishness. The inward battles of the four are sympathetically rendered, and they are realistic enough to have given encouragement and comfort to countless young readers trying to master similar faults. Yet the theme of moral struggle presented a problem for the development of the larger work: if each character were defined by a single flaw, what was to keep them from collapsing into sameness once those flaws were under control? Alcott had not fully worked out the answer to this question as she wrote these early chapters. Indeed, the unifying element at this stage of her work was not her concept of plot,
but rather the sustained analogy that she constructed between her emerging text and another book that she and much of her readership already found familiar.

  The text that underlies the first half of Little Women is The Pilgrim’s Progress, the book that had directed Bronson’s ethics from childhood and which he had passed on as a moral talisman to his daughters. Louisa’s reliance on Bunyan’s allegory is deliberately transparent, as reflected in several of the early chapter titles: “Beth Finds the Palace Beautiful” “Amy’s Valley of Humiliation” “Jo Meets Apollyon.” Alcott also acknowledges her debt to Bunyan by prefacing her novel with an adaptation of the poem that precedes part 2 of The Pilgrim’s Progress. In the original verse, Bunyan addresses his book as follows:

  Go then, my little Book and shew to all

  That entertain, and bid thee welcome shall,

  What thou shalt keep close, shut up from the rest,

  And wish what thou shalt shew them may be blest.11

  In her story itself, however, Alcott does not passively imitate Bunyan. She is continually revising her model in order to state her own ideas about the nature of morality and a well-written book. Alcott reiterates the quoted lines in her preface but alters the third to read, “What thou dost keep close shut up in thy breast [italics added].”12 Her emendation figuratively transforms her book into a living being, offering not merely moral prescriptions but the feelings that give them their practical truth. Alcott’s substituted words infuse her text with greater intimacy and a more feminine sensibility. Bunyan describes a recollected dream; Alcott speaks from the previously locked precincts of her heart.

  Although the specific references in Little Women tend overwhelmingly to concern part 1 of The Pilgrim’s Progress, the larger thematics of Alcott’s novel are more closely related to the lesser-known second part of Bunyan’s allegory. In Bunyan’s part 1, Christian sets forth alone to seek salvation while his wife, Christiana, timidly remains behind with the couple’s children. It is only in part 2 that Christiana, who previously doubted her husband’s sanity, realizes that Christian was offering her the only path away from destruction and that she and her children must now follow in his footsteps to the Celestial City. She tells her children:

  I formerly foolishly imagin’d [that] the Troubles of your Father…proceeded of a foolish fancy that he had, or for that he was over run with Melancholy Humours; yet now ’twill not out of my mind, but that they sprang from another cause, to wit, for that the Light of Light was given him.13

  Bronson Alcott, of course, had also passed through his “foolish fancies” and “melancholy humors” before finding the light that had saved him. The dominant question in part 1 of Little Women is the same that animates part 2 of The Pilgrim’s Progress: will the family of a sanctified but now absent father be able to follow him to salvation?

  While intentional, Louisa’s invocations of The Pilgrim’s Progress are also ingeniously ironic. Alcott resists mimicking the trajectory of the earlier work and wryly questions its moral conclusions. Whereas in Bunyan’s allegory the spirit saves itself only by moving outward and away from the familiar and the domestic, the movement advocated in Little Women is circular. Although Jo, Amy, and Mr. March all leave home to find a place in the larger world, their redemption requires each of them to come home. Alcott also illustrates, Bunyan’s allegory notwithstanding, that the process of moral transformation need not require any physical journey at all. In Little Women, the principal school of ethics, especially in those chapters most strongly influenced by Bunyan, remains the home.

  In recasting Bunyan’s moral drama in a realistic, female-dominated setting, Alcott makes a claim on behalf of the domestic sphere, arguing that the character formation that takes place in kitchens and parlors is every bit as important as the soul-making that takes place during Christian’s masculine odyssey. Little Women expands and improves on Bunyan’s allegory by reminding us that, contrary to what The Pilgrim’s Progress may suggest, moral improvement is seldom an individual pursuit. Although each of the March sisters wrestles separately with a signature weakness, they are present to assist in one another’s struggles, and it is as members of a community that they reap the benefits of their heightened virtue. In Bunyan’s expression of Christian ethics, there is a core of selfishness: one is to save one’s own soul even if it means leaving others to perish. For the March family, however, salvation is unthinkable in the absence of good works, and we are meant to agree with Jo when she exclaims, “I do think that families are the most beautiful things in all the world!”14 Home is the Celestial City toward which the March sisters always unconsciously strive.

  There is no evidence that Louisa revised her first dozen chapters in response to Thomas Niles’s initially negative judgment. Indeed, Niles observed that he thought he had never supervised a book that had required so little alteration or correction.15 Following the first twelve chapters, however, the structure of Alcott’s narrative promptly becomes more sustained, and her plot acquires a longer view. The change begins in chapter 13, “Castles in the Air.” Nestled on a hillside on a September afternoon, the March sisters and their friend Laurie exchange visions of what they want to achieve in life. Meg seeks material comfort; Jo and Amy covet success, respectively, in literature and art; Beth wants only to stay at home and care for the family. From this moment, Alcott’s story forms itself around a different question; we are prompted to examine how well the March sisters measure up to their own expectations. Prior to this moment, self-mastery has been presented as paramount. Henceforth, however, the novel’s moral universe becomes more complicated, for the March family’s ethics of self-denial and family unity may eventually run counter to the fulfillment of personal ambition and individual dreams. The remainder of Little Women continually wrestles with the possibility—an uncomfortable one for a veteran of Fruitlands, Abba Alcott’s intelligence office, and the Union Hotel Hospital—that living for the realization of one’s self-gratifying dreams might actually be a good thing.

  Early in part 1, Alcott distributes her attention fairly evenly among the four sisters. Thereafter, the novel becomes ever more focused on Louisa’s alter ego, Jo. As Jo receives more attention, the same concerns that troubled Louisa as an adolescent move to the foreground. In earlier chapters, the process of growing into adulthood has been taken for granted. Gradually, however, one discovers that Little Women is not just about growing up. It is also about the dread of growing up. Eager to lead her siblings into almost every other kind of adventure, Jo not only resists her own coming of age, but also resents the comparative ease with which her sisters appear to be making the transition. In chapter 14, Jo anxiously pleads, “Don’t try to make me grow up before my time… let me be a little girl as long as I can.”16 Soon after, she wishes that wearing a flatiron on her head would keep her from getting older.17 At first Jo would rather be a boy than a girl. Later, Alcott shows that Jo would rather remain a girl than become a woman.

  Jo’s desire for an artificially prolonged childhood arises in part from Louisa’s contradictory experiences in growing up as an Alcott. On the one hand, the Alcott girls had been expected early in life to begin working and bringing in the money that Bronson was unwilling or unable to earn. The inclinations of their parents toward philosophy and reform had also led the girls to ponder questions usually reserved for older heads. Simultaneously, however, Abba and Bronson had shielded their children from other aspects of worldly sophistication. At an age when many of her contemporaries were already married, Louisa was still very much under her parents’ protection, writing fairy tales when her peers were reading them to their own infants. Time played strange tricks in the Alcott family, where children were both enfolded in innocence and expected to be mature beyond their years.

  Moreover, while they lavished intellectual and moral stimuli on their daughters, Bronson and Abba were not clear as to what ought to become of all that knowledge and training when its recipients reached womanhood. The two daughters Bronson loved best, Anna and Lizzie,
never achieved a life outside the domestic sphere. In Little Women, even the meek and accommodating Beth admits in despair that her choice of a domestic life has resulted more from a failure of talent and imagination than a vision of fulfillment: “I’m not like the rest of you; I never made any plans about what I’d do when I grew up…. I couldn’t seem to imagine myself anything but stupid little Beth, trotting about at home, of no use anywhere but there.”18 The Alcott family emphasis on juvenile self-culture would seem to have been largely futile, even absurd, if it necessarily gave way to mature self-sacrifice. If childhood were all about self-discovery and adulthood were all about self-denial, who indeed would want to grow up?

  The struggles of the first dozen chapters of Little Women, as well as Jo’s ongoing battle not to grow up, are principally internal. However, the second half of part 1 shows the March sisters dealing primarily with external challenges, most notably Beth’s illness and Mr. March’s brush with death in a Union army hospital in Washington. Significantly, whereas one may associate Little Women with Louisa’s years at Hillside, the real-life correlatives of these two challenges—Lizzie’s initial bout with scarlet fever and Louisa’s nursing service—happened much later. Because the chronology of her story forced Louisa to keep her women “little,” it is the family’s father, not a daughter, who goes away to war.