Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Like Dickens, Stowe, and others before her, Louisa had learned the trick of selling the same story twice: first as a magazine serial and then as a hard-bound book. Initially serialized in monthly installments in Merry’s Museum throughout the second half of 1869, An Old-Fashioned Girl did not appear in book form until April 1870. Although the response from both readers and critics was generally enthusiastic, the reviewer for The Atlantic Monthly was not alone in complaining that the book contained some bad grammar and even some poor writing. In response to such criticism, Louisa told her family, “If people knew how O.F.G. was written, in what a hurry and pain and woe, they would wonder that there was any grammar at all.”13

  Louisa tended to discuss her work in disparaging terms, and her ready dismissal of An Old-Fashioned Girl therefore comes as no surprise. Nevertheless, the book ranks among the best of Alcott’s children’s fiction. Unlike many of her novels for juveniles, which are really little more than a series of sketches and vignettes, An Old-Fashioned Girl is confidently plotted and steadily develops its central theme: the shallowness of fashionable living and its particularly destructive effect on young women, whom it renders physically weak, emotionally vacant, and morally aimless. Alcott’s cautionary tale trains much of its focus on the Shaw family, who, but for the beneficent influence of an ethically upright outsider, would doubtless have tumbled into ruin. Mrs. Shaw, an otherwise inoffensive woman, is a model citizen of Alcott’s modern-day Vanity Fair. Her three children, also essentially good-natured but lacking any useful guidance, seek lives of ease, popularity, and pleasure. Fourteen-year-old Tom is forming the neglectful habits that will later plunge him into debt and expel him from college. His sister Fanny divides her time between reading cheap novels and buying costly hats. Even six-year-old Maud proves a quick study of her elders’ vanities; she is already adroit at aping the fashionable nerves and sick headaches of her mother. The only moral ballast within the household is supplied by Mr. Shaw and his seventy-year-old mother. However, the latter is too old to have her counsels regarded, and the former has become too enmeshed in the pursuit of wealth to assert any real authority.

  Salvation arrives in the person of Fanny’s friend Polly Milton. Coming from the countryside to pay a lengthy visit to the Shaws, Polly is initially scandalized by their worldly manners. Fortunately, she refrains from openly rebuking her hosts, and over time and despite innumerable setbacks, the Shaw children learn from her the merits of selflessness and the evils of vanity. Mrs. Shaw proves something of a lost cause. When, however, Mr. Shaw’s business fails, all three of his children rally around him, having finally understood Polly’s example of sincere caring and faithful industry.

  The more interesting problem for Alcott the author is not how Polly is to reform the Shaws, but how to tell so didactic a story without having it dissolve into a cloying, condescending sermon. An Old-Fashioned Girl escapes this fate in large part because Polly avoids the unctuousness that might be expected of her. Her goodness is neither self-righteous nor self-congratulating; it flows from an unaffected nature and a simple belief that kindness creates more happiness than self-indulgence. The real strength of Alcott’s tale, however, derives from the book’s firm advocacy of women’s rights, supported by its conviction that sexual equality is not the cause of a political faction but a tenet of common sense. In demonstrating Polly’s superiority over the Fanny Shaws of the world, Alcott protests a social system that fosters a commercialized sense of human value, a system particularly degrading to women. Allowed to participate in the marketplace only as purchasers, Fanny and her friends are themselves reduced to ornamental commodities. By resisting to define herself in objectifying economic terms, Polly tacitly insists that to live is not to have, but to think, to feel, and to do.

  Although this credo appears obvious to Polly, it brings her into such conflict with her materialistic surroundings that she becomes something of a radical in spite of herself. Between the seventh and eighth chapters of the novel, six years pass, and Fanny, Tom, and Polly reenter the scene as young adults. Asked to guess what new occupation Polly has adopted—she has become a music teacher—Tom supposes that she is going to deliver lectures on women’s rights. Utterly accustomed to his sister’s passive conformity, Tom can only interpret Polly’s simple desire to be active and useful as an overtly political stance. But Polly does not lecture. She does not vocally urge the values of independent work and compassionate charity so much as she embodies them. This fact is indeed the reason why An Old-Fashioned Girl, although it is a women’s rights novel, seldom feels like one. The radical new women in the story do not contort themselves to fit any particular social manifesto. They simply have the self-confidence to do what they feel natural doing. They embody Alcott’s essential concept of a free woman: one who claims the power and opportunity to explore and follow her own nature. Alcott was no doubt aware of the irony of her novel’s title. Her old-fashioned girl is the most forward-looking character on the scene, and her supposedly outworn virtues—simplicity of taste, self-reliance, and forthright expression—are precisely the values her new world needs.

  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American writers turned continually to the subject of divided families—families ironically broken apart not by want but by prosperity. Time and again, one encounters characters like Hurstwood in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Abner Spragg in Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, and the host of faceless, nameless toilers in Howells’ A Traveler from Altruria. They are men whose wives and daughters have no other purpose in life than to spend and be seen. To keep up with the ceaseless demands of fashion, these characters devote themselves to the making of money, so that at last their relationships with their homes and the people who live there become almost solely economic.

  Alcott should, perhaps, receive more credit for creating a character who, by more than twenty years, anticipates the better-known exemplars of his type. In some respects, Mr. Shaw is yet another of the shadowy fathers of Alcott’s fiction: aloof, quiet, and more or less excluded from the main action of the story. He provides an abundant life for his family. Nevertheless, he figures as an image of the depressing consequences that can ensue when a father behaves entirely differently from Bronson Alcott. Although Louisa sees some honor in the way Mr. Shaw goes to his office “with the regularity of a machine,” she also leaves the reader to infer that Shaw’s offspring would need less reforming if he had given them more of his time and less of an allowance.14 Louisa goes so far as to suggest that a well-provided childhood is a hindrance to happiness and achievement. With her modest appetites, Polly fits easily into a way of life in which talent, energy, and character matter most. Genius blossoms best, Alcott writes, “when poverty [is] head gardener.”15

  As the last installments of An Old-Fashioned Girl were appearing in Merry’s Museum, Bronson was making ready for another western tour, which would take him through fourteen cities, culminating in a sojourn in St. Louis, a city for which he was acquiring a deepening fondness. He was also developing a deep appreciation for the man who had first invited him to St. Louis, William Torrey Harris. In 1867, Harris had founded the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the first American philosophical journal that did not espouse a particular theological agenda. Bronson thought very highly of Harris’s journal, and he also felt that Harris’s review of Tablets had been the only one that had “penetrated to the core of its thought.”16 Opportunities to interact with Harris and the heartland in general, “so friendly to free and formidable thinking,” were almost impossible for Bronson to resist.17

  The welcomes that awaited Bronson along his way west in 1869 were unlike anything he had ever seen. The drawing rooms where he gave his conversations were crowded to capacity, and when the trip was over his appearances had earned him more than seven hundred dollars. Perhaps the publication of Tablets helped somewhat to swell the audience for his stately, poetic discourses on Health, Social Life, and Culture. Undeniably, however, it was Little Women that made by far the
greatest difference. His most popular lectures now were his observations on New England authors. He was accustomed to sharing stories of his personal encounters with Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Fuller, and Ellery Channing. Though he knew quite a bit less about them, he was also pleased to give his opinions regarding Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, and Longfellow.18 But it was his closeness to Louisa that had made him so popular. To his credit, Bronson never advertised a lecture on the subject of her life, and he told her story only when the audience asked him to do so. However, such requests were routine. He was now also a popular guest among school audiences, as most of the students were familiar with the book and were eager to know about the real Jo March and to see the face of her proud father.

  Bronson seems to have been happy to give the people what they wanted. True, his conversations now took on a far more personal, less philosophical tenor, but he had both the inventiveness and the good grace to regard the new kind of colloquy simply as a new genre, which he christened “the popular conversation.” In such a talk, he observed, “one does not venture deeply into metaphysical discriminations, but treats of living traits and personal anecdote chiefly.”19 Within the realm of personal observations, he found himself drawn to speak chiefly of Emerson, and he sometimes wondered whether his dilations upon his dearest friend tended to crowd out his other subjects to an excessive degree. As to Louisa, he also had a dramatic story to tell, and he knew how to tell it. With irrepressible pleasure, he wrote, “I am introduced as the father of Little Women, and I am riding in the Chariot of Glory wherever I go.”20

  Louisa’s sister May and Alice Bartlett share a comic moment on their tour of Europe.

  (Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  After sending An Old-Fashioned Girl to press, Louisa was able to turn her thoughts to a more leisurely prospect. She had long wanted to go with May to Europe, so that her sister might find artistic guidance and inspiration and so Louisa herself might finally recover her health. In the spring of 1870, an irresistible opportunity arose. Alice Bartlett, a friend of May’s, requested her company on a trip to France, Switzerland, and Italy. May insisted that Louisa be included. On April 1, the same day that marked the publication of An Old-Fashioned Girl, Anna’s husband John escorted the sisters by train to New York, to join Alice Bartlett. The next day, the trio of travelers boarded the French steamer Lafayette on its way to Brest, France.

  The first months of her travels with May were among the happiest times in Louisa’s life. Although there was to be no Laddie to add romance to her travels, this excursion to Europe was otherwise far more pleasant than the previous one. One key difference was Alice’s charm. Also, Louisa was now free from an urgent need to turn everything she saw into a travel article. Of course, she would not have been herself if she completely ceased to observe the world with an author’s eye, and after the trip was over she did describe some of the incidents of her travels in a second volume of Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag. Nevertheless, for once, no necessity tugged urgently at her sleeve.

  Unfortunately, she did not recover her health as quickly as she had hoped. Also, her ingrained habit of penny-pinching made her anxious about the money she was spending. She maintained that if the trip made her well and gave May a good time, it was well worth the expense.21 But her condition showed no signs of improvement. To the contrary, Louisa developed a persistent ache in one of her legs, and as she and May made their way through Brittany, she was in a desperate state over the pain. Her fortunes turned, however, when she consulted William Kane, a handsome, gray-haired English doctor who at last made the connection between her chronic ill health and the massive doses of calomel she had been given seven years earlier. Kane, while serving as an army surgeon in India, had fallen ill and had been treated with calomel. He had never gotten the mercury out of his body. He discussed with her the reasons why her pain came and went, and why it did not stay in the same places. The mercury, as Louisa paraphrased his explanation, “lies round in a body and don’t do much harm till a weak spot appears when it goes there and makes trouble.” Dr. Kane advised Louisa to take iodine of potash, which had given him relief from mercury deposits in his arms. She followed his suggestion.22 For a while, it seemed to work. A few weeks after beginning the treatment, she wrote to Abba, “I’m getting better so fast and enjoying so much.”23 Her good humor continued as the traveling party left France and settled for the summer in Switzerland. For the first time since she was a running, laughing girl at Hillside, Louisa had to hunt for reasons not to enjoy herself.

  Nevertheless, she did find a few. To begin with, she was not so carefree as to forget her finances, and her letters home were peppered with investment advice. A more personal concern caused her deeper unrest: she was not sufficiently confident of her mother’s health to feel entirely at ease. Louisa quietly dreaded the possibility that death might come to Orchard House in her absence. The relief of not having to look after her parents for a year was all but negated by her worries about how they would survive without her.

  If, in this sense, she was too far from home, she found that in another she was still too close. To her bemused chagrin, she learned that she had not gone far enough to escape the adulation that pursued the author of Little Women. She was most gratified, it seemed, when praise came to her by accident, as when a boy on the train to New York had placed a new copy of An Old-Fashioned Girl in her lap with the recommendation, “Bully book, Ma’am! Sell a lot, better have it.” When the boy discovered that his would-be customer had written the book herself, his shocked exclamation of “No!” was more delicious still.24 In general, however, the attentions of her public continued to irritate her. Undoubtedly meaning well, Abba sent Louisa a parcel of fan mail—perhaps, indeed, more than one. With emphasis, Louisa begged her mother not to send “any more letters from so cracked girls.”25 She explained that she had no time to answer them and that she had to pay for every one that was forwarded to her. She demanded, “the rampant infants must wait.”26

  The public wanted more stories, and Thomas Niles dutifully conveyed requests from papers and magazines for new material. She sent Niles her gratitude, but having come abroad for rest she was determined to stay off the literary treadmill until her year’s holiday was at an end. Perceiving that the requests would not cease on their own, Louisa finally dashed off a sop to her readers: a comic poem titled “The Lay of a Golden Goose,” in which she transformed the story of her own success into a barnyard allegory. It is a simple verse, full of observations about youthful yearnings for fortune and glory, and how absurd such aspirations seem to all but those who feel them from within. The poem tells of the dismissive mockery of those wedded to convention. Yet, as in these stanzas, it also tells of the indomitable self-confidence that enables both geese and brave young women to withstand it all:

  She could not sing, she could not fly,

  Nor even walk with grace,

  And all the farm-yard had declared

  A puddle was her place.

  But something stronger than herself

  Would cry, “Go on, go on!

  Remember, though an humble fowl

  You’re cousin to a swan.”27

  Barnyard opinion, of course, changes dramatically when it is discovered that the goose has been laying golden eggs. Derision promptly gives way to an incessant demand for more eggs. More realistically than most ugly-duckling fables, Alcott’s poem ends not with the feathered heroine enshrined in fame and comfort but, rather, paddling for her life across the Atlantic to escape her idolaters.

  The poem relates that, safe in the Alps, the goose regained “the health she had so nearly lost.”28 Though she was still not entirely well, Louisa was now feeling rejuvenated by her travels. Shortly before leaving Bex for Vevey, the scene of her innocent dalliance with Laddie, she wrote to Niles that she was rising from her ashes in a phoenixlike manner.29 It was a good thing, Louisa thought, that the books already in print were doing so well, since she could not bring herself to write anything
beyond a few odds and ends, more in the way of notes than an actual manuscript. She now caught herself “dawdl[ing] round without an idea in [her] head.”30 Having been told by her friend Alice that no one did anything in Italy, where she planned to spend the ensuing six months, Louisa looked forward to another half year of idleness before finally getting back to work. European living was agreeing with her so much that, in September, she talked of extending her holiday still further. Although it seemed obvious to her that someone should go home in the spring to look after family business, she saw no reason why May, instead of her, should not be the one to return.

  In October, the sisters left Switzerland for Italy, passing through Florence, Milan, Parma, and Pisa on their way to Rome. Whereas the beauty and romance of the ancient city enchanted May, Louisa saw her surroundings, as she put it, “through blue glasses.”31 Not only was poor health dampening her spirits, but some of the anti-Catholic feeling she had imbibed during her teenage years in Boston made her critical of what she saw. She felt continually oppressed by “a sense of sin, dirt, and general decay of all things.”32

  G. P. A. Healy, whose canvas of Lincoln hangs in the White House, painted this portrait of Louisa on her trip to Rome.

  (Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  In December came devastating news. John Pratt, Anna’s devoted husband of ten years, had died suddenly. Louisa had long since put aside the jealousy and resentment she had felt when John had first entered the family, and she grieved at his passing. She lamented, “No born brother was ever dearer, & each year I loved & respected & admired him more and more.”33 The letters from America indicated that Anna was bearing the situation bravely. Louisa wrote to Anna that the ten happy years the couple had shared could never be taken away. Although she considered cutting her travels short in order to be by her sister’s side, Louisa found that there was no need for her presence since a favorite cousin, Lizzie Wells, had rushed to Concord to attend to the dying man. At Louisa’s behest, Wells now remained there to fill the place Louisa had left empty. Louisa was still not well, and she thought it prudent to remain where she was and to gather strength in order to be the more useful when she did return. For the time being, she had one way to help her sister and nephews.