Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Although Concord Days begins with melancholy, it ends with cheerful exhortation. In the closing subchapter, “Ideals,” Alcott urges his readers to realize the best that is in them and to seek out tasks that demand more than a lifetime can give them. “Step by step,” he writes, “one climbs the pinnacles of excellence; life itself is but the stretch for that mountain of holiness…. Who ceases to aspire, dies. Our pursuits our prayers; our ideals our gods.”58

  Louisa, like her father, had not ceased to aspire. She still dreamed of winning a reputation as an author of serious novels for adults. In November 1872, two months after Bronson published Concord Days, came an opportunity to do just that. Henry Ward Beecher’s magazine, the Christian Union, offered Louisa three thousand dollars for a serial to run in weekly installments for six months. She accepted the thousand-dollar advance and proceeded to resurrect an unfinished manuscript she had begun even before she had written the first draft of Moods. She had called the project “Success” when she had first conceived it in her midtwenties. Now, she supplanted that optimistic noun with one that she had learned to see as the more fundamental truth of existence: Work.

  She found it almost impossible to write at an easy, measured pace. As with Moods and Little Women, she “fired up the engine.” “The thing possesses me,” she told her journal, “and I must obey till it’s done.”59 If the sense of creative abandon was still the same, however, it was no longer accompanied by the romantic sense of sacrificing herself for art. She now likened herself to a galley slave, chained to her oar by Beecher’s thousand dollars. She drove herself beyond reason, and when she put aside her novel, it was to write eight shorter tales she had promised another publisher for thirty-five dollars each. Shortly after Work was completed, she accepted another offer to write another ten tales at fifty dollars each. Once the fastest running girl in all of Concord, Louisa was turning into a literary Atalanta, pausing too often to snatch up a few more golden apples while the prize she most desired, a truly brilliant novel for a mature audience, slipped away from her.

  Objectively speaking, there was now no real need for her to press herself so mercilessly. Despite the abundance that surrounded her, however, and despite the fact that her work brought her less and less pleasure, Louisa could not stop writing. To some who have experienced poverty early in life, no subsequent amount of money or security seems entirely sufficient, for one lives forever in the fear that a time of need will come again. Concerned that one day her talent, or more likely her popularity, might desert her, she told the editor of the Boston Globe, “I find that I must make my hay while my sun shines, & so wish to earn all I can before Fortune’s wheel takes a turn & carries me down again.”60 She kept writing, too, because, on an emotional level, she could not help herself. There was a compulsive quality to her experiences of the vortex, and she seemed unable to resist the allure of the poetic maelstrom even when she knew that such prolonged fits of creativity were bad for her health. Then, too, she may have worked herself to exhaustion because she saw no further benefit in rest. A year of relaxation in Europe had not restored her health, and after speaking with Dr. Kane, she had good reason to believe that wellness would never truly come again. If she were to be ill whether she worked or not, the decision could only have been obvious.

  Because she needed to produce three copies of Work—one for Beecher and one each for her English and American book publishers—Louisa wrote three pages at once, one on top of another, using impression paper. The uncomfortable steel pens that she used, coupled with the added pressure needed to make a triple impression, resulted in permanent partial paralysis to her thumb. She then taught herself to write with her left hand. Her constitution was less and less able to withstand the punishment she inflicted on it, and at last she slowed her pace for fear of a breakdown. In November a terrible fire in Boston disrupted her writing. In February, she was again forced to stop work when a telegram from Bronson urged her to return to Concord because it was thought that Anna was dying of pneumonia. Thankfully, the fire spared Louisa’s apartment, Anna survived her illness, and the manuscript of Work went on. In March 1873, it was done.

  The story of the frequently ill-starred attempts of a plucky young woman, Christie Devon, to find employment that can sustain both her body and soul, Work takes up a theme that Alcott introduced in An Old-Fashioned Girl, in which Fanny Shaw wonders if the time would ever come “when women could earn a little money and success, without paying such a heavy price for them.” The heaviest possible price is almost exacted from Christie, whose failed attempts to find a secure place in the working world bring her within moments of suicide. Two of Alcott’s philosophical heroes, Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, had urged that labor is the process by which a person achieves full humanity. While Alcott agreed that work could be ennobling, she had also learned firsthand that undercompensated, unappreciated work could wear down and diminish the laborer. As Christie discovers, performing the very tasks that strengthen her competence and character leads a leisure-loving society to regard her as an inferior. Almost throughout Work, Alcott’s female characters either possess practical knowledge and strength of character but lack the worldly means to make a difference in society, or vice versa.

  During her picaresque wanderings in the first third of the novel, Christie performs with reasonable skill the tasks of maidservant, actress, governess, hired companion, and seamstress. She is driven from each occupation in turn by the impossibility of remaining under employers who have infected the employment relation with their own character flaws. Far from denouncing the impersonal nature of the marketplace, Christie’s history indicates that, in the occupations available to women other than factory work, employment relations were often too personal and that the need for cash too frequently meant exposure to the whims and cruelties of careless or obdurate employers. Economic relations in the book are unsatisfactory so long as they involve either the mere exchange of money for service or the flaunted superiority of one class over another. Alcott writes, “There are many Christies, willing to work, yet unable to bear the contact with coarser natures which makes labor seem degrading, or to endure the hard struggle for the bare necessities of life when life has lost all that makes it beautiful.”61 Hepsey Johnson, a black domestic who becomes Christie’s first friend in the novel, puts the matter simply: “Folks don’t seem to ’member dat we’ve got feelin’s.”62

  And yet, where the relationship is graced by mutual respect and sympathy, no task is truly distasteful. As Christie’s benefactor, Mrs. Wilkins, puts it, “There warn’t never a hard job that ever I’d hated but what grew easy when I remembered who it was done for.”63 Mrs. Wilkins is a laundress, but she is almost always shown working in her kitchen; Hepsey is employed as a cook. Both of them are nurturing characters, and their shared association with food illustrates that work must not only produce wealth. It must nourish both body and soul. In Work, Alcott explores the possible connection between love and money in both its highest and lowest forms. When Christie gives a hundred hard-earned dollars to Hepsey to help her guide slaves to freedom, Alcott invokes the language of the marketplace to highlight the act of charity. She calls the gift an “investment” and observes that “shares in the Underground Railroad pay splendid dividends that never fail.”64 The other side of the love-cash nexus is personified in Rachel, a former prostitute whom Christie befriends while the two are working as seamstresses, and whose experience illustrates the tragedies that result when physical intimacy becomes commodified. Christie’s kindness to Rachel is more than repaid when the latter appears just in time to save Christie from throwing herself in the river.

  Soon after Christie’s brush with death, the story veers into a love triangle somewhat stalely reminiscent of Moods. Again, one of the candidates for Christie’s affections, a florist named David Sterling, is modeled on Thoreau. Christie rejects a wealthy suitor and accepts Sterling, and the story teeters on the brink of predictability until the outbreak of the Civil War inspires both Sterling and Christ
ie to enlist, he in the army, she in the nursing corps. At their hastily planned wedding, both are in uniform. David is killed in action, leaving Christie to raise their baby daughter and to wonder whether she will ever find the work for which her life of struggle and trial has prepared her. The question is answered when, near the eve of her fortieth birthday, Christie attends a women’s rights meeting. It soon becomes apparent that the wealthy women in attendance and their working comrades have no idea how to communicate with each other. Standing at the lowest step of the speakers’ platform, symbolically bridging the space between high and low, Christie gives an eloquent, impromptu address whose spirit unites and inspires the crowd. Her sufferings have shaped her unawares into a potent women’s rights activist.

  The closing tableau of Work reunites many of the women whom Christie has met on her journey, including Hepsey, Mrs. Wilkins, and Rachel, who, it has been revealed, is actually Sterling’s sister, long presumed dead. Gathered together in the name of creating a better place for women in American life, Christie’s friends join hands as “a loving league of sisters, old and young, black and white, rich and poor.”65 Again, Alcott redefines family according to shared mission rather than bloodlines. However, Christie’s alliance is different in that it excludes any masculine presence. The war has made casualties of both of Christie’s lovers, making room for the higher love of sisterhood. At age eleven, Louisa had cried when her father suggested dividing their family along gender lines. Now, only a few years younger than her father had been at Fruitlands, Alcott saw intriguing possibilities in single-sex community. The ending of the novel reconstructs not only the idea of family but also the meaning of the book’s title. Whereas “work” had once signified to Christie the grubbing, lonely life of a menial laborer, the word is ultimately made synonymous with the holy labors of reform.

  Despite its reassuring ending, Work is Alcott’s most harrowing book. Her account of Christie’s near suicide shocked many readers, some of whom sent her personal letters demanding to know why she had included it. “I did not like the suicide in ‘Work,’” she replied to one such letter, “but as much of that chapter was true I let it stand as a warning to several people who need it to my knowledge, & to many whom I do not know.”66 Although Louisa’s thoughts of killing herself had long since passed, the memory of her suicidal depression had refused to lie quietly. Louisa had confessed it, one supposes, not merely as a service to others but as an unburdening of her own soul.

  But does Louisa’s allusion to “the suicide in ‘Work’” refer to Christie’s brush with drowning? Notably, Louisa’s letter does not refer to the attempted suicide in the novel, but to the suicide. If we take her literally, she is alluding to another moment in the novel that, though less obviously so, may be equally confessional. Earlier in the novel, Christie finds work as a companion to an invalid named Helen Carrol. After the two women have forged a friendship, Helen confesses the family’s secret: they suffer from hereditary mental illness: “We are all mad or shall be,” she relates, “and for years we have gone recklessly on bequeathing this awful inheritance to our descendants. It should end with us…none of us should marry.”67 Of this illness, Helen further relates, “When one generation goes free it falls more heavily upon the rest.”68 Helen eventually ends her own torment by completing the only successful suicide in Work.

  Louisa certainly knew of her Uncle Junius’s long struggle for mental health, which had ended with his suicide. She had witnessed firsthand her father’s episodes of strange behavior following the demise of Fruitlands. In addition, she was more than conscious of her own potentially self-destructive moods and consuming creative “vortices.” As befits the taut drama of her novel, the inherited derangement of the fictitious Carrol family is infinitely more devastating than any instabilities that haunted the Alcotts. However, it is not unreasonable to ask whether Louisa was daunted by the possibility of inherited mental imbalance in her own family, and whether this same anxiety played an unspoken role in Louisa’s own decision not to marry. As is more than once the case with Alcott, the fiction teasingly invites speculations that the surviving facts can neither confirm nor dispel.

  Louisa herself was dissatisfied with Work, which, like Moods, she had begun with great ambition, only to create a finished product that was good, not great. When her health permitted her, she could produce a flow of words virtually at will. However, it seemed that when she tried to write the books whose artistic success mattered most to her, inspiration did not come at her bidding. The truth was hard to avoid: she was a seasoned, disciplined writer whose voice resonated with young readers as no American’s ever had before. However, the highest levels of adult writing seemed stubbornly closed to her. She had, she felt, been forced to endure too many interruptions. She would have liked to write one book in peace and see whether then, at last, she could produce something to her liking. Perhaps, in time, she would get the chance.

  The four years that followed Work were ones of sustained financial comfort and productivity, as both Bronson and Louisa continued to reap the rewards that Little Women, Tablets, and their successors showered on Orchard House. As might be expected of a man in his seventies and his grown daughter in her forties, they were less involved in each other’s daily lives than they had previously been. Unable to settle in a single place, Louisa oscillated between Orchard House and various rented rooms in the city, always missing her family while in Boston and always yearning for urbane excitements while in Concord. Abba’s health was now much broken, and Louisa spent most of her time in Concord either caring for her mother or searching for someone else to do it. Moreover, her own health problems gave her little rest. Sometimes the pain from the ineradicable mercury made it impossible for her to write. Nights came when she could find no sleep without the help of morphine. In January 1874, she told her journal, “When I had youth I had no money; now that I have the money I have no time; and when I get the time, if I ever do, I shall have no health to enjoy life.”69

  Louisa had grown no more comfortable with her celebrity status, and she continued to view it as part of the unwelcome price she paid for making a comfortable living. Over a hundred people a month sometimes descended on Orchard House to spend a moment with their beloved Little Woman. “I asked for bread,” she quipped, “and got a stone,—in the shape of a pedestal.”70 At one public appearance, an energetic matron worked her arm like a pump handle and exclaimed, “If you ever come to Oshkosh, your feet will not be allowed to touch the ground: you will be borne in the arms of the people.” Louisa vowed never to visit Oshkosh.71 Despite it all, she added two more juvenile novels to her list of accomplishments, Eight Cousins in 1875 and a sequel, Rose in Bloom, in 1876. She also became increasingly involved in charitable concerns, visiting New York in 1875 and finding herself moved by the plights of indigent newsboys and the inmates of mental institutions. Closer to home, she loaned three thousand dollars to Dr. Rhoda Lawrence of Roxbury, Massachusetts, to establish a nursing home, remarking at the time that it was “just the place many of us used up people need to go for repairs.”72

  In contrast, Bronson hungered for more recognition rather than less. Although his popularity had never been greater, he found that a man in his midseventies, whatever his recent achievements, was seldom the first to receive an invitation to social or intellectual functions. Louisa noticed that at times he seemed “rather sad, to be left out of so much that he would enjoy and should be asked to help and adorn.”73 She felt that, if she had a little more money, she would like to bring all the best people “to see and entertain him.”74 Bronson’s lack of a college education remained a source of regret to him. He wrote that he now felt at home strolling academic grounds, feeling, as he put it, “a certain inborn title to their honors and advantages.”75 Nevertheless, as he stood inside the Harvard College Library one day in 1874, he felt “overmastered” and could not help wondering whether access to such a place sixty years earlier might have made him a wiser man.76 His need for inclusion was intensely gratif
ied when, the following year, Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society offered him an honorary membership. He responded so excitedly that his letter of acceptance contained two uncharacteristic misspellings.77

  It was perhaps hard for everyone to realize that May Alcott, the petted baby of Hosmer Cottage and the little girl of Hillside, was now a woman in her mid-thirties. Like Louisa, she had struggled to satisfy her artistic impulses while fulfilling her domestic obligations to the family. As shown by the somewhat amateurish illustrations that she contributed to part 1 of Little Women, May’s skills were initially slow to mature, yet more recently she had been making impressive strides. After returning from Europe alongside Louisa in 1871, she had sailed east again in April 1873, “brave and happy and hopeful,” for a year’s study in London.78 This journey would have been impossible if not for Louisa, who cheerfully gave her sister a thousand dollars and a like number of blessings. During her stay, May became adept at copying the Turner canvases that hung in the National Gallery. Her copies caught the eye of Ruskin, the greatest authority on the artist’s works, who proclaimed that she had “caught Turner’s spirit wonderfully.”79

  After she returned home the following March, however, May was forced to put aside her artistic ambitions as she became immersed in the daily work of Orchard House, taking up the hard, monotonous tasks that her mother was now too weak to perform. In between periods of housework, May was able to teach some classes and offer inspiration to other local artists. Among them was the young Daniel Chester French, who later sculpted the great statue of Lincoln housed in the Lincoln Memorial.80 However, May herself soon found that she needed more time for creativity, as well as more professional instruction and aesthetic stimulus than Massachusetts could give her. On September 9, 1876, she embarked again for Europe aboard the steamship China.