Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Still, Bronson himself felt like anything but a ruin. His appetite for life was as insatiable as ever. He had lately written a pair of sonnets on immortality. As the autumn rains fell outside his window, he wrote not of his nostalgia but of his “thoughts of the future.” Although he admitted some curiosity about “the geography and way of life” he would encounter after death, he still thought Thoreau had spoken wisely when he advised people to live in “one world at a time.”33 Nearing eighty-three, he was eager to know what services he had yet to perform on this side of the grave. The great charms of this life, he still believed, were to have work and to enjoy doing it.

  In October, in Boston, Louisa finally felt well enough to begin work on Jo’s Boys, the last of the Little Women trilogy. On the twenty-second, John Brown’s widow paid a visit to Bronson, whose kindness to her family she had never forgotten. She spoke in monosyllables and was not interested in answering Bronson’s questions about her. Bronson may have read her the sonnet he had written on her late husband for Sonnets and Canzonets, which eulogized Brown as a prophet of God and the messiah of the slaves. That evening, Bronson took tea with William Torrey Harris at Orchard House, where the two men and a caller named Ames disputed long into the night regarding the significance of the fall of Adam. Alcott tried to explain his theory of the first disobedience and of man’s rehabilitation, but Harris and his friend were unconvinced. Bronson recorded in his journal his failure to persuade them. He had written his last sentence.34

  On the twenty-fourth, barely started on her new manuscript, Louisa received a telegram. Her father had suffered a massive paralytic stroke.35 She rushed to Concord, but there was nothing she could do. Although Bronson appeared to recognize Louisa, he could not speak, nor could he move his right side. Louisa found the transformation from a vigorous man to a helpless invalid almost unbearable to look on. It seemed to her that, all at once, her father was tired of living, though, as she put it, “his active mind beats against the prison bars.”36 The doctors offered little hope, and Louisa and Anna spent anxious days both fearing and, for Bronson’s sake, half hoping that the end would come soon.

  Bronson was a strong man, however, and the stroke could not wholly destroy what it had tragically disabled. If his face seemed vacant to Louisa now, it also seemed oddly contented as he sat in his invalid’s chair and gazed out on the world. Although he remained speechless for several weeks, it was evident that he was trying hard to recover. He could not read, but he liked holding books and looking over their pages. Fifty years ago, he had taught children how to write. Now he faced the task of teaching the same lessons to his left hand, the only one that he could now control. By November 4, he was able to make letters on a sheet of paper. Occasionally a word was produced, although the letters most often came out in a random order. Friends sent good wishes, but Louisa thought he was not yet able to comprehend them.37 As November passed, he slept most of the time. Even as his doctor warned that death was imminent, some of Bronson’s faculties gradually started to return. At the beginning of the month, he was able to consume only milk and wine jelly. By the eighteenth, he was able to take spoon food and to speak in a halting, broken voice, sometimes putting words together in a way only he understood. His first intelligible word was “up,” an utterance that Louisa thought “very characteristic of this beautiful, aspiring soul almost on the wing for Heaven.”38 In general, however, Louisa was troubled all the more by what she regarded as “this pathetic fumbling after the lost intelligence & vigor.”39 Bronson, for his part, seemed focused on positive thinking. When his words could be deciphered, they played down the seriousness of his condition and reaffirmed the strength he felt in God. Even when he was asleep, Louisa overheard him say, “I am taking a predicament,” “True Godliness and the Ideal,” and “The Devil is never real, only Truth.”40 While Louisa prayed for a speedy end, it seemed that Bronson’s heart was set on a speedy recovery.

  On November 29, the two were together for their birthday. Bronson enjoyed the fruit and flowers he received from well-wishers, but he was quite positive that he was turning twenty-three instead of eighty-three. Louisa, he insisted, was a girl of fifteen.41 At Christmastime, Sanborn and Harris came to call. They were to become frequent visitors at Bronson’s bedside, although Louisa continually feared that their high spirits would excite her father more than was prudent. From time to time, she even turned the two friends away, believing that her father required rest more than stimulation. On this occasion, though, the influence seemed all to the good. As his two disciples rallied him with pleasantries about the School of Philosophy, Bronson sat up among his pillows and laughed at their jokes. Louisa had decorated the window with a green wreath. Noticing it, Bronson touched it over and over again, saying, “Christmas. I remember.”42

  Although Bronson was, on most days, a gentle invalid, he sometimes became angry. One day, Louisa found him in a worried and petulant mood, having clashed with his nurse. She reproved him softly, saying, “You are a philosopher and must not be upset by small trials.” The hint was sufficient. The old man gave his daughter a bright look and said, “Yes, I am. I will do it.” When the nurse returned, Bronson held out his hand and said, with an air of gentlemanly contrition, “I was cross, I confess. Forgive me; I am so old.”43 This glimpse of Bronson’s courtly and gentle nature, emerging from the confusion of his weakened brain, reminded Louisa of Shakespeare’s Lear. However, there was no Regan or Goneril in this version of the drama, only a steadfast Cordelia. Once disfavored for her forthrightness and independence, Louisa was now her father’s loyal daughter.

  In Sonnets and Canzonets, Bronson had offered tribute to Louisa as “Duty’s faithful child.” During his long, nearly silent illness, it was Louisa’s turn to express in verse what her father now meant to her. On his eighty-sixth birthday, she presented him with a poem that conjoined his life with the adventures of the fictional hero to whom, in Bronson’s eyes, there had never been an equal: Bunyan’s stalwart Christian.

  Dear pilgrim, waiting patiently,

  The long, long journey nearly done…

  From youth to age, through weal and woe,

  Climbing forever nearer God….

  Neglect is changed to honor now;

  The heavy cross may be laid down;

  The white head wins and wears at length

  The prophet’s, not the martyr’s crown….

  The staff set by, the sandals off,

  Still pondering the precious scroll,

  Serene and strong, he waits the call

  That frees and wings a happy soul.

  Then, beautiful as when it lured

  The boy’s aspiring eyes,

  Before the pilgrim’s longing sight

  Shall the Celestial City rise.44

  As much sympathy as Louisa felt for her father, she also felt fear on her own account. She had no doubt that Bronson’s stroke had been induced by overwork. Now, she could not help imagining herself in her father’s place, for she felt she had been following the same path herself. “I did not practise [sic] what I preached,” she confided to a friend. “And indeed I have great cause for fear that I may be some day stricken down as he is.”45 But there was no question of her breaking down now. Lulu needed a surrogate mother, and so did her father.

  Louisa was too busy now to keep the same kind of detailed journal that she had generally maintained since her late teens. She had to content herself with pausing to “jot down a fact now and then.” She did the best she could to keep up with the needs of her two dependents, but she found she lacked the nerves and strength to take full responsibility for Lulu, let alone for an infirm parent as well. The preferred solution, she was well aware, would be to hire a nanny for the one and a nurse for the other, but she cared so deeply about both of them that her standards were hard to satisfy. When she did have time to open her diary, her entries offered a litany of nurses hired and quickly discharged. As a group, she found these women “incapable, lazy, or nervous with too much tea.” The mos
t promising of the lot, immortalized in Louisa’s journal only as “Mrs. F.,” harmonized well with Bronson despite his fretful and unreasonable moments, but one day she turned up tipsy and was asked to leave.46

  Of course, where Lulu was concerned, no governess could be good enough, and, accordingly, none of them was. This one was too lofty. Another had no idea of government. The women who tried the job were incapable and proud. The girls were rough and vulgar. Louisa felt that the New England girls had brains and conscience enough for the job, but they lacked stamina. The Irish girls, to whom Louisa condescendingly referred as “Pats,” were strong but had no principle.47 Lulu’s own nature did not make things any easier. Louisa considered her “a fine specimen of a hearty, happy, natural child,” but what she leniently viewed as heartiness seemed to strike more objective observers as an intractable will.48 Lulu had inherited her mother’s determination to have things her own way, and her stubbornness was the frustration of a series of caregivers. Louisa regretted the rapid succession of Lulu’s nurses. She knew that this lack of continuity was hardly the best tonic for her niece’s fitful nature. By the fall of 1883, when Lulu turned four, Louisa had more or less resigned herself to the impossibility of finding adequate care outside the family. Her journals contained no more talk of searching for governesses. So far as Louisa’s health permitted her, she was to be Lulu’s mother.

  Devoting herself equally to her father’s care, however, was an almost impossible challenge. If she meant to continue with her writing and attend to Lulu, she was in a poor position to see to the wants of a man who was now as dependent as a child. In October 1883, she was trying valiantly to minister to the needs of both her beloveds, but she was finding that Bronson required more care with each successive month. Between her “two babies, both looking for me at once,” Louisa felt “like a nursin’ ma with twins.”49 Indeed, the two contended for Louisa’s attention like a pair of infants. Once the doting grandfather, Bronson was now jealous of Lulu and told Louisa to keep the child away. Lulu, for her part, took offense if Louisa kissed Bronson first, not her. The infighting amused Louisa, but it tired her too. Indeed, fatigue was becoming an almost constant fact of her daily life.

  Some changes in living arrangements became necessary. Anna and Louisa decided that winters in Concord were too hard for Bronson, and that a regular place of retreat in the summers would benefit everyone. In a transaction that was sensible but unquestionably laden with emotion, Orchard House was sold to William Torrey Harris, who had been renting the home for four years. Louisa used the proceeds to buy a summer cottage in Nonquitt, Massachusetts, a resort town south of New Bedford. For winter quarters, the family rented a handsome townhouse in Louisburg Square, Boston. Although Anna retained ownership of the Thoreau house, the family’s ties to Concord had not been this tenuous since the 1850s.

  Following the death of her sister May, Louisa became the adoptive mother of Louisa May (“Lulu”) Nieriker, who outlived Louisa by eighty-seven years.

  (Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  Louisa was determined to return to a piece of unfinished business. Niles was eager for a new novel, and Louisa, who had published nothing but short pieces since her revision of Moods, missed working on a large project. In December 1884, she tried to finish Jo’s Boys. For three straight days, she wrote for two hours. In the old days, such an effort would have seemed a trifle. Now, it was too much for her. Overcome by a violent attack of vertigo, she had no choice but to stop. She was ill for a week. Reluctantly, she put her papers aside and resigned herself, for the moment “to dawdl[ing] and go[ing] about as other people do.”50 For a woman who had always been anything but ordinary, acting like other people was the least normal of behaviors. Thankfully, Christmas remained enjoyable, due in large part to the strong ties that held the patchwork family together. Bronson especially seemed to take delight in having Anna, Louisa, and Lulu under the same roof. As Louisa observed, he lived in a narrow world now, but it seemed sufficient to make him happy.

  Throughout much of 1885, Louisa continued to seek a cure that would allow her to get back to work. From January to March, she paid for a series of sessions with a practitioner of mind cure. At first, the effect was agreeable; she imagined that her head was filled with blue clouds and sunshine, and she felt herself floating away. The benefits of the treatments were only temporary, however, and Louisa soon lost patience. “God and Nature,” she concluded, “can’t be hustled about every ten minutes to cure a dozen different ails.”51 Traditional doctors, however, were not much help either, and it was not until the late spring of 1886 that Louisa felt well enough to complete Jo’s Boys. Making the most of a rare stretch of good health and spirits, she fell upon her work with a vengeance, churning out fifteen chapters in June, adding the final necessary touches in July, and then triumphantly corking her inkstand. A period of peace seemed at hand. Shortly before completing Jo’s Boys, Louisa soothed herself by addressing a poem to her brain, as she gazed back on the mental labors of a lifetime and looked forward to the time of tranquility that she hoped awaited her:

  Rest, weary brain, thy task is done.

  The burden of the day is past;

  Thy wage is earned & freely paid.

  Thy holiday begins at last.

  There is no need for thee to seethe

  With romance, poem, play or plot,

  As when stern Duty was the spur

  That kept poor Pegasus atrot….

  Rest, & rejoice in thy one gift,

  For sure it is a happy art

  To conquer fate, win friends and live

  Enshrined in many a childish heart.52

  In her correspondence from this period, Louisa maintained that her career was far from over. For too long, she believed, necessity and her unexpected success in the genre had confined her to children’s literature. She hoped that she might now at last have the chance to write a few of the adult novels that she had simmering in her mind.53 Nevertheless, “To My Brain” conveys acutely her weariness and resignation.

  Louisa’s inability to work steadily on her final chronicle of the March family left its mark on the novel’s form. Whereas both Little Women and Little Men also had an episodic nature, changing focus chapter by chapter from one character to another, this quality is even more pronounced in Jo’s Boys. Although Plumfield remains nominally the center of the work, that center has lost much of its gravitational force as the younger generation has approached adulthood and begun to seek independence. Scenes shift with dizzying rapidity in the middle third of the book, where, in successive chapters, one of Plumfield’s alumni endures a fiery shipwreck, followed by a desperate struggle for survival aboard a lifeboat; another is imprisoned for manslaughter; and a third nearly falls victim to debauchery in the fashionable drawing rooms of Leipzig. Such events make Jo’s Boys by far the most exciting of the Little Women trilogy, as well as the closest in spirit to Louisa’s blood-and-thunder inclinations. However, they do little to promote a sense of cohesive plot development, and much of the book is an elaborate tying up of loose ends.

  Louisa regarded Jo’s Boys with dissatisfaction. She introduced it with a preface that sounds like an apology, pleading that, “Having been written at long intervals during the past seven years,” the book was “far more faulty than any of its very imperfect predecessors.”54 Nevertheless, she gave her readers to understand that she had felt a duty to complete the March saga and that her sense of duty had, in the end, outweighed her aesthetic scruples. She also explained that, because the real-life models for Marmee and Amy were now dead, Jo’s Boys had little to say about them. Indeed, Louisa included the death of her mother in the story itself. Interestingly, however, May’s fictional alter ego is permitted to live on, although her role in the action is minimal. Louisa did not want to burden her young readers with the death of a second little woman, nor could she bring herself to reenact in fiction the loss that had been so hard to bear in reality. Similarly, Louisa chose not to visit any colla
pse of health on Mr. March. In full possession of his faculties until the last, the elderly chaplain of Plumfield continues to preside over the souls of its pupils, superintending their progress with serene pleasure and occasionally turning up to discuss Greek comedy and Platonic theory.

  In this, her last treatment of her father in fiction, Louisa’s attitude is reverential. She describes Mr. March as “ever-young” and speaks admiringly of the “prophetic eye” of “the wise old man [who] was universally beloved” and whom many of his flock thanked all their lives for the help he had given to their hearts and souls. However, as always with Mr. March, the record is conspicuously barren of specifics. In the entire book, the chaplain dispenses only one significant piece of advice, and even that suggestion is played for laughs; he counsels Dan, the roughest, most mercurial, and least literary of all his daughter’s little men, to settle near Jacksonville, Illinois, because it has a Plato Club and “a most ardent thirst for philosophy.”55 None of the shipwrecks, homicides, or mine explosions that dot the narrative touch Mr. March even remotely, and those who truly crave the answers to life’s varied dilemmas know that it is Aunt Jo, not her stately, smiling father, to whom they must turn. As her own father stared out his window and quietly turned the pages of his journals, Louisa found that, as a writer, she could approach him in a spirit of love, but not a spirit of analysis. Mr. March remained the same enigma he had been since Little Women, deeply respected but never deeply known.

  Jo’s Boys is noteworthy, however, for its elaboration of Louisa’s ideas on women’s rights, and the book serves to correct the reversals of feminine ambition that Roberts Brothers and her conservative readership had initially argued her into adding at the close of Little Women. In Jo’s Boys, despite the mutterings of some prematurely crusty young alumni, Plumfield has become fully coeducational. It has also added a college, committed to the right of all sexes, colors, creeds, and classes to the best possible education. Most significantly, Nan, a girl who boldly breaches the gender barrier at Plumfield and who acts as Jo’s spiritual successor in Little Men and Jo’s Boys, deftly fends off the inept romantic advances of Tommy Bangs and remains happily unmarried. Having escaped the snares of matrimony, she is able to preserve her independence and achieve her dream of becoming a doctor. Jo’s earlier concessions to the social status quo eventually result in happier, more enlightened lives for all, both female and male.