March Sisters
Page 8
Within minutes of Lizzie’s birth, Bronson Alcott began writing what would eventually be a five hundred-page unpublished19 manuscript: Psyche, or the Breath of Childhood. The book was a combination of Bronson’s meditations on the growth of the spirit and his observations about childhood development. As Lizzie was an infant, she became the focus of the project, so much so the family called her “Psyche” for a time.
In its pages, Bronson Alcott sought to understand the mysterious alchemy occurring in his youngest daughter’s mind. “I took [her] in my arms today that I might perchance tempt forth the indwelling vision and fix it for a moment on my own face,” he wrote. “She fixed her eye on me with a deep intensity of vision. Yet a moment of endeavor, and the free will was disenthralled from the instinctive, and the vision was given her of living, individual being. Then came the smile—the sense—the upfilling joy—from the Spirit’s life, from the fount whence cometh all love, all bliss, all peace, and repose that bloweth into the ample heart of man.” He was also quite relieved at Lizzie’s relative agreeableness, a trait that had apparently not manifested in his other children. She “cries but seldom; often smiles,” he wrote, and “the prevailing temper of her spirit seems that of repose—deep, still, sustained peace. She is quiet, self-satisfied, self-subsistent. On the ocean of the Infinite doth her spirit calmly lie as a simple wavelet, unagitated by distant storms.”
Bronson did not write this way about his other children. He recorded Anna calling for him after a terrifying and vivid dream; he noted his desire to take Louisa into the country so that he might access the “true history of [her spirit] . . . [her] range of thought, [her] vocabulary, [her] prevailing tendencies, whether good or evil.” (May—the daughter after whom Amy would be modeled in Little Women—had yet to be born when Psyche was written.)
But as for Lizzie, her position was far more elemental:
This morning I saw Elizabeth,” he wrote, “while her mother was preparing her for the day. The forms and motions of an infant—how beautiful! . . . How open were her arms! How confidingly did she stretch them forth toward that nature on whom she now relies for that sustaining influence which shall supply the waste and exhaustion of the animal functions of the flesh, into which she hath just entered! . . . Her position is, in itself, a prayer of aspiration; her breath life, an ascription. She hath faith; she hath love; she is bent heavenward. She turnest toward the source of the Spirit by the sense that worketh deep within her, even as the sunflower towards the radiant light on which it feeds!
Here, we can see Bronson’s projections onto Lizzie, the way he views her as having plantlike passivity, her actions something akin to a Venus flytrap closing over its prey. Pure instinct.
I am being unfair to Bronson. Of course he thought of Elizabeth as a creature on whom he could project his own mind; we adore imbuing newborns, like dogs, with emotions and reactions that make sense to us. He feels guilty; she’s having an existential crisis. Plus, the other girls were older, already exhibiting their own personalities. Lizzie was an exquisite tabula rasa, an object with no obvious subjectivity. “Psyche,” Bronson wrote, “prefers summertime.”
In the story of Cupid and Psyche, Cupid was sent by Venus to curse Psyche to love ugliness. But he accidentally scratched himself with his own arrow and fell in love with her instead. Soon after, an oracle prophesied to her parents that a terrible monster would wed their daughter:
Let Psyche’s corpse be clad in mourning weed
And set on rock of yonder hill aloft:
Her husband is no wight of human seed,
But serpent dire and fierce as may be thought,
Who flies with wings above in starry skies
And doth subdue each thing with fiery flight.
The gods themselves and powers that seem so wise
With mighty Jove be subject to his might;
The rivers black and deadly floods of pain
And darkness eke as thrall to him remain.
In terror, they send her to a cliffside. “As Psyche marches to the place of her exposure,” writes Latin literature scholar Sophia Papaioannou, “[elaborate] rhetorical constructions are employed to emphasize the description of the funereal wedding and the coexistence of marriage and death . . . [once there, she] is exposed on the mountain and left there for a deadly marriage.”20 These ideas are “complementary aspects of a single experience, namely the transition to the unknown.”
“Beth’s lingering death symbolizes the marriages of the remaining sisters,” writes Athena Vrettos in her book Somatic Fictions, quoting the late feminist theorist Nina Auerbach. “Beth never matures because she does not seek access to a self-authorizing discourse. Her inability to construct a narrative identity21 parallels her inability to leave the home, and invalidism becomes the logical extension of her domesticity . . . The fact that Beth’s lingering death comes at the onset of adolescence allows her to retain her childhood identity amidst the changing structure of the March family.”
In paintings of Psyche, she is classically beautiful: apple-breasted with skin like cream. Cupid is portrayed either as a cherub—an infant—or an adolescent, and there is something very dark about their marriage: a beautiful woman claimed in holy matrimony by the concept of youth itself.
The scarlet fever chapter of Little Women is, I think, as close as Alcott gets to true, palpable horror. Beth talks in “a hoarse, broken voice,” tries to sing through a swollen throat, runs her thin fingers over her blanket as if trying to play the piano, calls her sisters by the wrong names. She is in a “heavy stupor,” her face “changed and vacant,” her hands “weak and wasted,” her “once-smiling lips quite dumb.” Her illness is, for lack of a better word, creepy. It is “uncanny valley,” dehumanizing. It is, like real illness and real death, terrifying, and gross.
But after this nightmarish period, the rest of Beth’s death is positively Victorian: beautiful, holy, austere. In part two of Little Women, Jo observes that there is a “strange, transparent look about [Beth’s face], as if the mortal was being slowly refined away, and the immortal shining through the frail flesh with an indescribably pathetic beauty.” As it does in every film of the Final Destination franchise, the death that has been chasing her for so long draws near. Like the moment during her initial illness when she sat up and played the bedclothes on her lap like a piano, she hovers in the doorway between this world and another. There are many references to Beth as a “shadow,” and this language appears also in describing Lizzie, in Louisa’s journal, Abba’s,22 and Bronson’s. It is easy to see why casting directors chose baby-faced, wide-eyed, peach-cheeked Claire Danes for Beth in the 1994 film adaptation—she was eerily adept at that ethereal plane.23
Late in the novel, Jo comes to believe that Beth has a big secret. After some deduction—including finding Beth weeping in the night—Jo concludes that her sister is in love with Laurie. “Jo mistakes Beth’s pallor for the conventional signs of unrequited love,” writes Vrettos, “[and her] first response is to try to write a new ending to Beth’s story as she might for her own heroines, thereby transforming the deathbed drama into a narrative of miraculous recovery.” Only later, during a trip to the seaside, does she find out that—far from a crush—Beth has accepted that she is going to die, and soon. There, on the shore of her own metaphor, Beth says, “Every day I lose a little, and feel more sure that I shall never gain it back. It’s like the tide, Jo, when it turns; it goes slowly, but it can’t be stopped.”
It is unfair to Louisa to be angry that she did not use Little Women to save her dear, dead sister. And yet it feels as if—as her father sealed Lizzie in the amber of his literary failure—Louisa did the same within her literary success. Infant or sweet or dying or dead, Lizzie never got the chance to belong to herself.
When I was in high school, a cyst that had grown on my ovary ruptured in the middle of algebra class. I raised my hand and asked to go to the nurse, but when I s
tood I screamed—a thin, involuntary sound. By the time I reached the nurse’s office, my body was covered in a chilly film of moisture. My mother arrived and drove me to the hospital. She tried to carry me inside, for reasons I did not understand, but of course I was already too big for such a dramatic gesture and also, it wasn’t necessary: they brought me a wheelchair.
I was fourteen that year. My mother’s and my relationship had been precipitously crumbling for ages, and by the time she pushed me into that emergency room we were barely speaking to each other. She had correctly deduced that I was selfish and ungrateful, that I thought I was smarter than she was, that I had no respect for her. I was still years away from understanding my mother with any kind of psychological accuracy, but even then I knew that we existed on opposite sides of a great river. When I thought about my mother—the many judgments she made about me—something deep and ugly inside of me curdled. She wanted me to be permanently stunted—an infirm Peter Pan who called her regularly—and I did not want that for one second. I hated everything about her, and I told her as much, more than once.
In the ER, they did an ultrasound; my belly was full of fluid. I needed painkillers and rest, the doctor told my mother, and eventually my body would absorb it all, like a nightmarish ShamWow. My mother drove me home and grasped my elbow as I shuffled down the sidewalk and into the house.
I stayed on the couch until I could walk again, watching daytime TV until I fell asleep. My mother was curiously sweet and accommodating during those days; her normal sharpness mellowed. I was reminded of the long-ago best days of my small childhood with her fussing over me, our conflicts forgotten. She liked being needed, and I liked her that way. The scent of her perfume, indicating that she’d come into the room—it was Cabotine de Grès, which takes its main notes from the fickle Himalayan ginger lily—was soothing.
“You’ll always need your mommy,” she said once that week, stroking my forehead while I convalesced on the couch. The idea drifted through the fog of opioids and landed in my silent contemplation. No, I won’t, I thought. Isn’t that the point?
Maybe the question isn’t Are you a Beth? Maybe the question should be, How do you keep other people from making you a Beth? How do you stay out of other people’s stories?
It’s weirdly hard to dislike Beth; she’s unflaggingly kind and selfless. A bit Pollyanna-ish, sure, but ultimately a force for good within the family. Alcott gives the tiniest bit of lip service to Beth’s human qualities—that is to say, the normal difficulties that mark everyone—but they do not emerge on the page. Beth does not rage against the unfairness of her situation; but even worse than that, she wants nothing. It is impossible to imagine her adulthood. Not even just the reader; Beth can’t imagine it, either. “I only mean to say that I have a feeling that it never was intended I should live long,” she tells Jo, shortly before the end of her life. “I’m not like the rest of you. I never made any plans about what I’d do when I grew up. I never thought of being married, as you all did. I couldn’t seem to imagine myself anything but stupid little Beth, trotting about at home, of no use anywhere but there.”
Lizzie’s doctor’s final diagnosis for her was “atrophy or consumption of the nervous system, with great development of hysteria.” It is hard, when thinking about Lizzie, not to also think of Alice James—younger sister of psychiatrist William James and author Henry James. Lizzie’s father, Bronson, and Alice’s, Henry James Sr., were contemporaries and acquaintances who moved in the same New England circles. Like Lizzie, Alice was an invalid, diagnosed with a litany of ailments common to women at the time, including neurasthenia24 and hysteria. Like Lizzie, she would die young, and recede into her famous family’s long shadow.
Unlike Lizzie, Alice kept extensive letters and diaries that showcase her brilliance and wit, even though it would take half a century for people to begin to acknowledge it. Unfortunately, there are not many surviving letters or diaries25 belonging to Lizzie Alcott, though whether that’s because they were lost, or because she did not write or keep them with any regularity, is unclear. But the writing of Lizzie’s that survives is wry and dark and creates a sketch of a fierce and funny woman managing her situation as best she can. In one letter, sent to her family from Boston where she was convalescing at the home of a family friend, she tells of her journey there:
A woman put her head in very saucily to inquire if I was an invalid and [if] I had been sick long. She stared her fill and not discomposing myself at all I stared at her. She soon retired, [and] I reposed quite nicely at my ease and though my head ached did not feel as much as I thought. Ate my chicken with a relish and troubled myself about nobody.
Later, she writes of a “Miss Hinkley”—presumably a nurse—who “was horridly shocked at my devouring meat . . . and stared her big eyes at me. [She] will probably come to deliver another lecture soon. I don’t care for the old cactus a bit.” At the letter’s closing, Lizzie implored them all to “write often to [their] little skeleton.”
Reading these letters, and imagining Lizzie’s dead-eyed stare at nosy women on public transit and overbearing, fussing nurses—imagining her eating with relish and troubling herself about no one at all—I feel a kind of mourning setting in. More than thinking about beautiful, kind, faultless Beth, who chatted endlessly about goodness and piety and nothing at all, I imagine instead this wasted young woman—barely ninety pounds, her hair falling out, so goth she married death itself—calling herself a “little skeleton,” and chuckling at her own dark joke.
Of course I didn’t always need my mommy. I did not want her narrative for my life. I actively rejected it.
In my day-to-day—my relationships, my friendships, my education, my job—I progressed along a normal path. I made my own choices, some good (grad school, thoughtfully selected tattoos), some bad (a string of unfortunate significant others, an ill-advised pixie cut). I started a career and got engaged and made my student loan payments every month and got married. But for some reason—a reason I never fully understood—my mother seemed to think I was permanently fourteen years old. “But you hate needles,” my mother said to me when I was in my mid-twenties, and I encouraged her to get a flu shot by telling her I’d gotten my own.
“I don’t love them,” I said, “but I get shots all of the time. I haven’t been scared of needles in ages.”
“But you won’t let anyone near you with a syringe,” she said.
“Yeah,” my sister echoed. “Remember how they tried to take your blood when you were a kid and six fat nurses had to hold you down?” Ah yes, the six fat nurses: identical and round and probably wearing jaunty mid-century nurses’ caps. Archetypal, misremembered unto fictional.
“That’s how I used to be,” I said. “I’m not like that anymore.”
“I’m your mother,” my mother said. “I know you better than you know yourself.”
This idea—that my mother knew that a young version of myself was more me than me, and that only she had access to that knowledge—bothered me so much I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What a thing to say. What a thing for a mother to say to her adult child who she rarely sees.
When I brought it up to my therapist, he drew upon the metaphor of a seesaw. It is possible, he explained, to make a seesaw sit level. As long as the participants on either side are the same weight, and sit in the same way, they will both be facing each other. But the minute that changes—the minute someone leans back or kicks off from the ground—the equality is altered. “When children become adults,” he said, “there’s an unspoken pact. Even though you were, once, a kid, you aren’t anymore, and your relationship has to change, or else it won’t. The minute one person acts like the kid, or one person acts like the kid’s parent, the balance shifts and you revert to the dynamic of your old relationship.” In other words, if you are the sort of person who needs an adult to remain a child, it is possible, through narrative, to keep him or her that way.
When she was a baby and sat playing on the floor of the family home, Lizzie’s older sisters built a tower of books around her. She was so agreeable about it, they kept going until she was entirely concealed. Then—losing interest in the game—they wandered away and forgot about her. When the Alcott family discovered that baby Lizzie was missing, they searched and searched. Eventually they found her “curled up and fast asleep in her dungeon cell,” Louisa wrote in her journal. “[She] emerged so rosy and smiling after her nap that we were forgiven for our carelessness.”
There are so many ways to read this story. Lizzie as inherently passive. Lizzie as a good-natured child. Lizzie as a character in a novel engaging in some good, old-fashioned foreshadowing. That last one is the one I cannot shake: Lizzie sitting obediently as her family built a sepulcher of words around her.