Who, then, was Abigail May Alcott at the age of forty-two? She still felt strongly that she had made an excellent choice of husband. She considered him the best and dearest of men, and she remained confident that he was destined to live on “in the…eternal reverence of posterity.” On their twelfth anniversary, two weeks after Bronson had left for England, Abba commented that the time since their wedding had been “great years for [her] soul” and that her life had become one of “wise discipline,” bringing “great energies into action.” Defeat, she felt, had made her strong.68 She was thankful for her husband’s misfortunes, for they had “nerved [her] up to do and bear.”69 When she thought of her husband, staunchly philosophical, willing to die for his principles, she realized that it was not the principles themselves, but his dedication to them, that made her love Bronson so. In her journal, she wrote as if she were addressing him directly: “It is your life [that] has been more to me than your doctrine or theories. I love your fidelity to the pursuit of truth, your careless notice of principalities and powers, and vigilant concern for those who, like yourself, have toiled for the light of truth.” The day after Bronson sailed, Abba had resolved to “hope all things, believe all things.”70 Fidelity was a virtue that Abba could understand, and her resolutions tended to be uncommonly firm.
On Abby’s second birthday, Uncle Junius took Abba and the girls for an excursion in his rowboat, the Undine. Abba wrote, “I seldom omit these occasions for showing my children the joy I feel in their birth and continuance with me on earth. I wish them to feel that we must live for each other. My life thus far has been devoted to them, and I know that they will find happiness hereafter in living for their mother.”71 On this day of pleasure, as sunlight danced on the water, Abba pondered the mysteries of nine-year-old Louisa, whose explosive nature continued to puzzle her. In her journal, she told of her sincere distress about her daughter’s spirit, which seemed to promise so much but which also seemed beyond Abba’s power to reach and soothe:
United to great firmness of purpose and resolution, there is at times the greatest volatility and wretchedness of spirit—no hope, no heart for anything, sad, solemn, and desponding. Fine generous feelings, no selfishness, great good will to all, and strong attachment to a few.72
While his children back home decorated a miniature portrait of him with flowers and hoped for his safe return, Bronson pondered how the two shining aspects of his life, his family and Alcott House, might be brought together. He rejected the possibility of transplanting his wife and daughters to England, where he found nothing attractive apart from Alcott House. By far his preferred option was to take the essence of Alcott House back to Massachusetts with him. Finding that he was already bound to Wright and Lane “by ties which cannot be sundered,” Alcott proposed to bring the two men with him to America. But he wanted them as more than neighbors. His plan was to establish, with their help, a “new plantation in America,” a community of men and women consecrated to the ideals of education and culture that had underlain both the Temple School and its English counterpart. “It is not in Old, but in the New England,” he grandly announced, “that God’s Garden is to be planted, and the fruits matured for the sustenance of the swarming nations.” Like his Puritan forebears, Bronson aspired to found a society in the New World that would be a city on a hill, a beacon of morality in a fallen world. This task seemed to him as good as accomplished, and he would not hear of its possible failure. He wrote, “I would not scatter so lavishly in hope as to reap mortification and defeat…. The heart’s visions shall all be realized.”73
The second Eden imagined by Wright, Lane, and Alcott would be agrarian. Taking Alcott’s own daughters and Lane’s son William as its first pupils, this great living school would be an ideal laboratory of moral education. Many of the three men’s founding principles were decidedly radical. If their home were truly to be an earthly heaven, it must do nothing that made the rest of the world into more of a hell. Thus, all commodities that came from the labor of slaves were to be strictly excluded. In addition, the community would do away with money. On the principles that slaughtering animals was a form of murder and that consuming their milk, eggs, and labor was a species of theft, the Alcottian paradise was to shun the use of animal products and would rely as little as possible on animals for work.
The remaining major tenet of the community was the most extraordinary. Lane strongly believed that the most persistent enemy of human rights and social equality had always been the primitive preference that people felt toward their own families. He had written a detailed pamphlet in which he explained that the social evolution of humankind would not be complete until the human race arrived at a “third dispensation,” whereby all people would cast aside their selfish devotion to their own spouses and children and would form, instead, a single, egalitarian human family. Lane persuaded Alcott that their community should be a model for this kind of “consociate” family, in which no member would have a higher claim than any other on the love and loyalty of his fellows.
For a brief period, Alcott hoped to bring a small army of followers from England to inaugurate the colony. He wrote to Abba that he was daily receiving letters from various parts of the kingdom expressing interest in the venture. As he composed lists of potential recruits, Alcott was already thinking about exclusion as well as inclusion. He wanted to populate his paradise with a moral elite for which, he expected, few would be suited. He wrote to Abba, “Almost every human being is disqualified now for such an enterprize [sic]—scarce one (of all our friends even) is emancipated from the bonds of self, and made free in the freedom of love.” The scant number of spiritually eligible persons, however, did nothing to dim his enthusiasm. The more he pondered his dream, the more ecstatic his anticipation became.74
However, Bronson’s hoped-for legion of approved acolytes failed to materialize. In the end, Wright was unable to persuade even his own wife, who feared that the ocean voyage would prove too perilous for their baby. Only the two most fervid English enthusiasts were game for the adventure. Lane resigned his post at the Price Current. Wright severed his connection with Alcott House, leaving the school in the hands of William Oldham, another of Greaves’s disciples. Through the letters he received from Lane, Oldham was to follow, first eagerly and then anxiously, the progress of Alcott’s search for an American Utopia. In mid-September, Lane, Wright, and Alcott, along with Lane’s son William, boarded a ship for Boston.
Abba did not know what to think. She doubted her power to adapt to the kind of community her husband proposed, yet she had no heart to stand in the way of his achieving the “rich harvest of life and love” that he imagined.75 He had written to her that she was almost the only person in the world who believed in his dream; how could she bear to confess that she, too, doubted him?76 Moreover, she was certain that the purifying atmosphere of her husband’s community would benefit her children. If her daughters were to fare well in the exchange, Abba decided, “surely then am I not injured, for they are the threads wrought into the texture of my life—the vesture with which I am covered.”77 Even before Bronson’s ship set sail for home, she began to travel about, trying on her own to find an acceptable property for the imagined community to call home. If her husband’s grand project did fail, she would not be to blame.
After Alcott left England, Carlyle, having had more time to reflect on the nature of his American visitor, delivered a more critical verdict to Emerson than he had previously rendered. “I consider him entirely unlikely to accomplish anything considerable, except some kind of crabbed, semi-perverse, though still manful existence of his own.” Although Carlyle admitted that living a manful existence was “no despicable thing,” Alcott’s choice of British associates horrified him. He had known Greaves, and he considered him a blockhead. Greaves’s followers, in Carlyle’s view, included some “bottomless imbeciles” and he admonished Emerson not to be seen in their company.78
Abba worked busily to prepare the cottage for her husband’s return, de
termined that, even if the house was small, he would find it “swept and garnished.” When Bronson and his allies arrived in Concord on October 21, she exulted, “Good news for Cottagers! Happy days these! Husband returned, accompanied by the dear Englishmen, the good and true. Welcome to these shores, [to] this home, to my bosom!” She wished, she wrote two days later, “to breathe out my soul in one long utterance of hope.” Louisa was ecstatic too; she asked, “Mother, what makes me so happy?” Abba could not reply. She explained in her journal, “A big prayer had just then filled my breast and stifled utterance.”79
As Alcott planned his commune, one might have wondered whether he was trying to march toward a shining future or to flee from a problematic past and present. Surely, he had reasons aplenty for wanting to escape Concord. As ever with him, living life within conventional society meant running up debts. By trying to create a self-sufficient community in the wilderness, one that would entirely renounce the use of currency, Bronson hoped at last to free himself from a world that seemed always to be demanding payment. Moreover, he was evidently tired of people, and he desperately craved greater solitude. For a while, Concord had seemed a sufficiently distant refuge from urban pressures and discontents, but it seemed to his sensitive perception that Concord, too, was falling victim to the encroachments of steam and steel. Alcott’s proposed departure from Concord was, in part, an escape from mechanized modernity, a flight from both social and physical machinery.
But the escape could not be effected at once. An unforeseen obstacle quickly arose. In marked contrast with the militant celibacy of Charles Lane, Henry Wright seemed incapable of regulating his sexual life. His wife and child in England notwithstanding, Wright fell in love with a thirty-two-year-old radical feminist named Mary Gove, who had left her abusive and impecunious husband some time earlier. Both politically and physically passionate, she was impossible for Wright to resist. Weary of the severely spartan diet that Lane and Alcott had imposed at Hosmer Cottage and equally unwilling to abstain from other pleasures, Wright left his fellow reformers in the early winter of 1842–43 to seek his own version of the new Eden in Mrs. Gove’s bedroom. Alcott was appalled at Wright’s faithlessness. In a heated interview before the latter’s departure, Alcott reproached him for his disorderly habits and unsteadiness of purpose. When the door of the cottage closed behind the exiting Henry Wright, Alcott also shut Wright out of his mind. From that day hence, there is not a single surviving scrap of paper on which Alcott so much as scribbled Wright’s name. Even when Wright died of cancer in Mrs. Gove’s arms just two years later, Bronson made no note of the event.
Charles Lane, whom Louisa remembered as the “Dictator” of Fruitlands.
(Courtesy of the Fruitlands Museum)
Charles Lane, on the other hand, settled comfortably with the Alcotts—comfortably, at least, for himself. Whatever physical energies he derived from the divine emanations of Concord, he appeared intent on conserving them. When Lane wrote to Alcott’s brother Junius, describing his life at Hosmer Cottage, the latter could not have failed to notice the rather unequal division of labor that Lane described. While Lane gave the children lessons in French, geography, and other subjects, he evidently took no part in the manual labor of the household. Whereas he observed that “Mr. A. saws and chops, provides water,…prepares all the food, in which he tries new materials and mixtures, of a simple character,” Lane himself passed his mornings in his room, enjoying “much God-like quiet.”80 He heartily approved of the simple breakfasts at the cottage, which consisted of bread, apples, and potatoes and were served, not on plates, but only with napkins. The only spice in evidence at these meals came from “conversation of a useful and interior kind.”81
Initially, at least, Lane cut an interesting figure among the liberal New Englanders to whom Bronson introduced him. When not busily turning out articles for reform journals, he appeared alongside Bronson at intellectual gatherings and symposia. Evidently, they made an attractively balanced team; Bronson’s mild tone and airy idealism were brilliantly complimented by the sharper accents of the Englishman, who spoke with a hard intellectual clarity. Emerson thought that the two could not open their mouths without proclaiming a new solar system.
The two also achieved a public relations coup when it was discovered that Alcott had refused to pay his annual dollar-and-a-half poll tax. On a winter’s day, the town constable came to the door of Hosmer Cottage and presented Alcott with an arrest warrant. Alcott meekly consented to be removed to the jailhouse, and when informed that the jailer was not on the premises, quietly waited for two hours while the constable went to look for him. As Alcott stood by, warming to the idea of his small civic martyrdom, a local attorney, Samuel Hoar, heard that his fellow Concordian was in danger of being incarcerated. Much to Alcott’s disappointment, Squire Hoar paid the tax for him, and Alcott was told to go home. Nevertheless, Charles Lane seized on the incident to write an impassioned article for the Liberator on the subject of personal freedom, arguing that the payment of taxes should be voluntary and presenting Alcott as a brave resister of state slavery.
Yet Lane also had a talent for ruffling feathers. He strode through life with a firm conviction that he was morally superior to everyone he met, and he felt no great shyness about asserting this opinion. Ignoring Carlyle’s caveat, Emerson had offered both Wright and Lane a room in his house when they first arrived in Concord. After briefly accepting this hospitality, Lane declared that Emerson lived all too comfortably and that his host’s table was “too good for my simplicity.”82 Emerson could detect no trace of warmth in the Englishman, of whom he commented, “His nature and influence do not invite mine, but always freeze me.”83 As to the heft of his visitor’s philosophical opinions, Emerson soon agreed with Carlyle. In his journal, he wrote that Lane and Wright were “two cockerels.”84
Not only Emerson was put off by Lane’s hauteur. During a philosophical discussion in which Emerson and Thoreau both took part, Lane surprised the company by accusing Thoreau, of all people, of ethical laxness and immoral self-indulgence. Lane averred that the love of nature that Thoreau championed was “the most subtle and dangerous of sins”—indeed, “a refined idolatry, much more to be dreaded than gross wickedness.” When Thoreau suggested that Lane had no faculty for appreciating nature and therefore did not know what he was talking about, Alcott sided with Lane. Both he and his English friend, Bronson explained, had gone so far beyond material objects and were so filled with spiritual love and perception that their love of nature was incomprehensible to less enlightened natures. Lidian Emerson, who recorded the scene, found it “ineffably comic,” although she noted that no one was laughing.85 Small wonder, then, that when Emerson and Thoreau were asked to join Lane and Alcott’s utopian venture, each discovered that he had better things to do.
No one was laughing at Hosmer Cottage either. Abba found it hard to abide Lane’s cold insistence on discipline in all things and his hostility to innocent fun; on Bronson’s and Louisa’s joint birthday, she complained to her journal that she was being “frowned down into stiff quiet and peaceless order.” To a woman accustomed to laughter and frolic, particularly one who had just finished enjoying five months of liberty, the change was especially irksome. By her own description, she was becoming morbidly sensitive to every detail of life, and she was starting to fear that her husband’s experiment might “bereave [her] of [her] mind.”86 Seeing to the wants of Wright and Lane had also tired her out. The day before Christmas, in hopes that a short absence from home would help to put matters right, she left Concord to visit her Boston relatives. The fact that, of her four daughters, she took only Louisa with her, suggests that Louisa, too, was chafing under the influence of Charles Lane.
After her initial outburst of joyous enthusiasm when her father came home, Louisa seems to have returned to reality with a bump. After her carefree summer with her mother and sisters, the presence of two strange Englishmen under the family roof required a tremendous readjustment. Moreover, she c
ould hardly have been pleased to find that the more dominant of the two men was utterly without humor and wholly intolerant of frolicsome natures like hers. High-spirited children tend to regard sudden impositions of authority as challenges, and they tend to fight back. A contest of wills thus began to unfold at Hosmer Cottage, one whose intensity can be inferred from the somewhat pleading letter that Bronson wrote Louisa on her birthday, the same day that Abba lamented the climate of “restriction and form” that now pervaded her home.
Since coming back to Concord, Bronson wrote, he had been continually near Louisa, whom he called his “honest little girl,” meeting her daily at the fireside and table, observing her in all her walks, studies, and amusements. Yet she had seemed to repel his attentions, valuing her distance more than his attempts to please and assist her. Bronson tried to explain his fatherly wishes: “I would have you feel my presence and be the happier, and better that I am here. I want, most of all things, to be a kindly influence on you, helping you to guide and govern your heart, keeping it in a state of sweet and loving peacefulness.” It baffled him, then, to discover that she was determined to resist him, that she would rather form her own spirit than accept the spiritual shape that he imagined for her. He was utterly sure that what he offered her was best. She seemed equally certain that she did not want it. Her stubbornness must have tried his patience, but it was with patient, persuasive tones that he pursued his argument: “Will you not let me do you all the good that I would? And do you not know that I can do you little or none, unless you are disposed to let me; unless you give me your affections, incline your ears, and earnestly desire to become daily better and wiser, more kind, gentle, loving, diligent, heedful, serene.” Then, as if knowing that his argument would fail, Bronson altered his tone. Without expressly accusing Louisa, he scribbled out a long litany of character flaws, including anger, impatience, evil appetites, greedy wants, ill-speaking, and rude behavior. These, he threatened, would drive the good spirit out of the poor, misguided soul, leaving it “to live in its own obstinate, perverse, proud discomfort; which is the very Pain of Sin, and is in the Bible called the worm that never dies.”87 In the space of a few lines, Bronson’s gentle admonition had transformed into a Calvinist sermon in miniature.
Eden's Outcasts Page 14
