Still, at times, the two men had the capacity to spellbind. In later years, Louisa wrote of how, on one of their excursions, they took passage on a boat without any means of paying the fare. When pressed for payment, they offered the only thing they had of value: their eloquence. They rose before the assembled passengers and spoke brilliantly of things seen and unseen. When they had finished, the crowd took up a collection for the two travelers, which was handed over to the captain. Finding that the donations exceeded the price of the passage, the captain offered the remainder to Alcott and Lane. True to their principles, however, the reformers refused to accept even a penny. As if completing a mathematical proof, they remarked, “You see how well we get on without money” and went calmly on their way.13
Back at Fruitlands, however, there was no calm. The very day that Alcott and Lane set forth on a recruiting tour, Abba looked out the farmhouse window to see dark clouds gathering. In the fields lay the season’s crop of barley, cut but not yet harvested. Joseph Palmer was away, tending to his cattle, and there was not a single man available to bring the grain into the granary. When the storm came, all would be ruined. As lightning darted across the sky, Abba called urgently to her three eldest daughters and to William Lane. Thrusting a basket into every hand, she hurried them into the fields, exhorting them to gather as if their lives depended on it. As the rains neared, they labored with a fury, dragging their loads to the granary and then dashing back to fill the hoppers again. At last the storm broke, and the little band ran for cover, but not before they had rescued enough barley to last for a few weeks.14
On the whole, the yield of all the consociates’ plowing and planting was worse than disappointing, and when Lane and Alcott returned from the last of their autumn tours, it was clear that the colony’s food stores would not last the winter. The sufficiency of the firewood, too, was seriously in doubt. The health of the tiny group was also becoming less robust. William Lane fell ill with a fever and required nursing for an entire month, too weak to raise his head. Eventually, his father also fell ill. Louisa, usually the most vigorous of children, was coughing heavily and complaining of pains in her side and head. As for Bronson, Abba reported to her brother Samuel that he was “low indeed.” He was growing feeble and nervous. The tone of his voice was sepulchral, and his thoughts were turning morbid. Thinking that some rest would help him, Abba suggested that he take a short, quiet journey in a chaise. Her husband replied darkly that, when he did journey, “it will be a long one and alone.”15 The prospects had become so bleak that they caused Bronson to question the very structure of his most personal relationships. One day in November, he privately accosted Lane, putting to him a question whose seed the Englishman had already planted in Bronson’s mind: “Can a man act continually for the universal end, while he co-habits with a wife?”16
Bronson certainly would have known what answer to expect. Lane had long believed that Bronson’s attachment to Abba and the girls was arresting his spiritual development and undermining the Fruitlands experiment. The example of the Shakers seemed to argue Lane’s point. Although he sincerely respected Abba’s capacity for hard work, he felt that her pride had not yet been eradicated and that her maternal love outweighed all other considerations. He wrote to his friend Oldham, “Mrs. Alcott has no spontaneous inclination towards a larger family than her own natural one, of spiritual ties she knows nothing.”17 When he visited Emerson in mid-December, Lane announced that he and Alcott now agreed that they had been wrong in lauding the maternal instinct and the family. They now both realized, he said, that such ideas were “the very mischief.”18
And yet, when Bronson placed the matter bluntly before him, Lane wavered. He had no desire to play the role of “that devil [who] comes from Old England to separate husband and wife…though it might gratify New England to be able to say it.”19 Lane also knew that, without Abba, he and Alcott alone could not sustain a community. Although he now regarded some kind of separation as “inevitable,” he refused to say the decisive word in the matter. If by the late autumn of 1843 Bronson’s and Abba’s marriage was teetering on the brink of collapse, Bronson was no less to blame than his meddlesome friend.
Circumstances were urging Bronson toward a crisis. Fruitlands had consumed virtually all his and Lane’s earthly resources. If they went back to the life they had left behind, they would be destitute. Then there was the opinion of others to consider. If Fruitlands collapsed, who would again believe in the chance for a virtuous life on earth? In the late autumn of 1843, this question was causing Bronson Alcott to think very hard. In search of his soul, he had rejected much of the world. Perhaps what he required was one final, great renunciation.
Bronson’s idea that he could save himself and his colony only by leaving his wife and daughters may have been partly inspired by the book that had dominated his formative years: The Pilgrim’s Progress. At the beginning of Bunyan’s allegory, the central figure, Christian, has a premonition that his city is soon to be destroyed by fire from heaven. Shaken by this intuition, he urges his wife and four children to join him in fleeing from the peril. However, his family cannot understand his strange preoccupation, and their hearts harden against him. Christian begins to run. When his wife and sons cry after him to come back, Christian “put his fingers in his Ears, and ran on crying, Life, Life, Eternal Life: so he looked not behind him, but fled towards the middle of the Plain.”20
Bunyan’s advice seems clear: no worldly attachment, not even the pleas of one’s own astonished family, must stand between a person and salvation. Unlike Bunyan’s pilgrim, Bronson had loved his wife and daughters enough to take them with him on his flight from a wicked world. Now, however, it seemed clear to him that the path of the soul must be individual. The person who was forced continually to pause and consider the wants and welfare of dependents would never have the focus and peace of mind that were the preconditions of enlightenment. Seeing no other way to preserve his ideal, Alcott decided that Lane must be right: if there were to be a Fruitlands at all, there must be one for men and another for women. To his distraught mind, dissolving the Alcott family seemed the only way to save it.
For Abba’s part, she too was confronting the possibility that loyalty to her marriage might be the swiftest road to ruin. The shortage of fuel and foodstuffs, as well as the illnesses that were breaking out among the group, were daunting omens for the coming winter. Matters of moral salvation and family unity were yielding precedence to the starker question of mere survival. Abba had also begun to question the basic wholesomeness of the consociate ideal. Bronson and Lane had always been noticeably imprecise about the sexual arrangements that would prevail among the ideal universal family, and now Abba seems to have begun to worry about this unanswered question. She confided to her brother Samuel that she could see “no clean, healthy, safe course here in connexion with Mr. L.”21 To another brother, she wrote enigmatically, “I am not dead yet either to life or love, but the last few weeks have been filled with experiences of the deepest interest to me and my family.”22
The precise meaning of these words cannot be deciphered. Perhaps Lane had decided that the spirit of community extended to the bedroom and was arguing for conjugal privileges. No less likely, given Lane’s high regard for all forms of self-denial, he was urging Bronson and Abba to abstain from relations with each other.23 Whether or not Bronson’s chastity was at issue, Abba plainly feared for his sanity.24 For her, the Fruitlands experiment was becoming too physically perilous and too emotionally strange to continue much longer. No matter how much she loved her husband—and no matter how bleak the prospects for a woman of her time who left her husband—Abba was perhaps almost as ready for a parting as Bronson.
The precise terms upon which Bronson contemplated dividing the family are unclear. Perhaps it was suggested that the Lanes and Alcotts would merge into the Shaker community. Perhaps Bronson meant for his wife and daughters to decamp entirely, leaving him and Lane to reconstruct Fruitlands as a sort of single-sex mona
stery. It is difficult, however, to see how either of these courses would have furthered Alcott’s purposes. Absorption into the Shakers would have obliterated the conceptual foundations of his vision; it is inconceivable that Lane and Alcott might have converted the Shakers to vegetarianism or that the Shakers would have willingly cast aside Mother Ann in favor of Father Bronson. As for requiring Abba and the girls to depart, one wonders how Alcott and Lane would have lasted the winter, having sent their only remaining workforce into exile. There was, moreover, a peculiar irony in asking the women to leave for the supposed good of the community. When the other members of the commune had departed and Lane and Alcott had impulsively gone off on their pilgrimages, Abba and her daughters had been the Fruitlands community. This fact, however, was evidently not in Bronson’s mind on November 20, the date when Louisa’s journal first mentions the possibility of a separation.
November 20 was a busy day for Louisa. She awoke at five, washed the breakfast dishes, and then helped her mother with the rest of the work. In the afternoon, she looked after Abby May so that her mother could concentrate on her chores. Since Anna was visiting relatives in Boston, Louisa probably had more to do than usual, yet she still had time to make some things for her doll in the evening. She relates what happened next in matter-of-fact language. After a talk with Lane, Bronson consulted Abba and Louisa, asking if they saw any reason to separate. Louisa added, “Mother wanted to, she is so tired, I like it, but not the school part or Mr. L.”25
The tensions in the farmhouse continued without resolution for three more weeks. During that time, on a snowy day, Louisa turned eleven and her father forty-four. Bronson’s preoccupation with moral improvement did not take a holiday, however; in the evening, he quizzed the children as to the fault that troubled each of them most. Louisa named her bad temper, and no one seems to have disagreed. But even as Bronson emphasized self-restraint, Abba spoke up for the other pillar of Alcott girlhood: self-expression. Abba wrote a note to Louisa praising her diary, and Louisa proudly copied the little missive into her journal:
I like to have you make observations about our conversations and your own thoughts. It helps you to express them and to understand your little self. Remember, dear girl, that a diary should be an epitome of your life. May it be a record of pure thought and good actions, then you will indeed be the precious child of your loving mother.26
All the pure thoughts and good actions Louisa could muster did not forestall the inevitable crisis. Even as the family celebrated the double birthday, Lane wrote to Oldham that Abba had seized control of the situation. She had informed him that, in response to the wishes of her friends, she had determined to “withdraw to a house which they will provide for herself and her four children.” Moreover, she proposed to take the furniture with her, a gesture that would, as Lane put it, “leave me alone and naked in the new world.”27 Apparently Abba and Bronson kept the extent of their differences from the children for several weeks. The silence was finally broken barely two weeks before Christmas.
Charles Lane was not present; perhaps he had foreseen a tempest and thought it best not to be nearby. Nevertheless, he was having an unpleasant trip. In Concord, he was arrested for having refused to pay his taxes. When he declined to call on any friend to answer for him, the authorities had no choice but to put him in jail. There he languished for a short time until a local samaritan paid the arrearage. Coming home from a visit to Margaret Fuller in Boston, Emerson found Lane waiting for him, looking “sad & indisposed.”28
On December 10, in the most anguished entry of her Fruitlands journal, Louisa wrote of a family meeting. In the evening, after another reading from The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bronson assembled Abba and his two older daughters for a talk. Louisa did not record exactly what was said, but what she did write was telling enough: “I was very unhappy, and we all cried. Anna and I cried in bed, and I prayed to God to keep us all together.”29
Neither Louisa the girl nor Louisa the grown woman made frequent mention of God in her journals. She did not often “pray in words,” and she almost never divulged the content of her prayers.30 Now, however, as her earthly father threatened to withdraw, she called desperately upon her Father in Heaven. Seven months earlier, she had been led to believe that family was everything. She had been asked to accept the notion that her own father was so exceptionally wise and loving that he could be not only her father but the sire of an entire community of work, devotion, and love. Now, that father who had seemed equal to any challenge seemed capable of any betrayal. Her mother, she knew, would still do all within her power, but on a December night in a lonely place, that power seemed small indeed. Louisa could not confidently look to her parents for security. She was only eleven years old.
The answer to Louisa’s prayers lay with her father. Bronson Alcott had been driven to the most important decision he would ever make. He was being asked to choose, irrevocably, what he was going to live for. If he renounced his family and strove on alone, he might at last discover the god of his imaginings. But if he did so, he would always know that he had betrayed perhaps an even greater trust. He would be deserting the wife whom he had cherished and who had selflessly adopted his ideals as her own. Still worse, he would turn his back on the four little girls whom he had tried to acquaint with the beauty and perfection of their souls. He would never finish the work of teaching them how to love, share, and make brave choices, and the final example he would have set for them would be a lesson in human faithlessness and self-absorption. He could achieve the transcendence he sought only by committing a selfish sin, while the sinful world held forth the trust and love of others. Seven months earlier, when he brought his family to Fruitlands, Bronson had supposed that he could both separate himself from the world and take its dearest aspects with him. Now, that attempt to have the best of both had failed. He had to decide who he really was.
He did not decide immediately, and no surviving writing illuminates the process by which he chose. At Christmas, Abba sang and played with the children, trying to cheer them as the snows mounted outside the door. Bronson, however, was in Boston, attending a convention devoted to some obscure reform. During this trip, evidently, he reached his decision. The world and the family had won. On January 1, 1844, a day for new beginnings, Bronson returned from Boston. Though it is not clear precisely when or how he broached the news of his decision, it soon became understood that he would not be a consociate, but an Alcott. To ease their hardships, the family decided to accept an offer to move in with a local family, the Lovejoys, until spring. Abba wrote in her diary with obvious relief that “all connection with Fruitlands” had been dissolved.31
The response to Bronson’s decision was predictably mixed. Lane, disappointed with what he saw as the triumph of his partner’s weak, uxorious nature, packed his bags. On January 6, he and William left to live with the Shakers. Five days later, Abba exulted in a letter to her brother Samuel, “All Mr. Lane’s efforts have been to disunite us. But Mr. Alcott’s conjugal and paternal instincts were too strong for him.”32
But the accumulated weight of the preceding months—the unrelenting toil, the continual moral self-examination, the gradual defection of his followers, and, finally, the near collapse of his family—had almost crushed Bronson. Not long after Lane’s exodus, before his own journey to the Lovejoy home could take place, Bronson climbed the stairs of the Fruitlands farmhouse, lay down on his bed, and turned away from the door. There he lay, the prey of dark reflections. He did not stir. He refused to eat. It is generally assumed that he had decided to die.
Then, on the edge of despair, a change occurred. In her story “Transcendental Wild Oats,” Louisa wrote nothing of the debate over whether her family would separate. However, she wrote long, poignant paragraphs about the days when her father lay silent, teetering between life and death, sanity and madness. These paragraphs are fiction, but they are the only account of those transformative hours by someone who observed them. For good reason, modern biographers of Br
onson have rarely been able to resist quoting them at length:
Then this dreamer, whose dream was the life of his life, resolved to carry out his idea to the bitter end. There seemed no place for him here,—no work, no friend…. Silently he lay down upon his bed, turned his face to the wall, and waited with pathetic patience for death to cut the knot which he could not untie. Days and nights went by, and neither food nor water passed his lips. Soul and body were dumbly struggling together, and no word of complaint betrayed what either suffered….
But the strong angels who sustain and teach perplexed and troubled souls came and went, leaving no trace without, but working miracles within. For, when all other sentiments had faded into dimness, all other hopes died utterly; when the bitterness of death was nearly over, when body was past any pang of hunger or thirst, and soul stood ready to depart, the love that outlives all else refused to die. Head had bowed to defeat…but heart could not grow cold who lived in its tender depths….
“My faithful wife, my little girls,—they have not forsaken me, they are mine by ties that none can break. What right have I to leave them alone? What right to escape from the burden and sorrow I have helped to bring? This duty remains to me, and I must do it manfully. For their sakes, the world will forgive me in time; for their sakes, God will sustain me now.”
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