Louisa May Alcott

by Susan Cheever

  Bronson Alcott had wanted to start his community closer to Concord, but Charles Lane insisted on the Wyman Farm, perhaps to get his protégé out of the reach of Emerson’s ideas and Emerson’s skepticism and Emerson’s generosity. At Fruitlands there would be only one patron—Charles Lane.

  In 1843 the Wyman Farm was approached by a cart track. These days the road to the farm runs along a ridge well above the farmhouse. In the distance, you can see the mountains of New Hampshire, while nearby Mount Wachussett appears in one of the many folds of green and blue landscape stretching away to the north. But the Fruitlands farmhouse does not have this view. The farmhouse at the top of the ridge belongs to someone else, it wasn’t there in 1843, and a road winds down the hill into what feels like a deep green pit or ravine, with the faded red Fruitlands farmhouse at the bottom. Bronson Alcott called this situation “the bowl of Heaven.” On a summer day, the air is stifling. On snowbound winter days, this must have seemed to be literally the end of the world.

  The Fruitlands farmhouse is only twelve miles due west of the Hosmer Cottage, but it feels as if it is on another planet. For the Alcott girls, there would be no more running down to the edge of the meandering Concord River or walking into town; instead, a wild clamber up a steep 500-foot ridge brought them to a place where they could see and feel their isolation. On arrival, Abba was so surprised by the size of the house that she compared it to a pigsty. The four girls lived under the roof in a crawl space around the central chimney so small that visitors today can only peer into the darkness of it from the top of a narrow staircase.

  Still, they were all young—Anna was twelve, Louisa ten, May eight, and Lizzie just two—and soon enough it was the height of a glorious New England summer. In the morning, after a five-thirty cold bath and lessons with Mr. Lane, Louisa was free to hike up the ridge from the house and admire the amazing view. Although to the people at Fruitlands, the outside world seemed impossibly far away, history proceeded with a grim, inexorable pace. The antislavery Liberty Party held its first convention. Alcott family birthdays were always big occasions, and for Lizzie’s birthday the family made a woodland bower filled with small presents to which they escorted the happy girl.

  Members of the Consociate family began to arrive to crowd into the narrow beds in the small farmhouse and create Bronson Alcott’s and Charles Lane’s new community. Another Englishman, Samuel Bower, came, hoping to practice his nudist principles in freedom. He was joined by Isaac Hecker, a refugee from Brook Farm, George Ripley’s community, which Hecker thought was far too worldly. Hecker, who heard imaginary voices and sometimes suffered from nervous fits—he may have been schizophrenic—had once upon a time been a New York banker. He abandoned the fleshpots of Brook Farm, where residents ate meat and wore leather, for the ascetic valley run by Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane. Ultimately, Hecker became a Roman Catholic priest, but his months at Fruitlands seem to have been a time of mental instability.

  Another member of this asylum in the woods was Abraham Everett, who had rechristened himself Wood Abram. Samuel Larned came from the community in Providence that had admired Alcott from afar. For most of the months at Fruitlands, Abba Alcott was the only woman in residence in a world where women did all domestic work without help—now a particularly overwhelming load. Ann Page was the one woman who arrived as company for Abba. “Are there any beasts of burden on the place?” Louisa has her ask Abba Alcott in Transcendental Wild Oats. “Only one woman!”2 replies the exhausted Abba.

  But in Louisa’s story Ann Page was soon enough expelled from Eden for having sneaked a serving of fish while visiting a neighbor. Eating fish was a flagrant violation of the strict vegan principles at Fruitlands. When questioned about her infraction, Ann Page protested that she had only eaten a bit of the tail of the fish. Louisa May Alcott’s Timon Lion turned Old Testament on her. “The whole fish had to be tortured and slain that you might tempt your carnal appetite with one taste of tail.”3

  Another Fruitlands recruit was Joseph Palmer, a neighboring farmer who owned land and ran a butchering business in Fitchburg. Alcott and Lane chose to ignore Palmer’s profession in the light of his fervor for their community. Palmer had been jailed for refusing to cut off his beard at some point, and at Fruitlands he found the hirsute freedom he was seeking.

  In July, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Ellery Channing paid a visit to the farmhouse, where things were still going well. But all this excitement was a distraction from the crops that were planned to feed the entire community in the long months of winter. Using an unmatched team of ox and horse—two animals that had presumably given their express permission to be used—Bronson, Lane, and their recruits started planting; but there were so many other things to do. In New England, by the beginning of August, there are cool days in which a slight shift of the light forecasts the deadly cold winter to come. In the end, the only crop that grew at Fruitlands was barley. By the time it had to be picked, the men were off visiting other like-minded communities. The barley had to be haphazardly harvested by Abba and the children using sheets and their own clothing.

  By that time, Fruitlands and its eccentricities had become a rich source of local gossip. People said that Bronson would only eat fruits and vegetables that grew above the ground, reaching for heaven, while he disdained the root vegetables that grew downward. Perhaps they exaggerated, but it would have been hard to exaggerate the lengths to which Bronson went in pursuit of the idea of purity. The pathetic family had never been conventional, but dressed in their linen frocks and shoes and living on fruits, vegetables, and grains while only provisionally using animals to plow, the Consociate family certainly reached new heights of weirdness. “[He] held that all the emotions of the soul should be freely expressed,” Louisa Alcott wrote later of Isaac Hecker in Transcendental Wild Oats, “and illustrated his theory by antics that would have sent him to a lunatic asylum, if, as one unregenerate wag said, he had not already been in one.”4

  By November, Anna, Louisa’s older sister, had been shipped off to her grandparents in Boston—it was hard for Abba to part with her and the extra pair of hands, but even one less body to care for was a relief. As soon as the cold set in, both Louisa and William Lane got sick. Bodies exposed to tremendous physical stress and the teeming bacteria colonies of other bodies often break down, and this is what happened to the children at Fruitlands that autumn. The colonists who had been happy to populate this new Eden in the summer fled from the cramped house in the cold months, and Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane were off on their long trips to visit other communities.

  In the hope of fostering familial honesty, Abba instituted a family tradition that would survive the Consociate experiment and reappear in Little Women—the family post office. Everyone was encouraged to use it to communicate with each other and the group. Abba also used it for little notes of praise and encouragement for those who deserved them. Part suggestion box, part reward system, this box was her way of keeping the family together on many days when it seemed to be flying apart.

  Some historians write about Fruitlands and the other Edenic communities fostered by Associationism as part of a desperate, eccentric reaction to the coming of industrialism. By December of 1843, something more important than Lane’s ideas had happened in the Alcotts’ world—the new railroad had been built as far as Waltham, and it would extend to Concord on the way to Fitchburg by June of 1844. The railroad would bring factories. It would end the real agricultural life that was all Bronson Alcott had known. In reaction, he created a fantasy agricultural life. “Industrialism had spread its first great wave across the countryside,” writes Bernard De Voto in his brilliant book The Year of Decision, 1846. “The sensitive found only two courses: they could flee from industrialism or they could master it with virtue. . . . The sensitive had reached perihelion at Fruitlands, where the Great Inane voiced thoughts while Mrs. Alcott and the children gathered in the barley, a poor wench was excommunicated for eating a shred of vile flesh, and in the end Alcott tu
rned his face to the wall and hoped to die because virtue had failed.”5

  Whether or not it was a reflection of the end of the agricultural world as they knew it, at Fruitlands that winter the Alcott family had their existential crisis, their long dark night of the soul. Whatever happened there came close to splitting the family apart, causing a permanent emotional distance between Bronson and Abba and the children and further bankrupting them. There on a snowy hillside where they had enjoyed a lovely summer, the family came to a sexual, emotional, and financial turning point that almost destroyed them. On this, all biographers agree. How much of the crisis was sexual and how much domestic and emotional is not as clear. Before Fruitlands, Abba Alcott adored her husband enough to follow him where he led in spite of doubts and disagreements; she worshiped him.

  Before Fruitlands, both Abba and Bronson lived in pursuit of a finer world, whether that was expressed in progressive ideas about education or Utopian ideas about community. After Fruitlands, Abba never again overrode her own doubts in order to do what he suggested. Bronson’s idealism was no longer the engine of the family but rather an eccentric, sometimes lovable, quirk. The pursuit of ideas and the ability to change the world were modified to become a pursuit of service to others, a worthy goal with less disruption and fewer expenses. Ultimately though, Abba’s dedication to service brought on a disaster worse than bankruptcy.

  Before Fruitlands, Abba and Bronson had had an apparently happy, straightforward sexual connection. Both agreed with Sylvester Graham that ejaculation was a dangerous loss of male fluids and that sex should occur only once a month; the experience of Fruitlands threatened to darken and distort this forever. As a ten-year-old, Louisa watched and absorbed this radical shift in the power balance of her parents’ marriage.

  One of the earliest and best biographies of Bronson Alcott, Odell Shepard’s 1937 Pedlar’s Progress, sketches out the problem between the three adults in power at Fruitlands. After visiting a nearby Shaker community run on the principles of the eighteenth-century Shaker leader Mother Ann Lee, Charles Lane’s belief that family and marital love are destructive came to a head. Lane felt that Alcott’s ties to Abba and his daughters were holding him back. On their long walks from Fruitlands to Providence and Boston, Lane tried to argue Alcott into his own belief that no one could achieve transcendence unless they severed all earthly bonds and lived without family ties as the Shakers did. In the celibate Shaker community, everything was shared, including families. (The Shakers’ belief in celibacy is one reason why the once-thriving Shaker communities of New England are no longer with us.)

  Charles Lane’s conviction, expressed again and again in the haylofts and spare rooms where the two men slept, was that only by abandoning all temporal and earthly loves could a man ever rise to what Lane called the love which is divine. Lane owned Fruitlands and had recently helped pay many of Bronson’s debts, and this gave his argument force. He was also a man whose intellect Bronson had much admired and not only because Lane was such a huge admirer of Bronson’s ideas.

  When Bronson was in residence, Abba Alcott argued the opposite case as if her life depended on it. It did. Family and marriage were the path to spiritual transcendence, she pointed out. In describing this battle for the body and soul of Bronson Alcott, Shepard admits what he doesn’t know about the sexual aspects of the struggle. “If the dark truth must be told, they were definitely reticent on this topic,” he writes.

  At some point, Bronson was forced to choose between what he felt were his higher ideals and his earthly family. “It was a real Gethsemane for Bronson,” writes Sandford Salyer in his 1949 biography of Abba, Marmee.6 Both Shepard and Salyer also make the point that the disagreement between Bronson and Lane had broader implications, and was a clash between the community-minded ideas of Europe and the reverence for the individual of the new world. This was a clash that had already led to the American Revolution and was now being relived in the shabby old Wyman Farm that had become Fruitlands. Both biographies suggest that Lane urged Bronson to become celibate, while Abba understood that her sexual relationship with her husband was the basis of the connection that had held them together so long and under so many pressures.

  In Madeleine Stern’s 1950 biography Louisa May Alcott, Stern sidesteps the issue of sex but reports that things at Fruitlands got so heated that Abba Alcott refused to sit down to dinner with Charles Lane even though she had cooked the dinner in question. A family conference in December, described in the young Louisa May Alcott’s journal, brought up the question of the family’s separation and left Louisa and her sisters going to bed in tears. “In the eve father and mother and Anna and I had a long talk,” Louisa wrote in her journal on December 10. “I was very unhappy and we all cried. Anna and I cried in bed, and I prayed God to keep us all together.”7

  A few days later, Abba Alcott played her ace. She announced, with a courage that is hard to imagine, that it was over. She was planning to take the girls and all the furniture that she had donated to Fruitlands. They would move to rented rooms in nearby Still River that her brother had helped her acquire. Would Bronson go with them or would he join Charles Lane in a search for divinity on earth?

  “I see no clean, healthy, safe course here in connection with Mr. L.,” Abba wrote to her beloved brother Sam in that dreadful winter, adding in another letter to her brother Charles, “I am not dead yet either to life or love, but the last few weeks here have been filled with experiences of the deepest interest to me and my family.”8

  What did she mean? There is no question that Charles Lane and Abba Alcott were fighting for the soul of Bronson Alcott, but were they also fighting for the body of Bronson Alcott?

  In her 1980 book The Alcotts, Madelon Bedell writes more directly about the possible sexual implications of the Fruitlands struggle. “We must conclude that Abby had begun to suspect that there was an attraction between her husband and Charles Lane that was personal and sexual as well as intellectual,”9 she writes. In Bedell’s account, Bronson was forced to choose between the man he loved and his family—certainly a difficult moment. Instead of being urged to be celibate, he is being urged to leave his wife for his teacher.

  Martha Saxton’s Louisa May Alcott, originally published in 1977, takes a different tack with the same set of letters and journals. Saxton tells a story of a marriage in trouble because of Bronson’s desire for sexual freedom. Many biographers have concluded that Bronson was a highly sexual man, partly from his veiled descriptions of male orgasm. Geraldine Brooks’s contemporary novel March about a fictionalized Bronson Alcott describes him as a man easily and deliciously swayed by women’s bodies. Saxton agrees.

  Of a visit Bronson paid to Emerson in December, Saxton writes that Emerson was amused by the grandeur of Bronson’s manner even in the face of failure and rejection. “Alcott was casting about for new roads to perfection,” she writes. “Not for the first time, he talked about abandoning the institution of marriage in favor of free love.” Emerson advised him against it. “Bronson wanted the freedom to experiment communally, spiritually and physically,” Saxton writes. “He discussed with his family the possibility of breaking up on many occasions.”10 In this version, the problem is not an American passion for individual freedoms, nor is it a sexual attraction to the fiercely intelligent and intolerant Lane. Instead, Bronson wanted permission to be free. He doesn’t seem to have had any specific woman in mind, although he had almost certainly met many interesting women on his recent travels with Lane.

  A more recent biography speculates that Lane wanted to sleep with Abba Alcott, not her husband. “Bronson Alcott had been driven to the most important decision he would ever make,” writes John Matteson of the events at Fruitlands in his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Louisa and her father, Eden’s Outcast. But what was that decision? “Perhaps Lane had decided that the spirit of community extended to the bedroom and was arguing for conjugal privileges,” Matteson writes. “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. Whether or not Bronson’s chastity was at issue, Abba plainly feared for his sanity.”11

  Faced with this decision, whatever it was, Bronson completely collapsed. He took to his bed, turned his face to the wall, and refused to eat for days. But at some point, his optimistic nature reasserted itself, and he asked for bread and water. In her account of Fruitlands, Louisa May Alcott describes his rising like a Phoenix from the ashes of his old self. “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 the sorrow I have helped bring?”12 Louisa has Abel Lamb exclaiming in Transcendental Wild Oats.

  Louisa’s version of the Fruitlands story is bitter and funny. “With the frosts, the butterflies, who had sunned themselves in the new light through the summer, took flight,” she writes of the people who had been happy to stay at Fruitlands in the summer months. But for those who were stuck there, “Precious little appeared beyond the satisfaction of a few months of holy living. At first it seemed as if a chance to try holy dying also was to be offered to them.” Instead of blaming the disaster on her father or the despised Charles Lane, Louisa reserved her bitterness for those old friends who had deserted them. “Then the tragedy began for the forsaken little family,” she wrote. “Desolation and despair fell upon Abel. As his wife said, his new beliefs had alienated many friends. . . . All stood aloof saying, ‘Let him work out his own ideas, and see what they are worth.’”13

  As the dream of Fruitlands vanished, even Emerson kept his distance. After his summer visit, he had written that the experiment that was doing well in July might not be thriving in December. His prophecy had come true. From twelve miles to the east he watched with an admiration that was useless to the starving, beleaguered family. Emerson admired Alcott for his honesty and intellectual ambition; he couldn’t help but notice that Alcott had been unable to provide for his family or even for himself. “The plight of Mr. Alcott!” Emerson wrote later. “The most refined and the most advanced soul we have had in New England; who makes all other souls appear slow and cheap and mechanical; a man of such courtesy and greatness that in conversation all others, even the intellectual, seem sharp, and fighting for victory and angry,—while he has the unalterable sweetness of a muse!”14