Louisa May Alcott

by Susan Cheever

  Psychological studies have recently shown that adversity can be a more powerful motivator than support. Successful people often remember being told that they could not do what they have, in fact, done brilliantly. Stubbornness drove them. Their parents or teachers have told them they will never make any money, or that they will never get a college degree, or that they will never marry and have children. The urge to prove authority wrong has often spurred human beings to unusual success. In 1854 there were no psychological studies of this kind, but it’s easy to see how a woman like Louisa May Alcott, told that she couldn’t write, vowed to write. “He could hardly have hit on a surer way to stoke her determination,” writes John Matteson.

  In describing this moment, however, Louisa May Alcott’s biographers vary markedly on when it happened. In the prestigious Library of America volume of Louisa May Alcott, Princeton Professor Elaine Showalter has this scene located in 1854, when Louisa was twenty-two and had yet to publish anything under her own name. She had recently been to Dedham and the experience of being trapped as a paid companion was fresh in her mind as she wrote the essay. Yet John Matteson in Eden’s Outcast has the same incident happening almost a decade later in 1862. Indeed, it appears in Louisa May’s journals in May of that year. Was she writing as a moneymaking writer and remembering the slight when she wrote, “Mr F. did say ‘Stick to your teaching you can’t write.’” In the 1862 journal, she adds, “Being willful, I said, ‘I won’t teach and I can write and I’ll prove it.’” That she did.

  Writing reveals character. A sentence or paragraph of writing can be like a fingerprint, so idiosyncratic and individual that a person’s character and eccentricities can be read there by an astute critic. Louisa’s essay about Dedham is the essay of a young woman, still upset and confused by Richardson’s behavior, a woman who isn’t sure exactly what happened to her in that cold, unwelcoming house. “My honored mother was a city missionary that winter,” the essay goes, “and not only served the clamorous poor, but found it in her power to help decayed gentlefolk by quietly placing them where they could earn their bread without the entire sacrifice of taste and talent which makes poverty so hard for such to bear.” In 1854, Louisa knew a great deal about such sacrifices of taste and talent. If Fields delivered his verdict in the spring, she showed him he was wrong by December when another publisher, George W. Briggs, published her book Flower Fables in an edition of 1,600, and it “did well,” as she noted in her journals.

  The Flower Fables combine the melodramatic inclination of the stories and plays Louisa had written for her family with naturalism and a powerful yearning for love—the elements that would mark Louisa May Alcott’s mature work. Moral fables originally written for Ellen Emerson, they feature flower fairy heroines and an evil Frost King. In the last story, a girl named Annie abuses a flower she has been given to help her be good and is enslaved by the nightmarish spirits of pride, selfishness, and anger. “Each tale is a pathetically simple fulfillment of a wistful desire for love,” writes Martha Saxton.

  The chronology of Louisa May Alcott’s work is clear from “How I Went Out to Service” to Flower Fables, from melodramas to the more serious autobiographical novel Moods that combines domestic detail with a melodramatic shipwreck. In fact, the scene in which Fields discouraged Louisa from writing must have taken place in 1854, before Fields took over the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly in 1856. By 1862, James Fields had changed his mind about Louisa May Alcott—he now thought she could write. By 1862 he had already published at least one of Louisa’s stories about “the pathetic family”: “A Modern Cinderella; or, The Little Old Shoe” in his magazine, a story Louisa based on her sister Anna’s romance with the Alcott family friend John Pratt.

  In 1862, Louisa was thirty, a woman who had suffered through a few crushes and turned down at least one marriage proposal and who had dedicated most of her time with a great deal of success to becoming a writer who could help support her family with her earnings. By then the Alcott family had returned to Concord, and they had suffered another great loss, a loss that put all Bronson’s eccentricities and Abba’s tears in a new perspective. But all that and a lot more were in the future. How many people in Boston could guess that the Civil War was the disaster for which they were headed, or that her participation in the war would change Louisa’s life forever. Who could know on that day when Louisa May Alcott first visited James T. Fields that she would become one of the most famous women in the world, while Henriette Sontag, the Willis family, and even the great James T. Fields are only remembered because of their connection to her?

  5

  Orchard House.

  1858–1862

  Greening, Porter, Northern Spy, Winesap, Baldwin, Pearmain: the Alcotts decided to name their new place Orchard House for the varieties of apple trees that grow on its east side. It’s one of the oldest houses on Concord, built in the 1600s by John Hoar as a workshop for Christian Indians of the Wampanoag tribe. In 1857 when the Alcotts bought its twelve acres for $945—once more with a $500 loan from Emerson, who would again be their neighbor across the street—the house was such a dilapidated wreck that it was thrown in for free with the land by the owner John Moore.

  Even from the comfort of Beacon Hill, Bronson and Abba Alcott had begun missing Concord, which had come to seem like home. Louisa disliked the town, she said, but she was old enough to live anywhere she pleased. On September 22, Bronson Alcott took the train to Concord, signed the papers drawn up by S. E. Sewall to acquire the new house, had dinner with Thoreau, and spent the night with the Emersons.

  Even better, the new place was next door to what had once been Hillside, the Alcotts’ former home in Concord. It was too close to the same road and backed by the same steep ridge. “I walk down Hawthorne’s Lane with my wife,” Bronson Alcott wrote with unusual clarity of approaching the new house from their old house through the woods. As always he was an optimist. To him the wreck was a gold mine of architectural potential. “Surveying our place from that perspective, and seeing how the prospect will be opened and improved when the barn opposite is removed to give full view of the willows by Mill brook and of the landscape beyond. It seems the fittest spot for a house,” he added, “protected so by the hills on all sides from round East to West, and enjoying the south so pleasantly. And the house standing quietly apart from the roadside to give room for the overshadowing elms to lend their dignity and beauty to the scene and bring out its homely aspects; the brown porches, many gables, architectural chimney tops; the hills through which winds the grassy lane. . . . Tis a pretty retreat, and ours; a family mansion to take pride in.”1

  Emerson was pleased to have his friend Bronson back; Thoreau was delighted. Even Hawthorne, who was in England when he heard that the Alcotts had bought the wreck next door, was pleased in his own, slightly less affectionate way. His delight was in the prospect of another Alcott failure that might benefit him as a landowner. He wrote his friend Howard Ticknor asking him to keep an eye on the possibility of the Alcotts being forced to move again. “I should be very glad to take it off his hands,”2 he wrote of the acres next to his own house.

  The Alcott family, although used to discomfort, was not quite pathetic enough to move into the new house as it was. While they oversaw the renovations, they rented half a house near the railroad station on the other side of town, on Bedford Street. May and Louisa both spent a great deal of time in Boston, and Anna was helping out at a nearby farm owned by a family named Pratt. Lizzie and Abba sometimes stayed with the Peabodys, who had rented the Alcotts’ old house from the Hawthornes, who were in England.

  Orchard House was to be the family’s final refuge, the place that would come to be the symbol of their family life and which still stands there at the bottom of the steep hill today. In many ways, it is Bronson Alcott’s accidental masterpiece. At a time when few Americans valued anything for its age—the word “antique” had a very different and negative meaning in 1857—Bronson Alcott understood how history could be writ
ten through objects. He studied the town records to learn the history of the old house and quarreled endlessly with the “unconquerably stupid” carpenters he hired to be sure that the renovation was done with respect. In return, the townspeople mocked him, saying that he had used enough wood on the graceful split-wood fence at the front of the house to build an entire new house. Bronson quoted Thomas Fuller: “He that alters an old house is tied as a translator to the original.”

  Orchard House today is a mecca to those who tour through the rooms where Louisa May Alcott set the scenes of Little Women even though, of course, the “real” scenes of the sisters’ teenage years happened in the yellow house down the street. The pilgrims who line up to go up the narrow staircase and look hungrily at the small bed in Louisa’s room and the minute desk between two windows where she wrote Little Women seem to be searching for something in the books on the shelf, in the party dress laid out on the bed.

  Perhaps because the impossible choices that faced Louisa May Alcott are still the impossible choices facing most women, Orchard House still vibrates with significance. The ghosts seem to be there in the very angles and doors of the place, the narrow staircase and the small scale of everything from the beds that are half the size of modern beds and the tiny rooms—hardly large enough to accommodate a modern walk-in closet.

  The young women who come to Orchard House, dressed in low riders and halter tops in the summer, sweaters and puffy parkas in the winter, are looking for a way to honor their awkward, tomboy Louisa May Alcott and Jo March selves and to succeed as women at the same time. How can they be girls without being the simpering, obedient, sexually dressed image of what we still call femininity?

  More than 150 years have passed since the Alcott family moved into Orchard House. The girls who chuckle at seeing Louisa’s “mood pillow” would be unrecognizable to the Alcott sisters or the fictional March girls. Their inner lives might look very familiar. If marriage is a woman’s goal, her primary job is to make herself attractive to men. A look at clothes and advice we give young girls makes it clear that attracting a man who will be a provider is still one of the major jobs a young woman has in our culture. We give them Barbie dolls and makeup. We tell them to be calm and quiet and to remember that men are predatory hunters so that successful women must pretend to be tantalizing, elusive prey.

  Yet Louisa May Alcott somehow escaped this fate. We know that it was a combination of accident, intelligence, world events, and focus on her family that facilitated her. She loved men, but she refused to marry. She had at least one proposal, one she apparently considered because the man in question (we don’t know who it was) might have been able to help the family financially. Louisa would have been happy to marry for the sake of the family, but she was unable to marry for the sake of herself. After a long talk with her mother—no, she did not love the man in question—Louisa turned the man down.

  On another occasion, when she was twenty-eight, the vibrant Louisa attracted a Southern gentleman of forty whom she met on the train from Boston. “A Southerner, and very demonstrative and gushing,” Louisa wrote in her journal, “called and wished to pay his addresses, and being told I did not wish to see him, returned to write letters and haunt the road. . . . He went at last and peace reigned.”3

  Louisa May Alcott now seems heroic for her refusal to compromise who she was—a rebel, a tree climber, a girl who loved to be free—free of the house, free of the schoolroom, free of the expectations of her family and her society. She was a woman, but she refused to be falsely feminine. Yet she triumphed, and her great novel, a novel in which a girl just like herself is beloved and successful, is still read and reread.

  In 1855, two years before the Alcotts moved back to Concord, yet another May relative had offered a house rent-free for the summer in Walpole, New Hampshire. At first Walpole, a small town on the Connecticut River, seemed a piece of good luck. The picturesque town with its central green and white-spired churches is now famous for being the home of Burdick Chocolate and one of the best restaurants in New Hampshire. But in 1857, it was the sticks, a town in the middle of nowhere. Open to the green New England summers and the glorious autumn foliage, it was definitely country living. Louisa felt isolated and quickly left for a job in Boston.

  In Walpole, Abba continued her charity work and in June started ministering to the Hall family, a mother and children who lived in a room above what had once been a pigpen. Outraged at the filth in the family’s rented rooms, Abba sued the landlord, a deacon, as Louisa angrily noted in her journal. Pigs and swine were thought to cause disease, and the Halls and the Alcotts all came down with scarlet fever—much as the Alcotts had in 1850, but this time it was a far more serious case. The two Hall children died, and May and Lizzie were very sick. Louisa came home to help with the nursing.4

  Lizzie Alcott’s heart began weakening, although overall it seemed that she was improving. Louisa, reassured, returned to Boston, where she lived in an attic room of a pleasant boardinghouse run by Alice Reed. Bronson started off on a lecture tour—his Conversations were becoming slowly more popular, and he was in some demand.

  By the time the family had decided to return to live in Concord at the beginning of 1858, Lizzie Alcott’s illness had caught up with her. The family had bought Orchard House. It was in their temporary quarters, the rented house on Bedford Street, a house that has long since been torn down, that the Alcott family as Louisa knew it—and as millions of readers would come to know it—began to come to an end. Life hadn’t been easy for the family of four sisters led by an impractical seer and held together by a solid, sometimes depressed woman who struggled with her own anger. But looking back even on the hardest times, it seemed that Louisa’s first twenty-six years were spent in a golden dream of family. It was a life where adversities were less difficult because the family dealt with them together and the whole world was cushioned by the family that, although pathetic, was also somehow divine.

  A room had been set up in the rented house for Lizzie, who was now too weak to continue pretending that she was not sick as she had been doing for months. In January a doctor who had finally been consulted in Concord, Dr. Geist, told the family that there was no hope for a recovery. It was no consolation that there had never been anything that the doctors or the medicine of that time could have done. The family gathered in the small rooms—the twenty-ninth place where they had lived in Louisa’s twenty-six years. Everything else was put on hold as snow piled up outside and the family poured its considerable energy into Lizzie’s last days, during which her suffering was slightly alleviated by ether and opium.

  In Little Women, Beth has a quiet, dignified death, a fictional death. Although young Lizzie Alcott was a graceful, quiet woman, she was not so lucky. A twenty-two-year-old whose disease had wasted her body so that she looked like a middle-aged woman, she lashed out at her family and her fate with an anger she had never before expressed. They responded with love. Louisa acted out stories and comic scenes from conversations with her Boston landlady to make her sister laugh. Bronson sat by her upstairs bed and had an intimate conversation with her. Always the curious one, even at his daughter’s deathbed, he asked if she had any idea where she would be going after death. “Have you some notions of your state after the change?” he asked gently. “Not so clear as I would wish,” replied his daughter, as always an Alcott. Her physical pain was forgotten in a moment of intellectual examination, she told him, “but I prefer going as soon as may be.”5 Thoreau dropped by to visit the invalid and talk about Nature with Bronson.

  Bronson distracted himself from his youngest daughter’s illness with the renovations of Orchard House on the other side of town. The run-down place became a member of the family during this time. As Lizzie faded, the new house took on a vivid life. It would be a safe place, ending the years of nomadic risk. On March 13, he noted in his journal that “bricklayer builds the west parlour fireplace, fashioning it after my design, the bricks projecting from the jambs and forming an arch.”6 Th
en on March 14, his journal continues in the same tone: “This morning is clear and calm and so our daughter Elizabeth ascended with transfigured features to the heavenly airs she had sought so long.”7

  Louisa and her mother were at Lizzie’s bedside when she took her last breath at around three in the morning. “A curious thing happened,” Louisa wrote in her journal, “and I will tell it here for Dr. G. said it was a fact. A few moments after the last breath came, as Mother and I sat silently watching the shadow fall on the dear little face, I saw a light mist rise from the body and float up and vanish in the air. Mother’s eyes followed mine, and when I said, ‘What do you see?’ she described the same light mist. Dr. G. said it was the life departing visibly.”8

  On March 15, a beautiful early spring day, the Emersons, the Alcotts, Thoreau, Anna and her employers the Pratt family, and Concord’s new schoolmaster, Franklin Sanborn, invited to town by Emerson—all gathered for Lizzie’s funeral and burial in the new Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, just established, on a ridge near Concord. The cemetery, a short walk from town, replaced the crowded old Concord Cemetery across from the village green. It was built along modern lines as a parklike Eden where visitors to the dead might be uplifted by the idea of natural beauty.