Lulu’s teething was a huge crisis, and the child was sometimes fretful. Yet her courage and exuberance never failed to thrill her fragile, aging aunt. In the ocean at Nonquit, the three-year-old plunged into the sea and started walking toward Europe. Alcott was very close to her two nephews, John and Fred, but taking care of a child of her own was quite different than visiting children who were well taken care of by their mother. Anna and her boys often took Lulu for days at a time, days that later would become weeks and months, but the pressures of actually raising a child both invigorated and exhausted Alcott, who continued to write and to share in the care of her father. To make matters more interesting, Lulu had a questioning, ferocious personality that was uncannily like that of her namesake, her beloved Aunt Weedy.
Alcott seemed obsessed with Lulu’s health and gave her homeopathic remedies for everything. Lulu had a variety of health problems. Louisa had been raised to think that the aim of life was the “regular movement of the bowels,” and, like an old-fashioned governess, she monitored Lulu’s digestion and even considered dosing the little girl with her own opium, which she had relied on for years.6 She was as frustrated as any parent at Lulu’s misbehavior—the little girl could not seem to do things on time, and she was always asking questions instead of expressing polite obedience.
Although Louisa tried to apply her father’s loving educational methods, and although she truly believed, along with Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the great Bronson Alcott, that children were wise and innocent and closer to God than adults, she found Lulu’s lack of obedience trying. In the year 1884, when Lulu turned four and began to have the kind of temper tantrums that are typical of a four-year-old, Alcott’s journals went from thirty years of voluble entries detailing her day-to-day life to terse one-line comments.
On New Year’s Day of 1884, in an incident that must have painfully evoked her own childhood, Lulu was so naughty that Louisa decided she needed an official spanking. Urged on by the heartless Miss Cassall, Louisa explained to her Lulu that she was going to be forced to spank her because of Lulu’s bad behavior. Lulu was beside herself with guilt and fear. She wanted to get it over with as fast as possible. “Do it, do it,” she urged her reluctant aunt. It’s hard to imagine that the frail, ill Alcott could administer much of a spanking, but the effect was disastrous at any rate. Lulu is “heart broken at the idea of Aunt Wee’s giving her pain,” Alcott wrote in her journal. “Her bewilderment was pathetic, & the effect as I expected a failure. Love is better but also endless patience.”
In June of 1884, Alcott finally sold Orchard House to educator William Torrey Harris and his family for $3,500. The place was filled with memories, the small rooms haunted by Alcott’s life as a young woman in her twenties and by the characters she had created and set in those rooms in Little Women. The scene of Bronson’s final successes at the Concord School of Philosophy in the arched wooden structure behind the house gave another dimension to what Alcott was leaving behind. “Places have not much hold on me when the persons who made them dear are gone,” Alcott wrote.7
With the money from the sale of Orchard House, the always frugal Alcott bought a cottage on Buzzards Bay at Nonquit, a lovely small seaside town where Alcott could enjoy the seascapes, so different from the gloomy Concord woods. In Nonquit, Lulu ran wild with pleasure. In the fall, the family moved back to Boston, first to the Bellevue Hotel and then to rented rooms in Chestnut Street. Eventually, Alcott would lease a townhouse in the heart of Beacon Hill at 10 Louisburg Square, trying to create an urban center for the family that would be more convenient than Orchard House had been.
As she played with Lulu and tried to keep the feisty young girl in line, and as she took care of her sick father and moved back and forth from house to house, Alcott’s own illness took up more and more of her time. Her delight in being Lulu’s parent faded as the pain in her body grew worse and worse. She suffered from tremendous aches in her legs, severe digestive problems, and lungs that seemed to have some kind of blockage.
The world around Alcott was changing and she struggled to change with it. An extraordinarily open-minded woman even as she sickened and lost her energy, she often signed herself in her letters “yours for reforms of all kinds.” She wasn’t kidding. Historically it was becoming clear, as President Grant gave way to President Hayes and the country again suffered the trauma of an assassinated president when James Garfield was murdered in 1881 and succeeded by President Chester Arthur, that reform was in the air. Alcott was in favor of women’s suffrage; she deplored what was happening in the southern states; she watched as Henry James took her ideas and characters and made his own brilliant career. In 1886 he published The Bostonians, a novel that comments on the communities in which she had grown up.
Over in England, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, which Alcott was too sick to read. Robert Louis Stevenson published Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and in France the pointillist painters broke up the unified surfaces of representation, and Georges Seurat showed his fabulous Un dimanche aprés-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte to horrified viewers.
In medicine, however, advances were few and far between. It was the age of invention, the age of electricity, and the soon-to-be-invented telephone, but it wasn’t until 1890 that the knowledge of the way bacteria are spread finally filtered down to the practice of surgery and the surgeons at Johns Hopkins donned rubber gloves to perform. When it came to helping her health, Alcott was as willing to try new things as she was in every other area of her life. Alcott was happy to have a go at everything available, including in 1884 the fashionable mind cure practiced by Anna B. Newman, a follower of Mary Baker Eddy, whose Christian Science movement was already gathering followers and properties. Mrs. Newman, like Eddy and others, believed that if the mind were cleansed, the body would follow suit. She urged her famous patient to clear her brain of thoughts and imagine blue sky and sunshine.
Although Alcott persisted in trying Mrs. Newman’s mind cure, she was deeply skeptical of psychological cures for her physical ailments. First, Mrs. Newman told her to be passive; she complained, and then Mrs. Newman told her she wasn’t positive enough. “God & nature can’t be hustled about every ten minutes,” she wrote in her journal. “Too much money made and too much delusion all around.”
In her rejection of the mind cure and the theories of Mary Baker Eddy, Alcott was also rejecting her father, who was a fan and disciple of Mrs. Eddy. Born in Bow, New Hampshire, the daughter of strict Congregationalists, Eddy was a slender girl with serious health problems. She suffered from fits in which she shook and fell on the ground—what we call grand mal seizures. These fits alternated with what seemed to be acute paranormal powers. She married George Washington Glover, a building contractor, when she was twenty-two.
One day after a fall on the ice, Mrs. Glover felt that she was able, by calling on her inner spirit, to heal herself. This event led to the founding of Christian Science, whose bible was Mrs. Eddy’s book Science and Health. In her early days of practice, Mrs. Eddy’s patients were limited to local people, including the millworkers in and around Lynn, Massachusetts, where she had moved in 1864. Her first visitor from the world of the intellect, the Boston world, was none other than Bronson Alcott, who was drawn by what now may seem like old-fashioned faith healing but which at the time seemed a rational alternative to nineteenth-century medicine.
Of course, Alcott was always a believer, and after reading Mrs. Eddy’s book, he called on her at her house in Lynn, where he was to pay many visits. Bronson was favorably impressed by Mrs. Eddy. He wrote in his journal that he found her one of the “fair saints.” He was moved by her accounts of “metaphysical healing—curing by sympathy with spiritual power over the mind. . . . Drugs are wholly unused and her cures have been many.”8
Mrs. Eddy was building an empire, and although Bronson was not an empire builder—he almost entirely lacked worldly ambition—he was impressed. He wasn’t alone. The most popular m
inister in Boston, the Reverend Edward Everett Hale, wrote of Mrs. Eddy that “she has taught me more truth in twenty minutes than I have learned in twenty years.” My own family, which in the nineteenth century clustered on Boston’s South Shore, were avid followers of Mrs. Eddy. My grandmother believed that doctors made everything worse and that the only cures were available through the spiritual world—not as eccentric a belief then as it would be now. When my father had tuberculosis as a child, she probably saved his life by avoiding medical treatment in a hospital where he might have been exposed to bacteria carried on every doctor’s dirty hands. (He was born in 1918, but modern medicine came slowly to the Boston suburbs.) When she broke her leg, she set the bone herself in unimaginable pain. She limped for the rest of her life.
But when Bronson brought the happy news of this new healing method to Concord and described it to the gathering of intellectuals and neighbors in Emerson’s library, he felt a distinct chill. There was something about Mrs. Eddy that grated. Perhaps it was her dreadful use of the English language, a problem for which Mark Twain unmercifully attacked her in his book about Christian Science. A fan of Emerson’s, Eddy nevertheless wrote more like Alcott—not a good thing. “Emerson says, ‘hitch your wagon to a star,’” she wrote. “I say Be allied to the deific power, and all that is good will aid your journey, as the stars in their courses fought against Sisera.”9
Perhaps it was her ambition—as Mrs. Eddy’s movement grew, it became a huge business with its own real estate, its own newspaper, and a significant endowment. Twain pointed out that Mrs. Eddy was doing with the human spirit what Jay Gould and Andrew Carnegie were doing with the country’s natural resources. She was a robber baron of the soul. “A marvelous woman; with a hunger for power such as has never been seen in the world before,” Twain wrote of Eddy. “No thing, little or big, that contains any seed or suggestion of power escapes her avaricious eye.”10
Bronson continued to be a fan and even took his failing daughter Louisa to see his new enthusiasm. Louisa was unimpressed but desperate. Hence when her illnesses got worse, she turned to a similar idea of mind cure with Mrs. Newman. Unlike her father, Alcott had become infinitely practical. Even as he had scrupulously avoided accepting the way the world works and the ability of men and women to sink to depths of greed and manipulation, his daughter had been forced to learn the truth about human nature the hard way. If her father was the Hoper, she was the Realist. While Bronson and Mrs. Eddy exchanged flowery complimentary letters, Louisa turned her attention to a different kind of healing—massage. She found massage helped as much as mental or spiritual manipulations.
As Alcott’s illnesses moved to the center stage of her life, her time was taken up more and more by fainting spells, dizzy collapses, vertigo, fatigue, rheumatism, rebellious stomach, and fright, as she wrote in her journal.11 She almost never felt well enough to work anymore, and her human interactions were pushed away as she focused on getting through each day and the long, often-sleepless nights. Her beloved Lulu spent more and more time with Anna and her boys. Even as the burden of raising a child was lifted more and more from the ailing Alcott, the intense joys of raising a child were also diminished.
In August of 1885 during a relatively pain-free summer with Lulu at Nonquit, Louisa sorted through letters and journals and again burned many of them in a ritual that she carried out more and more frequently as she became more famous and her feelings of being besieged and intruded on became sharper. “Not wise to keep for curious eyes to read & gossip lovers to print by & by,” she wrote in her journal.12 Although the Alcott version of privacy had always included total access by the family to each other’s private journals and letters, as Elizabeth Peabody found out to her horror, the family ethic also was to protect the family from talk in the outside world. In a note on her journals in 1878, Alcott had written, “These journals are kept only for my own reference, & I particularly desire that if I die before I destroy them they may all be burnt unread.”
On the other hand, Alcott took the time to annotate her own journals, and on the same day that she was sorting and burning, she seemed to have a desire to leave some of them behind. “Experiences go deep with me,” she wrote. “I begin to think it might be well to keep some record of my life if it will help others to read it while I’m gone.”
Intermittently, Alcott kept on working. Her work had become the center of her world—the activity that kept her feeling worthwhile and alive. Under the care of Dr. Conrad Wesselhoeft, she persuaded him that she should be allowed to work thirty minutes a day. In July of 1886, she finally finished Jo’s Boys, the third novel in the trilogy that included Little Women and Little Men, which were still selling in the thousands of copies every month. Thomas Niles ordered 50,000 copies as a first printing of Jo’s Boys, and the orders poured in for it before the press even started to roll.
As Alcott’s energy faded and her illnesses caught up with her, her work became more autobiographical. The energy of fiction fueled by yearning seemed to fade away, and she no longer had the fire or the passion to transform her life into art. Jo’s Boys is a sad, subdued novel in which Jo writes about trying and failing to accept fame and being happy that she has been able to provide for her beloved Marmee. Jo considers herself “a literary nursery-maid who provides moral pap for the very young.”
After finishing her last book, Alcott took her father to what would be his final session at the Concord summer school. The old man had recovered amazingly from his stroke, but he was fading again and used his ailing daughter, as always, as his maid, nurse, and financial support. The two fragile old people heard Julia Ward Howe talk about the women of Plato’s republic and chatted with Elizabeth Peabody and savored the deliciousness of the Concord summer days. “Very hot,” Alcott wrote in the abbreviated notation that had become the language of her journal. “Queer people. Glad it’s done.”
Back in Boston, Alcott, desperate for a way to stay healthy enough to function at all, was helped once again by Dr. Rhoda Lawrence, who ran the convalescent home in Roxbury. In an effort to improve her health, she was ready to cut herself off from her family and from Lulu, probably the sources of whatever good health she had. A young woman named Hatty Haskell had finally solved Alcott’s child-care problems. With the exception of occasional arguments that wearied Alcott more than she could express, Haskell would become Lulu’s babysitter for her remaining years with her failing Aunt Weedy.
In January of 1887, feeling very sad and lonely about it, Alcott moved into Dr. Lawrence’s home on Dunreath Place and away from her family, who now rotated between the Thoreau house in Concord, the house at 10 Louisburg Square, and the house in Nonquit. “Away from home & worn out with the long struggle for health,” she wrote. “Have had many hard days but few harder than this.”13 At last she would have all the rest she needed.
Whatever Alcott’s illness might have been, by this time it required much more than Dr. Lawrence had to offer. Even relieved of the cares of family and work, Alcott got worse. She had nightmares and delusions like the ones that had dogged her after the Civil War when her body suffered mercury poisoning. She thought she saw dead people; she thought Lulu had been killed. She was unable to digest solid food, and lumps appeared on her neck and legs. She was “so tired of such a life!” she wrote. She began to predict her own death. Her journals become a soulless recounting of every day’s illnesses, doses of homeopathic remedies, narcotics, and other substances, as if she had gone to dutifully recording changes in her health from actually writing a journal that reflected her life. Lulu visited often, and on good days Alcott was driven to see her family in Boston and Concord, but she never again was at the center of family life in the way that had both nurtured her and driven her crazy for all of her fifty-five years.
Even in the last months of her life, there were moments of hope when the symptoms eased and Louisa felt physically well enough to enjoy whatever there was to enjoy at Dr. Lawrence’s Roxbury home. Her doctors promised her that after another year
of rest she could look forward to twenty years of life; a fine example of the delusions of nineteenth-century medicine.
On the first of January, she wrote that although still alone “and absent from home I am on the road to health at last.”14 But she was not on the road to health at last. Whether Louisa May Alcott was suffering from an immune disorder like lupus, or whether a combination of exhaustion, lousy nutrition, and the damage done by the mercury that poisoned her system twenty-five years earlier, she was slowly losing the battle with death. She was also less needed than she had been for years. Anna seemed to do well at running the household that now consisted of Lulu and her governess, Anna’s two boys, and the ailing Bronson.
In the final months of her life, Alcott seemed shut down but content. Her journals show short visits to Concord, exhilaration over Fred’s glorious marriage, and concern over her father’s health.
Bronson, who had never completely recovered from his stroke, was now fading fast and, as always, with an inappropriate amount of hope and great expectation. “Most people buy religion, I have it,” he announced to his daughter, now his beloved Weedy, on one of his clearer days. Still, in February, Louisa was sad to see her father’s skinny, dying, diminished form. She had, as always, a clear view of reality that escaped him in all circumstances. “A mere wreck of a beautiful old man,” she wrote. “Sorry he did not slip away sooner.”15 Even in the last month of her own life, Louisa took care of her family. She sent money to Anna to run the household. She wrote as much as she could of a new story titled “Sylvester” and a collection of children’s tales she was writing for a fictional Chinese version of her Lulu titled “Lu Sing.”
A lot has been written about Louisa’s final visit to her father on his deathbed in the house on Louisburg Square. In Madeleine Stern’s account of the events of March 1, 1888, which she based on letters, journals, and news accounts of that day, and specifically on a letter written by Anna Alcott Pratt to Alf Whitman, Louisa walked past his two nurses, undid her shawl, and leaned over the beloved old man. She brought flowers. Her sister Anna stood on the other side of the bed.
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