(As I prepare this post, I realize it’s pretty long . . . but what can I say? The Alcotts are a fascinating bunch and I got carried away! Read on, if you dare, for a loony utopia, Transcendentalism, a weird love triangle, and everyone’s all-time favorite, DADDY ISSUES.)
The Scene: A Massachusetts farmhouse in the dead of December, 1843. A table is set with a Spartan meal of unleavened bread and boiled apples. Around the table sits a forlorn and underfed family. The father is Bronson Alcott – educator, philosopher, and founder of the utopian colony they call home. The mother is Abigail May Alcott, a Boston blueblood who, despite her high-flown progressive ideals about women, now finds herself subjugated by her husband’s dreams. They face their eldest daughter, Anna, and their second-eldest, the 11-year-old with the volatile temper and the gift for a well-turned phrase: Louisa.
The colony is an abject failure, its membership scattered. Mentally, Bronson is disintegrating. At this very fraught moment, he asks his wife and daughters whether they should separate, allowing Bronson to join fellow colonist Charles Lane at a Shaker community – Charles Lane, the man obsessed with Bronson, possibly erotically. The man Louisa loathes for driving a wedge between her parents.
Louisa bursts into tears. In fact, they’re all crying.
This is Fruitlands. And it’s here, amid chaos and trauma, that Louisa – a mere kid! – begins forming a more adult idea of herself: as an artist, a spiritual pilgrim, and a hopeless sinner. It’s all there in the pages of her diary, in very poignant form. Let’s take a look at the astonishing, self-critical little girl who became an even more astonishing (and no less self-critical) woman.
Introducing Bronson Alcott
Throughout her life, Louisa May Alcott had Daddy Issues – and with a dad like Bronson Alcott, who wouldn’t? To really understand her perfectionism, at so young an age, you have to understand who her father was.
“A. Bronson Alcott” started out as Bronson Amos Alcox (or Alcocke, depending upon the family’s whim), the Connecticut farmer’s kid who received only the most rudimentary schooling before being forced to go out and earn around age thirteen. His mom was such a backwoods type, she smoked a corncob pipe. Bronson scrambled to educate himself, reading voraciously while working for a clockmaker, then as a peddler. But from the beginning, he was baffled by the business of making money; he ended his peddling career so much in debt, he had to walk the five hundred miles back home.
Eventually, Bronson became a schoolteacher in Boston. It was there he married Abigail (who came from a distinguished Boston family) and launched his Temple School. Bronson ran the school to make Rousseau proud; he believed children already possessed a vast store of innate goodness and knowledge that an instructor only needed to suss out with Socratic dialogue – or what Bronson liked to call “Conversations”. He wound up publishing a series of such Conversations in book form, which got him into hot water, as I’ll describe below. But no matter: Conversations also earned Bronson the admiration of all the leading New England progressive intellectuals, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller. Emerson was so impressed, in fact, that he invited Bronson to contribute to his new Transcendentalist journal, The Dial (Bronson came up with that name, BTW). And contribute Bronson did, with his “Orphic Sayings”.
Now, I have a complicated relationship with Bronson Alcott. He’s a very, very frustrating personality, the kind you often want to throttle. And yet dammit if he doesn’t give you reasons to empathize with and even respect him. Take his prose, for example. A lot of it is ridiculous – just these turgid, impenetrable nuggets that say less about Transcendentalism than about his own pretensions to being a Super Genius. Case in point is Orphic Saying No. 43: The popular genesis is historical. It is written to sense not to the soul. Two principles diverse and alien, interchange the Godhead and sway the world by turns. God is dual. Spirit is derivative. Identity halts in diversity.
It's so tortured, you can feel the sweat pouring right off of him. Even Emerson – not always a plainspoken, easily-accessible writer himself – had to admit of Orphic Sayings: “I do not like them”. And the press was brutal, comparing Sayings to “a train of 15 railroad cars going by with only one passenger.”
And yet . . . Imagine you’re Amos Alcox, self-educated hick, and you manage, by stint of your own will, to synthesize all you’ve learned into a philosophy of teaching that makes an important break with convention. What if then, all of a sudden, you’re plucked from obscurity and noticed by all the leading Educators, Reformers, and Thinkers of the day? What if no less than the Big Daddy of the Transcendentalist set starts singing your praises? Geez, Emerson is telling everyone who’s anyone how smart and amazing you are! But deep inside, you know you’re still backwoods Amos, the guy who never went to college – let alone a place like Harvard or Yale. The guy whose mom puffs on a corncob pipe.
Might you feel like an imposter? Might you want to prove to your new peers – and to yourself! – that you’re on their level, a scintillating intellect in your own right? Might you do that by trying really, really hard – too hard, even, with writing that’s intentionally and excruciatingly ineffable? Screw “Amos Alcox” – might you try to fashion yourself into A. Bronson Alcott, America’s next great philosopher king?
I know I might. So I’m inclined to cut Bronson Alcott some slack about his writing.
Same goes for his Temple School failures. I believe his Conversations laid the whole “children innately wise and good” idea on crazy thick. But they also coaxed his students into thinking and questioning for themselves – a big deal, given that early 19th-Century teaching was more about pounding facts into kids through rote memorization and drill. 19th-Century teaching was also about corporal punishment, which Bronson, to his credit, reviled and never used. And while he may have been pompous, he was no hypocrite. He genuinely believed children could understand – and deserved to understand – a wide array of knowledge. Which is why he published, in Conversations, a dialogue explaining reproduction, using vague metaphors about plants and seeds. Parents were horrified and promptly withdrew their students, forcing the Temple School’s closure.
You might argue Bronson had no business talking about sex to his charges, and that’s a fair point. But remember: Temple School students were the children of Boston progressives, supposedly the most “enlightened” and forward-thinking parents around – the very folks Alcott could have reasonably believed to be okay with a little straight-talk about how babies are made. These parents were also fervent, ardent abolitionists. And yet when Alcott enrolled a bi-racial girl in his second attempt at a school, it was the same story: the parents freaked and pulled their kids, then the school went under. (Then as now, right? I used to live in an affluent town, packed with modern progressives. Everyone was constantly braying for “diversity” until the town council started talking affordable housing plans. You’ve never seen a group of people so quick to declare some scrubby, overgrown acreage a protected “wetland”).
Given the foregoing, I can forgive Bronson Alcott for a lot. However, I would gladly and enthusiastically reach back in time to bitch-slap him for his conduct towards Louisa. She was a self-described “topsy-turvey” little girl who, like her mother, struggled from day one with moods, impulsiveness and anger. In temperament, she was entirely mismatched to Bronson – a self-serious, head-in-the-clouds type who liked his women mild. But to make matters worse, Bronson’s personal theology made him consider and treat Louisa not simply as high-strung, but as a recalcitrant sinner.
You see, Bronson not only shared the Unitarians’ rejection of the divinity of Christ, he saw himself as Christ. Seriously! When asked whether he claimed to be Jesus Resurrected, he answered: “Yes, often.” He signed letters to Louisa, “Your Ascended Father.” And believing Louisa to be fully perfectible, he chided her for not exercising the self-discipline and self-denial that would allow her to reach his own exalted state. On her tenth birthday, he wrote to her:
I live, my dear daughter, to be good and do good to all, and especially to you and your mother and sisters. Will you not let me? . . . The good Spirit comes into the Breasts of the meek and loveful. . . Anger, discontent, impatience, evil appetites, greedy wants, complainings, ill-speakings, idlenesses, heedlessness, rude behavior . . . drive it away, leaving the poor misguided soul to live in its own obstinant, perverse, proud discomfort.
Will you not let me? How demoralized Louisa must have been to be cast as an impediment, a stubborn dam holding back the wellsprings of her father’s goodness. So yeah – I can’t forgive Bronson for torturing his daughter over what he termed her “corrosive nature”. And I can’t forgive him for the fiasco that was Fruitlands.
Transcendental Wild Oats
Bronson founded Fruitlands with one of his acolytes, Charles Lane, whom he met on a previous trip to England. Lane had recently divorced his wife and declared himself celibate, ostensibly in order to join the “Consociate Family” of humanity. Bronson was taken with Lane, describing him as “the deepest sharpest intellect I ever met with.” Abigail was less thrilled, especially when she observed Lane jealously hoarding Bronson’s time and attention, usually to her exclusion. But Lane did have the saving grace of being wealthy, which allowed the men – with the help of a loan from Abigail’s brother – to purchase an 80-acre farm outside Concord, Massachusetts for their utopian experiment.
The endeavor began in June of 1843, with the first residents comprised of Bronson and Abigail and their four daughters; Charles Lane and his son; and a handful of unrepentant oddballs. These included (1) A twenty-year old Brook Farm dropout in search of “discipline”, who had previously subsisted an entire year on crackers; (2) A man who greeted residents with, “Good morning, damn you!” in the belief that the spirit behind language trumped its accepted meaning; and (3) A nudist who, depending on the source, either walked around in a sheet or took private walks in the buff out of his insistence that clothes stifled his spiritual growth.
In short, they were a bunch of male kooks (with the exception of one female, Ann Page, a welcome companion to Abigail). But that was fitting, as the rules of Fruitlands were, by 19th Century standards, pretty kooky. The founding tenet was to avoid causing harm to any living being. As such, Fruitlands was vegan; most meals consisted of unleavened bread with a side of vegetables or fruit. Any products derived from slave labor were forbidden, meaning sugar, tea, and coffee were banned, and residents wore linen tunics to avoid dressing in cotton. What’s more, any products derived from animals were forbidden, as Bronson considered such products “theft”. So good-bye to honey, dairy, eggs and wool. Of course, reality mandated a few bitter compromises. Dang-it-all if leather boots weren’t practical for farm work. And although Bronson considered yoking a beast to a plow a form of ruthless capitalist exploitation, he found the plow too heavy to pull himself and had to bring in an ox.
Bronson and Lane seemed to have initially thrown themselves into Fruitlands, working the fields when they weren’t philosophizing. But by September their efforts were seriously flagging. In fact, for the most part they went AWOL, leaving Abigail and the dwindling number of remaining residents to harvest crops, instruct and tend to the kids, and otherwise perform the grinding drudgery of a functioning farm. Sometimes Bronson and Lane were found in the farmhouse, theorizing and writing; other times they took off for days or weeks together on recruiting and speaking tours. While the physical burden on Abigail was great, the psychic burden was greater – especially as Bronson had long since refused to share a bed with her, electing to sleep separately in their small quarters. The reason he gave was that, per Lane, sexuality was the root of sin and undermined the “Consociate Family.” But as many biographers have speculated, Abigail may have suspected the true reason for Bronson’s new celibacy was a mutual sexual attraction between himself and Lane.
And what about Louisa? What did she make of Fruitlands and the growing rift between her parents? How was she to follow her father’s injunction to “be and do good” in such a madhouse? Her diary lends us a few clues.
A Precautionary Note
Before we get to her journal, you should know this about Louisa May Alcott: You can’t always trust her. She has an uncanny knack for taking ugly experience and burnishing it into something warm and rosy and jolly. Take the way she portrayed her poverty. Money-wise, and largely due to Bronson’s inability or refusal to earn, the Alcotts were unstable at best, desperate at worst. Louisa’s journals and letters give us glimpses of a family that ate poorly, dressed shabbily, and never escaped debt. They moved twenty-two times over thirty years in an endless quest for better pay and cheaper rent. Daughters and mother hustled through a multitude of low-wage jobs, with Louisa at one point even working as a domestic drudge. And all the while, Bronson retreated into the labyrinth of his own mind (and likely, as has been widely conjectured, into mental illness).
But if you read Little Women? The book Louisa touted as a “semi-autobiographical” account of her childhood? The March family’s poverty is WASP-y and genteel. They eat plain fare but never go hungry; they dress in hand-me-downs but they’re never near rags. Hell, they can even afford an Irish maid! And the emotionally absent Bronson? Louisa transforms him into the physically absent Mr. March, serving as a Union chaplain.
Why does she do this? Well, I suspect she’s a savvy commercial writer who knows her middle-class readership isn’t going to cotton to descriptions of real poverty (ick). But I also suspect a little pride and shame come into play. Like Louisa, I had (clears throat) a challenging upbringing. And when you have such an upbringing, sometimes you take the hard truths and sand their edges. You alter and elide your way into a nicer reality, one that won’t freak people out too much – because if they’re freaked out, that means you’re kind of freakish, no? It’s a game I’m very familiar with and, if I’m being honest, I’ve always loved Louisa for her mastery of it. But it also makes her awfully tricky to get to know.
No problem! you might think. Her diary will show us the real Louisa! After all, everyone lets loose in their diaries. It’s a safe space for your unvarnished, unguarded Self.
Well, no – not if you’re an Alcott. At Fruitlands, even the residents’ “private” journals were considered communal property. In fact, during the entirety of their formative years, Louisa and her sisters knew their journals were subject to their parents’ review. Bronson, in particular, believed reading his daughters’ journals was a necessary part of monitoring their spiritual progress. And both Bronson and Abigail sometimes inserted their own notes into the girls’ journals, in a kind of running moral commentary on their thoughts. So at all times, Louisa knew she was writing for an audience – and a very critical one at that.
If that’s not complicated enough, throughout her life, Louisa not only re-read her journals, but annotated them herself, after-the-fact. Between 1867 and 1885, she appears to have inserted notes all throughout her original entries – notes that are often sardonic and knowing. As the Alcott scholar Madeleine Stern notes, “her comments indicate that she may have contemplated the future publication of portions of her journals” after her death.
So the Fruitlands diary is, really, three accounts in one. It’s 11-year-old Louisa’s personal account as she tries to make sense of herself and the world around her. It’s 11-year-old Louisa’s account to her parents regarding both her experience at Fruitlands and the state of her soul (and as such, both its inclusions and omissions are very telling). And finally, it’s adult Louisa’s account of a very strange and stressful part of her childhood, written with the kind of wry humor to make it a little more palatable to her anticipated readership.
The Poor Little Sinner
You get the sense of all three of Louisa’s accounts colliding in one of the first entries in her Fruitlands journal:
Sunday, 24th. – Father and Mr. Lane have gone to New Hampshire to preach. It was very lovely . . . I was cross to-day, and I cried when I went to bed. I made good resolutions, and felt better in my heart. If I only kept all I make, I should be the best girl in the world. But I don’t, and so am very bad.
[Poor little sinner! She says the same at fifty. – L.M.A.]
There’s some pretty tense ambiguity in that “very lovely”, isn’t there? Is she referring to the autumn weather or the fact that Bronson and Lane are blessedly gone? Yet despite his absence, Louisa seems to anticipate her father’s eyes scanning her journal on his return, tracking her attempts at virtue. A lot of eleven-year-olds might have fibbed and jotted down an entry about, say, how admirably they held their tongue, or how cheerfully they helped prepare supper. But Louisa not only knows herself too well, she’s genuinely contrite for her “crossness”. As for her claim to being “very bad”? I couldn’t help but read in this the plea of a kid who wants, more than anything, her parents to reassure her of their unconditional love. I ached for her. And in describing herself as a “poor little sinner”, I think adult Louisa ached for her, too.
October 8th – . . . We did not have any school, and played in the woods and got red leaves. In the evening we danced and sung, and I read a story about “Contentment.” I wish I was rich, I was good and we were all a happy family this day.
Now, when you have a dad as obsessed with rejecting materialism as Bronson Alcott – a dad who considers poverty a badge of honor – it’s gutsy as hell to admit: I wish I was rich. Give Louisa credit: she was a sophisticated 11-year-old, already canny to the useful ambivalence of words. That line reads as both a confession (I am not content as I should be) and an accusation (I’m tired of living in an overcrowded farmhouse, wearing an ugly tunic, with nothing of my own and little to eat.) As for her wish to be a “happy family” – well, that’s breathtakingly direct, isn’t it? She’s reminding both her parents that their marital suffering is hers, too.
I should mention that Louisa was also making strides in her artistic writing, as this entry shows:
Thursday, 12th – . . . I made a verse about sunset: Softly doth the sun descend/To his couch behind the hill,/Then, oh, then, I love to sit/On mossy banks beside the rill.
Anna thought it was very fine, but I didn’t like it very well.
From the get-go, then, Louisa May Alcott was her own toughest critic.
By November, it’s obvious Louisa not only noticed Charles Lane’s outsized influence on her father, but resented him for it – a sentiment that intensified for Louisa as an adult.
Friday, Nov. 2nd – Anna and I did the work. In the evening Mr. Lane asked us, “What is man?” These were our answers: A human being; an animal with a mind; a creature; a body; a soul and a mind. After a long talk we went to bed very tired.
[No wonder, after doing the work and worrying their little wits with such lessons. – L.M.A.]
Tuesday, 20th – I rose at five, and after breakfast washed the dishes, and then helped mother work . . . Father and Mr. L. had a talk, and father asked us if we saw any reason for us to separate. Mother wanted to, she is so tired. I like it, but not the school part or Mr. L.
At this point, the residents had abandoned Fruitlands, leaving Abigail, for all practical purposes, the sole adult in charge. The harvest was a bust, Bronson was broke (again), and a cold New England winter was setting in – the kind of cold that, in a drafty farmhouse, you felt in the marrow of your bones. Louisa, her sister Anna, and Lane’s son had been sick with one bug or another all autumn. It was no secret Abigail was worn out and miserable. And yet from Louisa’s entry, you get the sense Bronson was still not ready to accept defeat. “I’m okay staying,” I imagine him telling his wife and daughters. “Aren’t you okay staying?”
December marked the crisis point. With residents gone and food scant, Abigail forced an ultimatum. She convinced her brother to cancel his loan on Fruitlands, stating: “I see no clean healthy safe course here in connexion with Mr. L[ane].” (Now there’s some fraught wording.) Then she told Bronson she was leaving to find other lodgings, taking the kids and furniture with her. Bronson could either join them or stay with Lane, who was making noise about really committing to celibacy by joining a Shaker colony. But Bronson not only couldn’t renounce Lane, he seemed tempted to choose Lane over his family – and Louisa was overwhelmed:
December 10th – I did my lessons, and walked in the afternoon. Father read to us in dear Pilgrim’s Progress. Mr. L. was in Boston, and we were glad. In the eve father and mother and Anna and I had a long talk. I was very unhappy, and we all cried. Anna and I cried in bed, and I prayed God to Keep us all together.
Why didn’t Louisa describe the “long talk”? Perhaps it was too painful to record. Or perhaps the enormity of her father’s potential abandonment was something an 11-year-old couldn’t quite articulate. If the latter, the adult Louisa makes clear the child Louisa intuited the full import of the threat. On Christmas day she entered stern verses from Pilgrim’s Progress into her journal which, decades later, she appended:
“They move me for to watch and pray,/To strive to be sincere,/To take my cross up day by day,/And serve the Lord with fear.
[The appropriateness of the song at this time was much greater than the child saw. She never forgot this experience, and her little cross began to grow heavier from this hour. – L.M.A.]
Indeed, the mental and emotional toll on Louisa is perhaps most poignantly expressed in her last journal entry at Fruitlands:
Wednesday. – Read Martin Luther. A long letter from Anna. She sends me a picture of Jenny Lind, the great singer. She must be a happy girl. I should like to be famous as she is . . .
I wrote in my Imagination Book, and enjoyed it very much. Life is pleasanter than it used to be, and I don’t care about dying any more. Had a splendid run, and got a box of cones to burn. Sat and heard the pines sing for a long time. . . Had good dreams, and woke now and then to think, and watch the moon. I had a pleasant time with my mind, for it was happy.
[Moods began early. – L.M.A.]
Adult Louisa is trying to diminish the pain of her experience with her trademark dryness. It doesn’t work – how can it? An eleven-year-old writing about her preoccupation with “dying” gives you pause. As does a little girl who earlier attested to being “very bad”, yet now attests she longs to “be famous” – as if she’s craving a substitute for the love she’s been deprived (and Fame won’t demand that she be less emotional, or content with poverty, or make her read Martin Luther, now, will it?). What really kills me, though, is how young Louisa is already turning to her imagination as a source of comfort, a place where she can transform and construct a more hospitable reality.
The Longing to Rise
Bronson capitulated with the new year, and the Alcotts eventually found their way to Concord. However, this division-of-labor chart which Bronson devised for his daughters shows that the Fruitlands experience didn’t exactly lighten him up.
The chart also shows that, in 1845, Lane returned to the Alcott orbit after ditching a Shaker colony. Abigail’s attitude towards him had somewhat softened by that point, and so Lane became a temporary member of the Alcott home at Hillside, where he led Louisa’s lessons. Here’s one of their Socratic dialogues, which she recorded in her journal:
Mr. [Lane] - SOCRATES; [Louisa] - ALCIBIADES
How can you get what you need? By trying.
How do you try? By resolution and perseverance.
How gain love? By gentleness.
What is gentleness? Kindness, patience, and care for other peoples’ feelings.
Who has it? Father and Anna.
Who means to have it? Louisa, if she can.
[She never got it. — L.M.A.]
Subsequent journal entries show that, well into her adolescence (and adulthood!), Louisa remained concerned over her morality and how she fell short of Bronson’s ideals. Her sense of being deeply flawed, and Bronson and Lane’s uncompromising judgment, could have turned into an anger and resentment that alienated her from God. Instead, around thirteen or so, Louisa began to forge a new relationship with God that would sustain her for years to come:
Concord, Thursday (1845) – I had an early run in the woods before the dew was off the grass. The moss was like velvet, and as I ran under the arches of yellow and red leaves I sang for joy, my heart was so bright and the world so beautiful . . .
It seemed like going through a dark life or grave into heaven beyond. A very strange and solemn feeling came over me as I stood there, with no sound but the rustle of the pines, no one near me, and the sun so glorious, as for me alone. It seemed as if I felt God as I never did before, and I prayed in my heart that I might keep that happy sense of nearness in my life.
[I have, for I most sincerely think that the little girl “got religion” that day in the wood when dear mother Nature led her to God. – L.M.A., 1885]
For all their differences, then, Louisa was still her father’s daughter: a Transcendentalist, locating and experiencing the Divine in the natural world. Louisa expressed as much herself in a series of 1884 letters to Maggie Lukens:
Have you read Emerson? He is called a Pantheist or believer in Nature instead of God. He was truly Christian & saw God in Nature, finding strength & comfort in the sane, sweet influences of the great Mother as well as the Father of all. I too believe this, & when tired, sad, or tempted find my best comfort in the woods, the sky, the healing solitude that lets my poor, weary soul find the rest, the fresh hope, or the patience which only God can give us.
Louisa then explained to Lukens how she incorporated Buddhism into her belief system:
The simple Buddha religion is very attractive to me, & I believe in it. God is enough for me, & all the prophets are only stepping stones to him. Christ is a great reformer to me not God.
. . . I think immortality is the passing of a soul thro [sic] many lives or experiences, & such as are truly lived, used & learned help on to the next, each growing richer higher, happier, carrying with it only the real memories of what has gone before . . .
This is my idea of immortality: An endless life of helpful change, with the instinct, the longing to rise, to learn, to love, to get nearer the source of all good, & go on from the lowest plane to the highest, rejoicing more & more as we climb into the clearer light, the purer air, the happier life which must exist, for, as Plato said “The soul cannot imagine what does not exist because it is the shadow of God who knows & creates all things.”
Louisa wrote these words just a few years before her death in 1888. And as I read them, I can’t help but hear echoes of the eleven-year-old at Fruitlands. Once a striver, always a striver. From beginning to end, that “longing to rise” permeated her life.