Marmee & Louisa (22 page)

Despite her eagerness to be rid of the farm, this was agony for Abigail. Her husband was incapacitated. Her children were sick, cold, and hungry. She knew she could no longer remain at Fruitlands. “Mrs. Alcott gives notice,” Charles Lane wrote to a friend at the end of November, “that she concedes to the wishes of her friends . . . and shall withdraw to a house which they will provide for her and her four children.”
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She told
her brother, “Our situation here [is] quite uncomfortable.
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 . . . We shall probably leave here as soon as we can see our way clear where and how to go.” By “we” she meant herself and the children. She could no longer speak for Bronson.

On December 23, 1843, according to Louisa’s journal, “In the morning mother went to the Village and I had my lessons and then helped Annie get dinner after which mother came home and Annie and I went on an errand for mother to [a neighbor] Mr.
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Lovejoy. We stayed a little while to see their little baby boy. I often wish I had a little brother but as I have not I shall try to be contented with what I have got.” It is not clear if Louisa had any memory of her stillborn brother, four years before.

Two days later, for the second Christmas in a row, Bronson and Abigail were apart. He had gone to Boston to attend a conference. To celebrate the holiday Abigail prepared small gifts for each child and did her best to have “a little merry-making in the evening with the neighbor’s children.”
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But her heart was not in it.

Neither was Louisa’s. She “rose early and sat some looking at the Bon-bons in my stocking.” By herself she read further in
Pilgrim’s Progress,
which fascinated her. “I liked the verses Christian sung and will put them in [the journal],” she wrote on December 25:

This place has been our second stage,

Here we have heard and seen

Those good things that from age to age

To others hid have been.

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.

Decades later, reading back over this journal entry as the best-selling author of a novel that begins, “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” Louisa realized that the “appropriateness of this song at this time was much greater than the child saw.
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 . . . Little Lu began early to feel the family cares and peculiar trials. . . . She never forgot this experience,
and her little cross began to grow heavier from this hour. Poetry began to flow about this time in a thin but copious stream.”

One of the presents Louisa received from her mother was a poem, which the child transcribed in her journal:

Christmas is here

Louisa my dear

Then happy we’ll be

Gladsome and free.
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 . . .

A few days later, extreme winter weather hit central Massachusetts. Snowstorm upon snowstorm left the road to the house “completely blocked up.”
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Abigail could not reach the mailbox until their neighbor Mr. Lovejoy broke a path in the snow. Days were gloomy and evenings, gloomier. Her eyes were “quite troublesome.” She could no longer read to the children by candlelight, which they all loved. She played and sang with them “to cheer the scene within to render the cheerlessness without more tolerable.”

Sometime that month Abigail had told Mr. Lovejoy that she and her children could not remain at the farm. She needed a place to stay until she could make other arrangements. He offered her three rooms in his house and the use of his kitchen for two dollars a month. She agreed and notified her brother, who sent her ten dollars to shelter her and the girls for five months.

Bronson returned from Boston on January 1, 1844, to learn that his wife and children were leaving. “I have concluded to go to Mr. Lovejoy’s until spring, having dissolved all connection with Fruitlands,” Abigail announced.
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The “arrangements here have never suited me, and my children have been too bereft of their mother.”

Bronson protested, insisting, “I will not abide in a house set aside for myself and family alone.
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 . . . I cannot consent to live solely for one family.”

But Abigail had to live solely for one family. She refused to join another consociate family. “There is nothing there for us,” she explained, referring to herself, “no sphere in which we could act without an unwarrantable alienation from our children.”
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She told Samuel Joseph, “I cannot
live [Bronson’s] principle.”
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Her need to leave Fruitlands was sufficiently strong that she would, if necessary, separate from her husband.

At the same time she resisted the idea of divorce, which violated her every instinct, her inborn sense of duty. She remained devoted to the idea of her husband, if not the actual man, and her dream of all that he might accomplish in the world. There was another reason for her resistance: a divorced woman had no legal right to her children. Abigail “still rested under all the ancient disabilities of the common law,” as her cousin Samuel E. Sewall explained. If she did divorce Bronson, he could take the children and prevent her from ever seeing them again.

Only a year later, due to reforms initiated by her cousin and other lawyers, women’s marital rights would begin to change. Over the next half century, Sewall would write, “a great revolution in the law respecting this [marital] relation [was] effected, and all of it favorable to wives, recognizing and enforcing their rights to their property, their persons, and their children.”
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Sewall would note with satisfaction in the 1880s that marital law, though still defective, had improved significantly since his cousin Abigail’s crisis in 1844.
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These legal inequities had already affected Abigail. Had she been a son of Colonel May, she would already have received and gained control of her portion of her father’s estate. Her father’s estate planning had protected her inheritance from passing to her husband but forced it into probate, rendering it inaccessible for several years. And even after the estate was probated, later in 1844, her portion would be entrusted to male relatives, Sewall and Samuel Joseph, on her behalf.

“The very fault of marriage, and of the present relation between the sexes, [is] that the woman does belong to the man, instead of forming a whole with him,” Margaret Fuller wrote in 1845 in
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
.
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“Now there is no woman, only an overgrown child.” In order that “her hand may be given with dignity, she must be able to stand alone.”

Abigail did not have the power to stand alone, but she could act. One of her core beliefs, born of her long struggle to find her own, independent way in the world, was that each person has free will and the right to forge his or her own path. When Bronson was in England in 1842 and she alone with the girls, she had written in her journal, “All of us can carve out our own way, and God can make our very contradictions
harmonize with his solemn ends.”
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In other words, society’s inequities and her marital difficulties were insurmountable, but she was still free to maintain her dignity.

It was decided: they were leaving and the Fruitlands experiment was over. Years later she would recall, “Finding the [Fruitlands] scheme not likely to succeed, I hired a small house in Still River and took my 4 girls with our worldly goods . . . in January 1844.”
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Abigail spent the first few days of that year packing her beloved books—including sixteen Shakespeare plays, poetry and novels, and volumes of philosophy, botany, and herbal therapies—her furniture, and the family’s clothes, assisted by Anna and Louisa.
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At the same time, Charles Lane left with his son and his large library to join the nearby Shaker community. In the middle of January, according to a letter from Abigail to her brother, she and her four daughters bundled up in cloaks and walked the short distance through the snow to the Lovejoy house.
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There is no evidence of Bronson’s immediate actions, and several pages are here torn out of his journal. In addition, he later edited and rewrote portions of Abigail’s journals before destroying the originals, so that for this period only his redactions of her journals remain. Scholars have assumed that Bronson’s later presence at the Lovejoy house indicates that he moved with his family, but it is equally likely that Bronson remained at Fruitlands alone, without food, money, or support.
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“Never had she looked more beautiful as she stood there,” the adult Louisa would write of a woman trapped in a destructive love triangle in a story that evokes this drama that Louisa endured as a child.
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Pauline, the heroine of the story, appears as “an image of will, daring, defiant, and indomitable, with eyes darkened by intensity of emotion, voice half sad, half stern, and outstretched hand on which the wedding ring no longer shone. She felt her power, yet was wary enough to assure it by one bold appeal to the strongest element of her husband’s character: passions, not principles, were the allies she desired, and before the answer came she knew that she had gained them at the cost of innocence and self-respect.” Seeking revenge against the man who spurned her, Pauline “silently accepted his challenge to the tournament so often held between man and woman—a tournament where the keen tongue is the lance, pride the shield, passion the fiery steed, and the hardest heart the winner of the prize, which seldom fails to prove a barren honor, ending in remorse.”

Pauline was Louisa’s archetypal fictional heroine, according to Madeleine Stern. “Of all the characters [Louisa] adumbrated in narratives, the one who came most completely to life and who obviously was as intriguing to her author as to readers was the passionate, richly sexual
femme fatale
who had a mysterious past, an electrifying present, and a revengeful future.”
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Similarly, in Louisa’s novel
A Long Fatal Love Chase,
which was deemed “too sensational” to publish during her lifetime, the young heroine, Rosamund, seeks “freedom” by marrying a manipulative older man.
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Upon learning that he is not only evil but also already married, Rosamund flees his villa on the Riviera. He follows her, stalking her across Europe. She evades him by disguising herself as a seamstress, a Catholic nun, and a governess. In the end she can escape her husband only in death.

Abigail neither died nor succeeded in abandoning her marriage. Sometime that month, according to a letter she wrote on January 29, Bronson followed her to the Lovejoy house, where they took him in. Bronson had nowhere else to go. It is not clear if the couple shared a room at the Lovejoys or later, but there is no evidence that Bronson and Abigail—both in their early forties—were ever again physically intimate. Abigail’s personal papers burned decades later by Bronson and Louisa “were probably written during critical times,” the biographer Cynthia Barton noted, “and were more negative toward marriage and toward Bronson” than the papers that survive. As a result, “just when we’d really like to know how she felt, we can’t.” To Louisa, Bronson, and possibly other relatives, Abigail’s eloquent frankness in recording her thoughts and feelings was “threatening to the Alcotts’ posthumous reputation,” Barton wrote. Nevertheless, Abigail’s actions suggest that she decided to move forward with her husband, rather like a fifth child, in tow. Indeed, a woman who had met the Alcotts the year before had described Bronson’s “ultimate providence” as “an excellent wife, who clothed and fed him as a baby, and reverenced him as a divinity.”
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With the failure of Fruitlands, however, the power shifted in the Alcotts’ marriage. For the first time ever, according to Barton, “Abigail took control.
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She resolved to be less compliant, more vigilant concerning the ramifications of Bronson’s schemes for ideal living. As Louisa was to express it years later, [Abigail] became the ballast to Bronson’s balloon. . . . They were still dependent on the aid of friends and relatives,
who were vocal in their censure; but Abby finally agreed with them.” Abigail now knew that she could not rely on Bronson to provide for the family; she would try to rely on herself. This change affected all four of their children, especially Louisa.
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Monika Elbert noted that Louisa “suffered the most from the parental union” and, as a consequence, sought “to reconcile and integrate these contradictory [parental] influences through her writing.”

Abigail’s late January letter to Samuel Joseph seemed to lay all the blame for her family’s difficulties on Charles Lane. “All Mr. Lane’s efforts have been to disunite us,” she wrote.
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“I hope we shall be settled soon to some mode of life which shall either be more independent of the aid of others or less irksome to ourselves,” she went on with her usual wry fortitude. “Mr. Alcott cannot bring himself to work for gain, but we have not yet learned to live without money or means.” She wished to see Bronson “a little more interested in this matter of support.

I love his faith and quiet reliance on Divine Providence, but a little more activity and industry would place us beyond most of these disagreeable dependencies on friends.
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For though they aid, they censure. . . . Though they give cheerfully of their abundance, yet they feel that we should earn something ourselves. Mr. Alcott is right in not working for hire, if thereby he violates his conscience; but working for bread does not necessarily imply unworthy gain.

Even now, Abigail felt she had to defend her husband. Meanwhile, she earned money by sewing for her neighbors. She sold a piece of family silver for ten dollars. She feared offending her maiden aunt Hannah Robie, who had given her the silver, but felt she had no choice.
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“This will be a sad chapter in my book of fate,” she lamented in her journal, “if [Hannah] too in the absence of [my] Mother and Sisters shall go hence to be no more seen.” She felt more dependent than ever on the support of other women.