Marmee & Louisa (24 page)

As the teenage Louisa charmed children in the barn, her parents continued to disagree about the nature of a family. Bronson desired a consociate family and repeatedly urged Junius to return to live with them, but Abigail still wished to live with her nuclear family alone.
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Whenever guests departed she felt “thrown once more on my own efforts to do and be to my daughters what I believe I am capable of being—and I shall put myself in closer more intimate communication with them than ever.”
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It occurred to her that “a woman who has never known the maternal relation can know but little of the resource of a mother’s love to bring about most important and desirable results.”

But Abigail still needed boarders to cover her expenses, especially now that they owned a house. A young woman named Sophia Ford lived and ate with them at Hillside, helped teach the children, and assisted with housework.
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Younger boarders included John Edward May, Samuel Joseph’s eldest son.
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Three years older than Louisa, John Edward was now at the Lexington Classical School, preparing for college.

Settled in upstate New York, forty-eight-year-old Samuel Joseph was now the nation’s “first clergyman to advocate female suffrage and women’s rights.”
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His 1846 address, “The Rights and Condition of Women,” which began as a sermon to his Syracuse congregation, set the tone for the suffrage movement. “Why do half of the people have a right to govern the whole?” he asked.
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Women cannot “have their wrongs fully redressed, until they themselves have a voice and a hand in the enactment and administration of the laws.” He believed the “entire disfranchisement of females is as unjust as the disfranchisement of the males would be. . . . [America’s] utter annihilation, politically considered, of more than one half of the whole community . . . is all unequal, all unrighteous. . . . We [men] may with no more propriety assume to govern women than they might assume to govern us. And never will the nations of the earth be well governed, until both sexes . . . are fairly represented.” This new concept of gender equality led him to believe that every man and woman is an amalgam of male and female traits: “A perfect character in either man or woman is a compound of the virtues of each.” His niece would illustrate this philosophy in fiction, giving female characters masculine names, cutting their hair short, and creating a heroine who cries, “It’s bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boy’s games and work and manners! I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy.
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And it’s worse than ever now, for I’m dying to go and fight.”

While Louisa’s uncle loftily campaigned for women’s rights, her mother struggled with the practical limitations imposed on women because of gender. Abigail had once thought that the problem of gender inequality could be solved by women’s education. But now she saw her own daughters as constrained as she was by the rigid feminine mold, anticipating that as grown women they could not vote, own property, or speak in public. A corset was standard feminine apparel, but to Abigail it felt like a cage. In a corset she could not reach up or bend over, which
forced her to ask men for assistance. Years earlier she had begun lacing her corsets loosely and encouraged her daughters to do the same. Now she and her daughters decided to abandon corsets altogether.
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The hindrances on women went deeper than apparel, however. While mending and cooking alongside her daughters, Abigail ruminated on the causes of their struggle. “Many of the evils of Woman’s life may be traced to the want of education of the
Senses,
” she observed.
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The expectation that women withdraw from the world prevented them from learning how to feel and experience its complexities, she believed. Women were made “inclining and vacillating, tender and timid. . . . They do not
see
clearly,
hear
distinctly,
feel
deeply. Thus when they describe anything they are not quite sure of the distance, or colour; when they tell anything it is quite certain their statement is a good deal modified, and inaccurate, and their sensations are false or feeble. Girls are taught to
seem,
to appear—not to
be
and
do
.” Women are taught to employ “costume, not armor; innocence, not virtue;” and that “beauty, not godliness, should be the foundation of a woman’s character.”

Abigail aimed to teach her daughters otherwise. She would have Louisa and her sisters know they were equal to boys. Armor, virtue, and godliness should be foundations of their characters. “Strengthen your mind by reflection, till your head becomes a balance for your heart,” she told “all the girls,” she explained in a letter to her brother. Then “your actions would be more perpendicular, [your] whole life more direct and true.”

Samuel Joseph came to visit the Alcotts in the late summer of 1846, leaving his family at home. While in Concord, he received from Lucretia a letter of warning. “Be careful of yourself, avoid eating unwholesome food . . . & remember that disease sometimes lurks even in the
nectar & ambrosia
of Mr. Alcott’s utopia.” Lucretia had their two-year-old son, George, scribble on the letter, “Come home dear Far,” a family name for Samuel Joseph. “I want to see you very much. Mother is very lonesome.” As the pastor’s reform work sometimes kept him from home a week or more, Lucretia often wrote to urge her “great big darling” to return.
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“You ought to remember that what is fun to you is dull & lonesome to me.”
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One missive cautions against his generosity: “No money comes so you must not regulate your present expenses by golden hopes and silver anticipations but by the actual state of your purse.
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‘A word to the wise.’ Once more, make haste back, we long to see you, the light of
our dwelling is dim and my heart is heavy when you are away.” When another minister occupied his pulpit while he was in Buffalo, she wrote to him, “I can’t bear these prosaic ministers that must always walk not like snails exactly, with their houses, but with their churches on their backs & are always asking how many families in your parish? How large is your Sunday school? Does Mr.
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May visit much? Is he absent much? I never can answer a single question save the last.” She concluded, “Go to the [Niagara] Falls & see their beauty & magnificence in winter for us all. This will be the only compensation for your long absence. . . . I long, long to see you.”

Abigail and Bronson responded differently to separations. Not only was he often away, but she herself developed a habit of departing to visit relatives soon after his return. In 1846 in Concord, while Abigail was in Boston, Bronson wrote to Charles Lane, “Most [women] are quite out of place, if, indeed, there be place yet for them in the eye or heart of mankind.”
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Others in his circle denigrated women. Emerson considered the male mind active and intellectual, the female mind passive and dull, and once remarked of a friend’s newborn daughter, “Though no son, yet a sacred event.”
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Women are “all victims of their temperament,” Emerson wrote.
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“A woman’s strength is not masculine, but is the unresistible might of weakness.” Even Margaret Fuller, after giving birth to a boy, wrote to her sister, “As was Eve, at first, I suppose every mother is delighted by the birth of a man-child.
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There is a hope that he will conquer more ill, and effect more good, than is expected from girls. This prejudice in favor of man does not seem to be destroyed by his shortcomings for ages. Still, each mother hopes to find in hers an Emanuel.”

In the fall of 1846, as Louisa’s fourteenth birthday approached, Abigail saved enough money to purchase for her a fountain pen. The message she wrote on the birthday card reiterated their bond. “Dearest, accept from your Mother this pen and for her sake as well as your own use it freely and worthily.” Abigail admonished Louisa, “Let each day of this your 15th year testify to some good word or work; and let your Diary receive a record of the same. . . . May eternal love sustain you, Infinite Wisdom guide you, [and] may the sweetest Peace reward you. Mother.”

Louisa seemed increasingly serious about writing, as Abigail had hoped. Louisa’s “sentimental period,” she recalled, began at Hillside when at about fifteen “I fell to write romances, poems, a ‘heart journal,’
and dream dreams of a splendid future.”
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Almost a young woman now, she chafed at the restrictive feminine role, as Abigail had a generation before. Society did not interest Louisa, except when she joined other teenagers in theatrical performances, games, and sports. Like her mother, she lived in books. Among her favorite writers were Goethe—whose
Correspondence with a Child
she borrowed from Emerson—Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, and the Brontës.
Jane Eyre,
published when Louisa was fourteen and one of her favorite novels, contained passages that echoed her experience.
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“It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it,” Jane Eyre says, as if to Louisa. “Women are supposed to feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a constraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.” Young Louisa was inspired by the Brontë sisters, as well as by her mother’s friend Mrs. Child, to plot a short story. She thought she might even write a book. Prompted perhaps by her mother’s receipt of her inheritance, she would tell the story of a virtuous young woman with a vast inheritance of which she is not aware.

The house bought with Abigail’s modest inheritance in fact became the setting for a new stage in Abigail’s long mentorship of Louisa. In her mid- to late forties, Abigail knew that her own dreams of a productive public life would never be fulfilled. But her teenage daughters might accomplish more. She had high hopes for Louisa, who seemed to her mother to have “most decided views of life and duty. . . . She reads a great deal. Her memory is quite peculiar and remarkably tenacious. . . . Nothing can exceed the strength of [Louisa’s] attachments, particularly for her mother.” Strong views and attachments indicated that Louisa had prospects. “I believe there are some natures too noble to curb, too lofty to bend,” Abigail observed two years later.
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“Of such is my Lu.”

In spite of Abigail’s ambition and desire to improve women’s lot, she and her children continued to endure the indignities of poverty. “I
am constantly finding myself .
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 . . perplexed for the want of money,” she complained to Samuel Joseph in 1846. “My friends are wearied with my applications for help. It does not seem to occur to them,” she added resentfully, “that each [of them] putting [aside] a fraction [of money] at intervals for me, would relieve all this distressing embarrassment and give us a comfort which we deserve at their hands. I shall ask no more [of them] but help at the work of life while there is work to do, intelligently, conscientiously, as fast and far as I can, though the world call [me] idle.”

Abigail’s sense of entitlement may reflect her intense shame. Or perhaps she found it easier to play the loyal wife, to blame her friends and family rather than her husband. He had applied to teach at a district school in Concord, she reported, “but a child is preferred! He asks [for] bread, they will give him a stone. How destitute of sense and sentiment is the world of Concord, looking well to its Pockets! And Places!” She had tried to rent part of a house in Cambridge, “thinking a small school can be obtained for [fifteen-year-old] Anna” to teach in, but was told “that ‘Mr. A[lcott]’s religious opinions are repugnant to the Christian world of Cambridge’ . . . his not going to Church is an objection. . . . I suggest my willingness to become the matron of an Idiot institution,” and in response, “I am warned of the prejudices the public entertain against my husband’s theories. Indeed!” she added with her trademark sarcasm. “Believing and practicing the folly of loving our neighbors as ourself. Doing justice and loving mercy. Truly we deserve to suffer!”

Even as a young teenager Louisa “was not unmindful of the anxiety of her parents,” her first biographer, Ednah Dow Cheney, wrote. Louisa’s “determined purpose to retrieve the fortunes of the family and to give to her mother the comfort and ease which she had never known in her married life became the constant motive of her conduct.
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It is in the light of this purpose alone that her character and her subsequent career can be fully understood.”

At the end of 1846, Abigail reviewed her accounts for the year. Her family had taken in $478 and still owed $254. “These arrearages,” she told Samuel Joseph, “are very distressing, because I feel so helpless.
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Where to curtail? Or how to produce [money] is alike impracticable to me. My children are at no schools, I never rode [a coach] to the amount of one dollar since I lived in Concord, excepting to Boston where I have been called to go on business. I purchase no articles of dress excepting
cotton, calico, and shoes. Although much that I receive is useless finery or unconvertible articles of wearing apparel, yet we go without many things which we really need as common comforts. Our food is simple, our recreations not expensive.”

A few weeks later she resolved in the coming year “to do more for my children and turn their minds to still greater efforts to save and do. . . . They are bright active beings.
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I pray to be enlightened on my duty.”