Marmee & Louisa (36 page)

On December 16, 1862, Louisa’s first full day as a nurse, cart after cart of “legless, armless or desperately wounded” soldiers had arrived from Fredericksburg, Virginia. They were victims of a Union defeat in which nearly thirteen thousand men died. “In they came, some on stretchers, some in men’s arms, some feebly,” Louisa reported. “I drowned my scruples in my washbowl.” Like many Americans, she could no longer avoid the truth: war is grueling and awful, and in this war hundreds of thousands of men would die. “When I peered into the dusky street lined with what I at first had innocently called market carts, now unloading their sad freight at our door . . . my ardor experienced a sudden chill, and I indulged in a most unpatriotic wish that I was safe at home again, with a quiet day before me.”
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Louisa had never been on such intimate terms with men. “Having no brothers & a womanly man for a father I find myself rather staggered by some of the performance about me . . . by dreary faced, dirty & wounded men,” she told a friend.
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At close quarters with scores of “dilapidated patriots, hopping, lying and lounging about,” she found nearly all of them “truly lovable & manly.” Her “prince of patients” was a blacksmith from Virginia under whose “plain speech & unpolished manner I seem to see a noble character, a heart as warm & tender as a woman’s, a nature fresh & frank as any child’s.
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He is about thirty, I think, tall & handsome, mortally wounded & dying royally, without . . . remorse. Mrs. Ropes & myself love him & feel indignant that such a man should be so early lost.”

The opportunity to befriend men with whom she worked was another new experience. Dr. John Winslow, an army surgeon, invited Louisa on walks, to dinner, and to hear lectures and sermons in Washington, which she enjoyed. He also invited her to his rooms, “where I don’t go.” He seemed “odd, sentimental, but kind-hearted . . . amiable, amusing, & exceedingly
young
.”
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At first her “chief afflictions” were bad odors and “bad air & no out of door exercise.”
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But hardly a month into her nursing career she was laid up with a “sharp pain in the side, cough, fever & dizziness.”
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Doctors feared typhoid fever, which Hannah Ropes now had. They ordered Louisa to stay in her room. A few days later Louisa was diagnosed with typhoid pneumonia and advised to go home. She felt it “ignominious to depart her post,” so instead she chose to become a patient at the hospital.
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Doctors shaved her head and gave her the standard treatment for typhoid fever, daily doses of calomel, or mercury salts.
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Mercury, a heavy metal that affects the central nervous system and kidneys, causes tremors, inflammation of the gums, and psychiatric symptoms. She may have also received a “derivative of the opium poppy” that was freely available as a treatment for various ills.
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In her delirium Louisa had nightmares, some of which she managed to record. Her most persistent dream, she recalled later, was of being married to a man who was a terrifying version of her mother. “I had married a stout, handsome Spaniard dressed in velvet with very soft hands & a voice that was continually saying, ‘Lie still my dear.’ This was mother, but with all the comfort I often found in her presence there was blended the awful fear of the Spanish spouse who was always coming after me, appearing out of closets, in at windows, or threatening me dreadfully all night long.” In her unconscious, as in many of her sensational stories, marriage was alluring but ultimately enslaving. Above all, the dream suggests, Louisa depended on her mother, although she may have had mixed feelings about their intimacy.

In another dream Louisa “went to heaven & found it a twilight place with people darting thro[ugh] the air,” seeming “busy & dismal & ordinary . . . dark and ‘slow.’ . . . I wished I hadn’t come.” Louisa dreamed she was a witch “worshipping the Devil” alongside other nurses.
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“A mob at Baltimore” was trying to capture, stone, hang, and burn them. Despite her soft spot for her ancestor the Salem witch judge, Louisa identified
with the accused witches. Her uncle’s experience of being hanged in effigy with Susan B. Anthony may have suggested the mob scene.

Hannah Ropes died in early January. Several days later Abigail and Bronson received a telegraph saying their daughter was near death. Abigail urged Bronson to depart for Washington without delay and bring her home. At the hospital on January 16, Louisa opened her eyes to find her father at her bedside.
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She went in and out of consciousness, and doctors informed him she was too weak to travel. However, a few days later, somewhat improved, she took a cab with her father into Washington, where Miss Dix met them and provided two nurses to accompany them on the train to Boston. “Enfeebled by her sickness and the long journey,” Louisa spent a night with the Sewalls on Beacon Hill.
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Her father helped her onto the Saturday afternoon train to Concord on January 24, only six weeks after Louisa had left home.

Brief as it had been, this experience as an army nurse changed Louisa forever. It stole her health, which she had never before appreciated. At the same time, her wartime work fueled a remarkable literary productivity. To write stories, she no longer needed “to invent a clash of arms between a dark-robed scoundrel and a noble lord,” Madeleine Stern observed.
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Louisa had “gazed on Truth, the never-failing source for storytellers.” Years later Louisa would write, “I never have regretted that brief, yet costly experience . . . for all that is best and bravest in the hearts of man and woman comes out in times like those, and the courage, loyalty, fortitude and self-sacrifice I saw and learned to love and admire in both Northern and Southern soldiers can never be forgotten.”
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Louisa was one among hundreds of thousands of women whose professional lives were changed by the Civil War. With most American men engaged in the war, women were “taking over men’s jobs in types of work that had not usually been associated with females,” in hospitals, schools, newspapers, publishing houses, farms, government offices, and commercial firms, according to the historian Thomas O’Connor.
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Nevertheless, “It was clear that most men did not approve of ‘the petticoats’ moving into trades and occupations they traditionally considered the male worker’s exclusive domain.”

Publishing was particularly affected by the war. Centered in Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia, the field already attracted women because it was “a profession [that] could be made to look unprofessional,”
the historian Ann Douglas wrote.
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“It enabled its practitioners to do a man’s job, for a man’s pay, in a woman’s clothes.” Antebellum women writers had occupied a separate sphere from men, writing “pretty prattle” in which they were “discouraged from discussing politics or seeking literary fame.”
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Nevertheless, women were “among the first to sense and develop [publishing’s] business potential,” according to Elaine Showalter.
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After the war “gentlemanly publishers were driven out by businessmen, who were indifferent to ‘feminine’ values and more interested in impersonal profits,” and women writers came to see “themselves as artists rather than moralists.”

On Louisa’s return to Concord she could do nothing but sleep or rest. She was feverish, bald, frightened, and often delirious. Occasionally roused from her stupor, she complained of sore throat and exhaustion. She could not eat. She wanted to be left alone by everyone except Marmee, who often stayed at her bedside through the night.
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As she had done for Lizzie, Abigail now made nursing Louisa the center of her life.

Watching over her daughter, Abigail felt anxious but hopeful in a way she had not felt for Lizzie.
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Louisa had always been more vigorous than her sister. Josiah Bartlett, the family doctor, who came to see Louisa every day for weeks, reassured Abigail, “There is nothing against her getting well.
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All she needs is quiet and good nursing.” With Louisa bedridden and Anna pregnant in Chelsea, Abigail needed household help, so May found her a part-time maid.
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In early February, according to Bronson, Louisa finally came “to her right mind.”
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She was able to descend the stairs to breakfast on February 22, but soon returned to bed. She remained weak until late March, when she began to leave her room, join in the family’s activities, and “clothe herself with flesh after the long waste of fever,” her father said.
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A few days later, on March 28, Anna gave birth to her first child, Frederic Alcott Pratt, whom they called Freddy. The new aunt composed a letter to Anna narrating Orchard House’s reception of the news. Louisa, May, and their mother “were all sitting deep in a novel, not expecting Father home” from Anna’s house in Chelsea “owing to the snowstorm, when the door burst open and in he came, all wet and white, waving his bag, and calling out, ‘Good news! Good news! Anna has a fine boy!’ With one accord we opened our mouths and screamed for about two minutes.
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Then mother began to cry; I began to laugh; and May to pour
out questions; while Papa beamed upon us all,—red, damp, and shiny, the picture of a proud old Grandpa. . . . Father had told every one he met, from Mr. Emerson to the coach driver, and went about the house saying, ‘Anna’s boy! Yes, yes, Anna’s boy!’” Six months later Bronson, who had pined for a son, boasted that his “little grandson . . . bids fair to grow and be somebody.”
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Abigail was overjoyed to be a grandmother. She delighted in the comings and goings of her grandson and the babies of her nieces and nephews, who were mostly married by the mid-1860s. Louisa both adored babies and also knew she was unlikely to have any of her own. Her books were her offspring, she felt, with regret and relief: relief because her literary creations gave her such satisfaction, and regret because she would have loved a family. As Margaret Fuller had described this paradox, “I have no child, and the woman in me has so craved this experience that it has seemed the want of it must paralyze me.
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But now as I look on these lovely children of a human birth what slow and neutralizing cares they bring with them to the mother. The children of the muse come quicker, with less pain and disgust, rest more lightly on the bosom,” untainted with “earthly corruption.” At the same time, as Louisa would realize after her sister became a mother, “I sell
my
children, and though they feed me, they don’t love me as hers do.”
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Louisa experienced a burst of creativity as she recuperated from her long illness. In April, only a few weeks from her sickbed, she began a book based on the letters she had written to her mother from Washington,
Hospital Sketches: An Army Nurse’s True Account of Her Experience During the Civil War
. Frank Sanborn offered to serialize it in
Commonwealth
, an antislavery journal published in Boston. Her jaunty description of herself in the preface to
Hospital Sketches
evokes a promise her mother had made to herself as a teenager, never to be found inferior to a man or incapable of anything. “I’m a woman’s rights woman,” Louisa wrote a half-century later in
Hospital Sketches
, “and if any man had offered [me] help in the morning, I should have condescendingly refused it, sure that I could do everything as well, if not better, myself.”

When she was not resting or writing, Louisa received visitors. Samuel Joseph and his son Joseph, who was studying for the ministry in Cambridge, came to see her in May. Not long afterward Louisa spent “a
pleasant day” with “Lottie May,” her pet name for her cousin Charlotte, “& her boy,” five-year-old Alfred Wilkinson Jr.
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Hospital Sketches
came out as a book in August 1863 and was received more positively by critics and buyers than anything she had published before. Her sketches had “uncommon merit,” according to the
Boston Transcript
. “Fluent and sparkling in style, with touches of quiet humanity and lively wit, relieving what would otherwise be a topic too somber and sad, they are graphic in description.” On walks around Concord, Louisa had “the satisfaction of seeing my towns folk buying, reading, laughing, & crying over it wherever I go.”
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Her father remarked that “nothing could be more surprising to her or agreeable to us [than public] appreciation of Louisa’s merits as a woman and a writer.”
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But professional accomplishment was not always agreeable to Louisa. With a family to support, she told one publisher, she was impelled to devote her “time & earnings to the care of my father & mother, for one possesses no gift for money making & the other is now too old to work any longer for those who are happy & able to work for her.
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On this account I often have to deny myself.”

Still, she loved to share with her mother her own amazed amusement at her success. “A year ago, I had no publisher and went begging with my wares,” she said. Now three publishers “have asked me for something, [and] several papers are ready to print my contributions!” Sanborn told her that “any publisher this side of Baltimore would be glad to get a book from Louisa May Alcott.” She detected “a sudden hoist for a meek & lowly scribbler who . . . never had a literary friend to lend a helping hand!” Louisa wrote in her journal, “Fifteen years of hard grubbing may be coming to something after all, & I may yet ‘pay all the debts, fix the house, send May to Italy & keep the old folks cosy,’ as I’ve said I would so long ago yet so hopelessly.”

Louisa was herself again, Abigail observed with relief. Freed from housekeeping by illness and doted on by Marmee, she seemed hopeful, full of ideas, and eager to write. Abigail advised her to publish a collection of her popular stories, based on the printed copies she had saved.
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Boosted by her mother, she mined her war experiences in a short work of fiction, “My Contraband,” that she set in an army hospital after the beginning of the siege of Charleston, in July 1863.
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