Marmee & Louisa (37 page)

Like
Hospital Sketches
, “My Contraband” is narrated confidently by an army nurse. Louisa appears in
Hospital Sketches
as Miss Tribulation Periwinkle; in the story her alter ego is Miss Faith Dane.
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As the short story opens, a doctor asks Nurse Dane to watch over a new patient, a “drunken, rascally little” Confederate captain, “crazy with typhoid,” who must be kept apart from Union soldiers at the hospital. “Out of perversity, if not common charity,” she agrees. “Some of these people think that because I’m an abolitionist I am also a heathen, and I should rather like to show them that, though I cannot quite love my enemies, I am willing to take care of them.”

In the teenage captain’s room she encounters a slightly older servant, the “contraband” of the title, a former slave behind Union lines. The doctor describes the servant as “a fine mulatto fellow . . . too high and haughty” to be housed with “black fellows below.”

Nurse Dane glances “furtively” at the “strong-limbed and manly” contraband, who has “all the attributes of comeliness belonging to his mixed race.” Like the husband in Louisa’s dream, he has a “Spanish complexion darkened by exposure.” His eyes display “the passionate melancholy which in such men always seems to utter a mute protest against the broken law that doomed them at their birth.” She wonders incessantly what he is thinking, and feels a love for him both maternal and romantic. She respectfully calls him “Robert” rather than “Bob.” He has no surname, she learns, because he rejected his former master’s. “I wanted to know and comfort him; and, following the impulse of the moment, I went in and touched him on the shoulder.” Momentarily “the man vanished and the slave appeared.”

A week later the doctor asks her to stay by the rebel captain until he dies. In his sleep that night, the captain cries out for “Lucy.” To calm him “by following the fancy,” Nurse Dane says, “I am Lucy.” He murmurs that Lucy is dead; she “cut her throat.”

The next morning Nurse Dane wakes to find Robert, who overheard their dialogue, preparing to kill the captain. Her “heart began to beat, and all my nerves tingled.” The contraband reveals that Lucy was his wife and the captain his half brother because Robert is his former master’s illegitimate son. The captain raped Lucy, who then killed herself, Robert now knows.

“Do not commit a crime and make me accessory to it,” the nurse begs him. “There is a better way of righting wrong than by violence;—let me help you find it.” Thinking of her New England ancestry, she wonders silently why Robert should “deny himself this sweet yet bitter morsel called revenge? How many white men, with all New England’s freedom, culture, Christianity, would not have felt as he felt then? . . . Who had taught him that self-control, self-sacrifice, are attributes that make men masters of the earth, and lift them nearer heaven? . . . What did he know of justice, or the mercy that should temper that stern virtue, when every law, human and divine, had been broken on his hearthstone?”

Nurse Dane aims to use her clever tongue, “often a woman’s best defense,” to convince him not to kill the captain. “Do you believe,” he asks her, “if I let Marster Ned live, the Lord will give me back my Lucy?” God will, she says, “in the beautiful hereafter, where there is no black or white, no master and no slave.” Urging him to run away, she offers to “write you letters, give you money, and send you to good old Massachusetts to begin your new life a freeman.” With her help Robert escapes to the North.

During the attack on Fort Wagner a few months later, Robert fights in one of the first all-black Union regiments, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Army under Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. At a Beaufort hospital Nurse Dane encounters “my contraband . . . deathly weak and wan.” As he dies she notices his name written on a slip above his bed, “Robert Dane,” and realizes that he has taken her name, as a woman usually takes her husband’s. A similar reversal of tradition occurs in a story Louisa wrote three years later. In “Taming a Tartar,” a confident young teacher subdues a tyrannical, chauvinistic man and then, after agreeing to marry him, vows to “love, honor and—
Not
obey” him.

Stories like “My Contraband” and “Taming a Tartar” were fun to write and easy to sell, and they paid the bills. Louisa published scores of thrillers with abolitionist and feminist themes in “penny dreadful” magazines throughout the 1860s. Melodramatic tales of murder, revenge, and interracial love affairs, like soap operas of a later era, allowed her to explore her recurring literary theme, sexual inequality. The central characters in these stories are angry, insane, or manipulative women who fight with men for power.
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“Alcott’s feminism took the form of a power
struggle between the sexes,” Madeleine Stern observed. Androgynous pseudonyms concealed her identity, allowing her to live out her fantasies in secret. No one outside her family knew she wrote thrillers. Years later she told an interviewer, “I think my natural ambition is for the lurid style.
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I indulge in gorgeous fancies and wish that I dared inscribe them upon my pages and set them before the public.”

Feeling somewhat improved after nearly a year in Concord with her family, Louisa began to plan a trip to the South. “I love nursing, and must let out my pent-up energy in some new way,” she told a friend.
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“I am willing to enlist in any capacity. The blood of old Col. May asserts itself in his granddaughter in these martial times & she is very anxious to be busied in some more loyal labor than sitting quietly at home spinning fictions when such fine facts are waiting for all of us to profit and celebrate. . . . As I am no longer allowed to nurse the whites . . . [I will] help the blacks,” cooking for troops or teaching freedmen on the Sea Islands. In the Carolinas she hoped to write a sequel to
Hospital Sketches
for the
Atlantic
, “Plantation Sketches.”
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The trip never occurred. Her application to teach was rejected “because I had no natural [male] protector to go with me.” And her health remained unstable. Plagued by headaches, pain in her joints, and a weariness she could not escape, she was “a hollow-eyed, almost fleshless wreck,” in Julian Hawthorne’s words. Marmee’s poor health may also have kept her home. Louisa observed in her mother an “irrepressible conflict between sickness and the May constitution.”
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Perhaps this was an inherited condition that passed from Dorothy Sewall May to Abigail May Alcott to Louisa, a constitutional frailty they could not escape. Whatever the cause, the winter and spring found her at her desk revising
Moods
and working on another adult novel, this one about “the trials of young women who want employment & find it hard to get.”
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In 1864 she sent the manuscript of
Moods
to the publisher A. K. Loring, made the cuts and revisions he suggested, and awaited its publication in December.

Moods
was a disappointment to her, especially after the excitement aroused by
Hospital Sketches
. The novel neither sold well nor pleased many critics, although one review, in
Harper’s Weekly
, compared Louisa to a neighbor whose writing she admired: “After Hawthorne we recall no love-story of equal power.”
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Readers disapproved of the novel’s love
triangle and its unconventional portrayal of marriage. One reviewer alleged that she had based
Moods
on an actual love affair at Fruitlands between Charles Lane and Abigail, unaware that the affair, such as it was, was between the two men.
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“Some fear it isn’t moral because it speaks freely of marriage,” Louisa said of the novel, which in her view was “not a discussion of marriage, which I knew so little about, except to observe that very few were happy ones.”
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But Louisa’s most important critic, Abigail, loved
Moods
. She read it more than twenty times, according to her journals. “I look upon this early effort of Louisa’s as . . . quite remarkable. . . . Her descriptions of scenes [and] motives are admirable. I am charmed with it.” Years later, after Louisa’s remarkable success with
Little Women
, Abigail praised this “early effort,”
Moods
, for its “indications of intellectual power hardly discoverable in any of her subsequent lesser writings” for girls.

Louisa, poignantly aware of her mother’s thwarted ambition, dedicated
Moods
to Abigail. For Christmas that year, a full decade after making a gift of
Flower Fables
, she gave Abigail an early copy of her adult novel inscribed with a note: “I am happy, very happy tonight, for my five years work is done, and whether it succeeds or not I shall be the richer and better for it because the labor, love, disappointment, hope and purpose that have gone into it are a useful experience that I shall not forget.
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Now if it makes a little money and opens the way for more I shall be satisfied, and you in some measure repaid for all the sympathy, help, and love that have done so much for me in these hard years. I hope Success will sweeten me and make me what I long to become more than a great writer—a good daughter.”

Abigail tried to stay awake all that night to read the new book.
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The next day Bronson read it and observed that Louisa “has succeeded better in her treatment of the social problem [of male-female relationships] than did Goethe or George Sand.” Her style is “vigorous and clear,” her theme dignified, and her characters “forcibly drawn.
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 . . . She has written a better book than she knows, opening for herself . . . a career of wide usefulness, if not of permanent fame as a novelist and a woman.”

Louisa’s success was beneficial to him, too. It not only produced an income but also burnished his image. “Everywhere I am coming into importance . . . through that rising young lady,” he wrote in 1864 in his diary. Recognized now as “The Father of Miss Alcott,” he was “honored
as never before.” No one, he noticed, gave “the mother . . . her full share” of credit.
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The author’s mother was less sanguine about Louisa’s future. Despite all that Louisa and the family had gained from her creative achievements since her recovery from typhoid fever, something essential had been lost. Louisa’s vibrancy was gone. “I was never ill before this time, and never well afterwards,” Louisa observed. To Abigail, writing in her journal, Louisa’s mysterious affliction was “the bitter drop in this cup overflowing with success.”

Chapter Fourteen

From May to March

A
t Orchard House in January 1865, mother and daughter sat together beside the parlor fireplace. Abigail, wrapped in shawls and huddled in her comfortable chair, was writing in her journal, which her poor eyesight made challenging to read. Louisa sat nearby in her warm wrap, reading intently and occasionally stopping to write a quick note. Beside her was a stack of journals. There were ten, twenty, or more volumes of the diary that her mother had kept since 1811, one for each year. Abigail glanced at her thirty-two-year-old daughter the author with, one imagines, maternal pride and wrote, “Louisa is reading over my journals, from 1842, with many intermissions.”
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Louisa had often combed through her mother’s journals for material. Indeed “Louisa learned to write from reading her mother’s journals,” according to Lisa Stepanski; “the biggest gift her mother gave Louisa was her voice.”
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Louisa left no record as to why on that bitter January day she chose to start reading in 1842, the year she was nine. It was the year her father was gone for five months while she stayed in Concord with her sisters and mother. In the fall of 1842 Charles Lane and Henry Wright squeezed into Dove Cottage with the Alcotts, the beginning of the Fruitlands debacle. That was the year in which her mother feared losing her mind and acted in a matter that later seemed “heroic.” Eighteen forty-two was a time of drama, pain, loneliness, and triumph. Like Louisa’s experience at the army hospital, this was something to write about.

Throughout the 1860s, while considering Abigail’s powerlessness as
a wife, Louisa populated short thrillers with powerful femmes fatales who “could manipulate whole families,” scholars note.
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“Unbridled sensuality and principled struggles for equality vie in each [Alcott] heroine for pride of place.
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 . . . Alcott’s stories acknowledge that it is a man’s world and woman must fight for a place in it. Losing her struggle, she must live alone or die uttering the battle cry of freedom.”

In addition to these profitable tales, Louisa had begun another novel for adults,
Success
, which she later renamed
Work: A Story of Experience
. At the novel’s center is a young single woman who ponders the questions, What is success? How do I create a meaningful life? She forgoes a traditional marriage, leaves home to work in the city, and asks only “for a chance to be a useful, happy woman.”
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She tries every field a woman could—domestic service, nursing, teaching, and writing—and considers no marriage except that of equals. “Women who stand alone in the world, and have their own way to make, have a better chance to know men truly than those who sit safe at home and only see one side of mankind,” she explains. “We who are compelled to be fellow-workers with men understand and value them more truly than many a belle who has a dozen lovers sighing at her feet.”