Louisa May Alcott: Life, Literary Legacy, and Transcendentalism

Biographical and Literary Overview of Louisa May Alcott. Jo’s declaration in the epigraph of Little Women—"I want to do something splendid before I go into my castle—something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead... I think I shall write books and get rich and famous"—reflects the spirit of the book that made Louisa May Alcott "rich and famous". Because Alcott’s father, the education philosopher and transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, never made enough money for his family’s needs, Louisa May spent most of her 56 years producing at least 270 richly varied works. She is best known for the novel that features her thinly disguised sisters—Meg (Anna), Beth (Lizzie), Amy (Abba May); her absent father, made heroic; her well-educated, long-suffering mother; and the center of interest, Josephine (Louisa/Louey herself). In that particular book, as in many of Alcott’s others, the protagonist yearns for adventure for herself and for harmony and success for her family. The last of those goals was the most challenging, as the family would have a full portion of suffering and loss.

Family Background and Intellectual Influences. Born in 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, Louisa May Alcott moved dozens of times over the course of an often stressful life. She was the second daughter of two strong-minded dreamers: a clergyman’s daughter, Abba May, who was descended from the Sewall and Quincy families of Massachusetts, and Bronson Alcott, who had already written ten books on his progressive educational theories and had (unsuccessfully) tried them out in several classrooms—and later on his own children (the four daughters and a boy who died in infancy). Bronson Alcott’s keen observations of every detail of their infancy, toddlerhood, and childhood went into his remarkable journals. Adding up to some 2,500 pages, these observations have been called "the first work of child psychology in the United States" (Bedell 58). Abba gave to the family her own strong will and the influences of such women as her friends Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Peabody, and Margaret Fuller.

Transcendentalist Circle and Reform Movement Involvement. About the time of their marriage, Bronson Alcott, drawn to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, became part of the transcendentalist circle; he also became an active abolitionist. By 1835, when Louisa May was three, Bronson had made his own home a stop on the Underground Railroad, had been threatened by mobs, and had become an officer in the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Before Henry David Thoreau did so, Bronson Alcott refused to pay his taxes for similar principles. The family lived intensely. "The secret of the Alcotts," said their biographer Madelon Bedell, was "their largeness, their ability to live life with flair and a boldness of gesture, to see it as theater in which they might play out their role as actors and heroes in some grand drama" (xv).

Communal Experiments and Childhood Hardships. Such a heritage had its drawbacks. Before 1843, when the family bought into Fruitlands, the transcendentalist communal farm experiment that failed, they had moved 10 times in 13 years. Son of farmers, Bronson Alcott could work so hard on little bits of land that Ellery Channing dubbed him "Orpheus at the Plough," but he also spent long periods not working. Louisa May witnessed her father’s bouts with depression when the model Temple School in Boston and later education experiments failed because, for example, Bronson insisted on introducing sex education into the classroom and—once—because he admitted a Black student. His own children were well, if idiosyncratically, educated by Bronson, Abba, and such others as Sophia Hawthorne, who taught Louisa her alphabet, and Thoreau, who taught her botany. The girls read popular moralistic fiction, but they also read and quoted Plato, Thucydides, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, and volumes of others.

Socioeconomic Realities and the Fruitlands Strain. This was the more remarkable because of the family’s almost constant poverty. Abba actually took in sewing work and (in 1848) attempted to support the four girls and herself on the $25 a month she received for distributing goods to the poor on behalf of a charity. For a time, too, the family rented out one of the rooms in their small quarters. It was therefore no wonder that Louisa May cared so deeply about the poor: the Hummels, for example, in Little Women, the beautiful Edith Adelon in The Inheritance, and Christie Devon in Work. Perhaps the worst time, especially for the women in the family, was the seven-month failed communal farm experiment at Fruitlands, which Alcott bought in 1843 with Charles Lane. The daughters disliked Lane and the rural hardships that caused their mother to say the experiment demonstrated "the yoke on women" (Bedell 223). The Alcott family, poor enough already, was stuck with the freezing cold, needy house and surroundings after the other members bailed out. Bronson and Abba discussed the possibility of divorce, and, as Louisa remembered, "Anna and I cried in bed, and I prayed to God to keep us all together" (Saxton 165).

Literary Reflection on Transcendentalism. Thirty years later, after publishing her now-famous domestic stories for young people and, under pseudonyms, thrillers for magazines, Louisa May Alcott reflected on the Fruitlands experiment in the sharply satiric "Transcendental Wild Oats" (1872): "These modern pilgrims" who "journeyed hopefully out of the old world to form a new one in the wilderness," she implied, were woefully improvident. When the fictive family had no oil for lamps, for example, the fictive leader of the community said, "Go without until we have discovered some vegetable oil" (Alternative Alcott 268). The desperate humor of these passages turns simply desolate when the partner deserts and Abel (Bronson) tells Hope (Abba) that "all I have must be sold to pay the debts" (Alternative Alcott 376). The essay/short story ends, however, on a consolatory, Candide-like note: "Cheer up, dear heart, for while there is work and love in the world, we shall not suffer" (Alternative Alcott 379).

Concord Network and Personal Loss. In spite of the failed communal living experiment, Bronson Alcott’s work for the Dial, his educational theories, and his courage made him one of the central figures in New England transcendentalism. Emerson, who helped steer Bronson to his own lecture circuit and, with the May family, helped him financially, lived across from the Alcotts during one of their happy Concord tenures and was such an influence on Louisa May that he appears, greatly changed, as Little Women’s wise and shy Professor Bhaer. Emerson’s help was especially important at the time of Lizzie’s death. The sad event that became the lachrymose center of Alcott’s famous book and the movies based on it was grim, even ugly. It took two years between Lizzie’s contracting of scarlet fever from a charity case of Abba’s to the 23-year-old’s burial in Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Louisa watched "with stark horror" as the disease ravaged Lizzie’s small frame, by then dependent on opium and morphine (Saxton 237). Though the last moments were relatively peaceful and though Louisa May told herself that she must learn the lesson of this first break in the family, she fell into a deep depression after her sister’s death.

Residence at Orchard House and Early Employment. Unlike the thinly veiled Marches, in real life the Alcott family did not move to Orchard House (Louisa May called it "Apple Slump") until 1858, when 26-year-old Louisa and her family were recovering from Lizzie’s death. Some of the family would live there until 1877, making it the longest tenure for the family in any dwelling. There in 1860 Anna and John Pratt were married; there Bronson and Abba aged; there Little Women was written. Still, the family suffered financial straits. Abba May (now called May) worked at Dr. Wilbur’s Asylum, and Louisa (Louey), who had taken her turn as, among other things, a domestic worker ("in service," earning $4 for seven weeks of labor) and a teacher, signed on for perhaps the greatest adventure of her life: as a nurse during the Civil War. Later she became a tutor-companion for a family who traveled with two children on what would be Alcott’s first trip to Europe. That year abroad (July 1865–July 1866), for all its difficulties with the family, allowed Alcott to meet Dickens (she was unimpressed) and the Italian patriot and revolutionary Guiseppi Mazzini, and to form a friendship with young Ladislas Wisniewski, who became part of the portrait of Laurie. Such jobs made their way into Work (1873).

Early Writings and Pseudonymous Works. Alcott’s writing life, which continued through all her other labors, began as a child with her diary, the book in which she reflects such Alcott everyday occurrences as cold water baths and sibling squabbles. The journal, edited by Cory Ryan, provides an early glimpse of Alcott’s lifetime concerns: her ambition, her own morality, and her love of literature. At 15 Alcott wrote her first short story, "The Rival Painters, a Tale of Rome," published four years later in the Olive Branch, a family journal. At 19 Alcott began to find presses for her poems and stories; the first was "Flora Fairchild" in Peterson’s. Her first book, Flower Fables, appeared three years later. Little Women dramatizes Alcott’s flair for melodramas, but what was not known for almost 100 years was that she actually was writing stories as lurid as Jo’s. A few were published under Alcott’s own name, but many more were not. In the 1940s Madeleine B. Stern and her partner discovered the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, beginning the quest for a mother lode of thrillers, written between 1862 and 1867. Two later discoveries of earlier works—in this case, full-length novels—caused even more excitement.

Discovery of Early Novels and Civil War Service. The earliest-written but the last to be discovered (by Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy in 1994) was The Inheritance. Written when Alcott was only 16, the novel had been hiding, clearly marked by Alcott but apparently never read and certainly never published, until the scholars presented it in 1997. Once published, it became a television melodrama. This very early book introduces readers to characters who will appear in other guises in the other melodramas: a beautiful, sweet, and lonely girl; two Scottish children who turn out to be half siblings of the "orphan"; a widowed mother; an ugly, nasty cousin; plus two different admirers of the young girl. Virtue and luck combine to help this innocent Amy be both self-sacrificing and rich by the end of the novel. In 1860, some 15 years after she concocted the story of the three young people and their "inheritance," Alcott had a tiny bit more of the success she so craved when the Atlantic accepted "Love and Self Love," and two years later "Pauline’s Passion and Punishment" won a $100 prize. As "Pauline" began serialization in 1863, Alcott’s 30th year, her life became a great adventure, one that would quickly be transformed into a well-received publication.

· 1st stage: On a cold December night in 1863, Alcott made an arduous trek to Washington, D.C. (via coach, train, and boat) to nurse in one of the city's worst hospitals for wounded soldiers.

· 2nd stage: Hospital Sketches, her not-very-fictionalized report on this journey and her brief nursing career, recounts the challenges of being thrown into an intensely physical male world in a strange city in the early stages of a war that mattered so much to her family's principles.

· 3rd stage: Tribulation Periwinkle stands in for Alcott. Her work at the "Hurly Burly," like Alcott’s, at the Union Hotel Hospital, was cut short by her own serious illness.

· 4th stage: Within a week after she was struck by typhoid pneumonia, Alcott’s father took her home. She would never fully recover from the calomel (mercurous chloride) with which she was dosed.

· 5th stage: As soon as she was able, however, she turned to her account of the challenges of wiping the brows, cleaning the bodies, and writing the mail for soldiers—both Union and Confederate—for serialized publication in the spring 1863 Commonwealth.

Commercial Breakthrough and Gothic Sensationalism. Two months later Hospital Sketches found wide readership, and Alcott soon published two more books, The Rose Family and On Picket Duty and Other Tales. Within another year she had published a novel on which she had worked during the busy preceding four or five years, Moods. She had also become the editor of Merry’s Museum. About the same time, the editor Thomas Niles asked her to write a girls' book. She wrote part 1 of that girl’s book, Little Women—destined for translation into most languages, into drama and film form, even into opera form—in six weeks. Her life had turned a corner. Before Little Women Alcott had had mixed success with publishing. Although Hospital Sketches and Moods had been well received, A Long Fatal Love Chase, written in 1866, had been rejected. It is poignant to consider that although it created a sensation in 1995 when it was finally published through the efforts of the book collector and educator Kent Bicknell, who bought the manuscript of Love Chase for $50,000 and sold it to Random House for $1.5 million, the Alcott family was in almost abject poverty when Alcott wrote the book. The early gothic thriller involved the lust not only of the "chaser," Phillip Temple, but also of the female protagonist, Rosamond. Her opening challenge is portentous: "I tell you I cannot bear it! I shall do something desperate if this life is not changed soon. It gets worse and worse, and I often feel as if I'd gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom" (1). In the end, the chase is, indeed, fatal; even the modern reader keeps turning pages for the "who, what, and how" of the complex plot development. Although Alcott had no success with Love Chase in her own lifetime, she did sell (under pseudonyms) stories that were equally melodramatic.

Pseudonymous Thrillers and Psychological Themes. Published in England and serialized in American publications, these stories included "Behind a Mask, or, A Woman’s Power," which earned her $65, and "The Abbot’s Ghost, or Maurice Treherne’s Temptation". Of these stories, Alcott reported with pleasure, "Mr. L. [Frank Leslie] says my tales are so 'dramatic, vivid, and full of plot,' they are just what he wants" (Stern, "Introduction"). Like Alcott behind her pseudonym, the slippery protagonist Jean Muir is "behind a mask" as she evolves from a scorned governess to the wealthy wife of Sir John Coventry. Creator and protagonist are also alike in Jean Muir’s early humiliations, her determination not to be poor, her cleverness, and her way with words. One of the most shocking of these early Alcott stories is "Perilous Play," in which young women and a doctor experiment with pellets of hashish. Again the opening lines of this story are prophetic: "If someone does not propose a new and interesting amusement, I shall die of ennui!" (Plots and Counterplots 304). This story’s Belle and her friend Rose St. Just, who is reading—of all things—"The Lotus Eaters," find "interesting amusement" easily. Their doctor friend tells them what will happen if they try the hashish bonbons—"Your pulse will rise, heart beat quickly, eyes darken and dilate"—but they continue their "perilous play". Of the nine stories published between 1863 and 1869 Madeleine Stern notes that two were published anonymously; one bears the line "by a well known author"; three are "by A. M. Barnard"; and the last three, "Skeleton in the Closet," "The Mysterious Key," and "Perilous Play," were published under Alcott’s own name. Topics include mind control, the manipulative heroine, madness, and the use of hashish.

Publication of Little Women and Activism. Much more frankly autobiographical and certainly more successful was the book that changed her life. After Thomas Niles invited her to write "a book for girls," and in spite of her job editing Merry’s Museum, she completed the first half of Little Women in six months. Although both Niles and she thought book 1 "rather dull," it was published on October 1, 1868; book 2 was published six months later. Alcott took some time to try to help her parents, to try to get relief from her own health problems, and to take a trip to Maine. By the time she checked on the book’s success in August, she learned that Roberts Brothers had sold 23,000 copies and she was an honored authoress, well on her way to that wealth and fame her character Jo so fervently desires. Although it has some saccharine scenes and some silliness, it bears rereading. Alcott’s genuine interest in the women’s movements of her century shows in Jo, who is a thoroughly modern woman. Alcott had shown an interest in women’s rights throughout her life. The family friend and activist Margaret Fuller influenced the whole family. When she drowned, Bronson Alcott said that Fuller was "more to many women, and to many men, I may add, than any woman else, of these last years, nor is there any to fill and make good her place" (Saxton 205). Louisa kept up with the results of the 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention. At about the time she was writing Little Women, she attended meetings rallying for the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, and she participated in the lively debates of leaders such as Julia Ward Howe, Lucy Stone, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Later she was one of seven women to vote at a town meeting.

Characterization and Feminists Themes in Little Women. Alcott’s "girls’ book" reflects such interest in women’s rights. Each March sister, as does her Alcott counterpart, has and uses her talent:

· Meg, the eldest sister, has wisdom, moderation, and housewifely talents.

· Jo writes stories, directs plays, and generally acts as recreation leader.

· Amy is an artist.

· Beth, as does "Marmee," cares for the sick and poor in the community.

Late in book 1, as the family rallies to afford a ticket for Mother to travel to wounded Father, each makes a sacrifice, Jo most famously selling her long hair. As is Alcott, Jo is a tomboy and a dramatist; as Alcott does, early on, she takes a turn at being in service as a tutor; as is Alcott, Jo is a writer. As Alcott does, Jo samples big city pleasures; and she becomes fast friends with a European man. As Alcott took on the vocation of inspiring and educating children—she was called "the children’s friend"—so Jo declared that she would use Plumfield, the large home the dreaded (but secretly loved) Aunt March left them, to raise a profitable "crop": boys. Her goal is "to open a school for little lads—a good, happy, homelike school, with me to take care of them, and Fritz to teach them".

Later Career, Final Years, and Posthumous Legacy. Louisa May Alcott also sacrificed for her family and, through moralistic works, cast herself in the role of teacher of children. Although constantly plagued by health problems, she followed her famous book with a series of similar books, for example, An Old Fashioned Girl (1870), Little Men (1871), Eight Cousins (1875), and Jack and Jill (1880). She also revised Work, a book that records some of her own early harrowing adventures. By 1882 she recorded such troubles in her journal as her father’s illness and "much trouble with nurses"; her concern that Anna, now a widow, was tired; and the support of her new charge, Lulu, orphaned at May’s death. Most of all, she felt hedged in, worrying that "I shall never lead my own life" (Cheney 353). She never—or rarely—did, writing until her illness forced down her pen. Her mother died in 1876; her father, whose care was her late-life burden, outlived her by only two days. She cared for Little Lulu Nieriker and helped the fatherless Pratt household. "Work is and always has been my salvation," she had said, "and I thank the Lord for inventing it" (Saxton 353). Work’s protagonist Christie Devon adds to this sentiment, "There is so much to be done, and it is so delightful to help do it, that I never mean to fold my hands till they are useless" (chapter xx). But Alcott did wear herself out. Thirteen years after she published Work, she had to admit that she had folded her hands, saying that she was "quite out of the world, with its work and pleasure, laid up on the shore where so many wrecks lie" (Smith and Scharnhorst, 22).

Posthumous Reception and Literary Canonization. One year after Alcott’s death, Ednah Dow Cheney’s hagiographic biography was published, beginning the mythmaking of "the children’s friend". In 1893, five years after Alcott’s death, the last of the Little Women, Anna Pratt, died. Her sons would become executors of the estate. Little Lulu, born in 1879, a month before her mother May’s death, was sent back to live with her father, where, at a very old age, she brightly answered the questions of a biographer. Alcott would continue to be relished by young people. College classrooms and textbooks would celebrate her as a woman who gave eloquent voice to her awareness of the needs and rights of women. She had, perhaps, prepared for all of that in the preface to Little Women, paraphrasing John Bunyan: "Go then, my little book, and show to all / That entertain and bid thee welcome shall / . . . To them for good, may make them choose to be / Pilgrims Better, by far, than thee or me".