Louisa as Daughter

Before Louisa May Alcott grew up to be a famous children's author, she belonged to her parents: Bronson Alcott and Abigail May Alcott. Bronson was an educator whose lofty ideas brought him to the forefront of the Transcendentalist philosophy movement. Abigail May Alcott was a social worker and ardent supporter of women's suffrage. Together, they created a family where their four daughters were encouraged to be active, creative individuals. This is the story of Louisa May Alcott as a daughter.

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Transcript

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On Louisa May Alcott’s 24th birthday and her father Bronson’s 57th (yes, they shared the same one), Louisa wrote her father a letter from her little room with the dormer window on Chauncey Street in Boston. She was away from her family, living in a boarding house for the fall, while her parents and younger sisters were up in Walpole, New Hampshire. Louisa loved Boston- visiting with her mother’s family, attending operas, lectures, and intellectual gatherings. The sights and sounds of people and industry thrilled and uplifted her. The letters to her sister Anna during these weeks are rollicking and excited, full of amusing descriptions of the fun Louisa is having with her relations and friends in the grand city. The letter to Bronson, however, is subdued and sedate, like a practiced speech. Missing are the funny anecdotes of her escapades. Instead, she makes a point of mentioning how lonely she is and fills the first half of the letter with praise for her father and his accomplishments, as if stoking his ego. Yet she sneaks in, as if she can’t help herself, a simple statement of defiance, a quick jab at a man she loves but cannot truly understand: “Things go smoothly,” she writes, “and I think I shall come out right, and prove that though an Alcott I can support myself.” This is a bold, deliberate statement to a father who had consistently put philosophy and ideals above earning a living or feeding his family. She may have been defined as his daughter, but she would reclaim what it truly meant to be an Alcott.

INTRODUCTION

Before we are consciously ourselves, before we forge our own identities, we belong first to our parents. They are the first tellers of the story of who we are, as our habits, temperaments, and personalities are filtered through the lenses of the adults who care for us. How they respond to what lies within us creates lasting impressions on who we become. We are then left to pick through the labels they lay on us, accepting, discarding, or rewriting each in turn. This was certainly true of Louisa May Alcott. Before she was Louisa the author, she was Louy, the second-born daughter of Bronson and Abigail Alcott, one a philosopher, dreamer, and idealist, the other a headstrong, witty, and intelligent feminist. Louisa was the child most like her mother, the child attempting to please her father, the child more intelligent and perceptive than her sisters yet more wildly temperamental and unruly. Louisa never married or had children of her own, but lived with and supported her parents (both financially and emotionally) her entire life. Throughout her childhood and into her adult life, Louisa’s identity and role as “daughter” would supersede any other way Louisa defined herself; her parents’ analysis and understanding of who she was ultimately influenced her own conception of her personality and purpose.

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From the day she was born, Louisa was already the focus of a book- a journal in which her father kept a record of her childhood and development. Bronson was a self-taught philosopher and educator with new and modern theories about childhood development. He had also kept a journal of Anna, his first daughter, to understand how children’s brains and personalities develop in a controlled environment; her easy, serene nature, so similar to his own, seemed to prove his theory that, as John Matteson writes, “environment was all-important in the moral formation of a child.” To Bronson, it followed that the ideal father could only raise ideal children. 

The arrival of Louisa threw this theory out the window. From her birth, Bronson focused intently on the infant Louisa’s disposition. He described her as “a very fine, fat, little creature…with a firm constitution for building up a fine character.” As he watched her develop, he noticed her acute intelligence, her proclivity for language and vocabulary, and her “powerful character.” Yet Bronson was troubled by aspects of Louisa’s emerging personality that differed from his own and Anna’s docile temperament. Louisa’s stubbornness, willfulness, temper, and inability to master empathy (even though she was only two), worried him greatly and seemed to thwart his child-rearing philosophies. He couldn’t help but observe a frustrating similarity between Louisa and her mother, Abigail, whose independent spirit was also an enigma to him. “They are more alike: the elements of their beings are similar: the will is the predominating power,” Bronson mused, placing the responsibility for his failed theory squarely on his wife’s shoulders. 

Louisa’s mother, Abigail May, described herself once as “full of emotion, strong prejudices, placable but passionate” – a description that would later be apt of her daughter as well. She was descended from a long line of wealthy and distinguished Boston families. Although Abigail was extremely intelligent, she was not allowed, as a woman, to earn an advanced education as her brothers did at Harvard University. Undeterred, she educated herself at home and became passionate about social justice reform, particularly abolition and women’s suffrage. “I am not willing to be thought incapable of any thing,” the teenage Abigail proclaimed in a letter to her parents after outlining the extensive list of books she was studying. In her surviving writings, we see a woman who was witty, perceptive, and unapologetic of her original and controversial ideas, a woman with a passionate and untamable nature, and a writing talent to equal her daughter’s. It’s not hard to see that Abigail may be the original Jo March.

Bronson Alcott, the son of poor Connecticut farmers, was “tranquil and firm,” in Abigail’s estimation- the perfect counterbalance to her fiery disposition. Despite their different backgrounds, he was idealistic and hungry for knowledge, just like her. The two shared similar ideas about feminism, suffrage, childhood development and education, and the social ills of the day. Yet while the attraction of opposites worked during courtship, it did not lead to a happy marriage. Bronson’s idealism was admirable, but his impracticability and ego stood in the way of his ability to earn a living and provide for his family. His educational and social ideals often alienated him from friends and society, while his philosophic desire to rise above earthly cares meant he failed to financially support his family. The family descended into poverty, so Abigail took on the burden of daily survival for her growing family; to pay Bronson’s debts and feed her children, she worked odd jobs and begged money, clothes, and food from her wealthier relatives. The ideal marriage Abigail had envisioned when she had married Bronson had not come to pass.

Yet as a mother, Abigail thrived. On her youngest daughter May’s second birthday in 1842, she reflected on “the joy I feel in their birth and continuance with me on earth. I wish them to feel that we must live for each other.” Caring for and loving her children kept her from despair, she admitted. Her mothering was rooted in nurturing support, leading by example of helping others, and the “unconventional desire,” as Eve LaPlante says, “that her girls find their way to do good in the world without concern for society’s expectations.” Abigail was more interested in encouraging her girls to be who they were rather than asking them to be someone they were not, something her literary counterpart in Little Women shared.

“Miss Alcott [Louisa],” a family friend once remarked, “was more distinctly the child of her mother than of her father…” and it’s true that Louisa’s temperament, struggles, desires, and talents closely mirrored Abigail’s own, bonding the two women. “People think I’m wild and queer,” Louisa wrote when she was in her early teens, “but Mother understands and helps me.” For Louisa, Abigail was a kindred spirit in whom she took great comfort. Eve LaPlante refers to Abigail and Louisa as “a pair, each one the person in the world to whom the other felt closest.” LaPlante points to several indicators of their strong and mutually trusting relationship- when Louisa confided in Abigail about her thoughts of suicide in 1858, how Abigail gave Louisa her private journals to read for story ideas, and even left them to her upon her death. Throughout Louisa’s life, Abigail was astonishingly intuitive about her personality and emotional needs, seeing her more clearly than perhaps Louisa saw herself. In one journal entry, Abigail mused that “I believe there are some natures too noble to curb, too lofty to bend. Of such is my Lu.” Unlike her husband, Abigail wasn’t interested in changing her daughter; she concerned herself with guiding Louisa through her difficult emotional landscape and offering herself as a confidant. “My dearest Louy,” Abigail wrote in 1845, “I often peep into your diary, hoping to see some record of more happy days. ‘Hope, and keep busy,’ dear daughter, and in all perplexity or trouble come freely to your Mother.” Louisa responded with her own note back. “Dear Mother- You shall see more happy days, and I will come to you with my worries, for you are the best woman in the world.”

Abigail was not only attuned to her daughter’s complex emotions, but she was also the first to truly define Louisa as a writer, recognizing her talent as well as her dependence on writing as a creative outlet. “I encourage [Louisa’s] writing,” she wrote to her brother when Louisa was 13. “It is a safety valve to her smothered sorrow which might otherwise consume her young and tender heart.” Abigail carefully copied Louisa’s poems into her journals, gifted her with a pen, and offered insightful commentary on Louisa’s writing style as it developed in her adult years. She even predicted, years before Little Women was written, that Louisa will “establish a stable position among authorships.” Her support undoubtedly led to Louisa’s ability to conceive of herself as a writer and certainly helped expand Louisa’s resolve to follow that path. To Abigail, Louisa was a woman of great potential and promise who would be able to make her own way, as Abigail herself had once dreamed of doing.

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To Bronson, Louisa was an enigma, a puzzle to solve, a problem to fix. Bronson was a progressive father, heavily involved in his children’s upbringing and shying away from doling out physical punishments, both unusual fatherly attributes for the time. He often participated in their daily care, giving them baths and getting them dressed, since, as Madelon Bedell states in her book The Alcott’s: A Biography of A Family: “he believed that parents should share equally in the upbringing of their children.” Though he soon found this was easier said than done, he did seem to delight in and encourage his children’s playing and development, tracing his daughter’s hands into his journal and letting them build towers out of the books in his study. He also believed women capable of learning and deserving of access to education, a belief that certainly benefited his talented, intelligent daughters. Yet his philosophic idealism caused friction in his family. Despite his calm and agreeable personality, he held himself- and those around him- to extremely high moral and behavioral standards, in accordance with a philosophy that came to be known as Transcendentalism. This was a belief that knowledge came from inspiration and that the divine resided within every person, rather than merely in external forces. Bronson’s goal was “to search for the divine in the child, to attempt to cultivate it through education and nurturing,” according to Bedell. Bronson sought the “triumph of the child’s higher nature” and a “perfection of the will,” Matteson describes, and Louisa, a young girl desperate to win the love and respect of her father, could never alter herself enough to please him. Her early journal is riddled with reminders to herself to “be good,” showing that she was painfully aware of her failures, such as when she wrote at the age of 11, “Father asked us…what fault troubled us most. I said my bad temper.” In his journals, Bronson did not mince words about the objectionable temperaments of his daughter and wife, as well as his burden in governing them: “Two devils as yet, I am not quite divine enough to vanquish- the mother fiend and her daughter,” he wrote when Louisa was 13 years old. Yet Louisa had her own frustrations with her father. His expectations of virtuosity were unattainable for her, and she could not ascribe to his idealistic aspirations when they were not sufficient to support the family. “Speculation seems a waste of time when there is so much real work crying to be done. Why discuss the Unknowable till our poor are fed and the wicked saved?” she would write later in her life about Bronson and his peers. Years of experience in her own family had taught her that thoughts and discussion were all well and good, but not at the expense of ignoring real human needs.

Bronson’s disapproval, demanding expectations, and unquestioning moral egotism may have led a daughter with a weaker constitution to descend to meek submission. Instead, headstrong Louisa embraced her independent spirit. If anything, her father’s scrutiny and emphasis on vanquishing her inner “devil” contributed to a development of introspective and observational skills that ultimately enhanced her skills as a writer. She also learned, as Matteson wrote, “to address painful subjects with wit instead of fury.” Matteson points to her tendency to use the nickname “Plato” for Bronson in her letters and journals, as a means of teasing him instead of confronting him. Satire and self-deprecation were two of her best weapons, like when she poked fun at her father’s own descriptions of her, signing a letter to him “Ever your loving demon, Louisa.”

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“Louisa found comfort in Abigail who, more than anyone else, understood and sympathized with her,” LaPlante wrote. If Abigail was the only one who understood Louisa, then Louisa repaid the devotion and love her mother bestowed on her. With a front row seat to her parents’ unstable relationship and her mother’s mental and physical struggles, Louisa became fiercely loyal and protective of Abigail. With poems and little gifts, Louisa tried to buoy her mother’s spirits. It’s interesting that though Abigail had a self-proclaimed temper, scenes or stories of Abigail’s anger or bad moods never surface in Louisa’s surviving journals, letters, or recollections. Either Abigail’s frustrations were never directed at her daughters or Louisa chose not to dwell on or remember them. Yet Louisa was acutely aware of Abigail’s struggles and desperately wished to alleviate her mother’s burdens. Multiple times in her childhood writings, Louisa expresses concern for her mother and a desire to help, as when she wrote at age 17, “I think she is a very brave, good woman; and my dream is to have a lovely, quiet home for her, with no debts or troubles to burden her.” Her mother’s wellbeing was a driving force behind Louisa’s determination to establish a professional writing career. As the money rolled in, Louisa used her earnings to pay bills and purchase necessities for the family, including putting in a central furnace at Orchard House. “Mother is to be cosey if money can do it,” Louisa wrote in her journal. “She seems to be now, and my long-cherished dream has come true; for she sits in a pleasant room, with no work, no care, no poverty to worry, but peace and comfort all about her.” But Abigail’s peace and comfort came from Louisa herself more than the money Louisa brought in. After Louisa returned from a 6 week stay in Boston, Abigail journaled, “We are glad to get her back amongst us…it creates a new atmosphere in the house, and we all feel more protected when she is about us.” To Abigail, Louisa’s presence made life “full of joy sunshine and roses.”

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In the summer of 1879, a crowd of philosophers and thinkers filed into the parlor and halls of Orchard House for the first gathering of Bronson Alcott’s Concord School of Philosophy. As Abigail had once predicted, Louisa had become an extremely famous author. Abigail herself had died two years before; without her mother, Louisa grieved, “There is no motive to go on now.” Abigail’s presence had steadied Louisa and providing for her mother had given the adult Louisa purpose. LaPlante compared Louisa’s grief to that of a widow mourning a spouse. Yet despite her loss, Louisa still wrote prolifically, pulling in staggering royalty checks that provided for her entire family; she also carried on her mother’s legacy in her involvement in suffrage efforts and charity work. But at the Concord School that summer, it was Bronson who was pride of place. He and other distinguished figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and various professors from Harvard University, hosted lectures, panel discussions, and conversations with the attendees for an entire week on ambiguous philosophical topics such as “Memory.” For most of his life, Bronson’s endeavors had been stupendous failures, but in his seventy-ninth year of life, here was a project that not only succeeded but thrived and continued for many more summers. At the time, Louisa observed that her father “has his dream realized at last, and is in glory with plenty of talk to swim in.” There is unmistakable pride in that line, and love, and respect for a father she has tried to figure out her entire life. What is missing from that statement is Louisa’s almost certain awareness that her fame and money were the primary reasons this project had been possible in the first place. Her money made her parents’ old age comfortable and her celebrity as the author of Little Women and other popular novels made her father a success wherever he went. Ironically, Matteson states, “the one who had once seemed least of all to embody or even to understand [Bronson’s] spirit and principles,” had succeeded in creating a legacy for the Alcott name.

Louisa eventually did earn the respect from her father she had always craved. After her near-death experience as an Army nurse in the Civil War, Bronson bitterly reflected on what her loss would have meant to him. Her determination to support her family with her writing impressed him greatly, and after she became the most famous author in the country, he marveled at how fame and riches did not change her values or priorities. Towards the end of his life, Bronson published a book of sonnets which included one addressed to Louisa. This poem, which praises his daughter’s selflessness, devotion, and fortitude, is a much different portrayal of Louisa from the one Bronson made in the journal he kept after she was born. The man who had once labeled his headstrong daughter a “devil” finished his poem with a new description: Louisa, he wrote, was “Duty’s faithful child.”

The details of the last time Louisa saw her father is practically an apocryphal story among Louisa May Alcott scholars and fans, like an ironic scene out of one of Louisa’s blood-and-thunder stories. A few days before Bronson died on March 4, 1888, Louisa came to visit him. Bronson had suffered multiple strokes and was “lying helpless,” according to Anna; Louisa too was sickly and infirm, and had been suffering from an unknown chronic illness for years. Kneeling next to his bedside, Louisa asked her father what he was thinking of while he lay there. Bronson feebly pointed his finger up to the ceiling and said, “I am going up- Come with me.” Louisa responded, “Oh, how I wish I could.” On the day of Bronson’s death, Louisa slipped into a coma and never awoke. She died two days later at the age of 56, on March 6, 1888...the day of Bronson’s funeral. Anna remarked in a letter to a friend afterward that, “It seemed as if with his departure, her last earthly care left her, and she felt free to follow and be at rest.” Louisa, Anna implied, had fulfilled her duty. Whether their twin deaths were fate or chance, it is true that Louisa’s life had been entwined with her parents’ influences, support, and affection, as well as their dependence on her. Disentangling herself from her mother and father was never an option for Louisa. With her death, the same Louy who had sworn at an early age to care and provide for her parents, never knew a life without the identity of “daughter.”