Eden's Outcasts (27 page)

To Louisa's undoubted relief, another of her father's friends gradually withdrew from the Alcotts' lives during the Hillside years. Not long after Bronson purchased the home—almost inexplicably, considering the pain and chaos he had previously inflicted on them—Charles Lane briefly lived at Hillside, supervising part of the children's education. Lane tasked Louisa with writing out a list of her vices. Hoping to satisfy him, she produced a litany of nine, including those dreaded vipers of the soul “activity” and “love of cats.” Lane told her to define gentleness and asked her who possessed it. “Father and Anna” was the reply. Who meant to have it? he then demanded. The desired admission followed: “Louisa, if she can.”
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Louisa withstood Lane's assaults on her dignity, but she understandably hated him. Not only did his icy moralisms take the fun out of learning, but he also seemed to ruin everything he touched in her father's garden.
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Louisa must have rejoiced when, in October 1845, Lane left, never again to trouble her with his strikingly imperfect notions of perfection.

Lane, however, was not the only source of discomfort in Louisa's educational life. The sisters' governess, Sophia Foord, was something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, some of her teaching methods were pleasingly similar to Thoreau's. To teach botany, she took the girls into the woods. Louisa especially enjoyed a wading expedition to Flint's Pond, where she and her sisters “ma[de] the fishes run like mad” as they sloshed through the shallow water, and from which they returned “bawling and singing like crazy folks.”
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On the other hand, the craziness of the Alcott girls was too pronounced for Foord. In a frank conversation with Abba, she called the children “indolent” and laid the blame on the permissive practices of Abba and Bronson, whom she pronounced “faulty specimens of parental impotence.”
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Foord had other reasons for feeling frustrated with her situation. Bronson's promised Hillside school and the money Foord expected to earn from it never materialized; Alcott's radicalism had frightened off the parents of potential pupils. He was even denied permission to speak at a statewide convention of the Teachers Institute; rejecting his request, the famous public-school reformer Horace Mann explained that Alcott's political opinions were unacceptably “hostile to the existence of the State.”
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Disappointed professionally, Foord was also unlucky in love. Infatuated with Thoreau, she wrote him a letter proposing marriage, and the naturalist replied with “as distinct a no as I have learned to pronounce.”
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Embarrassed, Foord left the Alcotts' employ. They did not replace her.

A happier influence on Louisa's life continued to be the outdoors. She wrote a series of “flower fables” to amuse Emerson's young daughter Ellen. In the fields, she played tag with her sisters and friends. In the orchards, she climbed apple trees, rattling her bones when she happened to fall. She wrote to a friend, “We are dreadfull [
sic
] wild people here in Concord, we do all the sinful things you can think of.”
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The sins were hardly serious, though some of them were amusing. On one of her rambles, Louisa encountered a crew of men who were chewing tobacco as they hoed potatoes. Ever curious, Louisa asked to try a quid. She chewed it so vigorously that its effects overpowered her, and she had to be carried home in a wheelbarrow.
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But it was an intoxicating experience of another kind that most profoundly transformed her. As the sun rose on a Thursday in the summer or autumn of 1845—she did not record the date—Louisa went for a run. The dew was not yet off the grass, and the moss was like velvet. Pausing in the silent woods to get her breath, she beheld the sun, slowly ascending above the wide meadows and looking as she had never seen it before. In the hush of that perfect morning, something changed inside her, and she felt a stirring for which she could find only one name: God. It came to her not through scripture, not through
The Pilgrim's Progress
, but through the power of the natural world. To Louisa, it was a “vital sense of His presence, tender and sustaining as a father's arms.”
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She had never felt this way before, and she prayed that she might keep the sense of His nearness forever. Almost forty years later, she wrote with satisfaction that she always had. Through all life's vicissitudes, she wrote, the feeling never changed, standing the test as she passed through “health & sickness, joy & sorrow, poverty & wealth.”
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Though she destroyed untold quantities of her early writings, Louisa always preserved the journal entry that told of this moment of conversion when reason and faith, in the guise of a morning sunbeam, shone into her heart.
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The Alcotts remained at Hillside until November 1848. These three and a half years were the longest period the Alcott children ever spent in one house. These Hillside years correspond to the adolescence celebrated and fictionalized in
Little Women.
They are the years when Louisa began writing in earnest, and they were the time when she acquired her adult character and her permanent sense of individuality. At the same time that she was coming to a clear sense of self, however, Louisa would have been hard-pressed to define herself entirely apart from her sisters. Bronson, observing the strong, beautiful tie that united them, referred to his daughters collectively as “the golden band.”
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As a group, the four could make a powerful impression, but not always the kind that their parents might have hoped. Once, a few years earlier, at Hosmer Cottage, the Alcotts had welcomed Emerson and Margaret Fuller. As the four adults stood by the door, the conversation turned predictably to education. Apparently, Bronson lamented the lack of a school in which to pursue his theories. Fuller remarked, “Well, Mr. Alcott, you have been able to carry out your methods in your own family, and I should like to see your model children.” In a few moments, she got her wish. The high-minded colloquy was interrupted by a chaotic uproar, and around the corner of the house came the heedless foursome. In a wheelbarrow, transformed by imagination into an ancient chariot, sat little Abby in the costume of a queen. Louisa, bitted, bridled, and harnessed to the royal car, was a horse, driven by Anna. Lizzie had taken the part of a dog, and she was barking as loudly as her gentle voice permitted. Louisa writes, “All were shouting and wild with fun, which, however, came to a sudden end as we espied the stately group before us.” Louisa stumbled, and her three sisters all fell on top of her in a laughing heap. Abba gestured impressively toward the pile, saying, “Here are the model children, Miss Fuller.”
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When Bronson thought of Anna, he imagined “her beauty-loving eyes and sweet visions of graceful motions and golden hues and all fair and mystic shows and shapes.” She was the most even-tempered and amiable of the four. Her sense of humor was keen but without Louisa's tartness. While she partook enthusiastically in the games of her friends and sisters, her zest was tempered with a sense of dignity. She was more beautiful in her graceful bearing than in her physical features. Skilled in learning languages and a thoughtful writer, she perhaps exceeded all her sisters in terms of her pure intellectual gifts. Anna, too, wrote stories.
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Unlike Louisa, however, she lacked the confidence to try to publish them. Her excellent mind was “shown more in the appreciation of others than in the expression of herself.”
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Years of experience with Louisa's temper had taught Anna that it was most prudent to let her younger sister have her way, and by the time the family settled at Hillside, she had fully accepted her role as Louisa's subordinate, an eager second but never a daring first. As a longtime friend remembered, “She loved to hide behind her gifted sister.”
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Yet there was one ability that Anna did not hide. Almost everyone commented on her superior talents as an actress. In the family theatricals, it was she and Louisa who did almost all of the acting, each taking on five or six parts at once, sustaining the action amid a flurry of quick costume changes. As befitted their respective personalities, Anna played the sentimental roles, while Louisa inclined toward characters touched by the demonic or supernatural. Anna was, for a while, desirous of doing something in the world. Her grammar deserting her in the midst of her reverie, she once wrote, “I sometimes have strange feelings, a sort of longing after something I don't know what it is.” She had “a foolish wish to do something great.” In 1850, Louisa wrote, “Anna wants to be an actress, and so do I.” However, Anna sensed that her dream of stardom would not come true. She felt in the back of her mind that she would likely “spend my life in a kitchen and die in the poor-house.”
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Acting professionally had just enough hint of scandal to cause a proper young woman like Anna to hesitate. Moreover, as years passed, Anna became prematurely hard of hearing, so that picking up stage cues at last grew difficult. Anna, always a true mother's helper, at last confirmed the expectations of those who had considered her “the most domestic” member of the family.
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Despite their differences, Anna and Louisa came to share a deep mutual regard. Anna's blend of talent and humility suited well their father's image of what a young woman should be. During the years at Hillside, she was sometimes Bronson's only bulwark against despair.
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Although Bronson regarded his children as much more than subjects on which to test his theories of education, he may have thought of Anna as the experiment who turned out right.

When Bronson painted his third daughter, Elizabeth, with words, he chose pastel shades. He wrote of “her quiet-loving disposition and serene thought, her happy gentleness and deep contentment.” Lizzie was the most enigmatic sister, a passive, quiet soul who generally felt much less creative passion than her sisters. Although friends often remarked on her love of the piano, which she played with skill and appreciation, one struggles to find instances in which Lizzie did anything bold or original. As Louisa writes of Lizzie's counterpart Beth in
Little Women
, “she seemed to live in a world of her own, only venturing out to meet the few whom she trusted and loved.”
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Yet even among these she was noticeably guarded. Whereas the rest of the family made it a common practice to read aloud from their journals at the dinner table or around the fireside, Lizzie steadfastly declined to do so.

In the family theatricals, Lizzie took modest parts. A page here, a messenger there, formed the core of her repertoire. Although Anna recalled that Lizzie enjoyed “constructing properties for stage adornment and transforming the frailest material into dazzling raiment,” her preferred place during a performance was in the audience.
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A number of spirited arguments with a young friend over the virtues of vegetarianism are virtually the only remembered instances in which she showed any heated emotion. While her parents entertained audacious schemes to save the world and her sisters began to conceive their private visions of wealth and success, little of their imaginative energy seems to have rubbed off on Lizzie. She seems never to have wanted more from life than a quiet, comfortable smallness. Yet Lizzie's meekness charmed her father. He referred to her as his “Little Tranquility,” and it undoubtedly pleased him that her dreamy, quiet temperament was the very counterpart of his own. Like her father, as a playmate once observed, Lizzie was “all conscience.”
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Abby May, with “her frolick joys and impetuous griefs…her fast falling footsteps, her sagacious eye and auburn locks,” was a bright contrast to Lizzie.
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The baby of the family, she was adroit at reaping the benefits that this status can entail. Born after the Temple School scandal, too young to have more than a dim recollection of Fruitlands, Abby escaped some of the greatest trials of being an Alcott daughter. She also had a quality that her forthright older sister Louisa often lacked: a subtle, prepossessing charm that made allies of people when she needed them most. When she reached adulthood, Abby decided that her first name was too babyish for her and started insisting that people call her May. Bronson lauded Abby May's talents and good disposition. He was aware that, because of her late arrival in the family, her prospects in life were somewhat fairer than those of her elder sisters, “who, with gifts no less promising, [had] yet been defrauded of deserved opportunities for study and culture” by the cloud of social disapproval that hung over the family since the closing of the Temple School. Of all his children, Bronson was most certain that his youngest daughter would make her way in the world.
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Louisa, however, continued to inspire more perplexity than confidence. In Bronson's mind, she conjured the image of a girl “with…quick and ready senses,…agile limbs, and boundless curiosity.” He thought, too, of “her penetrating mind and tear-shedding heart, alive to all moving breathing things.” Bronson admitted that she was a loving child, but her impulsiveness had continued to trouble him. He had always believed that if one approached a child with respect and openness, that child would eventually become a docile ally. However, Louisa's attempts to master herself still tended to meet with frustration and self-condemnation. When Louisa was thirteen, Bronson wrote in his journal of a day when he checked the diaries of his three eldest daughters to see how regularly they were being kept. Both Anna and Elizabeth passed the inspection. Louisa, who had been “unfaithful,” was sent off to eat her dinner alone.
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Bronson had once believed that all minds in childhood were fundamentally alike, and that education had the power to shape them toward a common purpose and a shared standard of moral excellence. Over time, however, he had revised his view. It now seemed to him that character was “more of a nature than of acquirement, and that the most you can do by culture is to adorn and give external polish to natural gifts.”
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He believed that it was impossible to create or develop any spiritual qualities that were not inborn.