Marmee & Louisa (20 page)

Chapter Seven

To Drag Life’s Lengthening Chain

O
n June 3, 1843, the Alcotts’ third day at Fruitlands, after feeding her family and the Lanes and supervising the children’s morning chores, Abigail led her four girls outside. Each time they moved she explored with them the world around their new home. Her older children, especially, were increasingly aware of the world. Louisa and Anna, at ten and twelve, were practically young ladies, Elizabeth was almost eight, and Abby May nearly three. The five female Alcotts walked along the ridge between the farmhouse and the woods overlooking the Ascutney, Wachusett, and Monadnock mountains. Abigail pointed out and named the features of “our little territory . . . Hill, grove, forest . . . woodland, vale, meadow, and pasture . . . all beautiful . . . commanding one of the most expansive prospects in the country.”
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They came upon a pile of wood chips at the edge of the meadow. Kneeling to fill her apron with chips, Abigail encouraged the girls to gather flowers. They scattered and returned with four bouquets. “Like Provident Mother Earth, I gather for use,” she said with a smile, “while you collect for beauty. Both give pleasure.” This made sense to Louisa: beauty and usefulness are both of value.

“We are transported from our littleness” by lovely vistas, Abigail continued. “The soul expands in such a region of sights and sounds,” presenting people with a choice. “Between us and this vast expanse we may hold our [own] hand and stand alone, an isolated being occupying but a foot of earth and living for ourselves,” or “we may look again” and be
possessed by “a feeling of diffusive illimitable benevolence.” Despite all the frustration she felt in her marriage, Abigail was still committed to supporting her husband’s goal of living rightly, which he hoped to realize at Fruitlands. But she may not have considered the emotional cost to a child when a parent lives solely for “diffusive illimitable benevolence.”

Each time Bronson came to Abigail with a new dream, it seemed, she resolved to do all in her power to make it come true. Of this new “estate” he had proclaimed, “This dell is the canvas on which I will paint . . . a worthy picture for mankind.”
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She in turn prayed that Fruitlands would “prove a happy home” for her children.
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There she would try to “live the true life, putting away the evil customs of society and leading quiet exemplary lives.”

During their early days at the farm Abigail did her best to be, or at least seem to be, optimistic. “Lest you should for one moment be under the apprehension that I am dissatisfied, I hasten to discharge your mind of any such misapprehension,” she began her first letter to Samuel Joseph, defensively. “The house is even better (shabby and ill-looking as it is) than I expected, for they described it as being scarcely tenantable—whereas I assure you if all God’s creatures were as well sheltered as this, there would be no suffering on this score.” The land was “admirable,” the “woods, groves, pastures, brooks are delightful,” and “the prospect is indescribable,” of “lofty hills whose summits pierce the heavens as with a wedge.”

Abigail continued, “Mr. A[lcott] is in his element.” She was “quite comfortable. . . . Our children are very happy and when the planting is over we shall establish a school.” Bronson, Lane, and a hired man were already sowing corn, beans, and potatoes, which they anticipated would yield five hundred bushels, and Bronson was seeking new recruits to join them. “I do feel as if a great work may be effected here,” Abigail wrote. “The true life
ought
to be lived here if any where on earth—away from the false and degrading customs of society as now fashioned. . . . We may fail, but it will be something that we have ventured what so few have dared. We have had two beautiful Sabbaths.” The “solitude of the place” reminded her of South Scituate, where her brother had spent six years.

She invited Samuel Joseph and his family to visit Fruitlands.
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Lacking a horse and wagon, she advised him, “instead of stopping at the village of Harvard” two miles away, “tell the stage driver to leave you at [Mr. Edgerton’s] this side [of] Still River [village] and some of us will be over
to get you. . . . It will only be a mile—across the fields.” She thanked him for a recent gift of five dollars, “a great comfort as I paid off all my little [debts] and we owe
nobody nothing
 . . . a comfortable feeling after a perturbation of 10 years.” Her feelings were captured “beautifully” by a hymn they used to sing as children:

It surely is a wasted heart,

It is a wasted mind,

That seeks not in the inner world

Its happiness to find.
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For happiness is like the bird

That broods above its nest,

And finds beneath its folded wings

Life’s dearest and its best.

She did not mention in the letter to her brother that her husband had grown aloof from her and intimate with Charles Lane. She now distrusted and disliked Lane. Apparently, the feeling was mutual. “Her pride is not yet eradicated,” Lane wrote to a friend, adding that Abigail “has no spontaneous inclination towards a larger family than her own.
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 . . . Her peculiar maternal love blinds her to all else.” Lane, who had left his son’s mother, was convinced that sexuality was the root of all evil. Now he was thinking of joining the Shakers, who were celibate and forswore procreation. He hoped to convince Bronson to join him.

Bronson did seem to be moving in that direction. He continued to sleep apart from Abigail.
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In early July, she wrote in her journal, he “forcibly illustrated” to her the need to renounce sensual pleasure by marking in chalk on a slate “the † on which the lusts of the flesh are to be sacrificed,” in his words.
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Bronson urged Abigail to endure “the sacrifices and utter subjection of the body to the Soul,” explaining, “Renunciation is the law; devotion to God’s will the Gospel. The latter make the former easy, sometimes delightful.” Abigail was now convinced that Lane posed a threat to her marriage.
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In fact, according to the scholar Ronald Bosco, “Lane was a subversive influence on Bronson.
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Abigail was right to suspect that this community would not turn out well for her and her girls.”

The two men, having appointed themselves the leaders of their new community, jointly composed its rules, whose austerity the children and Abigail would not fully experience until winter. The men banned all products of capitalism, including wool, cotton, meat, dairy, cane sugar, and tea. Fruitlanders could wear only linen, loose tunics, and pants for both men and women in an era when women universally wore skirts.
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Every meal was “strictly of the pure and bloodless kind,” restricted to water, unleavened bread or porridge, and vegetables or fruits.
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“No animal substances, neither flesh, butter, cheese, eggs nor milk, pollute our tables or corrupt our bodies, neither tea, coffee, molasses, nor rice, tempts us beyond the bounds of indigenous productions,” they wrote. “Our sole beverage is pure fountain water. The native grains, fruits, herbs and roots, dressed with the utmost cleanliness . . . yield an ample store for human nutrition, without dependence on foreign climes, or the degradations of shipping and trade.” Cotton depended on slave labor, which Bronson now considered suspect; wool belonged to sheep. No whale oil lamps were entertained, for the oil was the whale’s. No beast of burden was permitted. “Only a brave woman’s taste, time, and temper were sacrificed on that domestic altar,” Louisa pointed out decades later, indignant on her mother’s behalf.
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Even Abigail herself remarked wryly to a nephew that summer, “They spare the cattle, but they forget the women and children.”
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“Ordinary secular farming is not our object,” Bronson and Lane declared in the Transcendentalist journal the
Dial,
edited by Margaret Fuller. “Consecrated to human freedom . . . this enterprise must be rooted in a reliance on the succors of an ever bounteous Providence.” They rejected “the cares and injury of a life of gain” and promised never to neglect “the inner nature of every member of the [Fruitlands] family.”

The population of their community swelled in July. Visitors that month included Emerson, who was curious to see the farm, the poet Ellery Channing (the minister’s nephew), several members of Harvard’s Shaker community, Abigail’s eighteen-year-old nephew Samuel Sewall Greele, and George and Sophia Ripley, who had founded Brook Farm, a utopian community of about a hundred people in West Roxbury.
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Six or seven men decided to stay as residents of Fruitlands, doubling the number of mouths Abigail had to feed. Only one newcomer was a woman, the “amiable” and “active” Ann Page, whose presence Abigail appreciated.
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Far from living out any utopian ideal, Abigail felt she was running an inn. She alone was responsible for the care of the house, bedding, clothing, washing, and meals, a huge task even with the help of her elder daughters and Miss Page.
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Abigail struggled to maintain the children’s daily lessons, sometimes asking twelve-year-old Anna to supervise them. The girls were no more fond of Charles Lane than she was. Louisa did not like Lane’s lessons. “I like [the farm], but not the school part or Mr. Lane,” she observed. One day “Mr. L[ane] was in Boston and we were glad.” Abigail continued to teach Louisa, Anna, and Lizzie to sew, as her mother and sisters had taught her. She did her best to be a mother to William Lane, who was included in many of the Alcott girls’ activities, forming with them a quintet reminiscent of the five siblings of Abigail’s childhood.

On Tuesday, July 18, 1843, Samuel Joseph, Lucretia, and their children arrived in a carriage to see how Abigail was faring.
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As the older Alcott girls played with ten-year-old Charlotte, Abigail talked with her brother and sister-in-law, who had troubles of their own. Samuel Joseph had recently resigned from his job at the Normal School in order to avoid further alienating Horace Mann, who objected to the minister’s decision to train a black woman for a teaching career.
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Other than preaching occasionally at Lexington’s First Parish, Samuel Joseph had no work and no way of knowing where he would next be called. In addition, he and Lucretia were planning a trip to Niagara Falls and western New York, a hotbed of abolitionism. But he still provided Abigail a “kind sympathy,” for which she was grateful.
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August at Fruitlands was busy and “toilsome,” even harder for Abigail than July. Bronson seemed to retreat even further. He still avoided physical contact with Abigail and was often away from the farm, traveling around New England, usually in the company of Lane, ostensibly seeking funds to maintain Fruitlands. Bronson returned from several days with Lane in Boston “quite ill” with dysentery and “terrible diarrhea” that left him feeble for weeks.
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Bronson was “low indeed,” Abigail reported to Samuel Joseph, “nor did I see by what human aids he was to be restored.”
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Even after “the acuteness of his disease had passed,” he still seemed “not essentially better, and the means he permitted to be used [for healing] were to my mind wholly inadequate.” Over and over he murmured, “Thy faith shall heal thee.”

Unlike his wife, Bronson had decided to rely entirely on faith. He was “content to wait till the Wise God decree for us all,” as he put it, because “a union . . . await[s] us . . . in the life of the Spirit.”
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Abigail, who trusted “common sense” over faith, reported, “I insisted on [Bronson taking] spearmint tea and a total abandonment of vegetable food.” The tea, copious blackberries, and a “shower bath” twice a day had “indeed restored him but not made quite whole this dying man.” He remained “more nervous and excitable” than usual. A visitor noted “the alteration in Mr. A[lcott], his sepulchral tones, and .
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 . . languor.”

Bronson “sees too much company” at Fruitlands, Abigail thought. “His mind is altogether too morbidly active. I thought of proposing to him a little quiet journey as a change—leaving the children with Mr. Lane and Abraham” Everett, another resident. “But he says no.” A decade later Bronson noted in his journal that in twenty-four years of marriage, during which he himself traveled extensively, he and Abigail never spent any time together away from home.
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At Fruitlands he refused a little quiet journey with his wife because, he told her, “I want rest and perfect quiet, that when I journey it will be a long one—and
alone
.”

The thought of his death frightened Abigail. As she told her brother, “I do not allow myself to despair of his recovery—but, Oh Sam, that piercing thought flashes through my mind of [Bronson’s] insanity.” She confessed that “a grave yawning to receive his precious body would be to me a consolation compared to that condition of life. . . . Don’t mention this to even Lucretia [May] or Elizabeth,” meaning, probably, twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth Willis Wells, the married daughter of their late sister Eliza May Willis for whom Abigail had cared when she was small.
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