Marmee & Louisa (33 page)

Paddle My Own Canoe

L
ouisa wanted to give up. In the autumn of 1858 she had just wasted another day circling Boston in search of employment. Twenty-five years old, with nearly a decade behind her of working or looking for work, she felt she had accomplished nothing. Her father would not support the family, her mother could not, and neither could Louisa, even though she had appointed herself the breadwinner. Now she stood on the edge of the Mill Dam, staring into the fetid water, wondering if she should jump.

There was suicide in the family. In New York State in 1852 her uncle Junius, who lived with the Alcotts when she was nine, had thrown himself into a threshing machine.
⁸⁸⁵
Her father had considered suicide, certainly at Fruitlands and possibly in Boston in 1849. Both her parents, she was aware, were sometimes depressed. Could Louisa bring herself to die in a whirl of metal and sparks like Junius, or drown herself in the Charles River?

A few days earlier, she had taken the train into the city on her “usual hunt for employment,” intending to stay several weeks or months.
⁸⁸⁶
From the Boston depot near her mother’s childhood home, she had walked up to Beacon Hill to spend a few days with her cousins, Samuel E. Sewall’s brother Thomas and his wife, Mary, at 98 Chestnut Street, before taking a bed at Mrs. Reed’s boardinghouse. Each day she had wandered the city feeling “anxious” and discouraged, she wrote to her mother, “for every one was so busy, & cared so little whether I got work or jumped into the river.”
⁸⁸⁷

In a “fit of despair” on that October afternoon, Louisa had headed down Beacon Street along the Common, past the State House and the mansion once occupied by her mother’s Aunt Q, toward the slender Mill Dam, which spanned the water west of the Boston peninsula.
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The Back Bay, as the water was known, had been dammed in 1820 to power grist mills, but the project failed. Now “a great cesspool” with “a greenish scum” along its shores, according to a contemporary report, the bay bubbled “like a cauldron with the noxious gases . . . exploding from the corrupting mass below.” Louisa looked down into the darkness and “thought seriously of” jumping.
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Glancing up, she could see the channel of the Charles River. At high tide it was a gray-blue expanse, at low tide a slender channel amid mud flats. Piles of suburban gravel dotted the flats, part of the city’s preparation to expand the land by filling in the bay. Beyond the river were Cambridge and Harvard College, which her male relatives could attend. To her right was the West Boston Bridge and affluent Beacon Hill, where her mother had rented when Louisa was nineteen. To the south, below the Muddy River channel and the embankments of the Boston-Roxbury railroad, was the receiving basin of the Charles River, which filled in at high tide. Louisa breathed deeply. The air reeked of sewage. The dam had failed. Louisa had failed, too. Should she jump?

She could not do it, she told her mother later. It seemed “so cowardly to run away before the battle was over.”
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Moreover, she knew Marmee could not bear another death so soon after Lizzie’s. So Louisa turned from the water and marched back to her boardinghouse, resolved to “take Fate by the throat and shake a living out of her. . . . There
is
work for me, and I’ll have it.” A few days later, after finding a job as a governess, she described the resolution of her despair to her understanding mother, whose response does not survive.

Louisa’s flirtation with suicide inspired a scene in a story she composed the following year, “Love and Self-Love.”
⁸⁹¹
The story’s central character, a young woman named Effie, throws herself into a river after discovering that her husband is in love with someone else. Instead of drowning, Effie matures: “the
child
Effie lay dead beneath the ripples of the river, but the
woman
rose up from that bed of suffering.” Louisa could have been describing herself. The child Louisa was long gone, after years of worrying over her daily bread. The woman Louisa was now rising.

But what was a woman? What could a woman be? If she worked at a career, she could not be a wife. No professional writer Louisa knew cared for children or a house. Emerson and Hawthorne had wives to raise their children and keep their houses. Thoreau and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody were unmarried. Her mother’s friend Lydia Maria Child, unhappily married and childless, had observed, “A woman of well-regulated feelings and an active mind, may be very happy in single life—far happier than she could be made by a marriage of expediency.”
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Margaret Fuller remained single and childless until she was nearly forty. No one Louisa knew could accomplish both tasks. A man with a wife and children could write. A woman with a husband and children could not.

“A man’s ambition with a woman’s heart is an evil lot,” Margaret Fuller had written of Louisa’s predicament—and her own—in her best-selling manifesto,
Woman of the Nineteenth Century,
which was published when Louisa was twelve. “One should be either private or public. . . . Womanhood is at present too straitly-bounded to give me scope.”
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Womanhood remained too restricted for Louisa, who agreed with Fuller’s famous remark, “If you ask me what offices women may fill: I will reply—any. Let them be sea-captains, if you will.”
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Like Fuller, she fantasized that marriage could be a union of equals, which was not possible so long as women were inferior to men in custom and law. Women’s growing awareness of these inequities is one reason that the late nineteenth-century generation, according to Nancy Theriot, was “the least married group of women in United States history, with a record 13 percent remaining single.”
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A nineteenth-century woman who chose not to marry was expected to remain at home with her parents, caring for them as they aged.
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Louisa did this, but part of her longed to escape home, to be alone and creative. To satisfy this longing she sometimes took rooms in Boston without the pressure of seeking paid employment, simply to write. Later that fall, while quietly working in her Boston studio, the “old maid” received as a twenty-sixth birthday gift from her sister Anna and Anna’s fiancé, John, a “peace-offering,” a braided ring of their hair.
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Anna knew Louisa’s character better than anyone except perhaps their mother. The sisters, only twenty months apart, had lived at close quarters their entire lives, sharing a room if not a bed and always, it seemed, supporting each other. It had pained Anna, who was devoted to Louisa, to see her so hurt by Anna’s engagement.

The transition to adulthood was proving even more difficult for Louisa than it had been for Abigail thirty years earlier. Both women had goals in conflict with society’s expectations. But Louisa, unlike her mother, had a most unusual upbringing. As a child she was asked to support her family. In her teens she vowed to pay the family’s bills. As a young woman she yearned to accumulate cash. Moreover, Louisa’s parents’ marriage presented a powerful negative example. Louisa had “seen so much of . . . ‘the tragedy of modern married life,’ ” she wrote a few years later that she was “afraid to try it.” Accepting her fate as an unmarried woman, Louisa wrote, “Liberty is a better husband than love to many of us.” Anna and John’s future “nest” would be “very sweet and pretty, but I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe.”
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In sum, she felt, “The loss of liberty, happiness, and self-respect is poorly repaid by the barren honor of being called ‘Mrs.
⁸⁹⁹
’ instead of ‘Miss’.” On account of her mother’s experiences, Louisa knew that marriage can lead to misery. If she counted on no one but herself, then should she fail she could blame only herself. “Now that Mother is too tired to be wearied with my moods,” she wrote in November 1858, “I have to manage them alone, and am learning that work of head and hand is my salvation when disappointment or weariness burden and darken my soul.” Ironically, by choosing to go it alone in the world Louisa became even more dependent emotionally on her mother.

Louisa and Abigail’s marriage-like bond was not unique. Because “an intensely close spousal relationship was not a part of many marriages,” most of which were unhappy, according to Nancy Theriot, “women created intimacy . . . with their women friends and in their mothering.”
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Many mothers and daughters of the period described “tremendous need” of each other and “a recognition of mutual confidence and friendship.”
⁹⁰¹

Louisa’s story about Effie’s near drowning brought in fifty dollars—more than she could earn from a month of sewing or teaching—from a new magazine called the
Atlantic,
which her father considered “far superior to any other literary journal.”
⁹⁰²
Emerson wrote for the
Atlantic,
which was read all over America. For each sensational or antislavery story she sold in this period, she usually earned between ten and a hundred dollars, often from the
Atlantic
or the
Saturday Evening Gazette
.
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So as not to offend “the proper grayness of old Concord,” she published her stories
under pseudonyms, usually “A.M. Barnard,” a masculine-sounding surname appended to the initials for
Alcott
or
Abigail May
.
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Louisa concealed her gender for business reasons. Not only were books by men more likely to sell, but also she desired privacy, particularly from older male acquaintances and relatives. “Suppose [my favorite fictional characters] went to cavorting at their own sweet will,” she explained, “to the infinite horror of dear Mr.
⁹⁰⁵
Emerson” with his “chain armor of propriety. . . . And what would my own good father think of me?” Discussing a manuscript with an editor, she said, “My family laugh & cry over it, & think it fine—they are no judges—neither am I. Mr. Emerson offered to read & give his opinion long ago but I hadn’t the courage to let him.”

She was not afraid to discuss her stories with Abigail, however, who encouraged her imagination no matter where it led. Perhaps because of a long love affair with the written word, Abigail habitually gave Louisa her own private journals and letters and suggested she study them for ideas and let her fancy roam. On one of Louisa’s visits to Concord, her mother suggested it was better to invent fiction than to write history. “The writer of fiction follows his characters into the recesses of their hearts,” Abigail said, quoting a British writer she admired, Arthur Helps.
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“There are no closed doors for” the fiction writer. “Could you have the life of any man really portrayed to you, sun-drawn as it were, its hopes, its fears, its revolutions of opinion in each day, its most anxious wishes attained, and then, perhaps, crystallizing into its blackest regrets, such a work would go far to contain all histories, and be the greatest lesson of love, humility and tolerance, that men had ever read. . . . It is not to be wondered at that the majority of readers should look upon history as a task, but tales of fiction as a delight.” In Abigail’s view, only fiction could fully portray the life of any person, and Louisa likely agreed.

In Concord not long after Christmas, when none of her family but Anna was home, Abigail became quite ill. Winter weather bothered her in a poorly insulated house with only potbelly stoves and fireplaces for warmth.
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She still mourned Lizzie and may have been depressed. Bronson had already gone west, stopping as usual in Syracuse, where Lucretia had suffered a “relapse into the old malady” of frequent headaches and possible depression, forcing Samuel Joseph to postpone a trip to Paris to see their son Joseph.
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The Mays took Bronson to an elegant Christmas party at which, Bronson reported to Abigail, “Sam told stories of your
father, and repeated some of your best ones of Fruitlands and the heroic periods of our history.” Fruitlands was now a family joke, although the details of the stories are lost to history.

Anna, alone with her “invalid” mother, wrote to Louisa and May, who were spending the winter in a boardinghouse in Boston.
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Louisa rushed home to “cure” her, for she felt she was Marmee’s best nurse. In Louisa’s words, whenever “Mother fell ill . . . I corked up my inkstand and turned nurse.”
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Bronson wrote to congratulate Louisa for her daughterly devotion, “I am glad you take things so bravely.
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It encourages your Mother under her trials, and . . . lightens the load with which she is so burdened.” During the weeks she cared for her mother, Louisa wondered “if I ought to be a nurse, as I seem to have a gift for it.” She cherished the arts, but “if I couldn’t act or write I would try” nursing. “[I] May yet.”

Once Abigail recovered, Louisa returned to her manuscripts and May in Boston. In April, not long after Bronson’s return from his five-month trip, Abigail went to Boston to visit her two daughters, the Sewalls, and Hannah Robie, leaving Anna to keep house for Bronson in Concord. Anna’s fiancé worked in insurance in Boston, as Grandfather May had done. A quiet, modest man, John Pratt had already taken “the family,” Anna felt, “under his fatherly care.”
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At the Concord Town Hall on May 8, 1859, Louisa and her parents attended a lecture by the radical abolitionist John Brown.
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Bronson, whose view of slavery had evolved, was impressed by the tall, handsome vigilante in his late fifties, a Connecticut native like himself, with “hair shooting backward from low down on his forehead, . . . set lips, [and] countenance and frame charged with power throughout. I think him about the manliest man I have ever seen.” Several scholars have theorized that Bronson “found John Brown physically attractive.”
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And Bronson was now a convert to Brown’s cause.