Marmee & Louisa (43 page)

“Tell her I am seventy-three,” Abigail replied with what Louisa called “the ardor of many unquenchable Mays shining in her face.”
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Abigail cried, “I mean to go to the polls before I die, even if my three daughters have to carry me!”

Louisa could not keep up with the public requests. “I am very lame & tied to my sofa for some weeks I fear,” she wrote to the editor and writer Mary Mapes Dodge, who desired a children’s story.
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“I am so busy with home affairs just now that I have no time even to think of stories. If I can get any leisure this winter I will try to send one or two [stories]. The state of my mother’s health forbids my making any very binding engagements this year, so I can only say I will if I can.”

In the fall of 1873 Louisa rented a large apartment for her three-generation family on Franklin Square in Boston’s South End, at 26 East Brookline Street, facing the elegant St. James Hotel. Abigail enjoyed “the prospect of wintering in her native city,” Louisa wrote to Bronson, who had already gone west.
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Each spring the family returned to Concord. Anna and her boys spent summers now with John’s relatives at the Pratt farm. Louisa and her parents lived in Orchard House. Bronson described his wife “reinstated in her chamber above my study. . . . She reads much, sews, as usual, and relinquishes household cares delightfully” to paid help or to Louisa. “I find myself inevitably alone much of the time,” Abigail noted in her journal in early 1875, several months after May’s return from Europe.
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“Louisa and May in Boston most of the time. Anna busy with her various duties. Not to be postponed for much gossip with the garrulous old Marmee. All right!!” she added, resignedly. “I am most comfortably situated, luxuries easily obtained, necessities anticipated. All in good health, fine weather . . . frequent letters, and propitious news from the dear old man at the West.”

Abigail could finally relax and enjoy her old passions, reading and writing. “It makes me happy only to record all this. For a journal has its uses direct on the heart of the researcher.” Considering her long habit of keeping a journal, she wrote, “I often feel happier after putting down some of my
own
experience than I do in r
eading
much. Novels, even if they are good, pass out of my memory very rapidly. I enjoy it as I should a scene at the theatre; but am not essentially benefitted by the incidents or morals. What more desirable at this period of my life, than to find sources of daily peace and joy from within; that I think is true life. Let me not be selfish; but the best work done for others is that which proceeds from a contented mind.”

For Louisa, it was fulfilling to see her old mother busily rereading old diaries and scribbling in a new one. As Abigail had difficulty walking, Louisa often invited her out for rides in a phaeton drawn by a horse named Rosa that May had purchased, partly for this purpose.
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May, too, enjoyed riding through the Concord woods “so deep and shady, . . . full of ferns, Solomon’s seal, and field flowers . . . with the nice fresh smell so like the taste of wild strawberries,” with “Marmee beside me,” her “little
crepe bonnet perhaps all on one side, but that handsome, pale face and soft hair so lovely to me.”
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One fair day in early 1875, as Louisa and her parents were driving toward the town of Lincoln, Abigail remarked to Bronson that Louisa’s new book “surpasses its predecessors in power and brilliancy, and the author will not be easily recognized by its readers.”
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Bronson, who had not read the manuscript or been told its title, was surprised that his wife had.

The new book,
A Modern Mephistopheles
, which only Louisa’s mother had seen, was a Gothic thriller for adults, which is now believed to be the last sensational fiction she wrote.
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At the novel’s center are a Faustian quartet—two men and two women, two young and two old—entangled by artistic longings, struggles for power, and sexual passion. The four are repeatedly compared to characters in
The Scarlet Letter
, a book that Louisa adored. There are indeed resemblances between Hawthorne’s 1850 masterpiece and
A Modern Mephistopheles
, “Alcott’s most elaborately disguised yet fullest disclosure of her artistic intents and purposes,” according to Elizabeth Lennox Keyser.
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“By associating her artist hero, as well as his masculine and feminine alter egos, with Hawthorne’s Dimmesdale, [Alcott] confesses that she, like that pillar of the patriarchal community, is an accomplished actor. . . . Dimmesdale time and again confesses publicly to his sin only to be canonized as a saint for his confession. . . . Alcott, too, repeatedly confessed her commitment to radical reforms for women only to be revered as a defender of [women’s] traditional roles and values.” Aware, perhaps, that she was and would be misunderstood, Louisa published
A Modern Mephistopheles
anonymously in Thomas Niles’s 1877 No Name series. Reviewers “praised and criticized [it], and I enjoy the fun,” she said, with a hint of irony, “especially when friends say, ‘I know you didn’t write it, for you can’t hide your peculiar style.
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’” Ten years later, though, perhaps to reveal herself as a woman more layered than the “little woman” seen by the world, she reprinted
A Modern Mephistopheles
under her own name.

Another effect of Louisa’s success was wealth, which enabled her to help relatives and friends. It was a pleasure, after so many years of accepting charity, to become a patron. She paid for several of her cousin Charlotte’s children to attend college, sending Alfred Jr. to Harvard, and
Charlotte and Katherine to Smith. In 1875 she lent three sisters she knew three thousand dollars for the down payment on a house they wished to purchase in Roxbury, just west of Boston, where her seventeenth-century May ancestors had first settled.
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Of these sisters, the one Louisa knew best, Dr. Rhoda Ashley Lawrence, was a homeopathic therapist whom Louisa had encountered in her efforts to treat her long-standing ailment.
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Three years younger than Louisa, Dr. Lawrence was born in Lubec, Maine, the nation’s easternmost town, trained in Boston as a schoolteacher, married and moved back to Maine, and had a son. A widow by her early thirties, Dr. Lawrence taught school before turning to the study of homeopathy and massage, which she provided Louisa. The doctor intended to start a convalescent home in the Roxbury house. “I very much want to help [her] . . . get a good start,” Louisa explained to her mother.
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“Life was always a puzzle to me,” she observed in 1874, in considering her astonishing success.
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“When I had the youth I had no money; now I have the money I have no time; and when I get the time, if I ever do, I shall have no health to enjoy life. I suppose it’s the discipline I need; but it’s rather hard to love the things I do and see them [pass me] by because duty chains me to my galley. . . . If I can only keep brave and patient to the end.”

Chapter Sixteen

Thou Excellest Them All

A
t nine in the morning on April 19, 1875, soldiers were marching, bands were playing, and it seemed the whole town of Concord had gathered to celebrate the centenary of the first battle of the American Revolution. President Ulysses S. Grant rode a barouche drawn by four bay horses at the head of the parade. The crowd was said to number fifty thousand, among them grandchildren and great-grandchildren of men who had fought in the war.

Louisa and Abigail arrived at the town center as men were taking their seats under a tent.
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The women were told to go to Town Hall, stand, and wait. After a while, Louisa asked a man if a few elderly ladies, including her mother, could occupy a corner of the tent until seats could be found for them. He replied, “They can sit or stand anywhere in the town except on this platform, for gentlemen are coming in to take these places.” Another man “growled” at Louisa, “No place for women.”

Women’s participation in the celebration was limited to the festive ball that evening. Indeed at that point women had “six chairs apiece if we wanted them,” Louisa remarked. Abigail had borrowed for the occasion the old Hancock punch bowl from a May cousin. She “enjoyed showing off the jolly old bowl immensely” at the ball, Louisa said afterward, “and I shall enjoy getting it off my hands still more” for fear of losing the cousin’s “cherished treasure.”
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Louisa had written to him requesting the loan, “Ma’s dander is up and she is prancing like an old war horse, demanding that I should go to the ball as Madam Hancock.”

The exclusion of women from most of the events angered both mother and daughter. “I was ashamed of Concord that day,” Louisa said, echoing her uncle Samuel Joseph’s remarks on racial discrimination: “I felt ashamed of Canterbury, ashamed of Connecticut, ashamed of my country, ashamed of my color.” Two weeks later in an article in
Woman’s Journal
Louisa predicted, “By and by, there will come a day of reckoning, and then the tax-paying women of Concord will not be forgotten. . . . Following in the footsteps of their forefathers, they will utter another protest that shall be ‘heard round the world.’”
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She was practically quoting Abigail, who, having failed to achieve female suffrage two decades before, was now composing another petition demanding the vote. “Women of this enlightened country,” Abigail began, “Declare your right to freedom from Taxation without Representation and you will get it.

You can do . . . as patiently and as wisely as the men of 1775. The parades and shot may be shared and the guns and glory less apparent yet if justice and righteousness
can
be reached a whole century after the men obtained
their
rights and the quarter of a century after the slaves obtained their freedom; 1900, shall witness women at the Polls, at Cabinet and Counsels of the Nation. By the side of the men, as aids to protect, legislate, to save the nation from Factions and Treachery. If ten men can do it, 20 wise, discreet, well cultured women can help them.

The women of Massachusetts were taxed without representation, Abigail pointed out. Citing recent state tax figures, she wrote, “In 1871 it appears that 33,961 women were taxed the previous year in the form of one million, nine hundred and fifty-three dollars.” Concord’s top female taxpayers included her daughter Louisa and Lidian Emerson. “This was nearly one eleventh of the entire tax upon property,” Abigail observed. “This is an . . . extortion. Either the tax should be given up or the exclusiveness which surrounds the Ballot Box should be broken down.” She urged “wives, mothers, daughters, sisters” to “protest, petition, clamor for the right of Suffrage. The vote is the power.”

Abigail also proposed that women have educational and professional opportunities equal to men’s. Young women should be “educated up to the knowledge of their rights.” Having emancipated the slave, women
“must work out their own emancipation. [Women] must help make the Laws, be educated as Jurists, Drs. Divine, Artists, Bankers. It will occupy and give dignity to their minds and lives. Rear for the nation beautiful girls and powerful boys. Learn to control their own homes, by love and discretion, never forgetting that the latter virtue is the better part of valor; and the proverb that he who controleth himself is greater than he that ruleth a nation.” Abigail sent her petition to the state legislature, as she had done decades before. This time, with the call coming from the mother of Jo March, from Marmee herself, even more of Abigail’s peers spoke out in support. “Our women are beginning to look after the justice of being taxed without representation, and are sending their protests,” she said in early May, feeling hopeful. “They propose a convention to open the eyes of our women to the various degrees of Tyranny to which they are submitting.” But her neighbors in Concord “seem wonderfully indifferent to the whole subject.”

A few months later, the Massachusetts legislature “laid aside” Abigail’s petition “with as little regard as the stump of a well worn cigar,” she noted. Undeterred, she wrote seeking help from “our old friend Mr. Garrison.” She hoped the petition might “be remembered for the next century as the test of our cause . . . for freedom to vote and liberty to choose our representative.” Female suffrage would not come immediately, she predicted. “I cannot be here to see this, but I can leave my protest for my posterity.”

Her posterity, meanwhile, continued to share the housekeeping and care of their parents.
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“Mother & Father are now 75,” Anna wrote that year, “and their heads are snowy white, though their hearts keep young wonderfully.
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Mother is somewhat of an invalid owing to her extreme size, and inability to exercise, but she keeps very busy, still writes her diary as in old times, sews, and reads a great deal.” Bronson, in contrast, was not even very hard of hearing. “With as few inherited ail[ment]s as most of my time,” he wrote at seventy-six, “and these mostly held in check by habitual temperance during my later years (never indulged inordinately), I may possibly reach my hundredth birthday.”
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He enjoyed gardening on “my little estate,” taking tea with Emerson or dinner with Longfellow, corresponding with Walt Whitman, and visiting a fascinating young woman in Lynn, Mary Baker Glover, who is remembered as Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.