“LEARNING FROM THE LIFE OF LOUISA MAY ALCOTT”

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, November 8, 2009

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

It is almost a cliché to say that we are all products of out time. It is also true that few of us are able to know the impact that our era and environment have on us. We can look back to the mid-1800s, the time we’ll visit today, and know from our wisdom 150 years later that slavery was wrong and that women were oppressed. It’s so obvious, but the blinders of time prevent us from known that for certain except by hindsight. Understanding what shapes our worldview today is something that can only adequately be done by generations looking back.

I’d like us to look back this morning at what might seem an unusual subject: Louisa May Alcott, known primarily as the author of children’s books, with the still popular best-selling book Little Women. We find that her life, like her work, is far more complex than it first appears. The world she experienced was in many ways unlike the world she wrote about. The world she experienced was, in its time, rather extraordinary and out of the mainstream. In many ways her writing became an attempt to normalize her world.

We are all, in so many ways, the product of our times. And yet there are people who come around from time to time who can show us with equal persuasion that this does not mean we are the slaves of our times. With vision, we can break out of the world that molds us. With vision we can make imagine our world differently.

Louisa May Alcott was such a person, and the world she was raised in was in some ways unlike the world anywhere else. It has been called the “American Renaissance,” that early period in our nation’s history in the mid-1800s that produced an unparalleled stream of great writers and thinkers – Melville and Whitman, Hawthorne and Longfellow, Emerson and Thoreau. The heart of that outburst of culture was New England, and the epicenter was the town of Concord, Massachusetts.

Louisa May Alcott was shaped directly, not just by the influence of that culture, but by personal experience with the people themselves. Their world was hers.

It is difficult to consider the life of Louisa May Alcott without looking at her in the context of her family, and especially her father. Her family became famous over time because of her depiction of it in her best-selling work Little Women.

Louisa’s life was shaped by that family, but the most influential person was her father, Amos Bronson Alcott – influential in many positive and some not-so-positive ways. Much of Louisa’s life would be lived in response to the impact of her father on her world. After all, she was born exactly on her father’s 33^rd birthday, and died two days after he died, on the day he was buried in Sleepy Hollow cemetery. So no exploration of her life can be complete without beginning by looking at him, Bronson Alcott.

Today we joke about celebrity by observing that some people seem to be famous for being famous – that their claim to fame is simply because everyone knows who they are and the media follows them. Bronson Alcott was well-known in literate circles of New England, and in some ways he was well-known for, well, being well-known in literate circles. He was an educator, a bit of a philosopher, a writer – but not particularly successful at any of them, though he cultivated friendships with the culture’s greatest thinkers. And he had enough eccentricities to make his life interesting and the subject of quite a few biographies over the last 150 years or so. A look at some of his life opens a window into the life of his second daughter, Louisa May.

He was born at the turn of the century, in 1799, and after several stops and starts at various jobs in life, Bronson Alcott finally began career as a teacher, and taught at a variety of schools over several years, from Philadelphia to Boston. In 1830 he married Abigail May, the sister of vocal abolitionist Samuel J. May, also a Unitarian minister. Abigail was raised in a Unitarian family and remained connected with her roots throughout her life. Bronson was raised in a traditional Calvinist New England church, and early on abandoned all associations with any organized religion. In some ways, transcendentalism was to become his religion.

As a teacher, Bronson Alcott developed a rather sophisticated and unusual philosophy of education, and with the support of wealthy benefactors, in 1834, he founded a school in Boston which drew its children from many of the elite families of the area. It was called the Temple School because he rented facilities for the school at the Masonic Temple. He hired as his teaching assistant Margaret Fuller, who would become famous as a transcendentalist writer and feminist, and Elizabeth Peabody, who would herself become a recognized innovator of education in America.

But Bronson’s pedagogical style was controversial to say the least. He didn’t believe in teaching by giving the children information, by lecturing. Rather he adopted what might be called a “Socratic” method – asking the children questions and engaging in conversation that would help them discover the wisdom within themselves. He made the mistake of publishing in a book some of his conversations with the children, and included his free-thinking ideas on the Bible, speaking of Jesus as a mere person and expressing doubts about biblical claims. Parents were shocked and offended. But it was when he enrolled an African-American child in the school that most of the parents withdrew their children, and the school had to close after only five years. Bronson Alcott was bankrupt.

The family then moved to the town of Concord when Louisa was only eight years old, and lived next door to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became Bronson’s strongest mentor and supporter over the years, and an informal teacher for young Louisa.

But his itch to make a significant impact on the world returned, and with a British friend, Charles Lane, he decided to design a Utopian Community. When Louisa was 10, they purchased a farm and acreage around the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, and moved there with about a dozen people. The community had very strict rules.

First of all, they were vegetarian, vegan, in the extreme. Not only did they not eat animals or animal products, like dairy, but they wouldn’t wear clothes that came from animals, not even wool. They would not exploit animals, for example, by using horses for plowing fields.

The members of the community were an interesting lot. In addition to Bronson Alcott and his family, and Charles Lane and his son, there was a man who came there from prison after being jailed for wearing a beard, another man named Abram Woods who asserted his individuality by insisting his name be reversed and people call him Woods Abram, another man who was a practicing nudist, another man who for one whole year had eaten only apples, and for another year had eaten only crackers, and a woman who would eventually be expelled from the vegan community for eating a fish. That was the entire community.

Largely because of their dietary rules, but perhaps for other reasons as well, they named this utopian community “Fruitlands.”

The experiment failed in less than a year. As one observer wrote, “Many saw the community as an opportunity to be housed and fed while sitting in apple trees writing poetry or thinking great thoughts.” Furthermore, there was conflict between the founders, Alcott and Lane, that doomed the project.

So yet again, Bronson Alcott’s great dreams crashed and burned, and the family was left penniless. The strongest legacy of the experiment came from the pen of Louisa May who many years later put her reminiscence of Fruitlands as a 10 year old into a book she entitled “Transcendental Wild Oats.” It became one of her more popular books.

Bronson Alcott had been an early advocate for the Transcendentalist movement in Boston, and was an active member of the Transcendental Club, whose public voice was that of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but was created at the inspiration of a Unitarian minister named Frederick Henry Hedge. The Transcendental Club fueled the movement that would eventually find a permanent place in American literary history and culture.

For the next decade or so, Bronson Alcott would travel around as a lecturer on almost everything, from philosophy to education, from things spiritual to things practical. Among other things, his was a voice for transcendentalism. In those days before radio or television, public lectures, or “lyceums” were the popular form of entertainment and distraction. After leaving the Unitarian ministry, Emerson made an extremely successful career out of the lecture circuit. Alcott was not nearly as popular, but with the financial support from his wife and patronage from Emerson and other friends, as well as from Louisa May once her career took off, Bronson Alcott career allowed him to eke by.

Louisa May Alcott’s childhood had to be challenging. On one hand her family was always on the brink of poverty, and her father became a public figure admired by many, but ridiculed by many others. On the other hand, few people grow up in such a stimulating intellectual environment. As a child, she read through the library of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was her next door neighbor and her closest adult friend. She took nature walks regularly with Henry David Thoreau, who also gave her botany lessons. Imagine what that must have been like! The anti-slavery activism of her father and mother, and her mother’s family, brought her in contact with nationally-known abolitionists: newspaper publisher William Lloyd Garrison, orator Wendell Phillips, and the poet John Greenleaf Whittier. At one point her home was a shelter for a fugitive slave. She had an early introduction to the movement for women’s rights and knew Margaret Fuller and Julia Ward Howe. Among her Concord neighbors and family friends was the family of author Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Emerson was particularly close. Later in life she confessed a kind of youthful crush on him.

“I wrote letters to him,” she said, “but never sent them; sat in a tall cherry tree at midnight, singing to the moon till the owls scared me to bed; (I) left wild flowers on the doorstep of my ‘Master’ (Emerson), and sung Mignon’s song under his window in very bad German.”

When she later told Emerson about this crush, “he was much amused,” she wrote.

“But Emerson remained my ‘Master,’ while he lived, doing more for me – as for many another – than he knew, by the simple beauty of his life, the truth and wisdom of his books, the example of a great, good man.”

Her education was somewhat informal, but between her father and Emerson, it was extensive. She read Shakespeare and Plutarch, Dante and Goethe, Shiller and Bronte, and all the classics. Just like you and I did as children. Right?

Looking at this childhood makes one reflect on her most successful book, Little Women, which was a transparently autobiographical look at her family growing up together. It is true that the famous family friends had no mention, and the fictional portrayal of her father was far different from the flamboyant real father she had, but otherwise the fictional mother and sisters were quite alike in personality and life experience as her real-life family and experience. The book is famous for presenting this family as a very ordinary family with ordinary joys and sorrows, but one wonders how such an ordinary story could be based on such an extraordinary life that was her childhood.

In many ways her life was anything but ordinary. At an early age, she started taking on odd jobs to bring money into the household. She did teaching and nanny work, she did sewing and house-cleaning. She left home as a young adult to live independently, but throughout her life she continued financial support for her family, even after she became one of the most successful writers of her time. At age 40, after a long run of success, she could write this:

“Twenty years ago, I resolved to make the family independent if I could. At forty that is done. Debts all paid, even outlawed ones, and we still have enough to be comfortable. It has cost me my health, perhaps; but as I still live, there is more for me to do, I suppose.”

Louisa May learned her principles as much, if not more, from her mother rather than her father. Her mother was a hard worker who tried to bring in money for the family when it was close to desperately needy. From her mother’s Unitarian roots, she became an advocate against slavery and a proponent of women’s suffrage. At one time, her mother Abigail took a paid position sponsored by the South Congregational Unitarian Church and gave her the title “Missionary to the Poor.” She would distribute food and clothing to those destitute in the city. In her first report to the Church, she wrote,

"Believe me, it is more frequent that despair paralyzes the heart than that hunger starves the body." She continued: "We do a good work when we clothe the Poor, but a better one when we make the way easy for them to clothe themselves—the best when we so arrange Society as to have no Poor."

When the Civil War started, Louisa May felt called to do something in support of the antislavery cause that she’d supported for some time. She volunteered as a nurse to help wounded soldiers, and became stationed at a hospital in Georgetown, near Washington, D.C. What she intended to be a long-term involvement lasted only a couple of months because she quickly became bedridden with typhoid pneumonia, and had to return home. The illness plague her the rest of her life, and she never fully recovered. Much of the problem was the treatment prescribed at that time for the typhoid pneumonia included a dangerous amount of mercury. Modern medical scientists who looked into it determined that treatment was likely the cause of her premature death twenty-six years later at the age of 56.

But her brief experience in the war was powerful. She later compiled the letters she wrote home about her experiences as a war nurse, and they became published as a popular book under the title “Hospital Sketches.” She continued corresponding with the soldiers she met, and later wrote this:

“I have never regretted that brief, yet costly experience. . . . for all that is best and bravest in the hearts of man and woman comes out in times like those, and the courage, loyalty, fortitude and self-sacrifice I saw and learned to love and admire in both Northern and Southern soldiers can never be forgotten.”

After returning from the war, Louisa May accepted a position to accompany an disabled lady for a year of traveling around Europe. Louisa May never married, and lived most of her time by herself, though at times she would live for a period with her sister. Her sister May moved to London, where she began a successful career as an artist, and where she was married. When her sister May’s first child was born, she was given the name Louisa, after Louisa May, and the baby was also given the nickname “Lulu,” which was Louisa May’s childhood nickname as well. Within a few weeks of giving birth, her sister May died, and Louisa May agreed to take in the baby and raise her. When she did so, Louisa was 48 years old. She loved young Lulu, and this filled her remaining years with joy.

That she never married added to the ongoing dispute over her sexual orientation. In an interview she gave near the end of her life, in 1883, she said this:

"I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man's soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman's body... because I have fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man."

She spent most of her adult life living in Boston, and she developed a lasting friendship with the radical Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. She wrote a preface to the 1881 edition of “The Prayers of Theodore Parker.”

The stereotype of Louisa May’s writing career is not always on the mark. Because of the success of the Little Women series, she is perceived primarily as a writer for older children or young adults. It is true that much of her success was from that genre, but her writing style ran the gamut from personal reports like that from her nursing experience, to her fanciful memoirs of living in Fruitlands community, which she called “Transcendental Wild Oats.”

In Little Women, Louisa’s fictional alter ego, Jo March, tries writing stories of sensational intrigue, thrillers and gothic “potboilers.” A publisher tells Jo that the books are trash, and Jo agrees and quits writing. “They are trash,” Jo says, “I can’t read this stuff in sober earnest without being horribly ashamed of it.” In fact, many years before writing these words in Little Women, Louisa published several books of intrigue, thrillers that she herself called “lurid” in style. They were published under a pseudonym A.N. Barnard, and Louisa appears to have enjoyed writing them more than the ones she wrote for children.

Louisa May Alcott published over 30 books during her career, and by the time she died she had sold over a million copies.

Her very first published book, called “Flower Fables,” was written when she was 22. When she cared for Emerson’s young daughter “Ellen,” Louisa May would invent stories and fairy tales to share with Ellen, and she decided to write those down and put them into a book. From there her attempts at writing took off in many directions.

She was a regular writer for Atlantic Monthly magazine. Many of her mature stories carried commentaries on social mores. Her book entitled Work: A Story of Experience, is a story about a young woman entering the workforce, somewhat autobiographical and also a subject matter quite unusual and controversial in her Victorian age. It carried a message of equal rights and opportunities needed for women.

The book Little Women was not her idea. Her publisher suggested that she write a book for girls. She hesitated, but found it came easily, and though this was not her favorite genre for writing, she would return to it frequently because it was so popular.

And the writing, we know, would define her legacy. And she would become counted among the great American writers as one product of the time and place known as the “American Renaissance.”

Even as she was a product of those times, her life shows us you we don’t also have to be a slave of our times. Louisa May Alcott did not follow in the path of her famous father, nor did she reject him or turn away from him. She found her own way.

Her own way was through writing, and her stories, including so many written for an audience of children, became her path for making a difference in the world. She was a woman who shaped her own destiny at a time when independent women were not accepted by most of society. She was herself enough of a transcendentalist to live her life, as in Thoreau’s words, to follow the beat of a different drummer.

I’d like to close with a few quotes I found from Alcott, which don’t necessarily fit in the narrative I’ve given this morning, but which I think express the breadth of her visions, from idealistic, to ascerbic, but ultimately to hopefulness.

Ø Far and away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.

Ø Love is the only thing that we can carry with us when we go. And it makes the end so easy.

Ø I believe that it is as much a right and a duty for women to do something with their lives as for men, and we are not going to be satisfied with such frivolous parts as you give us.

Ø I asked for bread, and I got a stone in the shape of a pedestal.

Ø I put in my list all the busy, useful independent spinsters I know, for liberty is a better husband than love to many of us.

Ø (The word) “stay” is a charming word in a friend’s vocabulary.

Ø I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.

READING: “Reform Motifs in the Writings of Louisa May Alcott”

Essay by Freda Baum

Louisa May Alcott was not satisfied that the world was as true or as just as it could be, and she repeatedly used her pen as a weapon against injustice.

In order to understand Alcott’s commitment to reform, it is necessary to consider her perception of individual worth. Alcott was raised in the midst of a group of intellectuals which included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and, of course, her father Bronson Alcott. These men believed that all individuals, regardless of race or sex, were part of an “oversoul” and were therefore divine. The potential oof human beings was stressed, not the limitations upon them. It is natural that the thinking of the young Louisa was molded by this community.

The journals of Louisa May Alcott reveal that the greatest concern of her early life seems to have been the abolition of slavery and the greatest concern of her later years, women’s rights. These interests are reflected in her writings, along with defenses of temperance and the rights of blacks, Indians, and the poor.

In the evil of slavery, Alcott recognized a class of persons who had been deprived of the opportunity to develop their individual worth. Alcott was raised in an abolitionist household. Her home in Concord was a station on the underground railroad, and the Alcott family consciously attempted to boycott good produced by slave labor. Slavery was believed to be an unholy subjugation of worthy individuals and was among the greatest of all wrongs. . . .

In 1881, when Alcott was a famous and successful author, she wrote about the abolitionist movement, saying “I take more pride in the very small help we Alcotts could give than in all the books I ever wrote or ever shall write.” . . .

Blacks were not the only worthy individuals powerless in a white man’s world. The worth of women was also largely unrecognized. Alcott’s anger at the subjection of women is reflected in her fiction, which presents a powerful, and sometimes angry, picture of the role of women in nineteenth century America. A great contribution of Louisa May Alcott literature is her insistence that women are capable beings who should be allowed a choice of lifestyles. . . . Alcott never suggests that it is better to be a professional than a homemaker, nor does she suggest that it is better to be a wife and mother than to follow a career. Both types of lifestyles are noble as long as each has its roots in the nature of the individual. . . .

(In Little Women, the town of) Plumfield is in effect a microcosm of a better world in which women are accepted as men’s equals. . . . The males of Plumfield never relegated the females to a sphere; each individual, male or female, is accepted on the basis of his nature. Plumfield is no utopia; Alcott was too aware of human frailties to create a vision of perfection. It is, however, a glimpse of the better world which she was sure would come one day when women achieved full citizenship and recognition. . .

Her acquaintance with intelligent women and her concern with social issues led Alcott to support the organized battle for women’s rights. She advocated the adoption of suffrage as acknowledgement of woman’s worth and because the issues voted upon were of importance to both sexes. When Concord’s female residents were granted the right to vote for members of the school committee, she was the first woman to register her name as a voter. . . .

Alcott, and her characters, also spoke out for those she perceived as the downtrodden. She felt that Indians, like blacks, had been mistreated. In Jo’s Boys, Dan refers to the Montana Indians as a much wronged people who had been “cheated out of everything, and were waiting patiently, after being driven from their own land to places where nothing will grow.”. . .

In Little Women, Jo and Amy have a conversation in which Amy expresses her dislike of reformers. The character of Jo is modeled after Louisa, and her response to Amy’s statement is characteristically Alcott. Jo says, “I do like them, and I shall be one if I can, for in spite of the laughing the world would never get on without them. We can’t agree about that, for you belong to the old set, and I to the new; you will get on the best, but I shall have the liveliest time of it. I should rather enjoy the brickbats and hooting, I think.”

Throughout her life, Alcott demonstrated concern for those who by accident of race or sex or circumstance were not allowed to develop the full potential as human beings. Alcott’s novels and stories are not mere adventure tales written to amuse young readers. They constitute a whole catalog of nineteen-century social concerns.