Little Women. Louisa May Alcott

Forty-seven. Harvest Time

      BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

      LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

      Known primarily for her quaint novels on domestic life during the Civil War, Louisa May Alcott’s literary legacy boasts a far wider breadth of work than her earnest and optimistic tales of the March family. While her classic novels Little Women and Jo’s Boys have made Alcott a household name, their popularity overshadows the variety of work Alcott published throughout her career. In addition to her sentimental tales of domesticity, Alcott published lurid gothic tales noted for their perversity, violence, and overall madness. She printed graphic accounts of her experiences as a nurse in the Civil War, fairy tales for children, and political letters demanding social change. Alcott was a fiercely determined and progressive intellectual who supported Unitarianism, political reform, and women’s rights in the late 19th century. Alcott never sought inspiration for her work, but based many of her famous writings on her own life events. Therefore, it is impossible to fully understand her work without the knowledge of her life’s experiences. Ultimately it was Alcott’s conservative family values that launched her into literary stardom, and echoed in her series of March novels that have been cherished for generations.

      Born on November 29, 1832, Louisa May Alcott was the second of four daughters to transcendentalist educator Amos Bronson Alcott and social activist Abigail May Alcott. Upon moving to Boston, Massachusetts when Alcott was two years old, Bronson set up an experimental school founded on the principal that children should enjoy themselves while learning at their own pace—a similar pedagogical theory to that on which today’s Magnet schools are founded. Although this progressive educational system was maligned by critics and the system collapsed a few years later, Bronson’s avant-garde approach to education had a profound impact on the young Alcott. Despite the fact that Bronson moved his family from utopian society to utopian society—many founded on the belief that humans are born righteous and it is only through our relationship with nature that we grow closer to God—Alcott’s childhood was far from idyllic. The family was extraordinarily poor due to Bronson’s inability to provide a steady income for his family, and in Alcott’s childhood journals she wrote, “In the eve father and mother and Anna and I had a long talk. I was very unhappy and we all cried. Anna and I cried in bed, and I prayed to God to keep us all together” (James).

      Alcott’s own schooling came primarily from Bronson, but was supplemented by mentorial relationships with such scholars and family friends as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorn. It is clear that these mentors’ literary influence deeply affected Alcott, who published her first poem, “Sunlight,” at the age of twenty. Until then, she had been supplementing her family’s meager income by mending laundry and reading for the elderly. With her first publication, and the subsequent publication of her book Flower Fables a year later, Alcott caught a glimpse of the literary success that would forever end her family’s financial woes. Historically, it is also clear that the Alcott family’s relationships with such academic figures greatly influenced Bronson. As a part of the transcendental community, the Alcott family supported many of social causes the movement espoused, such as the abolition of slavery and the establishment of women’s rights—causes that Alcott would support until her death.

      In the early years of Alcott’s literary career, she separated from her family by staying in Boston while they moved on to Walpole, New Hampshire. She was reunited with her family under the sad circumstances of her sister Lizzie’s death from scarlet fever—an event that would later inspire Beth March’s death in her classic novel, Little Women. After comforting her mother for the loss of two daughters—her elder sister, Anna, moved away from her family after marriage—Alcott entered the Civil War battlefield as a nurse. Although single women were generally not allowed to serve as war nurses, a determined Alcott used her family’s strong connections to secure a position on the front lines. Alcott was ill prepared for the grisly traumas she would encounter, and she processed her emotions about the bloody war through her graphic collection of essays, Hospital Sketches (1863). Modern readers familiar only with Alcott’s quietly moral narratives on domesticity may be surprised to read their precursor: a collection that does not shy away from the grotesque violence of war. Indeed, Alcott, who upon joining the medical service was too modest to give soldiers sponge baths, had learned how to bathe patients, comfort the wounded, change bloody dressings, and even assist in amputations. The collection itself is told from the perspective of Nurse Tribulation Periwinkle—Alcott believed it was unladylike to promote her own name in print—but is entirely autobiographical in nature. At the end of the collection, Nurse Periwinkle is whisked back to Massachusetts by her father after six weeks of service due to her contraction of typhoid. Alcott found herself in the same situation as her fictional Nurse, and spent her weeks of bed rest re-penning the hasty notes she sent to her family from the field into the essays that would form the collection.

      Critics of Hospital Sketches have both praised the collection for its vivid account of medical care during the Civil War, and dismissed it for its “amateurish” writing (Alcott has since defended her apparent haste by arguing that the collection’s pace preserves the urgency of continuous hospital scramble). Regardless of critics’ complaints, and Alcott’s own confusion about the collection’s success—she later wrote, “I cannot see why people like a few extracts from topsey-turvey letters written on inverted tea kettles, waiting for gruel to warm, or poultices to cool, [or] for boys to wake and be tormented”—Hospital Sketches garnered enough acclaim to make Alcott an overnight literary sensation (Reisen). Alcott harnessed the excitement over Hospital Sketches and used the momentum to publish three anti-slavery short stories starring women subverting gender expectations by acting to save the lives of the men they loved. These stories also broke convention by supporting interracial marriages, progressive thinking even for passionate abolitionists at the time.

      Alcott continued to publish widely, including the passionate, commercially sensational novels A Long Fatal Love Chase, and Pauline’s Passion and Punishment among many others. These books, published under Alcott’s pseudonym A.M. Barnard, starred protagonists out for revenge against those who have thwarted them. A classic theme of these “blood and thunder tales” was the despoilment of innocence by the malevolent compulsions of the impure (Shealy). These gothic and melodramatic tales earned Alcott a pretty penny, but she did not admit ownership of their creation until years later. Alcott also wrote the novels Moods and Work in an attempt to encourage young women to redefine female gender roles, relieving women of society’s strict behavioral codes. Moods received notably bad reviews. When Alcott considered her views on womanhood—that it is only when a woman is able to stand alone, without dependence on a man, that she can truly be happy, a strong theme in Moods—she wrote in her journal, “My next book shall have no ideas in it, only facts, and the people shall be as ordinary as possible” (Cheney).

      Three years after Hospital Sketches’ success, and her agent’s request for “a girls story,” Alcott spent two months furiously writing a novel based on her life with the three most interesting girls she knew: her sisters. Little Women was published in September, 1863, and was an immediate success, selling out of its initial 2,000 copy print run. The second volume, Good Wives immediately sold out of its 13,000 copy print run. Alcott’s tales of the March sisters, Meg, Beth, Amy, and Jo launched her into literary superstardom, and their success was quickly followed up by the subsequent Old Fashioned Girl, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys. With the renowned success of these novels, Alcott’s desire to continue writing adult fiction was thwarted by her agent. In her 1872 journals, Alcott wrote, “Twenty years ago I resolved to make the family independent if I could. At forty that is done. Debts all paid, even the outlawed ones, and we 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” (Cheney).

      Little Women is largely accepted to be based on Alcott’s life with her three sisters, save only for the fact that Alcott created a stable home life for the March sisters, a characteristic starkly missing from her own upbringing. In a society where men typically worked to support their families, it would have been difficult for audiences to understand a father who stayed home, allowing his wife and daughters to support him. In casting Mr. March as an idealized, traditional