Alcott: From Apple Slump to Orchard House

Alcott:  From Apple Slump to Orchard House

(c) Copyright (2016) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

According to one contemporary authority, Louisa May Alcott "remains the most widely read 19th-century author in America." Numerous adult American women fondly remember reading Alcott's novel "Little Women" and its first sequel, "Good Wives." The restless ambition of Alcott's heroine Jo March has spurred far more women than just Jo herself. 

Radical Causes

When the excellent 1994 film of "Little Women" showcases the family's long-suffering mother, Marmee March, as an outspoken feminist, that interpretation may strike some viewers as a late 20th-century distortion of Marmee's character. In fact, both Alcott ["Jo March"] and her mother, Abigail (Abba) May Alcott ["Marmee"], ardently advocated for women's rights. 

However, when creating Marmee, Alcott downplayed her mother's assertiveness and highlighted her moral suffering and superiority. Their feminism was hidden in plain sight. Feminism animated the portrayal of Jo as a young girl dreaming of self-expression and freedom. Yet Alcott—though she wanted to leave Jo single—reluctantly succumbed to the pressures exerted by her enthusiastic leadership. 

Although the Alcotts, Louisa's real family, inspired her fictional family, the Marches, Alcott's artistic compromises detached the March family's history from the full complexity of the Alcott family's involvement in Transcendentalism, antislavery movements, feminism, utopian communes, and other 19th-century radical causes. The 1994 film partly replants "Little Women" in this rich soil.

Radical Imperfections

The intense involvement of the Alcott family with radical causes provided the hidden bedrock upon which "Little Women" and its three sequels rest. Bronson Alcott's innovative theories of teaching, for example, govern Jo's residential school for boys in "Little Men." Also hidden in plain sight in Alcott's fiction is the radical imperfection of the Alcott family. Not that the somewhat idealized March family is perfect. An enraged Jo, for example, almost allows her annoying youngest sister, Amy, to drown. Nevertheless, Alcott portrayed the four daughters and two loving parents as a fallible but essentially model family.

The Alcotts had lived far less ideally. "Marmee and Louisa," a biography by Eve LaPlante, concerned Abba May Alcott's tremendous influence on her daughter. Abba was a brave and loving woman, and her beloved brother, Samuel Joseph May, supported her emotionally and, often, financially, because Bronson Alcott was, to speak frankly, an impractical leech who even considered abandoning this wife who had long toiled to support him and their four daughters. For a time, he thought that sexual purity demanded that he reject their marriage and its consequences—an episode of appallingly narcissistic idealism.

Bronson Alcott decided to stay with his wife and daughters, but, after Abba's death, reading her private journals revealed even to his self-absorbed mind the years of anguish that his fecklessness had caused her. Louisa also suffered from her father's narcissism, yet she largely refrained from portraying him critically.

A summer visitor to the Alcott family plot in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (Concord, Massachusetts) might feel puzzled as to why a Memorial Day marker distinguishes Louisa's grave. After all, doesn't Mr. March go off to the Civil War, leaving Marmee and their four daughters at home? Alcott honored her father, Bronson, by misattributing to him service that she herself had performed at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown and later described in "Hospital Sketches."

Just as Alcott attributed to her fictional father her own war service as a Civil War nurse, she erased his failure as the family breadwinner. Correcting Bronson Alcott's long and sorry record of improvidence by writing popular novels, Alcott made her mother's old age financially comfortable.

Apple Slump

Even though Alcott often avoided confronting her father's faults, she gently but definitely satirized his doomed utopian commune, Fruitlands, as "Apple Slump" in her very funny story "Transcendental Wild Oats." Although only ten years old in 1843, Louisa observed (and later recorded) that her mother did most of the work of the commune while her father propounded profound thoughts about the dignity of labor. 

To Abba fell the challenge of feeding the commune while observing its idealistic dicta: “Neither coffee, tea, molasses, nor rice tempts us beyond the bounds of indigenous production .... No animal substances—neither flesh, butter, cheese, eggs, nor milk—pollute our tables, nor corrupt our bodies.” Farming eleven acres without animal labor or products proved uninspiring to the transcendentally inspired. This experiment in ethical living exploited the wife and mother who had sustained it. Alcott managed to imply this without overtly criticizing her father by humorously and gently mocking his obliviousness.

Orchard House

Alcott's eventual great success as a popular novelist meant that her mother could live out her old age at ease in the Alcott family home (1858 to 1877), "Orchard House," the opposite of Fruitlands or "Apple Slump." Perhaps surprisingly, the hyper-masculine Theodore Roosevelt considered "Little Women" and "Little Men" among his own favorite books. Understanding how the March family novels both reveal and hide the full story of the Alcott family, both adult men and adult women can enjoy perceiving how the March family and the Alcott family are the obverse and reverse faces of the same weathered coin.

first published in The Woodstock Independent