Eden's Outcasts (37 page)

Louisa's story for
The Atlantic
, “Love and Self-Love,” can be read as veiled autobiography.
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Though narrated from the viewpoint of a man, Basil Ventnor, it is just as much the story of an orphaned sixteen-year-old named Effie Home. Rejected by a wealthy grandfather who did not approve of her parents' marriage, Effie touches the charitable nature of Ventnor, a man twice her age. Persuaded that they are too close in age for him to adopt her without exciting scandal, Ventnor fulfills the last request of Effie's dying guardian and marries the teenager. Effie falls in love with Ventnor. However, he is unable to return her love on an equal basis, partly because he sees his relationship to her as a matter of self-abnegating duty and partly because his heart belongs to a former lover, Agnes, who has thrown him over for another man. Moreover, Ventnor egotistically imagines that, because he has given Effie his name and protection, he owes her nothing more. The relationship becomes progressively unequal.

Unexpectedly, Agnes returns, now widowed and seeking to rekindle her former romance. The intimacy of Ventnor and Agnes soon becomes too much for Effie to bear. One moonlit evening, as the three glide downstream in a rowboat and the two older lovers relive their romantic past, Effie impulsively plunges into the water. His conscience suddenly awakened, Ventnor plunges in and rescues her. Effie hovers near death for weeks. When she returns to health, Ventnor finds her nature fundamentally changed. As Alcott tells it, “The
child
Effie lay dead beneath the ripples of the river, but the
woman
rose up from that bed of suffering like one consecrated to life's high duties by the bitter baptism of that dark hour.”
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She becomes a perfectly dutiful, if emotionally remote, spouse. Unable to love the girl, Ventnor gradually discovers that he reveres and admires the woman. Determined to give Effie her freedom, he sends her back to her grandfather and secretly prepares to dissolve their marriage. Before he can do so, however, he loses his fortune. Hearing of his distress, Effie comes back to him, and the two proclaim their mutual affection; each is now capable of both duty and passion. Effie reveals that her grandfather has died, leaving her his entire estate, and all ends blissfully.

By ambiguously presenting Ventnor as potentially either a father or a lover, “Love and Self-Love” implies a perilous choice regarding the categories of affection. It suggests that two people who fail initially to achieve a deep connection can nevertheless find satisfaction if they start again on a less volatile basis of respect and duty. “Love and Self-Love” speaks as eloquently of the maturing relationship between Bronson and Louisa as anything she ever wrote, and great significance lies in the fact that she wrote the story as her relationship with her family was emerging from crisis and near the time when she briefly considered suicide. “Love and Self-Love,” of course, also describes a suicide attempt, but that attempt is not really about physical death. Rather, it concerns the death of an immature spiritual self, which departs only to be replaced by a wiser, more resilient soul.

The resurrected, wiser Effie finds that deep feelings need not seek exuberant expression. She eventually achieves the acceptance she craves, but only after she has mastered the art of self-control. Louisa's moment at the Mill Dam seems to have marked a similar crossroads in the development of her emotional nature. Like Effie with regard to Ventnor, she had previously sought to elicit from her father an effusive response that he was not capable of giving. Indeed, it can be argued that Louisa's youthful romanticism placed her in an analogous relation with the world at large. She wanted to embrace life, and she wanted life to receive her and her talents with passionate enthusiasm. She did not realize at once that the world is, at bottom, phlegmatic, and that, for most of us, impressing it takes much more patience and effort than she had thus far dedicated to that purpose.

Had Bronson read between the lines of “Love and Self-Love,” he would perhaps have detected some insights into his own psychology. Although Louisa portrays Ventnor as a man of fine charitable instincts, she represents his apparent unselfishness as a symptom of a deeper narcissism. Shunning the world, engrossing himself in his books, Ventnor appears to be a man of modest appetites. However, Ventnor deems himself superior to others precisely because of his ability to resist pleasure. Through her portrayal of Ventnor, Louisa makes the incisive point that self-discipline, pursued so obsessively that it harms and alienates others, is its own species of sinful self-absorption. No one had taught Louisa this lesson more effectively than her father.

As she passed her twenty-sixth birthday, Louisa was far from deciding that life was sweet and wonderful merely because her fortunes had taken a momentarily upward turn. She was prepared to treat life as an absurd joke and to proceed on that basis, accepting irony as a means of greeting adversity on its own bitter terms. She voiced her satirical outlook in a letter to Anna in which she suggested that the allegedly all-wise Creator might do well to begin again from scratch:

Anna thought the passage funny and copied it into a letter to Bronson. There is no sure way of telling whether he saw through the humorous gloss and into the cynical nihilism beneath. In any event, it must have pleased him to know that his stormiest child was making people laugh again.

Bronson received this letter on the road, during another tour of the West. Louisa remarked that he had set out full of hope. “Dear man!” she observed. “How happy he will be if people will only listen to and
pay
for his wisdom.”
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Western excursions were becoming something of a habit with him, and if they still did not bring the profits he imagined, he always seemed to locate high-minded persons generous enough to house him and cover his expenses. He outfitted himself simply and carried his own bags.
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In the homes of his hosts, he found warm fires to sit by and babies to play with. To Anna, as well as to others, her father's ability to inspire kindness and receive blessings seemed a sort of ongoing miracle. She asked, “Doesn't it sometimes seem as though Providence took trusting spirits like your own into his especial keeping, and smoothed the rough places, or is it that people who ‘live in the clouds' don't so much mind the little troubles that beset us of the earthly mould?”
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Anna knew no better way to account for her father. He was a lily of the field, one of the rarest species of holy fool. Those who loved him learned to emphasize the adjective instead of the noun.

By mid-December, Bronson was in Chicago. On this trip, he admitted, his expectations were moderate. Everyone seemed pinched for money, and he hoped only to “glean something as we go.” He sent home an unspecified amount of money for the holidays, apologizing that its meagerness was “in keeping with our humble fortunes.” In a wan, philosophic tone, he added, “Blessed be
something
to those who have so long waited for
nothing
.”
⁵⁰
He felt the sadness of knowing that the first Christmas at Orchard House would pass without him. He wrote to Louisa in Boston and urged her to make up for his own absence, “to run up and warm the House of Seven Gables and as many fireplaces.” He took pride, he said, in her enterprise and courage, and he advised her to make her Christmas visit to Concord as long as possible, and make “the house joyous to its inmates all.”
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Louisa honored her father's wish, though her mother and Anna disagreed in their description of her visit. Abba wrote to Bronson, “Louisa is with us and we are having cosy times. She is not very well and is enjoying the freedom of her home and the joys of rest, rest.”
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Anna's account described a much more vivacious visitor. She related that Louisa had come “bringing news, gossip, & fun, enough to keep us laughing the whole time, & doing us heaps of good into the bargain.”
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Louisa surprised everyone by saying that she did not want to go back to Boston and was quite willing to stay longer if only her obligations did not call her away. Abba and Anna reluctantly let her go.
⁵⁴

“The past year,” Bronson wrote in early 1859, “has changed the aspects of life to us all.”
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With Lizzie's death and Anna's betrothal, it had seemed to Louisa at various times in 1858 that the family would dissolve. To the contrary, it had reformed itself on a different basis, and as the year ended, all were appreciative of one another's strengths and confident of one another's love. But if, as 1859 began, the Alcotts seemed able to withstand all challenges, the greater Union of the United States inspired far less confidence. Before the year had run its course, the mounting disquietude over slavery would erupt into violence, and the repercussions would be felt within the Alcotts' closest circle.

It was a hard winter for Abba, who became seriously ill in January. Anna took over the housekeeping but wished her sisters, both in Boston, could be with her to take the gloom out of the dismal days.
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Louisa responded, coming home for a week to ease Anna's burdens and take care of their mother. She began to wonder whether nursing might be her true calling. Bronson wrote that necessity alone prevented him from hastening to Abba's side. He called it “good and true” of Louisa to have come so quickly when needed.
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He was at a loss to explain the urge that sent him forth on his tours when he suspected that his usefulness and welcome would always be greatest at home. He was, perhaps, as perplexed as anyone by his life of “wandering thus far from one's fireside and chambers, to sit solitary often and strange in strangers' houses and companies to which one feels drawn by sympathies he is sometimes ashamed to own, and yet is fated to admit.”
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He perhaps sensed that, to continue thinking independently, he had to keep moving independently as well. In choosing the road over his hearth and study, he continually chose the harder path, as if deep armchair comfort were a kind of death to the spirit.

Abba was evidently better by the time her husband came back from his journey in early March.
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Bronson was very much of two minds about the inland regions of the country. On the one hand, he found everywhere “in this wide West…earnest men and women, seeking faith if they have lost it, or [e]stablishing themselves as they may in the little they have chanced to keep.”
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And yet the turgid streams, the sparse cornfields, and the dreary monotony of the prairie depressed him. The flatness of the land seemed mirrored in the flat speech of its inhabitants. Was there not a flatness of the mind at work as well? Travel for a month in that wild country, he claimed, “and you shall come round home, whatever you were at starting, the Cynic confirmed, the Skeptic and the Sloven, in spite of yourself.”
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On coming home, he observed, “I perceive that I am neither a planter of the backwoods, pioneer, nor settler there, but an inhabitant of the Mind, and given to friendship and ideas. The ancient society, the Old England of New England, Massachusetts for me.”
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The trip had tired him out. He spent the early spring reading over old books and putting his garden back in order, always a task of some magnitude after a New England winter. Meanwhile, Louisa was taking pleasure in the praise she was receiving for a new story, “Mark Field's Mistake,” published in the
Saturday Evening Gazette.
She was busy with teaching, writing, sewing, and gathering all the available benefits of lectures, books, and good people. She wrote that life was her college. She hoped to graduate well and earn some honors.
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In April, she finished her teaching for the spring, with the hope that she would never again have to stand before a classroom. The qualities that had made her father a remarkable teacher—his patience, his love of trying new methods, and his fascination with the slow, mysterious progress of children—were ones she had not inherited.

At almost the same time that Louisa was grumbling to her journal about the miseries of teaching, Bronson received news that heralded his improbable return to the profession after an absence of twenty years. On April 7, Franklin Sanborn came to Orchard House to announce that the town's school board, under Sanborn's leadership, had decided to offer Alcott the position of superintendent of the Concord schools. The job would require him to pay periodic visits to the town's schools and report to the board at its monthly meetings. The salary was a paltry one hundred dollars a year. Nevertheless, it was the first regular employment that Alcott had had since the closing of his last school in 1839. Bronson said he would accept only if the board were willing to allow him the freedom of action to make the job truly his own, and if they accepted that he would discharge his duties in a manner consistent with his own ideas on education. The committee, certainly at Sanborn's insistence, assented, and Bronson became a paid employee of the town that had never known quite what to do with him.