Eden's Outcasts (58 page)

During her picaresque wanderings in the first third of the novel, Christie performs with reasonable skill the tasks of maidservant, actress, governess, hired companion, and seamstress. She is driven from each occupation in turn by the impossibility of remaining under employers who have infected the employment relation with their own character flaws. Far from denouncing the impersonal nature of the marketplace, Christie's history indicates that, in the occupations available to women other than factory work, employment relations were often too personal and that the need for cash too frequently meant exposure to the whims and cruelties of careless or obdurate employers. Economic relations in the book are unsatisfactory so long as they involve either the mere exchange of money for service or the flaunted superiority of one class over another. Alcott writes, “There are many Christies, willing to work, yet unable to bear the contact with coarser natures which makes labor seem degrading, or to endure the hard struggle for the bare necessities of life when life has lost all that makes it beautiful.”
⁶¹
Hepsey Johnson, a black domestic who becomes Christie's first friend in the novel, puts the matter simply: “Folks don't seem to 'member dat we've got feelin's.”
⁶²

And yet, where the relationship is graced by mutual respect and sympathy, no task is truly distasteful. As Christie's benefactor, Mrs. Wilkins, puts it, “There warn't never a hard job that ever I'd hated but what grew easy when I remembered who it was done for.”
⁶³
Mrs. Wilkins is a laundress, but she is almost always shown working in her kitchen; Hepsey is employed as a cook. Both of them are nurturing characters, and their shared association with food illustrates that work must not only produce wealth. It must nourish both body and soul. In
Work
, Alcott explores the possible connection between love and money in both its highest and lowest forms. When Christie gives a hundred hard-earned dollars to Hepsey to help her guide slaves to freedom, Alcott invokes the language of the marketplace to highlight the act of charity. She calls the gift an “investment” and observes that “shares in the Underground Railroad pay splendid dividends that never fail.”
⁶⁴
The other side of the love-cash nexus is personified in Rachel, a former prostitute whom Christie befriends while the two are working as seamstresses, and whose experience illustrates the tragedies that result when physical intimacy becomes commodified. Christie's kindness to Rachel is more than repaid when the latter appears just in time to save Christie from throwing herself in the river.

Soon after Christie's brush with death, the story veers into a love triangle somewhat stalely reminiscent of
Moods
. Again, one of the candidates for Christie's affections, a florist named David Sterling, is modeled on Thoreau. Christie rejects a wealthy suitor and accepts Sterling, and the story teeters on the brink of predictability until the outbreak of the Civil War inspires both Sterling and Christie to enlist, he in the army, she in the nursing corps. At their hastily planned wedding, both are in uniform. David is killed in action, leaving Christie to raise their baby daughter and to wonder whether she will ever find the work for which her life of struggle and trial has prepared her. The question is answered when, near the eve of her fortieth birthday, Christie attends a women's rights meeting. It soon becomes apparent that the wealthy women in attendance and their working comrades have no idea how to communicate with each other. Standing at the lowest step of the speakers' platform, symbolically bridging the space between high and low, Christie gives an eloquent, impromptu address whose spirit unites and inspires the crowd. Her sufferings have shaped her unawares into a potent women's rights activist.

The closing tableau of
Work
reunites many of the women whom Christie has met on her journey, including Hepsey, Mrs. Wilkins, and Rachel, who, it has been revealed, is actually Sterling's sister, long presumed dead. Gathered together in the name of creating a better place for women in American life, Christie's friends join hands as “a loving league of sisters, old and young, black and white, rich and poor.”
⁶⁵
Again, Alcott redefines family according to shared mission rather than bloodlines. However, Christie's alliance is different in that it excludes any masculine presence. The war has made casualties of both of Christie's lovers, making room for the higher love of sisterhood. At age eleven, Louisa had cried when her father suggested dividing their family along gender lines. Now, only a few years younger than her father had been at Fruitlands, Alcott saw intriguing possibilities in single-sex community. The ending of the novel reconstructs not only the idea of family but also the meaning of the book's title. Whereas “work” had once signified to Christie the grubbing, lonely life of a menial laborer, the word is ultimately made synonymous with the holy labors of reform.

Despite its reassuring ending,
Work
is Alcott's most harrowing book. Her account of Christie's near suicide shocked many readers, some of whom sent her personal letters demanding to know why she had included it. “
I
did not like the suicide in ‘Work,'” she replied to one such letter, “but as much of that chapter was true I let it stand as a warning to several people who need it to my knowledge, & to many whom I do not know.”
⁶⁶
Although Louisa's thoughts of killing herself had long since passed, the memory of her suicidal depression had refused to lie quietly. Louisa had confessed it, one supposes, not merely as a service to others but as an unburdening of her own soul.

But does Louisa's allusion to “the suicide in ‘Work'” refer to Christie's brush with drowning? Notably, Louisa's letter does not refer to the
attempted
suicide in the novel, but to
the
suicide. If we take her literally, she is alluding to another moment in the novel that, though less obviously so, may be equally confessional. Earlier in the novel, Christie finds work as a companion to an invalid named Helen Carrol. After the two women have forged a friendship, Helen confesses the family's secret: they suffer from hereditary mental illness: “We are all mad or shall be,” she relates, “and for years we have gone recklessly on bequeathing this awful inheritance to our descendants. It should end with us…none of us should marry.”
⁶⁷
Of this illness, Helen further relates, “When one generation goes free it falls more heavily upon the rest.”
⁶⁸
Helen eventually ends her own torment by completing the only successful suicide in
Work
.

Louisa certainly knew of her Uncle Junius's long struggle for mental health, which had ended with his suicide. She had witnessed firsthand her father's episodes of strange behavior following the demise of Fruitlands. In addition, she was more than conscious of her own potentially self-destructive moods and consuming creative “vortices.” As befits the taut drama of her novel, the inherited derangement of the fictitious Carrol family is infinitely more devastating than any instabilities that haunted the Alcotts. However, it is not unreasonable to ask whether Louisa was daunted by the possibility of inherited mental imbalance in her own family, and whether this same anxiety played an unspoken role in Louisa's own decision not to marry. As is more than once the case with Alcott, the fiction teasingly invites speculations that the surviving facts can neither confirm nor dispel.

Louisa herself was dissatisfied with
Work
, which, like
Moods
, she had begun with great ambition, only to create a finished product that was good, not great. When her health permitted her, she could produce a flow of words virtually at will. However, it seemed that when she tried to write the books whose artistic success mattered most to her, inspiration did not come at her bidding. The truth was hard to avoid: she was a seasoned, disciplined writer whose voice resonated with young readers as no American's ever had before. However, the highest levels of adult writing seemed stubbornly closed to her. She had, she felt, been forced to endure too many interruptions. She would have liked to write one book in peace and see whether then, at last, she could produce something to her liking. Perhaps, in time, she would get the chance.

The four years that followed
Work
were ones of sustained financial comfort and productivity, as both Bronson and Louisa continued to reap the rewards that
Little Women, Tablets,
and their successors showered on Orchard House. As might be expected of a man in his seventies and his grown daughter in her forties, they were less involved in each other's daily lives than they had previously been. Unable to settle in a single place, Louisa oscillated between Orchard House and various rented rooms in the city, always missing her family while in Boston and always yearning for urbane excitements while in Concord. Abba's health was now much broken, and Louisa spent most of her time in Concord either caring for her mother or searching for someone else to do it. Moreover, her own health problems gave her little rest. Sometimes the pain from the ineradicable mercury made it impossible for her to write. Nights came when she could find no sleep without the help of morphine. In January 1874, she told her journal, “When I had youth I had no money; now that 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.”
⁶⁹

Louisa had grown no more comfortable with her celebrity status, and she continued to view it as part of the unwelcome price she paid for making a comfortable living. Over a hundred people a month sometimes descended on Orchard House to spend a moment with their beloved Little Woman. “I asked for bread,” she quipped, “and got a stone,—in the shape of a pedestal.”
⁷⁰
At one public appearance, an energetic matron worked her arm like a pump handle and exclaimed, “If you ever come to Oshkosh, your feet will not be allowed to touch the ground: you will be borne in the arms of the people.” Louisa vowed never to visit Oshkosh.
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Despite it all, she added two more juvenile novels to her list of accomplishments,
Eight Cousins
in 1875 and a sequel,
Rose in Bloom
, in 1876. She also became increasingly involved in charitable concerns, visiting New York in 1875 and finding herself moved by the plights of indigent newsboys and the inmates of mental institutions. Closer to home, she loaned three thousand dollars to Dr. Rhoda Lawrence of Roxbury, Massachusetts, to establish a nursing home, remarking at the time that it was “just the place many of us used up people need to go for repairs.”
⁷²

In contrast, Bronson hungered for more recognition rather than less. Although his popularity had never been greater, he found that a man in his midseventies, whatever his recent achievements, was seldom the first to receive an invitation to social or intellectual functions. Louisa noticed that at times he seemed “rather sad, to be left out of so much that he would enjoy and should be asked to help and adorn.”
⁷³
She felt that, if she had a little more money, she would like to bring all the best people “to see and entertain
him
.”
⁷⁴
Bronson's lack of a college education remained a source of regret to him. He wrote that he now felt at home strolling academic grounds, feeling, as he put it, “a certain inborn title to their honors and advantages.”
⁷⁵
Nevertheless, as he stood inside the Harvard College Library one day in 1874, he felt “overmastered” and could not help wondering whether access to such a place sixty years earlier might have made him a wiser man.
⁷⁶
His need for inclusion was intensely gratified when, the following year, Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society offered him an honorary membership. He responded so excitedly that his letter of acceptance contained two uncharacteristic misspellings.
⁷⁷

It was perhaps hard for everyone to realize that May Alcott, the petted baby of Hosmer Cottage and the little girl of Hillside, was now a woman in her mid-thirties. Like Louisa, she had struggled to satisfy her artistic impulses while fulfilling her domestic obligations to the family. As shown by the somewhat amateurish illustrations that she contributed to part 1 of
Little Women
, May's skills were initially slow to mature, yet more recently she had been making impressive strides. After returning from Europe alongside Louisa in 1871, she had sailed east again in April 1873, “brave and happy and hopeful,” for a year's study in London.
⁷⁸
This journey would have been impossible if not for Louisa, who cheerfully gave her sister a thousand dollars and a like number of blessings. During her stay, May became adept at copying the Turner canvases that hung in the National Gallery. Her copies caught the eye of Ruskin, the greatest authority on the artist's works, who proclaimed that she had “caught Turner's spirit wonderfully.”
⁷⁹

After she returned home the following March, however, May was forced to put aside her artistic ambitions as she became immersed in the daily work of Orchard House, taking up the hard, monotonous tasks that her mother was now too weak to perform. In between periods of housework, May was able to teach some classes and offer inspiration to other local artists. Among them was the young Daniel Chester French, who later sculpted the great statue of Lincoln housed in the Lincoln Memorial.
⁸⁰
However, May herself soon found that she needed more time for creativity, as well as more professional instruction and aesthetic stimulus than Massachusetts could give her. On September 9, 1876, she embarked again for Europe aboard the steamship
China.