Eden's Outcasts (9 page)

It has often been assumed that Bronson Alcott was an emotionally distant parent, more absorbed with philosophical abstraction than with the unglamorous work of raising children. A reading of Alcott's own records from these months, however, tells a different story. As much as his work at the Temple School would permit him, Alcott was wholly immersed in the spiritual growth of his daughters. It troubled him that he could not be with the children around the clock. When he was obliged to rely on Abba's reports of what Anna and Louisa had done in his absence, he felt that his records lost their freshness and “force of delineation.”
¹⁴
He loved to walk with them, answering their questions and pointing out “objects calculated to excite pleasing and improving trains of thought.”
¹⁵
Bronson also welcomed Anna and Louisa into his study. Sometimes he paused from his researches and meditations to trace the outlines of their hands or feet into his notebooks. Once, he helped them build an elaborate tower out of books, then carefully sketched it into his notes. He tucked them into bed at night, seldom leaving them without “something to make us laugh,” as his daughters put it. It was rare, however, for him to tell them anything for the mere sake of being funny. “The humorous, or the ludicrous, merely” held little value for him unless it was connected with “something highly ideal.”
¹⁶
Bronson Alcott never understood the value of humor, either as a buffer against the shocks of life or as a teaching tool.

Alcott could not express too strongly the importance of parental guidance in the awesome task of forming the juvenile mind. The influence of the parent must be supreme, and it was impossible to delegate. He was equally clear as to the one quality he thought necessary for doing this work well: “Love! Love! Includes both the art, and the results—the philosophy and the practice; and whosoever
loveth,
as becometh a parent, hath an art of Celestial Tuition.”
¹⁷
If anything, Alcott's approach erred on the side of involvement, not that of aloofness, as when he postulated:

In the care of Anna and Louisa, Bronson found pleasure and sacred duty hand in hand. Between the Temple School and his less visible work at home, he had found two occupations that filled him with interest and joy.

Nevertheless, there were frustrations in the Alcott nursery. One of the greatest came from Alcott's sense that, although his children were playing and learning directly under his eyes, the thing that he most wanted to see remained tantalizingly invisible. He wanted to observe his daughters with the eyes of both a parent and a scientist. He was convinced that there was a secret to the inner growth of children; and he had hoped that he might be the first to solve the riddle. He did not, of course, know precisely what he was looking for. He only knew, to his chronic disappointment, that he was not finding it. The soul remained inscrutable.

Alcott found himself playing a game of psychological hide-and-seek, as the elfin souls of his children darted and fluttered before his eyes and then, with an innocent giggle, vanished from view. He was convinced that all children, not merely his own, were metaphysical, but his vision stopped at the blank wall of the flesh.

With some regret, too, he had to concede that innate spiritual qualities and a carefully controlled home environment were not the sole ingredients in shaping character. Most significantly, he found he had underestimated the influence of his children's physical condition on their emotional development. Anna, he discovered, was not as robust as Louisa, who had grown rapidly and was now routinely prevailing in their nursery-room clashes. Also, during the period of her father's “Observations,” Anna was recovering from a severe foot sprain, and her injury had made her all the more passive. Bronson feared that Anna would fall into “the evils of indolence, imbecility of purpose, [and] extreme susceptibility of sentiment.” He saw her good qualities as “the virtues…of a sickly growth,” lacking “the sturdy, energetic, productive life that tells of maturity and perfection.”
²⁰
He noted in particular that Anna could not bear criticism. Fearful of discipline and desperate to maintain the good opinion of her parents, Anna would emphatically deny having done wrong even when her fault was obvious. In his records, Bronson had stern words for what he called Anna's “moral cowardice,” but he ascribed this failing to her physical weakness and believed that punishing her would only weaken her further. Using the generic masculine pronoun, Bronson wrote out a spiritual prescription for such a child:

While he did not refrain from pointing out Anna's shortcomings, Bronson was always careful not to crush her fragile feelings. He was soon pleased to report that, when properly addressed, Anna was perfectly docile and obedient.
²²

Louisa was a more difficult case. Bronson felt a natural resonance with Anna's nature. Being of a “more meditative cast” than her sister, Anna dwelt on sentiments, which she clothed “in imaginative drapings” and viewed “in the beautiful ideals of her own fancy.”
²³
Louisa, by contrast, cared more about things than concepts and ideals. Moreover, in vibrant contrast to Anna's physical and emotional passivity, Louisa possessed what Bronson called “a high and excessive flow of the animal nature,” a quality that, he believed, made her liable to develop all the faults related to the will: “ferocity, ungovernable energy, [and] passionate obstinacy.”
²⁴

Bronson saw Louisa as a younger version of her mother. Reflecting on Abba and Louisa, Bronson wrote, “They are more alike: the elements of their beings are similar: the
will
is the predominating power.”
²⁵
Before long, Bronson came to regard Anna and Louisa as opposites, and his observations of them became a sustained study in contrast. If, in Bronson's view, Anna's inclinations were epic, then Louisa's were fundamentally dramatic. Whereas Anna shared her father's preference for vegetables, Louisa relished animal food—an appetite that Bronson saw as both a cause and effect of her “untameable spirit.”
²⁶
Anna inclined toward theorizing and creativity; Louisa, intent solely on practice, continually demolished Anna's fantasies—and belongings—with the rude force of a Hun. “One builds; the other demolishes,” Bronson observed, “and between the struggle of contrary forces, their tranquility is disturbed.”
²⁷

Bronson desperately wanted to cure Louisa's seemingly innate violence. In his records, he fretted endlessly over her fierce will and volcanic temper. He anxiously observed:

Perhaps most damning in her father's eyes, though hardly unusual in a two-year-old child, was Louisa's utter immersion in her own wants and impulses. The very touchstone of Bronson Alcott's moral creed was self-surrender. It was therefore with grave disappointment that he wrote of Louisa, “Self-sacrifice is an act beyond her present apprehension; she must be led to it, by symbols in actual life—through
punishment
and
reward
.”
²⁹
Bronson valued self-denial to the point of self-injury. This kind of discipline, of course, was beyond his daughter's comprehension, and her instinctive pursuit of pleasure was to lead Bronson for many years to view Louisa as the most selfish of his children.

However, Bronson's native element was gentleness and reason, and the tools he thought of using against a stormy temper felt awkward in his hands. No matter how violently Louisa fought against him, Bronson refused to use the rod on her. And yet, when all else failed, he did resort to spanking, even though he knew that every blow he directed at her bottom was a ringing slap against his own theories of child rearing.
³⁰
The spankings did not seem to work anyway. When possible, Bronson continued his practice of letting the punishment fit the crime. If, for example, Louisa threw away her food and treated Anna unkindly, he would send her to bed without supper and without the customary bedtime story and good-night kiss, explaining that children who misused their food or failed to love their sisters must be denied access to them. On one occasion, when Louisa had pinched Anna and pulled her hair, Bronson called Louisa to him and said, “Anna says that you took hold of her hair
so,
” and pulled her hair. He then continued, “And, that you pinched her cheek
so.
” After braving the pain for a moment, Louisa's fortitude gave way, and she admitted, “Father, I was naughty to hurt Anna so.”
³¹
If Louisa could not comprehend the pain she gave to others, then she must experience it herself.

Much of Louisa's misbehavior probably stemmed from sibling rivalry, and when Anna's foot sprain made it harder for her to stand her ground, Louisa pressed her advantage. Bronson wrote, “Anna seems to fear her sister's approaches; and so alarming has she become to her, that some discipline will be necessary to reduce Louisa to tameness.”
³²
The best solution, he discovered, was to keep the sisters apart for a portion of the day. Bronson started taking Anna with him to the Temple School during the day and left Louisa at home with Abba. Yet this plan had a significant drawback, since each child now moved more exclusively under the influence of the parent to whom she was already closer. By taking Anna with him to school and leaving Louisa behind, Bronson purchased some domestic peace, but only at the cost of reaffirming that Anna was his child and Louisa was her mother's. With time, these attachments grew stronger. Once solidified, they never entirely changed.

Although he was most concerned with curbing Louisa's excesses of temper and will, Bronson was by no means indifferent to her admirable qualities. He felt that Louisa's understanding was more acute and her ability to imitate was better than her sister's.
³³
He took early notice of the verve with which she acted out the dramas of the stories he read to her. He recorded with pride her “rapid progress in spoken language” and her extensive, choice vocabulary.
³⁴
He also wrote of her “sturdiness of purpose,” her “deep and affluent nature,” and the exuberance of her powerful character.
³⁵
He firmly believed that his dark daughter possessed “noble elements,” and he only prayed that he might be able to tame and direct those elements to an equally noble purpose.
³⁶

What is most remarkable in all of this is the aptness of Bronson's perceptions. He saw in his infant daughter the salient character traits by which people came to know the adult Louisa May Alcott: a powerful will; a temper that she labored to control; an innate flair for the dramatic; and, of course, a superb command of language. Why did her father's early observations of her show such prophetic accuracy? It was certainly due in part to Bronson's gifts of perception and the earnestness with which he strove to see things in their right proportions. Yet one may perhaps argue that Bronson's prophecies were also self-fulfilling. Louisa was certainly made to know what her parents thought of her. Being continually told that she was willful, temperamental, and gifted in all things verbal, she probably became all the more so. In describing his daughter, Bronson also cast her more firmly in the mold in which she had begun.

Bronson seems never to have thought much about the possible effects of the exaggerated self-consciousness that he was instilling in his children. It seems impossible to deny, however, that, by ceaselessly calling on Louisa and her sisters to inspect their motives and to compare their conduct to a standard of saintly perfection, Bronson conferred on them a deeply mixed blessing. On the one hand, he shaped them into acutely thoughtful, generous beings whose lives were filled with acts of kindness and charity. On the other, he imposed a regimen of moral self-criticism that only a rare person, adult or child, could assume without flinching.