Marmee & Louisa (18 page)

Chapter Six

Looking to My Daughter’s Labors

O
n the morning of May 8, 1842, the day that Bronson’s ship was scheduled to sail, Abigail rose early, “sick and sad.”
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She donned her hood against the chill and “walked away a few minutes” so Anna and Louisa could not see her tears. “Increase my faith!” she prayed. Bronson had gone to Boston the previous day to view his ship’s quarters. She did not know how long it would be before he returned from England. Months? More than a year? What if his ship sank? She sought reassurance in the Book of Isaiah. “Must we be robbed of our treasure,” she asked herself, thinking of her husband, “to know its real value?”

Bronson awoke that morning at her cousin Thomas Sewall’s house on Beacon Hill, where he had spent the previous night, with a powerful sense of guilt. Immediately he wrote a letter to Abigail, vowing to “reward” her “sacrifice.” His return to Concord, he promised her, “would be to us a second nuptial eve—a wedding . . . in which our own children shall partake of the sweet sacredness of our Joy,” as if the entire family would join in matrimony.
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Three weeks later, as his ship approached Dover, England, he continued in the same vein. “I have not left you. . . . You have been my companion and company all the way, and have grown more and more precious to me.”

Meanwhile, in Concord only a few days after his departure, Abigail was relieved to be able to think “with more composure of Mr. Alcott’s absence. . . . My thoughts begin to dwell on the fact of his arriving safely,
and the desire for letters” from him. “Is not sorrow, all sorrow, selfish?” she wrote in her journal. She found herself distracted from her worries by the usual work of nurturing and teaching her girls, whose summer frocks needed mending.

The love between her and Bronson did seem stronger in his absence, as he had suggested in his May 8 letter. Two weeks after his departure, in her journal, she called him “Dearest, best of men.” She reassured him, as if he were present, “Few know you now; but there are those coming up to the true perception of all that is divine and sublime in your principles and life.” She tended to idealize Bronson, as he tended to idealize himself; this instinct intensified in both of them whenever he was attacked. She wrote to her absent husband, “Your life has been more to me than your doctrine or your theories. I love your fidelity to the pursuit of truth, your careless notice of principalities and powers, and vigilant concern for those who, like yourself, have toiled for the light of truth.”

On May 23 Abigail observed their twelfth wedding anniversary alone with her children, who were now one, six, nine, and eleven years old. “These years [of marriage] have been great years for my soul,” she said. “Wise discipline, circumstances the most diversified, have conspired to bring [my] great energies into action. I have not been always wise, or prudent; I have looked too much to consequences, not enough to principles and motives; but I feel encouraged. Defeat has given me strength.” Earlier that month she had expressed this sentiment as a metaphor: “Some flowers give out little or no odour until crushed.”
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She received no communication from Bronson for six weeks.
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During this time she liked to imagine him in England, “greeted by friends and coadjutors, surrounded by elements of kindness and love—no longer as exposed to the tempests of wind and water.”
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In truth, he had already arrived at Alcott House and discovered not only that he disliked the English but also that his sponsor, Greaves, had just died. Nevertheless, he sought the friendship and support of Greaves’s reform-minded allies, foremost among them “a younger disciple” named Henry Gardiner Wright and Charles Lane, a man so brilliant as to seem Bronson’s peer.
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With them Bronson hoped to return to America to establish “a new plantation,” an egalitarian, agrarian, vegetarian community dedicated to his ideals.
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Even as he sought recruits for his utopian vision, he recognized that “almost every human being is disqualified now for this enterprize.”

For Abigail in Concord, two months’ contemplation of her life in her husband’s absence led to an epiphany. She spent the morning of July 8 at the handsome Old Manse near the North Bridge with her friend Elizabeth Hoar, a judge’s daughter who had been engaged to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brother Charles before he died, of tuberculosis, several years earlier. Miss Hoar and Henry David Thoreau were readying the house for the expected arrival of the newlyweds Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of
Twice-Told Tales,
and Sophia Peabody, an artist who had briefly assisted her sister Elizabeth and Bronson at the Temple School. The Hawthornes’ first home was to be the Old Manse, which had belonged to the Emersons’ grandfather during the revolution. In this “charmed spot” overlooking the Concord River, its gardens newly adorned by Thoreau with “exquisite” Etruscan vases and “antique flower-stands of old roots of trees,” Abigail felt for the first time “dissatisfied with my home.”

A few hours later, as she walked back to her cramped, disorderly cottage on the other side of the village, she realized that her family “suffered for want of room. We have always been too crowded up.”
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Consequently, “We have no room to enjoy that celestial privacy which gives a charm to connubial and domestic intimacy. I have suffered in my tastes, and encroached on the rights of my husband and children by this intense proximity.”

Despite her anguish at Bronson’s leaving and the increased affection that had accompanied his departure, Abigail now admitted in her journal what she dared not say aloud: “I am enjoying this separation from my husband.” Although alone and sometimes lonely, especially for her dead mother and sisters, she felt sufficiently strong and cheerful to “meet the demands of my family with swift duty.
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I am not unhappy.” Whereas her absence seemed to make Bronson fonder of her, his absence simply made her happier. She was finding marriage itself perplexing. “Domestic life,” she added, “is a problem not easily solved.”
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As hard as it was to raise four children alone, Abigail preferred this separation to her troubled marriage.

To celebrate Abby May’s second birthday in late July, Abigail packed a picnic and walked with the girls to the Concord River for a ride in Junius’s dory. Each daughter’s birthday gave Abigail another opportunity to show her children “the joy I feel in their birth and continuance with
me on earth,” she observed.
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“I wish them to feel that we must live for each other. My life thus far has been devoted to them, and I know that they will find happiness thereafter in living for their mother.”

For Louisa these were prophetic words, although it is likely that many years passed before she read them in her mother’s journal. Already at age nine Louisa displayed “peculiarities and moods of mind, rather uncommon for her age,” Abigail had noted. “United to great firmness of purpose and resolution, there is at times [in Louisa] the greatest volatility and wretchedness of spirit—[she has] no hope, no heart for anything, sad, solemn, and desponding. Fine generous feelings, no selfishness, great good will to all, and strong attachment to a few,” especially to her mother. The assorted traits she observed in Louisa—“wretchedness of spirit,” resolve, volatility, hopelessness, loyalty, and generosity—were also traits Abigail saw in herself.

Meanwhile, in England, Bronson was busy seeking money and members for the “consociate family” he hoped to create in New England, apart from the world’s corruption. He was pleased to report to Abigail in a letter that Charles Lane was wealthy. He asked her to visit possible sites in the countryside for their community. She did as he asked but found no available farms she liked.

Moreover, she doubted she would enjoy a consociate family. She had rejected even the idea of living with the Emersons, whom she knew and admired. Now she wondered “whether my capabilities for such an association are at all equal to the demand.”
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She reassured herself that “my powers of adaptation to circumstances have usually been found sufficient to sustain me comfortably to myself and agreeably to others.” But she drew a bottom line in her own mind: “My children . . . must be benefited” by any project their father undertook.
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“If
they
are, surely then am I not injured, for they are the threads wrought into the texture of my life—the vesture with which I am covered. . . . I live, move, and have my being in them.”

In Concord she began sharing the effusive letters she received from Bronson with her friends, including the Emersons and Margaret Fuller, who now lived with them. Fuller, according to biographer Joan von Mehren, felt that Bronson’s letters demonstrated his “swelling vanity” and “boyish infatuation” with himself. Fuller was “both moved and embarrassed” that Abigail felt “forced to flaunt such specious displays of
devotion from a husband whose boundless belief in his own genius had excused him from family responsibilities.”
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Emerson also saw chinks in Bronson’s armor, concluding that his impecunious friend “is quite ready at any moment to abandon his present residence & employment . . . his wife & children, on very short notice, to put any new dream into practice which has bubbled up in the effervescence of discourse.”
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Abigail was not blind to her husband’s faults, but at the same time she wanted badly to admire him. Bonded to him in marriage, she was determined that he succeed, despite her own pain. In September, as she awaited his return from England, she wrote, “The lord of our house and life shall find that his servants and lovers”—she was both—“have not slept or idled during his absence from the field of labour. We have toiled” in the garden and the house.

On October 20, after an absence of more than six months, Bronson arrived home with his two new friends, Charles Lane and Henry Wright, whom Abigail initially called “the dear English-men, the good and true.”
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Her husband seemed infatuated with Lane, who he felt possessed “the deepest sharpest intellect I ever met with.” Lane arrived in America with a library of a thousand books, abundant cash—the equivalent of nearly fifty thousand dollars in 2000—and a son Louisa’s age named William, from whose mother Lane was separated.

The Alcott girls welcomed their father with joy. Louisa, already exquisitely sensitive to her mother’s feelings, sensed that in her father’s presence all should finally be well. “Mother,” she wondered aloud on October 23, “why am I so happy?”

Abigail could not speak.
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A swell of emotion—“a big prayer”—prevented her. In that moment, “I wished to breathe out my soul in one long utterance of hope that the causes which were conspiring just then to fill us with such pure joy might never pass away—the presence of my dear husband, the gentle sympathy of kind friends,” Lane and Wright, “and the inspiring . . . influence of Nature.
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We have planted and watered in our natural life. . . . May we reap and garner in a divine love!”

Her optimism soon waned. Bronson and his friends—who considered marriage immoral because it separated individuals from the universal “consociate family” they envisioned—seemed to scorn Abigail and condescend to her.
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The cottage, which was already cramped with five females and Junius Alcott and Charles May, now had four additional male occupants.
Abigail’s lack of resources and the uncertainty of her family’s situation continued to cause her anxiety. But Bronson, Lane, and Wright “all seem most stupidly obtuse on the causes of this occasional prostration of my judgment and faculties,” she confided in her journal. “I hope the solution of the problem will not be revealed to them too late for my recovery or their atonement of this invasion of my right as a woman and a mother.”

Only a month after their arrival from England, she complained that Bronson and his friends “most cruelly drive me from the enjoyment of my domestic life.” With the men “I am prone to indulge in occasional hilarity,” a desperate sort of humor, “but I seem frowned down [by them] into stiff quiet and peace-less order.
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I am almost suffocated in this atmosphere of restriction and form. . . . Perhaps,” she realized, recalling her time alone with the girls, “I feel it more after this five months of liberty and option.” Indeed, the liberty and option she had experienced in Bronson’s absence were now gone.

No married woman in America in 1842 could expect to enjoy liberty and option. Under the English common-law principle of coverture, the husband and father owned his wife and children.
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A divorced woman lost all rights to her children, including custody, because children were a husband’s property. Three years later, in
Woman in the Nineteenth Century,
Margaret Fuller would describe this disparity: “Innumerable . . . profligate and idle men live upon the earnings of industrious wives; or if the wives leave them, and take with them the children, to perform the double duty of mother and father, [the men] follow from place to place, and threaten to rob them of the children, if deprived of the rights of a husband, as they call them, planting themselves in their poor lodgings, frightening them into paying tribute by taking from them the children, running into debt at the expense of these otherwise so overtasked helots.
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 . . . I have seen the husband . . . come to install himself in the chamber of a woman who loathed him and say she should never take food without his company.” The law “still reflected the traditional patriarchal view of marriage,” according to the historian Nancy Theriot.
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“Wives belonged to their husbands. . . . Married women held no property in their own right and were not entitled to their own wages. Married women also were not legally exempted from mild physical chastisement or marital rape.” In sum, “the entire empire of the mother was within the jurisdiction of the father.”