Marmee & Louisa (21 page)

Even writing now seemed a burden to Abigail. “I have written Charles”—her eldest brother, recently returned to Boston after decades away at sea—“a hasty note but now my mind is too much oppressed to do any thing long which is not connected with the condition of things here,” she told Samuel Joseph. “I wish you would explain to him more fully how I am distracted—with a large, but fluctuating family—feeble husband—and not wholly persuaded in my own mind that all that
is,
is
best
—I ought not to write to any body. . . .”

With guests she was gloomy and apologetic. She said to one visitor as he departed, “You must come ten years hence for my opinion about Fruitlands.”
⁵⁴⁰

“Dear Lady,” he replied, “you will not be here to answer me.”

“Perhaps not. In that case it will speak for itself. It will be a barren wilderness or a fruitful Paradise, I fear, despite of me.” Inwardly she thought, “My Genius is too rigidly set in the old mould to make great progress. I abhor Society, as it is, with its fallacies and shams. But I can only be real myself.”

Her girls, she felt, also needed to be “real themselves.” Conscious of this, Abigail gave Louisa another blank book that summer. “Write in it,” she said, explaining that keeping a diary was a long habit in the family, beginning with the male Puritans who regularly recorded their observations and feelings. Louisa began immediately: “Friday, August 4, 1843. After breakfast I washed the dishes and then had my lessons. Father and Mr. Kay [a visitor] and Mr. Lane went to the Shakers and did not return till evening. After my lessons I sewed till dinner. When dinner was over I had a bath, and then went to [a neighbor] Mrs. Williard’s. When I came home I played till supper time, after which I read a little in Oliver Twist, and when I had thought a little I went to bed.” Louisa concluded her first entry, “I have spent quite a pleasant day.”

It was surprisingly satisfying to record her activities and thoughts. Louisa recounted sewing, ironing, and setting the table, her lessons, playing alone or with Lizzie, and picking blackberries and raspberries with Anna and William Lane. Now and then she asked Abigail to read through her entries and comment on them. “I told mother I liked to have her write in my book,” Louisa explained.
⁵⁴¹
“She said she would put in more and she wrote this to help me: ‘Dear Louie,—Your handwriting improves very fast. Take pains and do not be in a hurry. I like to have you make observations about our conversations and your own thoughts. It helps you to express them and to understand your little self. Remember, dear girl, that a diary should be an epitome of your life. May it be a record of pure thought and good actions, then you will indeed be the precious child of your loving mother.’ ”

Keeping a journal seemed to protect Louisa from pain. On the evening of August 10, after “Mother and Father came home” from a visit to the Shaker community in Harvard that Bronson and Lane had spoken of joining, Louisa and Anna heard their parents arguing. “Though it was unpleasant without,” Louisa wrote in her journal, “I was happy within,”
in part because she had an outlet for the anxiety aroused by her parents’ fights.

She and Anna, sensing their mother’s growing distress, tried harder to behave. They “deport themselves with more than usual discretion and quietude,” Abigail noticed.
⁵⁴²
One late summer evening, as Louisa lay in her bed and “the moon came up very brightly and looked at me,” she regretted she “did not mind Mother” that day. She vowed, “I must not tease my mother.”
⁵⁴³
A few weeks later, on Abigail’s forty-third birthday, Louisa’s first thought on waking was “Mother’s birthday: I must be very good.” She gave Abigail a cross she had made of moss collected in the woods, and a bookmark she feared was “not very pretty.”
⁵⁴⁴
Louisa wrote in her journal, “I wish I were rich, I was good, and we were all a happy family.”
⁵⁴⁵

Abigail and Miss Page were able to steal a day from their Fruitlands duties at the end of August to visit the nearby Shakers, whose sexual abstinence, farming, and ritual dancing intrigued Bronson and Lane. Neither woman was impressed. “We saw but little of their domestic and internal arrangements, [but] there is servitude somewhere, I have no doubt,” Abigail said.
⁵⁴⁶
The Shaker men had “a fat, sleek, comfortable look. . . . Among the women there is a still, awkward reserve that belongs to neither sublime resignation [n]or divine hope.”

Waxing philosophical, Abigail moved from the stifled Shaker women to the lot of women everywhere. “Wherever I turn, I see the yoke on women in some form or another. On some it sits easy for they are but beasts of burden. On others pride hushes them to silence; no complaint is made for they scorn pity or sympathy. On some it galls and chafes; they feel assured by every instinct of their nature that they were designed for a higher, nobler calling than to ‘drag life’s lengthening chain along.’ ”

Without defining the group to which she belonged, Abigail considered her own domestic arrangement. “A woman may perform the most disinterested duties. She may ‘die daily’ in the cause of truth and righteousness. She lives neglected, dies forgotten. But a man who never performed in his whole life one self-denying act, but who has accidental gifts of genius, is celebrated by his contemporaries, while his name and his works live on, from age to age. He is crowned with laurel, while scarce a ‘stone may tell where she lies.’ ”

Miss Page, according to Abigail’s journal, replied, “A woman may live a whole life of sacrifice and at her death meekly says, ‘I die a woman.’ A man passes a few years in experiments on self-denial and simple life and he says, ‘Behold a God.’ ”

“A good remark and true!” Abigail exclaimed.
⁵⁴⁷
“There certainly is more true humility in woman, more substantial greatness in woman, more essential goodness, than in man. Woman
lives
her thought; man
speculates
about it. Woman’s love is enduring, changeless; man is fitful in his attachments; his love is convenient, not of necessity. Woman is happy in her plain lawn; man is better content in the royal purple.” Life was fundamentally unfair, she felt, as her daughters were doubtless aware. To be a woman in the world, particularly a married women, was to be subservient and neglected. She found it particularly galling that men, who had so much more power and privilege, often seemed inferior to women in character.

This was aptly demonstrated by her husband, whose behavior became more erratic that autumn. After all his talk of farming, he would not bring in the harvest. In early September he and Lane spent two weeks traveling to Rhode Island, New York City, and Bronson’s hometown in Connecticut. Just before the men left the farm Anna and Louisa heard their father call the trip a “separation” and suggest he might never return.
⁵⁴⁸
During the men’s absence Abigail continued the children’s lessons. One day she “read [a]loud to Miss Page and the girls
The President’s Daughters, a narrative of a Governess
by Frederika Bremer,” which contained “fine touches.” One passage struck her: “Within the good and happy family all inequalities are smoothed down so as to form a common element of goodness and beauty, in which each member of the family finds his life.” If only she could create a family in which all inequalities were smoothed down.

Decades later, in
Transcendental Wild Oats,
her 1873 account of Fruitlands, Louisa recalled the scene that month with an insouciance that may belie her feelings then. Humor was a mask that Louisa used “to keep [at bay] the reality of her passions,” a biographer wrote.
⁵⁴⁹
Louisa described the behavior of “all the men”—her father, Lane, and perhaps a few others—at harvest time:

The rule was to do what the spirit moved, so they left their crops to Providence and went a-reaping in wider and, let us hope, more fruitful fields than their own.
⁵⁵⁰

Luckily, the earthly providence who watched over [Bronson] was at hand to glean the scanty crop yielded by the “uncorrupted land,” which, “consecrated to human freedom,” had received “the sober culture of devout men.”

About the time the grain was ready to house, some call of the Oversoul wafted all the men away. An easterly storm was coming up and the yellow stacks were sure to be ruined. Then Sister Hope [Abigail] gathered her forces. Three little girls [Anna, Louisa, and Elizabeth], one boy ([Lane]’s son), and herself, harnessed to clothes-baskets and Russia-linen sheets, were the only teams she could command; but with these poor appliances the indomitable woman got in the grain and saved food for her young, with the instinct and energy of a mother-bird with a brood of hungry nestlings to feed.

Like her “mother-bird,” ten-year-old Louisa disliked the stream of strangers who came to see Bronson’s experiment, eat their food, and sometimes stay for a few nights or weeks. She wished they would all go away. “More people coming to live with us,” she wrote in her journal not long afterward. “I wish we could be together, and no one else.
⁵⁵¹
I don’t see who is to clothe and feed us all, when we are so poor now.” Feeling “dismal,” Louisa composed a poem on despondency, which concluded with a wish to “smile through the darkest hours.”

Everything was uncertain. “I
believe
that we are to stay here this winter,” Abigail told her brother in November, more than a month after Bronson and Lane had returned, “[but] I will predict nothing but try to fortify myself for all the storms and be grateful for all the gales which may be breathed upon me.
⁵⁵²
 . . . We are loading up wood and apples as the one thing needful. We all are comfortably fixed for clothing, and come what may I shall try that the peace of these dear children be no more disturbed by discussions and doubts. I and they
will
have comfort, a good fire, cheerful faces and pleasant books.” She wrote an affectionate note to Anna: “I feel as if I could fold my arms around you all, and say from my heart, ‘Here is my world within my embrace.
⁵⁵³
’ ” Abigail encouraged the
children to play games. Among their favorites were cribbage, casino, Old Maid, and Nine Men’s Morris. Each morning, no matter how dreary, her daughters recalled waking to the sound of Abigail singing.
⁵⁵⁴

“I am not dead yet, either to life or love,” Abigail reassured her brother Charles in a letter.
⁵⁵⁵
“This is a Hotel where man and beast are entertained without pay, and at great expense. I keep saying ‘Oh when will rest come?’ ” Herself a beast of burden on her husband’s farm, she had no heart to expect others to join her there. “I am too generous to tackle anybody [else] into this harrow, for drag as you will you cannot get the ground smooth: the asperities are too sharp, the sinuosities too deep.”

She was no longer confident in Bronson’s dream. “It is absurd to suppose,” as he seemed to do, “that all move in the same circle” as oneself. Abigail wished to “permit each to be good in his own way.” Unlike Bronson, “I do not wish to transcend humanity; I wish to transcend nothing but evil and sin.” Thinking again of insanity, which she dreaded, “I hope not to transcend my senses; they are the sentinels to guard the citadel of my soul.” Finally, she rejected her husband’s recent renunciation of sexual passion. “Even our passions are heralds announcing a deep nature.
⁵⁵⁶
A passionless person is to me a tame, half-whole animal. . . . If rightly governed, [passions] render us invulnerable to All the heresy of Sin.”

In addition to all the other physical deprivations, the farmhouse was unbearably cold, which would soon reduce the population of Fruitlands to the original group of Alcotts and Lanes. Abigail tried, without success, to “fortify” herself against “the severe weather” by taking two cold-water showers a day.
⁵⁵⁷
William Lane “has been sick a fort night,” she informed Samuel Joseph in November, “and Louisa with a dreadful cough, pain in her side and head-ache.” As for the adults, Bronson remained distant and unhappy. “Mr. Lane looks miserably and
acts worse
.” He demonstrated a “contemptible, pitiable moodiness.
⁵⁵⁸
But no man is . . . always sublime to his
house maid,
” Abigail added bitterly, in reference to herself.

Many evenings in November, Louisa and Anna lay silently in their bed as their parents discussed a separation. This made Louisa “very unhappy,” she wrote in her journal.
⁵⁵⁹
“Father and mother and Anna and I had a long talk . . . and we all cried.” Then “Anna and I cried in bed, and I prayed God to keep us all together.” She feared her father would abandon them and depart again with Charles Lane, dissolving her family.
One evening, she reported, “Father and Mr. L. had a talk, and Father asked us if
we
saw any reason for us to separate. Mother wanted to, she is so tired.”

Not long afterward, Louisa turned “
Eleven years old. Thursday,
[
November
]
29th
—It was father’s and my birthday. We had some nice presents. We played in the snow before school. Mother read [the poem] ‘Rosamond’ when we sewed.
⁵⁶⁰
Father asked us in the eve what fault troubled us most. I said my bad temper.”

Six months had passed since the purchase of the farm, so the first mortgage payment was due. Samuel Joseph, who had doubtless discussed the matter with his sister, simply declined to pay the seventy-five dollars. Without it, the farm went into foreclosure. “Dear S,” Abigail wrote with a hint of triumph to Samuel Joseph on November 11, “Your letter [about the mortgage] pleased me better than it did the other proprietors of the Estate,” namely Lane and her husband, neither of whom had seventy-five dollars. “I do not wish you to put a cent
here
” at Fruitlands. “I am sifting everything to its bottom, for I will know the foundation, center and circumference,” she promised.
⁵⁶¹

Bronson, on the other hand, fell into an “extreme mental depression.”
⁵⁶²
Without income or property, estranged from his wife, and feeling himself a failure, he took to his bed, starved himself, and made it known that he wished to die.
⁵⁶³
“Then the tragedy began for the forsaken little family,” Louisa wrote in
Transcendental Wild Oats,
assuming an opacity reminiscent of her father’s style.
⁵⁶⁴
“Desolation and despair fell upon [Bronson]. As his wife said, his new beliefs had alienated many friends. . . . He had tried, but it was a failure. The world was not ready for Utopia yet. . . . Then this dreamer, whose dream was the end of his life, resolved to carry out his idea to the bitter end. . . . Silently he lay down upon his bed, turned his face to the wall, and waited with pathetic patience for death to cut the knot which he could not untie. Days and nights went by, and neither food nor water passed his lips.”