14 Alcott, Louisa May (1832–1888)
Alcott, Louisa May (1832–1888)
“I want something to do”... “Write a book,” Quoth the author of my being. “Don’t know enough, sir. First live, then write.” “Try teaching again,” suggested my mother. “No thank you, ma’am, ten years of that is enough.” “Take a husband like my Darby, and fulfill your mission,” said sister Joan, “Can’t afford expensive luxuries, Mrs. Coobiddy.” “Go nurse the soldiers,” said my young brother, Tom... “I will!” —Louisa May Alcott, from Hospital Sketches (1960, 7) During the Civil War, Louisa May Alcott worked as a writer, teacher, and nurse as well as serving as a volunteer in SOLDIERS’ AID SOCIETIES, abolitionist organizations, and the Boston auxiliary of the UNITED STATES SANITARY COMMISSION.Ofall of her wartime activities, her writing most occupied her thoughts, her time, and her dreams. Even while engaged in other business, war-related or not, she was always gathering ideas and organizing material for her next story, novel, play, or poem. Alcott’s fledgling professional writing career of the 1850s and early 1860s finally took flight in 1863 with the publication of Hospital Sketches,afictional- ized memoir of her experiences as an army nurse in Washington, DC. Alcott’s illustrious family background provided an important impetus and backdrop to her literary efforts and her war work. Aside from her earliest childhood years living in German- town, Pennsylvania, Alcott was raised in Concord and in Boston, Massachusetts, in an environ- ment steeped in transcendentalism, Unitarianism, and progressive educational reform. The daughter of Transcendental philosopher and writer Amos Bronson Alcott and the social reformer Abigail May Alcott, Louisa grew up in the midst of the most well-known intellectuals, writers, and social reformers of mid-nineteenth-century New England. As a young woman in the 1850s, Alcott was determined to become the family breadwin- ner. Though her father was well known, he had never shown much interest in keeping his family out of poverty. At various times, Alcott was a teacher, governess, domestic servant, seamstress, and laundress (Moyle 1985, 225). Although informed by a prominent Boston publisher that she could not write, she vowed that she would succeed as a writer. In 1854, her first book, Flower Fables, was published. For the remainder of the decade, she struggled to make time for writing and managed to publish stories and verse in a variety of newspapers and magazines. Her first big break came when the prestigious Atlantic Monthly published her story “Love and Self-Love” in March 1860. With the $50 payment in hand, Alcott dared to hope that she might one day support her family by her literary efforts. The Atlantic Monthly went on to publish two more of her stories that year. Alcott’s family and all her social connections were strongly antislavery. Her uncle Samuel Joseph May was a leading orator within the American Anti-Slavery Society. Alcott’s immediate
0129$$000A 07-26-03 08:10:14 Alcott, Louisa May (1832–1888) 15 family all participated as rank-and-file abolitionists. Alcott rejoiced over John Brown’s attempt to trigger a slave insurrection in October 1859 and her entire family mourned his execution in early December 1859. She dedicated a poem on the occasion of a memorial service for Brown held in Concord. “With a Rose That Bloomed on the Day of John Brown’s Martyrdom” was published in William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator a month later. From the outset of the war, Alcott yearned to contribute to the war effort. She sewed shirts for the troops during the first weeks of the war in 1861 and attended “Lint Picks” where Concord women and girls scraped and collected lint from cotton fabric to be used for the dressing of battle wounds. Alcott read Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing and studied the treatment of gunshot wounds, two early clues that she contemplated a future in army nursing. But domestic contributions to the war effort frustrated her. She confided to her journal that she longed to march off to war. Following a difficult and financially unproductive year of teaching and writing, in November 1862, she declared in her journal that she, “Decided to go to Washington as a nurse if I could find a place. Help needed, and I love nursing, and must let out my pent-up energy in some new way. . . . I want new experiences, and am sure to get ’em if I go” (Alcott 1989, 110). In December 1862, she arrived at Union Hotel Hospital in Washington, DC, a decaying three-story structure. In January 1863, in letters home and in her diary, she described the details of her life in the wards. Her attention to personal details and her emotions and reactions to events distinguish her writings from other nurses’ memoirs.
Though often home sick, heart sick & worn out, I like it—find real pleasure in comforting tending & cheering these poor souls who seem to love me, to feel my sympathy though unspoken, & acknowl- edge my hearty good will in spite of the ignorance, awkwardness & bashfulness which I cannot help showing in so new & trying a situation.
Louisa May Alcott. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
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Her days were a never-ending series of tasks, providing a glimpse of a Northern nurse’s duties. Up at six, dress by gas light, run through my ward & fling up the windows. . . . Poke up the fire, add blankets, joke, coax, and command. . . . Till noon I trot, trot, giving out rations, cutting up food for helpless “boys”, washing faces, teaching my attendants how beds are made or floors swept, dressing wounds, taking Dr. Fitz Patrick’s orders, (privately wishing all the time that he would be more gentle with my big babies,) dusting tables, sewing bandages, keeping my tray tidy, rushing up & down after pillows, bed linen, sponges, books & directions, till it seems as if Iwould joyfully pay down all I possess for fifteen minutes rest. (Alcott 1989, 113–114) After only a few weeks, Louisa fell ill with what doctors believed was typhoid pneumonia. She became more gravely ill as the days passed and as the treatment was administered. She was given calomel, the drug of choice for fevers and pneumonia. Calomel is a mercury compound (mercurous chloride) and Alcott, like most patients to whom it was prescribed, was given huge doses of it. Although commonly administered at the time, it is extremely toxic. In Alcott’s case, it appears not only to have precipitated a life-threatening crisis but it also permanently damaged her health. She returned to Concord to recover but never regained the abundant energy and strength that she had once enjoyed (Saxton 1977, 281, 294–295). Although Alcott’s nursing experience profoundly impacted every aspect of her life, it consumed little of her time during the war years. Prior to her tenure in Washington and afterward, when she was not caring for her parents or sisters, she devoted wholeheartedly to her writing. She did, however, continue to make time for the USSC. In December 1863, Alcott turned her lifelong passion for the theater into a moneymaker for the Boston Sanitary Fair, a fund-raising event for the USSC. A group of amateur actors produced her dramatization “Scenes from Dickens.” The six performances yielded $2,500 for the USSC. Hospital Sketches, her fictionalized narrative of her six weeks as an army nurse, is a strikingly vivid, though sentimentalized portrayal of the relationships between Nurse Tribula- tion Periwinkle (Alcott) and her wounded patients. Appearing first in newspapers, then re- printed in magazines and journals, it was published as a book in 1863. Hospital Sketches was immensely popular, perhaps because it informed readers of the emotional worlds within the army hospital while also providing physical descriptions of life on the wards. Even though Hospital Sketches idealizes the wounded and dying soldiers, its understated blend of humor and courage combined with tragedy and loss create a powerful reading experience. Though the impact of Alcott’s nursing experience was profound and long-lasting, it was merely one episode in a long chain of experiences in the 1860s that advanced her career as a writer. The Civil War’s effect on society, marked by profound sweeping social upheaval and gender role reversals in the North and South, deeply affected Alcott’s literary life. During the 1860s, she vigorously pursued the role of family provider, author, and businesswoman at the time when women throughout the North and South were taking a more active role in the public sphere. She achieved her financial goals through the production of literary works that she knew her parents and the people of Concord would approve and those that she knew they would not. In addition to her socially acceptable fiction, Alcott secretly became a popular writer of what she dubbed “lurid tales.” Writing either anonymously or under several pseudonyms, she wrote many sensational stories of revenge and jealousy, including such thrillers as “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” “A Whisper in the Dark,” and “A Marble Woman” for the Boston- based The Flag of Our Union and for several of newspaper mogul Frank Leslie’s publications. Following disappointing reviews of her adult novel, Moods, published in 1864, she acknowl- edged in her journal, that she “. . . fell back on rubbishy tales, for they pay best, and I can’t
0129$$000A 07-26-03 08:10:14 Alcott, Louisa May (1832–1888) 17 afford to starve on praise, when sensation stories are written in half the time and keep the family cosy” (quoted in Stern 1998, 98). By 1866, Frank Leslie was paying her $100 for each story, making her a highly paid newspaper writer. In addition to publishing several war stories, she wrote tales in which she grappled with the paradoxes of interracial relations in a new society without slavery, based on issues that emerged in her awareness while working among the freedpeople or “contrabands” at Union Hotel Hospital in Washington. These “abolitionist stories,” as she called them—“M.L.” (writ- ten in 1859 but not published until 1863), “Brothers” (renamed in 1869 to “My Contra- band),” and “An Hour”—were all examples of her literary fiction. After the war, Alcott continued writing in two opposing veins. Her sensational novel Behind a Mask: or A Woman’s Power was published in 1866. To Alcott’s surprise, Little Women, her novel for girls based loosely on her own experiences growing up in Concord, was published in 1868 and became an immediate, enduring best-seller. When the book’s publisher asked her to write a book for children in 1867, she had only consented because of her shaky family finances. Little Men, Jo’s Boys, and five other books for children followed, proving the popularity of books displaying strong, creative girls who grow up to have interests aside from securing a husband. Alcott also published two novels for adults in the 1870s, Work: A Story of Experience and A Modern Mephistopheles. With the publication of Little Women, Alcott was a wealthy woman. Yet she needed to keep publishing to maintain her entire family in comfort. In addition to her parents, she supported her older, widowed sister and two nephews, and after 1879, the niece of her deceased youngest sister. Despite increasing weakness and ill health, Alcott drove herself unmercifully, often working in the face of debilitating pain and exhaustion. She confided the inner conflict in a journal entry. Very poorly. Feel quite used up. Don’t care much for myself, as rest is heavenly even with pain; but the family seem so panic-stricken and helpless when I break down, that I try to keep the mill going. (quoted in Moyle 1985, 278) Alcott continued writing until her death, despite her ill health. Two days after the death of her father in March 1888, Alcott died at the age of 55. Her illness was never named or officially diagnosed, though her biographer and other researchers believe that the long-term effects of mercury poisoning had taken their toll on her system. See also Literary Women; Nurses
Selected Readings
Alcott, Louisa May. The Journals of Louisa May Al- Saxton, Martha. Louisa May: A Modern Biography cott. Edited by Joel Myerson and Daniel Sheahy. of Louisa May Alcott. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Boston: Little Brown. 1989. 1977.
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