The Noveis of Louisa May Alcott As Commentary On

THE NOVEIS OF LOUISA MAY ALCOTT AS COMMENTARY ON THE AMERICAN FAMILY Martha Irene Smith Shull A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 1975 Approved.by Doctoral Committee i 1 k - - II ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I should like to acknowledge my grateful thanks for all the assistance and many kindnesses shown me by my committee: Dr. David Addington, Dr. J. Robert Bashore, Dr. Frederick Eckman, and Dr. Virginia Platt. I should like especially to thank the chairman of my committee, Dr. Alma J. Payne, who gave unstintingly of her time, her knowledge, her experience, and her self. My committee are more than academiciansj they are true reflections of Chaucer’s Clerk, "And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche." TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION..................................... 1 Chapter I....................................... 26 Chapter II....................................... 82 Chapter III.............................. 137 Chapter IV....................................... 203 Bibliography..................................... 233 I INTRODUCTION The novels of Louisa May Alcott shed a great deal of light on the complex plight of the American family in the Gilded Age. It is generally accepted by social historians and sociologists that the beginnings of the erosion of the American family as a tightly-knit unit exerting consider able influence on the mores of society began with the 1870s. Parallel with this working hypothesis is the supporting literary evidence in the American novel. With the excep tion of the sentimental and sensational novels prior to Realism, the American novel generally did not center around a family situation or around American social behavior. Be fore literature dealing with manners and domestic problems can be written, there must be a stable society with a con tinuum of established traditions and behavior patterns. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were ones of settle ment and adventure, whether by the single male adventurer or the settling family. The myth of the American Adam, so popular in present American Studies and English literary studies, has its roots in the frontier-settler-adventurer figure. It is no wonder that the greater number of American novel heroes are single men and generally orphans. There 2 are only three well-known novels written before the 1870s in which the major character has both parents living through out the novel, parents who to some extent influence the actions of the plot and the protagonist: Susannah Rawson’s Charlotte Temple, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, and William Gilmore Simms' The Yemassee. Of these, the first two are sentimental novels of the most cloying variety. The latter's heroine has both parents, although they affect the course of events in the novel to no great degree and are of no interest, sociologically or historically. Coin cidentally, there are only three novels that involve mother- only families prior to 1870: Hannah Foster's The Coquette, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and Herman Melville's Pierre. Motherhood in all three is certainly not a state of life to be sought nor are any of the mothers to be commended for setting an example for the reader. One can then only compare these figures with the preponderance of father-only novels (13) and orphan novels (15)• James Fenimore Cooper in his sweep of novels contri butes heavily to the father-only plots. Cooper's novels might well be examined to determine how well his familial structure mirrors the paternalism of the American family that lasted through the 1850s. When one compares the over whelming number of father-only novels in Cooper's shelf of 3 novels with the mother-centered works of Louisa May Alcott, interesting speculations arise about the differences in the Coopers' and Alcotts' homelives and personal attitudes towards family relationships and the opposite sex. The novel with the central character as an orphan, or for all practical purposes an orphan, serves as a structural device; there is no problem with any extraneous plot move ments and involvements since this type of novel allows for great freedom for the major character. Also it allows the author to create a one-character novel with intense probing and dissection of the psyche and development of the charac ter. Mythically, such a character then fits well within the American Adam tradition, much better than a character burdened with a quiverful of relatives all of whom have some control over or, at least, opportunity to comment on and affect his life and actions. With Realism comes the American variation of the roman fleuve that is essentially a domestic novel allowing for great continuity of past and present, expanse of time, setting, characterization, and a plethora of subplots and dramatic incidents. With in creased leisure time for the readers the roman fleuve is a popular type of novel. Hand in hand with prosperity and leisure comes literary Realism and its photography of and commentary on the world of everyday America. Louisa May Alcott, 4 of course, writes her novels during that literary period of economic prosperity, increased leisure time for middle- class women, and the move to the city. The family is cen tral to her novels; moreover, it is a mother-centered family that she describes. The shift from the paternalism of Cooper's world has already been effected via the Civil War, the city, and technology. In examining the American family during the Gilded Age, one can see quite clearly that a major shift in familial patterns comes as the matri archal control of the American family supercedes the author itarian paternal family system that had begun to collapse during Louisa May Alcott's girlhood. This is not to say that the role of the mother in the American family of the colonial, eighteenth, and pre-Civil War periods was insigni ficant and negligible, but that the power of the father and the male was nearly omnipotent until his abdication. In the mythic studies of the past several decades, much has been made of the American Adam and the search for paradise in this New Eden of the New World. The New Eden expands to merge with the widening American frontier. Little, however, has been said of a similar mythic strain that seems also to run throughout American literature, that of a search for community. Recent sociological studies such as those by Warner, Nisbit, and Riesman have stressed 5 this drive in American life and have seen it in relation ship to American mobility, the growth of urbanism, and the increasing feeling of alienation that seems to pervade American life. The utopian dreams and visions of America did not start with the actual utopian experiments of the 1840s nor end with the spate of fifty-odd utopian novels in the 1880s. The Puritans talked of the New World in terms of a Christian-Calvinist utopia. Initially, the Puritans saw the New Jerusalem as a place from which to ascend to God; the second generation, as a place fitting to receive Christ. These utopian dreams were parallel in the Southern colonies when English aristocrats designed colonial utopias as paradises for the privileged. Jefferson talked of America as the New Atlantis, another view of America as a utopia. Cooper, disillusioned with the social changes in America, wrote The Crater; the optimism of the early chap ters is swallowed up in the despair and disillusionment of the ending where the hero feels the earthquake's blowing up the colony is better than the utopian experiment that had become such a miserable failure. The human beings, with all their human failings, had gotten in the way of the ideals. Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, too, reveals the inadequacies of mere human beings to form perfect com munities. The real communities of Brook Farm and Fruitlands, 6 too, were likewise hampered by the limitations of human beings. As the problems of urbanism and the political corruption of the post-Civil War period grew and the Amer ican dream seemed swamped in a morass of corruption, literary utopias flourished anew. As described, these suggested safe, womblike communities where human beings could develop at their own pace, according to their own abilities, and where equality and human dignity were accorded to all men and women. The reform movements went hand in hand with these searches for communities that offered safety, security, physical and emotional nurture, and companionship. Interestingly enough, the goals sought by people who dreamed of utopian communities sound very like contemporary socio logical-psychological definitions of the ideal family and descriptions of what the family should offer the child. Americans have no clan nor extended-family sociological history, yet this yearning for some societal unit that will offer support, nurture, and growth opportunities seems im plicit in the utopian concept and to be a parallel with the family unit. Thus the concept of the utopia is not far removed from the concept of the family community. Little Men is not too far removed from Altruria. The difference between William Dean Howells' utopia, which had to be on another planet, and Plumsted is in the personal knowledge 7 gleaned by Louisa May Alcott from having tried to live in a utopia and her resignation to the inevitability of human limitations. Alcott seems to be saying that the closest to paradise man comes on this earth is in his family. Literary interest in society comes in with the develop ment of the great Realistic novelists of the middle and latter half of the nineteenth century. The American Adam was a loner; however, the revised, counter-myth of the Realists deals with those isolatos looking for a family. The avuncular welfare community of the post-Second World War America in many ways seems still another variation on the basic theme of a search for community.

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