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.

Central to Louisa May Alcott’s treatment of the family in her novels is her reliance on personal family history and autobiography as plot, incident, setting, and character sources. To understand the Alcott's novels, one must first have a brief background of her life and times.

Miss Alcott was the second daughter of Amos Bronson

Alcott, that self-educated Connecticut peddler whose con­ versations delighted Emerson and whose educational theories have recently come into vogue as part of the classic theories of American pedagogy. Her mother, Abigail May

Alcott, was a sister of the noted abolitionist minister

Samuel May and one of a long, distinguished family line. 8

The May family intermarried with nearly every major New

England family; the family stories that Abba May Alcott

told her daughters later became plot material for short

stories or incidents interwoven into novels.

The Alcotts’ first child, Anna, was born in 1831 in

Germantown, Pennsylvania where Mr. Alcott had set up the

first of his experimental schools. Anna's every action and

speech were recorded by Bronson Alcott in a thorough study

of his daughter which was to serve as a model for many

modern case studies. In 1832, Louisa May Alcott was born

in Germantown. By 183^» two years after the death of

Bronson Alcott's patron, Reuben Haines, the Alcotts moved

to Boston to establish the famous Temple School about which

Elizabeth Peabody, who acted as general dogsbody in the

school, was to write The Record of a School. Elizabeth,

the third Alcott sister, was born in 1835 shortly before the school was closed.

Several reasons have been given for the closing of the

Temple School: Bronson Alcott's conversations with the children about God and sex, 'exposed' by Harriet Martineau, his insistence on taking a black pupil, and the general economic depression of the times. Fortunately for the

Alcott family, Ralph Waldo Emerson came to their assistance and helped them by financing Hosmer Cottage; thus the 9

Alcotts came to be part of the Concord Circle. It was in

Hosmer Cottage, that perfect little nest later described as the Dovecote in the Little Women series, that Abba May

Alcott was born in 1840.

After several years of in-between jobs and handyman- gardener positions, Bronson Alcott sailed to England, again with the financial assistance of Emerson. Alcott had a fine reputation in London as an educator and was re­ ceived as the new Socrates. When Alcott returned in 1843,

Charles Lane, a wealthy Englishman interested in utopian communal life, especially that of the Shakers, accompanied him to finance and establish a utopian community near Con­ cord, known as Fruitlands. The experiment terminated in

December of 1843. The seven month experiment failed more from Lane's strange, negative views about matrimony and his perverse attempts to destroy the Alcott family structure than from his dietary and clothing peculiarities. Lane, wisely enough for him, went on to stay with the Shakers.

Bronson Alcott in a state of deep depression took to his bed and refused even to eat. It was only the kindness and understanding offered by his wife and family that brought him back to life from what might have easily been death by self-starvation. The strength of Abba May Alcott during those bleak days is a testimonial to motherhood and common sense. 10

Mrs. Alcott's example as a mother toward her husband

and children served Louisa May Alcott as a prototype for

all her mother characters. It is, in many ways, fortunate

for Alcott's novels that her mother-centered family settings

and plots come at the same time in American history that

the family itself is becoming increasingly mother-dominated.

From the strong and noble character of Mrs. Alcott, one

cannot help concluding that she had the strength of person­

ality that would have controlled and directed the family

were she a Sultan's favorite wife in a completely patri­

archal Turkish family.

After the failure of Fruitlands, the Alcotts moved

into a home in Still River where the Alcott girls went to

a village school and participated in village life such as portrayed in Louisa May Alcott's novel, Jack and Jill. In

the spring the Alcotts moved back to Concord, staying with

the Hosmers this time. In 18^5 Mrs. Alcott inherited a

little money, tied up securely so that it could not be

frittered away on Bronson Alcott's idealistic dreams and projects. It was secured in a home, Hillside. This now famous home had also been the Hawthornes' first home,

Wayside. The Alcotts lived there until 18^9 when the family finances plummeted to a near poverty level. Always practi­ cal, Mrs. Alcott obtained a position as a social worker in 11

Boston. Before the Alcott family left Concord, however,

Louisa Alcott had written and acted with her family in

many plays. She had actually started writing stories that

were later to be published. Out of her friendship and

esteem, a feeling for Ralph Waldo Emerson that amounted

almost to worship, Louisa May Alcott dedicated Flower

Fables to his daughter, Ellen. These little tales, a blend of fantasy and botany, were first written to amuse

Ellen and were published much later.

While the Alcotts lived in Boston, Louisa went into domestic service, a disastrous experience, wrote volumin­ ously, and then held a school in the family parlor with her sister Anna as the other teacher. In 1866 Louisa went as a companion for the entire summer to Walpole, New Hampshire.

Her family joined her there in the fall. It was there that

Elizabeth and May both came down with scarlet fever. Mrs.

Alcott had been nursing and tending a poor family who had scarlet fever, much as Mrs. March and Beth do in Little

Women. The Walpole summer boarding experience is often used as a setting in Alcott's later novels and short stories

In 1857 Louisa returned alone to Boston to Mrs. Reed's where she tried to earn a living for the family by her writing. Louisa's independent girl-alone-in-the-city at­ tempts and adventures are also often repeated in her novels 12

and short stories, especially in Work, Little Women, and

An Old-Fashioned Girl.

All the while Louisa was in Boston, Elizabeth was steadily becoming more and more ill. Louisa returned to

Concord to nurse and care for Elizabeth, who died in 1856,

just before their new home at Orchard House was completed.

In 1858 Anna became engaged to and married John Bridge

Pratt. The Alcott family was shrinking fast.

Until 1862 Louisa lived primarily in Boston on her own, writing, sewing, and teaching for a living. In 1860-

1861, she wrote Moods. This first novel contains many of

Louisa’s later themes and embryo characters for later novels. In Moods, the wealthy Yule family is composed of a father who has married for money and Mrs. Yule is long dead when the story opens; and her position is filled by a managing, unimaginative older sister, Prudence, whose life is circumscribed by house and social dicta. There is an only brother, Max, a dilletante whose idleness and frivolity are finally settled by a marriage late in the novel to

Jessie, a fine woman whose love for Max, morals, and sense of duty redeem him. The heroine is a baby sister, the beautiful, wilful, tomboyish, impulsive Sylvia. Sylvia is tempermental and wild because she has never known a mother’s guiding hand. The entire family is awry and unhappy because 13

of a lack of motherlove and mother-concern. Sylvia takes most of the novel to learn that she does not love the exo­

tic Warwick as she thought and that she does love the

steady, compassionate, understanding Geoffrey Moor whose character had been shaped and toned by a fine mother and sister, both for the sake of the plot conveniently dead when the novel opens.

The book was revised later by Miss Alcott so that

Sylvia could be reunited with her husband at the end rather than kill herself when she believes that he has been killed in battle. Geoffrey, like Lord Byron, has gone off to fight for a democratic cause in Europe. Louisa has him fighting in Italy in a highly dubious battle that seems to owe a great deal to Chartreuse de Parme. The finest section of the novel is the camping out trip that Sylvia,

Max, Warwick, and Geoffrey take together. The very fact that a delicately nurtured ’young person’ like Sylvia would be allowed to go on such a trip with only her brother for a chaperon might offend European sensibilities and social decorum, but it mirrors quite realistically the freedom allowed many American girls and foreshadows the freedom and independence of Henry James’ American heroines. There is also a delightful, realistic local color vignette of a farm family's home and anniversary celebration. The Yule 14 party takes shelter at a farmhouse and participates in the party. Alcott's eye for realism endows this incident with a life that the rest of the novel lacks.

In 1862 Louisa Alcott volunteered to go to Washington to nurse the wounded. This is one of the most significant periods in her formative years. The largely ignored, but delightful Hospital Sketches came out of this period. Miss

Alcott calls herself Tribulation Periwinkle and realisti­ cally, with humor and compassion, but, without the exces­ sive sentimentality that generally characterizes many Civil

War nursing memoirs, describes the conditions in the hospi­ tals. This is a Civil War description that should not be ignored by scholars. Nurse Periwinkle’s attempts to get military vouchers and early pay are hilarious and not a day out of date. In desperation she resorts to what she most hates having to do—turning to a male for assistance, namely to her brother-in-law. He is able to set things right in a very short time. Nurse Periwinkle’s attitude towards man, the 'lord of creation' is that primarily of a mother through­ out Hospital Sketches. Louisa May Alcott is suggesting that a mother is the best friend that a man may have. This view is not sentimentally presented but done with an air of realism that remains with the reader. There is an especially realistic scene where one of the men is dying. Instead of 15

recording touching last words to bring tears, Alcott has

the deathbed scene end with the poor man's crying out for

air. Some sacred cows are gored. Her handling of the

chaplain force is a wickedly delightful example. Hospital

Sketches is a Hogarthian attempt that ought not to be buried in the bibliography of little read works by well-known authors.

Unfortunately, Louisa's health broke and she had to return to Concord. Throughout the rest of her life, Louisa suffered from recurring complaints connected with her nurs­ ing career. In 1865, she went as a chaperon and governess to Europe. There she met Ladislas Wisniewski in Vevey.

The breath of romance that is summed up in the character of

Laurie in Little Women was inspired to a great degree by the friendship she had with Ladislas.Returning to Concord in July, 1866, she was approached by Thomas Nile to write a book for girls. Louisa did not know any girls except those in her immediate family and had always preferred boys; therefore, she had to turn to her own family as source material. From this request comes the immortal Little Women.

The first half was published in 1868 and the second in 1869.

^Louisa May Alcott, "Laurie," Glimpses of Louisa, A Centennial Sampling of the Best Short Stories of Louisa May Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1968), pp. 213-222. 16

Little Women centers around the March family of four

girls, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. The reader lives and breathes

with them from pre-adolescence to marriage. Jo befriends

the boy next door, Laurie, and involves them all in many

adventures. Meg's marriage with Laurie's tutor, John

Brooke, and Beth's death from scarlet fever rend into sec­

tions what seems an indissoluble family. Amy grows up and

goes with Aunt March to Europe as a companion and while

there becomes engaged to Laurie in spite of nearly every

reader's hoping that Laurie will marry Jo and the general

reader's resentment that Aunt March took Amy instead of Jo

to Europe. Jo goes off to Boston to write thrillers and

teach; there she meets Mr. Bhaer who ultimately marries her.

Little Men takes off where Little Women ends. The Bhaers

have turned Jo's inheritance of Plumsted into a school for

boys. Meg's son, Demi, comes and brings Daisy, his twin

sister. With the addition of naughty Nan, Plumsted becomes

co-educational. Very few of the boys are more than types

Little Men except Dan, the 'brand snatched from burning.'

Dan grows up and goes away to return again in Jo's Boys.

Dan's generosity and feeling for the underdog gets him mixed

up in a brawl where he kills a man who was fleecing a green­

horn at cards. Dan goes to jail; when he gets out, he saves

twenty-one lives in a mine explosion. Dan nearly dies, but 17

Laurie goes to bring him back to Plumsted to recover.

Plumsted and the old Lawrence home have become part of

Lawrence College. Mr. Bhaer and old Mr. March dream and

scheme for its success; their co-educational experiments

advance along with the children's development. Jo's Boys

as it rounds to a close is a nosegay of weddings for the

Plumsted children except for Dan. Unable to marry the

tiresomely pure and beautiful snow maiden, Bess, Dan goes

off to help the Indians. Just as Louisa May Alcott skirts

sentimentality in realizing that the Jo-Laurie match was

not realistic, she does it again very realistically with

the failure of the Dan-Bess match to materialize.

An Old-Fashioned Girl is probably Louisa May Alcott*s next most famous novel. It is an excellent novel and de­ serves to be even better known than it is. Polly, a little

friend from a country parish, goes to Boston to visit a rich school friend of her mother. The woman has a daughter,

Fanny, who is just Polly's age. In this rendition of the classic city-country mouse tale, it is the country mouse who has all the advantages that matter in the long run.

Polly is a sweet, innocent girl full of life and vigor;

Fanny is a sophisticated miss knowledgeable beyond her years of worldly ways and is missing all the fun of growing up.

Polly finds that she is often better friends with Fanny's 18

wily, naughty big brother Tom than with Fanny who makes

fun of Polly’s hair, clothes, and behavior. Once again

Louisa May Alcott is stressing how easily children go awry when there is no mother at the helm of the family.

In this novel Louisa is also buttressing the agrarian myth.

Fanny’s mother, Mrs. Shaw, is fashionably ill; Mr. Shaw is busy making money. The family in an urban environment is besieged with temptations; if this family has no strong mother-figure, the family faces destruction. The second part of the novel tells of Polly’s coming to Boston as an adult, independent and hard-working, giving piano lessons to help pay brother Will's expenses at Harvard. Fanny has become a fashionable, pleasure-seeking grown-up, unhappy and bored with her empty life. Tom is busy with Harvard, sowing wild oats and spending recklessly. When Mr. Shaw loses his money, Fanny finally has a chance to prove her­ self—and does. It is moral as well as financial reckon­ ing. Tom goes West, that universal American cure-all for failure, and returns prosperous enough to wed Polly. The spoiled baby sister Maud becomes an independent woman and chooses not to marry. She lives a happy, useful life at home caring for her father. Maud is only the first of a series of female characters who choose not to marry and have successful, fulfilling careers independent of male 19 protection and provision. Not only is Maud the first such character in Louisa May Alcott's repertoire but she is also a real first in American letters as a whole.

While Louisa and May were in Europe, Anna’s husband died, leaving Anna with two small boys to rear. Louisa hurried home to comfort her sister and to incorporate the

Pratt family within the nucleus of the remaining Alcott family. In little less than a decade the Alcott family was splintered into several new families of orientation.

Anna and her boys in returning to the Concord nest were the first section of the expanded Alcott family with Louisa as provider and 'mother,,' Louisa had always been fond of her nephews; now they became closer than ever to her. Frederick and John, together with their friends, certainly contributed characters and incidents for Louisa's fertile mind. She found it hard to write in Concord and often went off to

Boston for brief writing sojourns. In 187^ she took a house in Boston for the Pratts and herself. There she finished

Eight Cousins.

Eight Cousins (1876) and Rose in Bloom (I876) center around the orphaned Rose left with her Uncle Alec Campbell as guardian and cared for by the Campbell aunts. In Eight

Cousins nearly all the Emerson-Alcott theories for women's education are aired, and the hothouse forcing of pre-adolescent 20 girls of the Gilded Age is exposed. Rose learns old-

fashioned virtues and skills from the wonderful old aunties,

Peace and Plenty. Rose learns to get along with boys and be friends with them as the only girl in a family with seven male cousins. In Eight Cousins Phebe, the orphan servant from the poorhouse, becomes Rose’s friend and adopted sister. Wedding bells sort out all the cousins in

Rose in Bloom. Handsome ’prince' Charlie is killed in a horse and carriage accident as the result of drunken driving.

The eldest of the clan marries Phebe in spite of early parental opposition. Phebe*s beautiful voice and good heart move all who might otherwise disagree on worldly grounds.

Rose marries young Mac who turns out to be a poet as well as a doctor like Uncle Alec.

In I876 May Alcott sailed alone to Europe. There she met a handsome, younger man, Ernest Neiriker, whom she married. May died shortly after her first wedding anni­ versary in childbirth. The little girl, Louisa Neiriker, was sent home to Boston to Louisa May Alcott's care as soon as the child was able to travel. During this time of grief,

Louisa began one of her most bright, cheerful novels, Jack and Jill. Jack and Jill is a story of village life and of a sledding accident culminating in a broken leg for Jack and an injured back for Jill. Jill has to spend nearly a 21

year flat on her hack and in so doing learns patience.

Her little circle of friends learn to be men and women.

Jack and Jill, like Little Men and Eight Cousins, has a

great deal of the narrative dedicated to educational

theories.

While still in Boston in 1877, Louisa May Alcott wrote

and published anonymously A Modern Mephistopheles, a novel

which she considered a serious adult affair and vzhich she

felt was to be a significant contribution to American

letters. In A Modern Mephistopheles, she investigates

what would happen to a young writer who sells himself to

the devil in return for success. Felix Canaris, alone and

facing death from starvation, sells himself or is rescued

by Jasper Helwyse. Helwyse allows Felix to publish his

own novel under Felix’s name; Felix becomes reknown imme­ diately. Helwyse thenceforth owns Felix and sees him as a source of amusement. He invites an old admirer of his

to visit and watches Felix succumb to Olivia’s charms. As

this triangle develops, Helwyse introduces the beautiful, pure orphan Gladys into the situation. Gladys marries

Felix, as anticipated, but the script from there goes awry.

Helwyse learns to love Gladys for her goodness. Felix, too learns to love his wife. Gladys dies conveniently in child­ birth as does her male child. Felix is freed from his 22

obligation to Helwyse; the debt he owed is cancelled by

the redemptive death of Gladys. Helwyse, too, dies; he

has realized as he lies dying that he has thrown away the

love of Olivia and destroyed Gladys. In spite of the de­

light of both Mrs. Alcott and Louisa with this 'serious

adult' novel, Louisa's American version of La Peau de Chagrin

is not truly a very successful one. Goethe, Balzac, and

Hawthorne need not fear this as a rival.

During these years, Alcott's literary production in­ cluded dozens of short stories most of which were published in children's magazines. Many of these have recently been gathered into collections in honor of Louisa May Alcott's centennial. In 1877, Alcott began Under the Lilacs, a slight novel with great amounts of sentimentality. It features an orphan Ben Brown and his dog Sancho who are rescued by Betty and Bab Moss. The beautiful, wealthy owner of the local 'big house' is the orphaned Miss Celia who with her brother, Thornton, comes home while he re­ cuperates from an illness. Miss Celia patronizingly forms a friendship with Ben Brown and takes his education and training in hand. Miss Celia plans to marry a minister and is getting ready for the corporal acts of mercy in her new role as minister's wife. Everyone lives happily ever after once Mr. Brown returns from the dead. He had only 23 been West, not dead. He marries the good, motherly Mrs.

Moss, and Celia marries her minister in great splendor.

Her brother, Thornton, has learned that birth and money do not make gentlemen, only good hearts and genuine compassion.

The circus dog, Sancho, is by far and away the most ap­ pealing and alive character in the entire novel. This novel is the sort of novel that can only be read during the dog-horse phase of pre-adolescence. Celia, Ben Brown et al can then be tolerated because of Sancho.

In 1873 Louisa May Alcott had written another adult novel, Work, which in her usual autobiographical fashion relies heavily on personal experiences, this time Louisa's experiences alone in Boston. Unfortunately, it is also of about the same literary quality as Moods and A Modern

Mephistopheles. The heroine, Christie Devon, goes to the big city from the farm where she has been reared by an aunt and uncle. There in the city Christie tries everything legitimate—seamstress, maid, actress, governess, and com­ panion. She has a great run of bad luck, meets many social­ ly undesireable people who are the only convincing characters in the book, grows up, discovers her own innate worth, almost marries several estimable men, and finally settles on a tiresome but worthy male. It is indeed sad that Louisa

May Alcott's adult novels never have the life and reality 24 that her juvenile ones possess.

In 1880 Lulu Neiriker arrived in Boston and became the center of the Alcotts’ life. Coterminously with this, the

Concord School of Philosophy opened with Bronson Alcott the leading figure in it. Louisa May Alcott does not describe in any great detail in her journal these men to whom she refers as 'weird students.' It is the very practical and hard-working writer who mentions their advent in these words: "The philosophers began to swarm, and the buzz starts tomorrow. How much honey will be made is doubtful, but the hive is ready and drones also." Jo's Boys was publish­ ed in 1886 during these last hard years of physical collapse.

Louisa worked hard at writing short stories and mothering her family.

Throughout her life, Louisa May Alcott's family bulked largest in her thoughts and actions. To ‘duty’s child' the family was the first obligation. The family was central to

Alcott's life and works. She took on her sisters' children, supported her mother and father with her writing, and tended her ailing mother as her child. There is no novel

^Ednah D. Cheney (ed.), Louisa May Alcott, Her Life, Letters, and Journals (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1928), p.”2S7. 25 or short story that does not make some comment either directly or obliquely on the family and the roles of its members. The family was central to Louisa’s emotional and physical well-being, one of the reasons for her writing, and never-failing source material in her writing. Louisa

May Alcott simply cannot be discussed separate from her family. The realistic approach to literature taken by her provides the American Studies student with a window on the

American family of the Gilded Age via the novels of Louisa

May Alcott. CHAPTER I

Both the immediate Alcott family and the extended

Alcott-May families serve as source and background mater­

ial for the novels and the short stories of Louisa May

Alcott. The family stories and tales told by Bronson and

Abba Alcott to entertain and instruct their children as well as actual events and incidents that happened to Louisa and her sisters are incorporated within the plots of several novels. The stories that Grandma Shaw told to amuse Fanny,

Polly, and Tom in An Old-Fashioned Girl are stories of the

May family during the Revolutionary War with little added or changed. The short story "Eli's Education" is based on

Bronson Alcott's growing up years and his early adventures as a peddler. The very colorful May family with its past kept fresh by members of each new generation repeating the tales their mothers and grandmothers told contributed several characters to Louisa May Alcott's novels, e.g.

Colonel May as Old Mr. Lawrence and Great-Aunt Hancock as

Aunt March and Aunt Kipp. Mrs. Alcott's favorite brother,

Samuel May, may well have been the inspiration as well as the physical counterpart of the gentle and wise Uncle Alec in Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom. The socially illus­ trious May connections and the fine Boston home probably 27 provided the social and household background for both An

Old-Fashioned Girl and the Eight Cousins-Rose in Bloom novels. These three novels themselves could well serve as commentary and source materials for sociological study of the manners and the social pecadillos of Boston’s upper- middle classes in the Gilded Age.

The Alcotts themselves became the Marches with very little alteration. Their own adventures became incorporated into the Little Men trilogy: Little Women, Little Men, and

Jo's Boys. The village life at Still River and Concord furnished background and incidents as well as characters for LLn4er the Lilacs, Jack and Jill, and numerous short stories. Eventually almost all of Louisa May Alcott's life and that of her family and friends became ingredients that were used in her writing. The autobiographical elements within the body of Alcott’s work are significant. With the exception of Little Women which has been the subject of much work, little has been done specifically with the other novels in identifying characters and incidents. Reminis­ cences and memories in fictional form make up the greater portion of nearly all of Alcott's novels. There can be no complete appreciation of Alcott's novels and stories without some understanding of how she used her own family and back­ ground as material and inspiration. 28

Although biographical criticism presently is somewhat out of fashion, it is still a viable approach to any body of literature. The novels of Louisa May Alcott seem espe­ cially fitted to this kind of approach since they are so heavily freighted with autobiographical elements, a fact which she herself often acknowledged. In a letter to Mary

Mapes Dodge, Miss Alcott candidly comments about her new plot, "It would be much easier to do, as I have a party of children. We have many little romances going among the

Concord boys and girls, and all sorts of queer things, which will work into ’Jack and Jill’ nicely.The obvious simi­ larities between the Alcotts and the Marches are commented on by nearly every critic or biographer and seen by any per­ ceptive reader who has read any biographical material at all. Those people used most as character source and as inspiration for Louisa May Alcott's most real and credible characters are the members of her own immediate family whom

Louisa knew intimately and whose motivations and aspira­ tions seemed quite clear to her.

Even for a closely-knit family, the Alcott sisters in retrospect seem unusually, even inordinately, close to each other as well as to their parents. The generation gap,

3 ^Cheney, p. 251« 29

though touched on humorously or drily with tongue-in-

cheek, does not trouble the Alcott household greatly.

Mother knew best, and the theme and consequences of going astray from Mother’s experience and wisdom are drummed

into the reader's head, frequently subtly, but unfortunately, quite often blatantly for the twentieth century reader. The closeness among the members of the Alcott family provides a mental and emotional intimacy and knowledge from which

Louisa can draw a group of individual portraits. As some novelists create endless variations on themselves, Louisa is fortunate in having these familial sources for an in­ creased number of variations.

Although quite often Louisa May Alcott uses material from family experiences and does not necessarily give a faithful rendering of what precisely happened to the Alcotts, this does not seem to happen nearly so often in character development and delineation as in combinations of incidents to produce a needed setting or incident for a particular novel. The Dovecote where Meg and John Brooke live is drawn from the Hosmer cottage to which Bronson Alcott and his family moved after the Temple School was closed in

Boston. Anna and John Pratt never did live there.

A Cheney, p. 11. 30

The incident where Jo comes home as a successful authoress

for the first time and reads her story aloud from the news­

paper to Marmee and her sisters was in reality Anna's

adventure and story.-’

It is of interest to note how very closely Louisa May

Alcott's characters are word pictures of their models.

There seems little doubt, for instance, that Anna Alcott,

Louisa's oldest sister, serves as the source for Meg in

Little Women and Jo's Boys. Physically and emotionally,

Meg is an artistic transcription of Anna. Meg, like Anna,

adores the family theatricals, goes out as a governess to

the small children of a wealthy local family, falls in

love with a very nice, but not very prosperous, man, and

tears the first hole in the tightly-knit family by marrying

him. The wedding incident itself in the second half of

Little Women is almost a reconstruction of the actual Alcott- 6 Pratt nuptials, complete with the round dancing on the lawn.

The warm-hearted, loving, but essentially conventional and

certainly rather dull matron in Jo's Boys reveals much of

the matronly widowed Anna Pratt who, when she moved in with

Louisa, took over much of the household chores. Phebe and

Aunt Plenty in Eight Cousins-Rose in Bloom are another two

-’Cheney, p. 54. 6Ibid., p. 99- 31

such comfortable, hard-working women. In spite of Phebe's

singing and musical abilities and her independent teaching

in Boston before marrying Archie, she is just such a home­

body and comfort-maker as Aunt Plenty. Such human beings are, of course, marvelous to have around, but, like pillows, are difficult to describe without giving soporific qualities to the prose. Louisa May Alcott suffered just such diffi­ culties in her Anna-grown-up characterizations. Phebe offers tempting scope for enlarged characterization of per­ haps the musically artistic types described and developed by Willa Cather, but, alas, the reader suspects that Phebe was only accomplished, not gifted. It might be suggested that Miss Alcott would not really want Phebe to be gifted to the degree that she would not fit into the middle-class, nineteenth century American family. Such a swan would be suspect. In spite of many of Alcott's beliefs and goals that would support a socially emancipated woman, her con­ servatism would insist that Phebe try her wings only while waiting to marry and become a mother. Polly in An Old-

Fashioned Girl escapes the tedium in characterization of these other strictly domestic Anna-matron characters by being a sprightly combination of dutiful Martha and Jo-

Louisa. 32

Just as Anna was the source for so much of the Meg

characterization and the other comfortable, prosaic

matrons scattered throughout her novels, Louisa herself was

the material for Jo March. Children reading Little Women

seem from the first to have identified Jo with the author;

she complains that the little fans are so disappointed

when they come and find her old and not "Aunt Jo with long

pigtails." Alcott tells of one of her escapades with these 8 persistent little fans in Jo's Boys. Pretending to be the

maid, Aunt Jo is able to discourage avid readers from

stealing locks of her hair and demanding autographs. The

Jo character throughout the Little Women series and a large percentage of the Jo incidents are based on autobiographical material. Jo March as mask for Louisa is repeatedly em­

phasized by biographers and critics unlike several of the

other Louisa variations. Naughty Nan who comes to keep

Daisy company and help civilize the boys in Little Men is

in many ways a little ’Jo'—headstrong, independent, mis­ chievous, and generous-spirited. Nan, too, in Jo's Boys parallels the adult Louisa in becoming a career woman.

^Louisa May Alcott, Jo's Boys (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 19^9) p. 49. Louisa May Alcott complains of fans' inconsideration in her Journals, Cheney, p. 266.

^Alcott, Jo's Boys, pp. 46-55« 33

Nan as a doctor has fulfilled her life's needs without the

panacea of marriage; one cannot help comparing Nan's whole­

some, frank attitude toward Tommy's swooning and 'lovering'

with Louisa May Alcott's attitude toward several of her a suitors. Through Nan, Alcott seems able to convey the

idea that worthwhile work brings its own reward and that a

woman need not settle for a second-rate marriage when she

can have a first-rate career. Josie, Meg's youngest daughter,

is in Jo's Boys a teenage variation of Jo.

The Jo character is seen chronologically first in

Hospital Sketches in Tribulation Periwinkle and again later

in the wilful Jill of Jack and Jill. Tribulation Periwinkle's adventures are almost a literal transcription of what really happened to Louisa May Alcott when she went off to nurse the wounded and dying in Washington during the Civil

War; the moral strength, common sense, willingness to work, and puckish sense of humor are the qualities of Louisa,

Civil War nurse, coming out in the character of Tribulation.

Tribulation's affection for her patients is similar to that of a mother for her sick children. The maternal side of Louisa's character is very strong. There are neither molasses-sweet sickbed romances or miraculous recoveries complete with wedding bells to mar the refreshing realism

^Cheney, pp. 192-193; 197 > 34

of this Civil War memoir. A few men recover; many die in

the midst of filth, smells, overcrowding, and noise. The

doctors are overworked; the nurses are exhausted and in­

adequately trained. Tribulation like her creator goes

home sick herself from overwork and improper food and sani­

tation. The hoop-skirted beauties of Washington who come

infrequently to visit the dying and wounded and then only

to bring fruit and books are generally only in the way.

In spite of a few fresh and lively remarks about the powdered

and painted petticoat crowd who are saving their youth to

dance with the whole soldiers, Louisa is rather quiet about

that segment of feminity whose gods are male adoration and

support. Louisa's essential values are conservative and are based on women as the center of the home and family.

All strides taken forward in changing the status of women are to better the family, not to free the individual from the family.

Polly in An Old-Fashioned Girl has many of the Jo-

Louisa traits without the tomboyishness. Polly, too, be­ comes a self-sufficient and independent young miss earning her living teaching music in Boston much as Louisa did when she tried her hand at independence. Polly's loneli­ ness and depression after the music lessons cease to be an adventure and become an everyday routine mirror what 35

Louisa must have felt while living with the Reeds in Bos­

ton, doing various jobs, and trying to write novels. Mrs.

Reed's 'sky parlor' is transformed in An Old-Fashioned

Girl into Mrs. Kirk's. These scenes where the young hero­

ine is on her own in the city have a poignant realism in

both An Old-Fashioned Girl and Little Women that smacks of

memories of an emotional deprivation that Louisa herself

must have felt, cut off from daily communication with the

other members of her family and striving to succeed alone

in a city.

The most alone of all of Louisa May Alcott's heroines

is Christie in Work. Christie's decision to leave her

aunt and uncle on the farm and to find her fortune in the

city results in many very realistic scenes of what life is

really like for an unprotected girl with few abilities and

only a ladylike, modest upbringing. Prostitution under

the circumstances is the general answer for immediate pros­

perity, but Christie's rearing forbids such a solution

even though she is briefly an actress. It seems that

Christie will be a successful actress; however, she is

unable to cope with the pettiness and selfishness of ego­

centric actresses and would-be stars. Her basic personality makes success as an actress difficult, and a fall injuring

her back makes it impossible. Christie tries everything-- 36

housework, sewing, being a companion, and being a gover­

ness, Christie fails as a governess because she refuses

to marry her employer’s brother. This proposal seems an

insult to the sister, Christie's employer, who thought her

brother should look higher for his bride. The brother in

spite of his protestations of love for Christie seems au

fond to agree with his sister's social beliefs. It is no

wonder that Christie refuses his hand; it is a most un­

comfortable sort of proposal, wrung from the brother almost

in spite of his inner and more worldly self. The family

relations are strained both by the proposal and the re­

fusal.

Christie's problems with the brother parallel to an

amazing degree Louisa's own personal experience when she

'went out to service.' Louisa volunteered to act as a com-

panion-housegirl for a minister's sister in Dedham. The

position turned out to be that of a starvation-wage drudge

once Louisa refused to consider the minister's attentions.

"Finally, Louisa could bear his maudlin attentions no

longer and, stranded on a small island of water in a sea

of soapsuds in the kitchen, she delivered an ultimatum with

a flourish of her scrubbing brush. She had come, she reminded him, not to act as his companion, but his sister's."10

^Madeleine B. Stern, Louisa May Alcott (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), pp. ¿5-66. 37

It is important not to ignore this minister and his forcing

his unwanted attentions on Louisa. Louisa's attitude to­

ward men is on the whole reserved unless the men are too

young or too old, e.g. Laddie or Emerson. This unpleasant

specimen of masculinity and religious life was Louisa's

contemporary, had what one assumes were honorable inten­

tions in spite of his inability to pursue a successful method of courting, and seemed to present a threat to

Louisa that was all out of proportion to what occurred.

He seems to have taken to writing little notes to her and pushing them under her bedroom door; he does not seem to have attempted to come’ into her room. He read to her, discussed philosophy over the dishes, and in general pestered her with his interests and his presence. The writer finds it difficult to understand why while the minis­ ter was prosing endlessly on and Louisa was doing the dishes,

Louisa did not hand him a cloth and employ his hands.

Louisa could have made lists in her head of things she had to do, thought about clothes for May or herself or whatever while all the time giving him a nominal amount of attention, a nod or two, an understanding smile, using those conversation-oiling 'umms'; she seems to have felt irra­ tionally persecuted by very ordinary attempts of what must have been a very egotistic man to monopolize her. Christie 38

in Work has just the same problem coping with these foolish,

selfish young men who will persist in falling in love with

her. Both Louisa and her alter-ego Christie seem sadly

inept in handling young men. Much of Louisa's own problem

may have been that her own father and mother did not pre­

pare her for easy male-female conversations and simple

badinage. Brilliant conversationalist though Bronson

Alcott indubitably was, he does not strike one as the type

of father who could serve as example and guide for a young

lady learning to chat with young gentlemen. Never having

met men her own age on their level contributed, too, to

shyness and over-reacting when a problem like that of the

minister from Dedham came along. Unfortunately this over­

reaction to the minister colored her relationships with

male contemporaries the rest of Louisa's life. Louisa

seems to have allowed herself to fall in love with only

ineligible men—perhaps directly as a result of this clergy­ man.

The real scenes of poverty, misery, and loneliness in

Work have a genuine impact on the reader and stem from

Louisa's and her sister's own experiences in Boston. Louisa too, was actually a housemaid and knew the drudgery and work extracted from the help. Christie helps in a genteel home where the man is a single minister, shades of the situation 39

in Dedham. He is attracted to her while all the time ex­

pecting her to clean his boots. Some of the incidents of

real want and deprivation that are described in Work as

well as in the second half of An Old-Fashioned Girl come

directly from the stories told to Mrs. Alcott as a social

worker in Boston. Work as a novel has strong meat aplenty

for a severe indictment of society and its education and

treatment of women. Unfortunately, it lacks the impact of

The Jungle because of the sentimentality to which Louisa

May Alcott allows herself to fall prey. Christie is saved

from poverty, degradation, and a certain 'fate worse than

death' by a good woman and her son. Such miracles must

occur in real life, but in a realistic novel they seem

terribly unlikely, especially since Christie marries her

savior.

Sylvia in Moods has many aspects of the Jo characteri­

zation. Sylvia is a Jo without the ballast of Marmee and salutary poverty. Rose in Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom is the least Jo-Louisa of any of the major novel heroines.

Unlike Jo, Nan, Josie, Polly, Jill, Sylvia, and Christie,

Rose has May Alcott's golden curls and blue eyes. Rose seems to combine Jo's ability to get into scrapes and her essential goodness of heart with an Amy-May exterior. Such a combina­ tion seems to have been difficult for Louisa to handle. 40

The characterization of Rose slips into that of a senti­

mental novel heroine quite often and lacks the realism of

Jo March or Polly.

The Jo character is only one side of Louisa May

Alcott. It would be a gross distortion to say that all of

these characters who are primarily based on Louisa herself

are complete and precise photographs with words. It is

interesting to note that no one has commented on the charac­

ters drawn from other aspects of Louisa's own personality

and life. There is another entirely different type of

character who seems to crop up quite often in her novels,

but even more often in the short stories. This character

is the elder sister character who is doing her duty, sub­

stituting often as the mother-figure, and even more often providing the treats and opportunities for the beautiful, essentially immature, younger sister.

One might say then that Louisa is using herself for both Sylvia and Prudence in Moods. Tribulation Periwinkle is a combination of the Jo character with the wise spinster figure, mothering the wounded. Kitty's older sister, too, in "Kitty's Class Day" is this other side of the Louisa character. This relationship between the sensible pelican- sister and the younger one parallels the sacrificial-indulgent relationship between Louisa and May which developed after 4l

Elizabeth had died and Anna had married. Although it is unanswerable, it is noteworthy to question how aware Louisa was of this carryover of Amy's and her relationship into these stories. If one reads these stories bearing this in­ terpretation of sisterly sacrifice in mind, then "An Ivy

Spray and Ladies' Slippers" is an interesting variation on the theme of sisterly duty and sacrifice. Here the younger sister gives dancing lessons to support the ailing, older sister. It is a sentimental daydream of a story where the older sister rescues them both by marrying a rich man who has admired her little china paintings. Even in this very sentimental, almost maudlin short story, the Louisa figure in spite of illness and handicaps still saves the May figure.

These stories 'all reveal a thoughtless, worldly, spoiled sister whose only redeeming qualities are physical prettiness and a charming air of dependency. There is a decorative toy quality to these characters that parallels the typical young girl and young matron of the comfortable urban middle class of the Gilded Age. Prettiness and sex appeal are also generally linked in Louisa May Alcott's works with mental fuzziness and general ineptitude. In considering the un­ reality of these pretty cardboard dolls versus the very credible, hoydenish or capable characters, the reader must weigh several factors that may have influenced their creation. 42

There is perhaps a deep-seated and almost certainly un­

acknowledged dislike and jealousy of May, of the dictates

of a society that awards its laurels of success to these

women who make a ’good’ marriage, and of the legal and oc­

cupational position of women in the middle class during

the 1870s-1890s. Louisa’s acknowledged preference for

boys as companions and human beings in general perhaps

concealed a desire to have been born male and thus a ’lord of creation.' The convincing older sister characters are

Louisa’s mother who was the center of the family as the provider-nurturer figure until Louisa’s earning power estab­ lished her as the authority figure in the Alcott extended family.

There seems little doubt that Louisa May Alcott ac­ tually had her youngest sister May in mind for the character of Amy in Little Women. Although both Cornelia Meigs and

Ednah Cheney refer to that characterization as a marvelous tribute, readers of all ages have had no trouble in heartily disliking Amy. Even Caroline Ticknor, whose biography of

May Alcott, May, is written in almost eulogistic terms, perhaps unwittingly allows her dislike to creep in among the glowing comments. In speaking of May’s letters, Miss

Ticknor says, "Throughout them, one discerns a little touch of the spoiled child, flashes of childish impatience, and keen displeasure at any failure to receive what she regarded as her rightful due."11 The Amy-Bess characteri­

zations reveal a rather tangled sibling rivalry that fur­

ther highlights the stories where the Louisa character

is the wise older one providing for the younger. The

realism with which Amy is drawn in Little Women is etched

with a tinge of gall that creates a memorable, real charac­

ter whether or not May was as obnoxiously elegant and

affected as Amy. Louisa May Alcott remarks in her pre­

face to Jo's Boys "To account for the seeming neglect of

AMY, let me add that, since the original of the character

died, it has been impossible for me to write of her as when

she was here to suggest, criticize, and laugh over her namesake." One must consider the Victorian convention,

too, of not speaking ill of the dead. It surely speaks

well for May that she was able to laugh with Louisa over

that portrait,

There seems to be considerable ambivalence in the May-

Louisa relationship. Louisa as an adult woman seemed bent

on providing all the frivolous desires that May’s spirit

craved and then on being the mother to May's little girl,

11Caroline Ticknor, May Alcott (Bostons Little, Brown, and Co., 1928), p. 27. 1 p Alcott, Jo's Boys, p. i. 44

Lulu, after May's untimely death. On the other hand, there

is also tension that seems to result from the Alcott family's

considering May the 'Queen.' Morrow quotes from a family

story that has Elizabeth asking about the birth of May.

"Can we keep her?" and Louisa replied, "Didn't father say

God sent them to where they fitted? I suppose we'll have to keep her! No matter how tired mother is."^ There is a certain stoic quality about Louisa's rejoinder that re­ minds one of Job accepting all that God sent. Some of the difficulty, other than natural sibling rivalry and jealousy of the baby, may have resulted from May's fair prettiness, her natural gifts in painting and sketching, both feminine accomplishments popular and valued in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and May's attempts to be a little lady in a house full of little women.

Readers have had trouble loving Amy. Her shallowness and self-centeredness allow for situation comedies, but not for reader-identification and sympathy. One always has a sneaking feeling that she married Laurie for his money.

Unlike the living but obnoxious Amy of Little Women, the matron Amy is totally cardboard in Little Men and Jo's Boys.

■^Honore Willsie Morrow, The Father of Little Women (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1927), p. 228. 45

Bess, a variation on May-Amy, is too fragile and lovely to

be credible. Her vaunted innocence, beauty, and gifts

(Bess is an aspiring sculptor) are merely descriptive at­

tributes like clothing and coiffures; Bess is never well

developed as a character. At least, Amy is real enough

to be unlikeable; it is hard to recall Bess’ name. Strong

Jo-Dan partisans find her attitude toward Dan comprehensible

only in terms of worldly, successful marriages. Iconoclast

though Miss Alcott could sometimes be, she still could not

allow the stained and heritageless Dan to marry into Con­

cord’s first family. Such realism does credit to her

knowledge of the world in which she lived.

There are also two other characters whom readers have

enjoyed dissecting and querying as to their origins: Mr.

Bhaer and Laurie. Louisa May Alcott tried to make it very

clear in her short story "Laurie" that Laurie was based 14 on the Polish boy she met on her first trip to Europe.

He is physically very like Ladislas Wisniewski; Laurie is

charming and warm like the delightful young man Louisa May

Alcott describes. Madeleine Stern suggests that to the

personality and appearance of Laddie, Louisa added some of

the scrapes and adventures of Alf Whitman, a young man who

had boarded on and off with the Alcotts in the summers.

^Alcott, "Laurie" Glimpses of Louisa, pp. 213-221. 46

Laurie as half-Italian and half-American could easily have

been a composite portrait of both. Although there have

been several attempts to puzzle out the depth and extent

of Louisa's true feelings for Ladislas and 'what really

happened', it seems sufficient on reading "Laurie" and

Little Women in conjunction with her journals to realize

that Louisa did indeed love him dearly. The Freudian inter­

pretations of such a warmth of feeling would suggest the

repressed love of an older woman who allowed herself to

be 'mother' to her 'big boy' than what Louisa might have

felt had she allowed herself to do so, or sadly enough,

been encouraged to feel. The significance of the Laddie-

Laurie friendship lies not in attempting to analyze Miss

Alcott's psyche with the rapier of modern Freudian criti­

cism but in the fact that Miss Alcott's personal involvement

was sublimated into creating a memorable, magnificent

characterization.

Mr. Bhaer is the true puzzle of Little Women for most

biographical critics. Unlike Jane Eyre's Rochester, Mr.

Bhaer lacks the romantic fire and exoticism of the gothic novel here born out of repression and daydreaming; however, like Rochester, Mr. Bhaer is just as unreal. With such a highly autobiographical writer as Alcott, it seems fair play to allow speculation about the identity of Mr. Bhaer. ^7

It seems unlikely on merely physical appearance that he

is based on Bronson Alcott, yet Mr. Bhaer does have some of the same educational hopes and dreams. His Teutonic origins perhaps spring from Louisa Alcott's adoration of

Goethe and all things German. Mr. Bhaer has possibly another source as v/ell as Bronson Alcott and a vague wor­ ship of Geothe, that of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Louisa's great fondness for Emerson is remarked on by nearly all her biographers. Louisa herself is very open about her childish infatuation for Emerson and her continuing admira­ tion and fondness that seems at times to sound remarkably like the respect and feelings of a woman in love.

About that time, in browsing over Mr. Emerson’s library, I found Goethe's 'correspondence with a child,' and at once was fired with a desire to be a Bettine, making my father’s friend my Goethe. So I wrote letters to him, but never sent them; sat in a tall cherry-tree at mid­ night, singing to the moon till the owls scared me to bed; left the wild flowers on the doorstep of my 'Master,' and sung Mig­ non's song under his window in very bad German.15

Physically, Mr. Bhaer is more nearly like Theodore

Parker with his large, square build and twinkling blue eyes

Mr. Bhaer and Theodore Parker are both big, bluff, hearty men. After Charles Sumner had recovered enough from his attack in the Senate to be on his feet, he was cheered

15Cheney, p. 57- 48

wherever he went in Boston and whenever he went out.

Louisa tells of one day she and Theodore Parker saw him

on Beacon Street. "I cheered, too, and was very much ex- 1 6 cited...Mr. Parker cheered like a boy." Theodore Parker

was always evidencing concern for Louisa’s welfare while

she was alone in Boston, helping her to find employment,

and inviting her to little Sunday evening at-homes where

she could sit by the fire and listen to all the good talk

of Boston. Louisa described him. "He is like a great . 17 fire,...where all can come and be warmed and comfortable."

There is much of Papa Bhaer in this description. There

seems little doubt that Mr. Bhaer is a wish-fulfillment

character and that he is a combination of all these men

who made such an impact on Louisa's life. It is unfortunate

with such splendid origins that Papa Bhaer does not have

more life and appeal.

In any discussion of family sources in Little Women,

one must comment on the portrait of Mr. March as a very

ineffectual husband and father and unworldly dreamer. Mr.

March's position as chief philosopher in the Lawrence College

■^Marjorie Worthington, Miss Alcott of Concord (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1958), p. 80.

17Ibid., p. 81. 49

of J° *s Boys reveals much about the Concord School of Phil­

osophy that Bronson Alcott ran in his declining years.

Louisa's comments in her Journals on the type of men who

came to Bronson Alcott's Concord School sound amazingly

like the reaction of many middle-aged people to the college students who affected the 'hippy' garb and lingo. The character of Mr. March, although a dearly loved man by his family, is that of a not particularly effective or provi­ dent father and husband. The 'man' of the family is the practical Jo, complete with a boy's nickname. Jo reflects in actions Tribulation Periwinkle's verbal complaints about not having been born a 'lord of creation.' The role of the female in the last half of the nineteenth century must have been excessively exasperating to Louisa May Alcott, if the character of Jo is any indication.

The most obvious parallels between the Marches and the Alcotts are between Marmee and Mrs. Alcott, Elizabeth and Beth. Stern remarks that Beth Alcott translated into 1 A Beth March was accurate and true. Salyer goes even further to indicate that Beth Alcott was even a lovelier 19 and more appealing girl than the character Beth.

l8Stern, p. 74.

^Sanford Salyer, Marmee, The Mother of Little Women (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 19^9), p. 57 • 50

Louisa’s own personal emotions about her dead sister

Elizabeth certainly find an outlet in the death scene.

It is always hard for a twentieth century reader to judge

these deathbed scenes of nineteenth century novelists.

Sex is so much more the forte of the twentieth century

writers that death scenes are frequently judged merely as

bathos. Bad taste or not, Beth's death has the same shat­

tering impact on the reader as that of Little Nell and

Little Eva. If one tends to scoff and suggest that this

effect would not be as strong if read by an adult, it may be suggested that the scene be reread. Whether the reader's response is because of the identity that the general reader feels with Jo and, as Jo, is sorrowing for the gentle

Beth or whether the actual character is impellingly enough delineated to produce genuine grief, the scene is still powerful and moving. One tends as an adult to question whether or not Beth is too good to be true, yet those who knew Beth Alcott insist that Beth March was perhaps not as fine. This is an acolade indeed.

Marmee is Mrs. Alcott to a tee. Marmee has elicited over the years such staunch supporters as Sanford Salyer who wrote the biography of Mrs. Alcott, Marmee, emphasizing how her goodness, love, and common sense kept the Alcott family alive. Marmee seems to have a band of faithful 51 followers who rank her as a character right along with the immortal Jo. Stern says of Marmee-Mrs. Alcott, "What family would not love Marmee, tall and motherly, whose gray cloak and unfashionable bonnet adorned a staunch 20 defender of human rights." Marmee, as was Mrs. Alcott, was the core of the family; the story could not have been written without such a mother. Mrs. Alcott always gave of herself completely to save her family and keep it united

The really desperate battle waged against Charles Lane and his family-destroying notions was conducted with all the strength and love Mrs. Alcott could summon to her aid and launched with all the faith of the forces of light against those of darkness. The family was a sacred trust to Mrs.

Alcott. Her concept of motherhood was idealistic and lived with much the same fervor that attends the American sense of world mission. One cannot stress enough the sig­ nificance of the dominant mother figure in Alcott*s novels.

With such a highly autobiographical writer as Louisa

May Alcott, it is interesting to examine minor characters for real life parallels, too. Hannah Stevenson, the lady who arranged for Louisa to nurse during the Civil War, is portrayed several times as a philanthropist, e.g. Mrs.

20Stern, p. 176. 52

Mills in An Old-Fashioned Girl and the good woman in Rose

in Bloom. Julian Hawthorne may well have been the model

for 'Prince' Charlie in Eight Cousins-Rose in Bloom; he

was good-looking and wild enough. His mother, Sophie

Hawthorne, may have sat, or reclined, for Mrs. Shaw, Clara

Campbell, or Psyche's mother. Louisa May Alcott in Little

Men introduces a character, Mr. Hyde, who interests several of the boys at Plumsted in the animal and insect life around them. When one considers that Henry David Thoreau once briefly taught the Alcott girls as well as being a friend of the family, Dan's description of Mr. Hyde as well as the name chosen for him suggests that Thoreau may well have been the prototype for this character.

'Oh, he was a man who lived round in the woods studying these things—I don't know what you call him—and wrote about frogs, and fishes, and so on...Did you ever tickle a lizard with a straw?...Mr. Hyde used to do it; and he makes snakes listen to him while he whistled, and he knew just when certain flowers would bloom, and bees wouldn't sting him, and he'd tell the wonderfullest things about fish and flies and the Indians and the rocks.'2-

Daniel Chester French is probably the village sculptor in

Jack and Jill; Great-aunt Hancock surely was the model for

Aunt March and Aunt Kipp; Colonel May, for old Mr. Lawrence;

21Louisa May Alcott, Little Men (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 19^7), p. 167. 53

Grandma Alcott, the grandmother in An Old-Fashioned Girl,

•'Kate’s Choice," and "A Country Christmas." Dan in Jo's

Boys was created from a prisoner whom Louisa actually knew

and with whom she had talked at length. All those hoys

throughout all her novels and short stories must have had

models in Sanborn's school, amongst her mother's boarders,

and amongst the Concord boys with whom Louisa grew up.

Incidents and settings can be identified more closely

and with greater respect for actual facts than with the

educated guesses that match character with historical

persons. In nearly all the novels and short stories, one

can match plot incidents directly with journal entries and

letters. This, in fact, supports what Stern says, "Where

did fact and fiction begin?...Fact was embodied in fiction,

and a domestic novel begun in which the local and the uni­

versal were married, in which adolescents were clothed in 22 flesh and blood." Louisa May Alcott's family provided

her with the necessary sustenance and support for maturing

and also served for inspiration and source material for

novels that were to depict the American family of her times

and cast light perceptively on many of the enduring aspects

of the American family as well as to add luster to the

idealistic myths that surround the reality of American family life.

22 •Stern, p. 178-179- 5^

One simply cannot discuss the influence of Louisa’s

family on her novels without getting drawn into what is

essentially a controversy between two factions: that pro-

Bronson Alcott who stress his influence on Louisa's life and works and credit his wife with very little important influence and that pro-Abba May Alcott who credit only per­ nicious influence to Bronson Alcott and characterize Mrs.

Alcott as a nineteenth century saint. It is unfortunate that some critics seem lined up on firing lines rabidly committed to and supporting solely one candidate since both parents contributed in heredity and environment, especially when one considers that most of Louisa's life was spent within the bosom of her entire family.

Bronson Alcott, presently enjoying a revival in Amer­ ican educational circles as one of the foremost precursors of progressive education, undoubtedly had great influence on both Louisa's formal education, such as it was, and her education received at home. Louisa Alcott often remarked that she had only been once to public school; however,

Cheney names three times that Louisa attended a public school.2-^ The majority of Louisa's education was, however, received at home under the tutelage of her father and

23Cheney, p. 25• 55 mother. Bronson Alcott*s teaching method was a combination of the Socratic method and Jesus's use of parables. His theories were child-centered; the education was to fit the needs of the individual child rather than educating the child to fill the needs of society. When he had his

Temple School in Boston, there was great emphasis on pleasant surroundings and small, comfortable furniture to fit the child, not arranged in rows but such that it was possible to have conversation groups or privacy. Rather than spank­ ing or hitting the child who was naughty, Bronson Alcott made the child strike him. This is seen in Little Men in the chapter where Nat must strike Papa Bhaer. Nat is sup­ posed to hit Mr. Bhaer with the ruler twelve times since

Nat has lied again, having been warned repeatedly. No one in Bronson Alcott's school was to be reprimanded without the child's understanding what he had done wrong. Many correc­ tions were effected merely through parables told the class, leaving the naughty child to draw his own conclusions.

The children seemed to progress at their own speeds rather than working within the confines of a set curriculum for each age group. Later Louisa May Alcott remarked that the texts were Pilgrim's Progress, Krummacher's tales, the

^Dorothy McCuskey, Bronson Alcott, Teacher (New York: Macmillan Co., 1940), p. 162i 56

parables of Jesus, and German fairy tales. Throughout his

life, Bronson Alcott emphasized diet, abhorring flesh

and eating only grain, fruits, and vegetables.

He, like his wife, felt that growing children needed

exercise daily as well as mental activity. Louisa records

some rather fantastic walks as commonplace to her. Bronson

Alcott's educational theories did not separate education

according to sex but according to interest and ability.

Odell Shepard in Pedlar's Progress suggests that Bronson

Alcott's educational theories were in part reactions to the

one-room schoolhouse in Connecticut of Bronson Alcott's

childhood and youth and were formed to show what education

should not be. Yet this very schoolhouse provided Alcott

with Noah Webster’s American Spelling Book with its de­

pendence on woodcuts, fables, and morality, thus confirming

and reinforcing in Alcott a lifelong dependence on symbols

and emblems that began with his mother's stories and con-

tinued to his fable-parable method of teaching. Like

nearly all of the major figures of the nineteenth century,

Alcott kept a journal and encouraged his children and

pupils to do so.

The Alcott family was very close-knit. His experiences

as a peddler showed him that loneliness in America was a

25odell Shepard, Pedlar's Progress, The Life of Bronson

Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1937)i PP« 11-12. 57 more powerful foe than many other threats to the isolated

American families. The family here was necessary as a source of emotional security, company, and entertainment.

Alcott’s own attitudes that grew out of his early child­ hood home were later dramatically seen when he chose to get up from his bed at Fruitlands and thus chose his family over the persuasions and ideals of Charles Lane.

Bronson Alcott has been greatly criticized for his impracticality and improvidence. The impracticality is best seen in his indifference to public opinion and his insistence on going on in his own way in spite of pres­ sures from those who were essentially his employers about matters which to him were vitally important and over which there should be no compromise, e.g. sex education conver­ sations with the children at the Temple School and the little black students whom Alcott insisted on including.

This is admirable impracticality buttressed by principles; however, it fed no one. Alcott always had great faith in the Lord's providing for His own. Nearly every biography mentions the story in which Mrs. Alcott repeatedly asks for more firewood to be cut as they are running out and that it looks like a heavy snowfall before night. Alcott has other projects in hand that do not include the mundane task of splitting kindling. To any foolish entreaties of those 58

without faith, Bronson refers them to the sparrow's fall­

ing. When night and snow both come, the family is saved

from freezing and pneumonia by a farmer's bringing a cart­

load of wood and asking to leave it until the roads improve.

He had planned to go into Boston to sell it that day, but the weather's turning had prevented this. The Alcotts are given all the wood they can use just for assisting the farmer. The story is told to show the justification of

Bronson's attitude; however, not one of the biographers mentiors exactly who carried in the wood and helped the farmer. One has the suspicion that the four girls and

Mrs. Alcott lined up and fire-bucket style moved the wood under the supervision of Mr. Alcott. The load of wood story shows great faith in God’s providence, but it flies in the face of Yankee wisdom on which most Americans are nourished that 'God takes care of those who take care of themselves.' There is no doubt that for the Alcott family

Bronson Alcott's goals and principles were beacons to fol­ low, but there must have been many dark nights with almost no light at all on the path when the mundane affair of pro­ viding oil took second place to considering the absolutes of life.

Louisa May Alcott's feelings toward her father, like those toward May, are ambiguous. She wavers from finding 59

him a saint to nearly labeling him shiftless. She cannot

have wholeheartedly approved of their family’s reliance

on others' financial charity or she would not have been

so anxious to pay off her family's debts immediately after

writing her novel about what she called the 'pathetic

family.' This term, the 'pathetic family,' runs through­

out her journal and is surely an indication of how she

viewed her family's situations. A further undercurrent of

embarrassment over Bronson Alcott's actions as a philosopher

is there in Louisa's description of a philosophers "My definition is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and 2 6 trying to haul him down."

Critics like Morrow are eager to claim all sorts of accomplishments for Bronson Alcott as an educator and al­ ways stress his influence on education, his times, and his daughter. It is surprising in their zeal to resurrect him no one has suggested that his very improvidence could be construed as a blessing in that it spurred Louisa on to write. The most rational and reasonable assessment of

Bronson Alcott is the work done by Odell Shepard. Shepard's summary of Alcott in the introduction to his journals is certainly just and throws Alcott's personality into perspec­ tive .

pCheney, p. 263. 60

His peculiarity was not that he was an idealist, for all true Americans are that. It was, rather, that he was nothing else. He looks odd to us chiefly because he was so consistent in his ideal­ ism, and did not even attempt to serve both God and Mammon. In other respects, Alcott was an American to a fault. He showed our restless no­ madic tendency, for example, in the fact that during his married life alone he lived in some thirty different houses, although he deserves credit for his American ability to make each of these bivouacs at once a home. His indomitable hopefulness, even when no more than that of the sunnier aspect of procrastination, is charac­ teristic of a people always expectant of a glorious tomorrow that it can ignore a dis­ graceful today.27

Whether a self-made man or a God-made man, his life had been fashioned of home-grown materials ...he had made it sing forth what music there was in him...he had done something toward the liberation of childhood. Out of pure love and longing, moreover, he had created a home which was known and beloved now, through the words of his own daughter, by all the world.28

Shepard in his biography divides Bronson Alcott’s life into three sections which he identifies with three places in the sun: Temple School, Fruitlands, and the Con­ cord School of Philosophy. Fruitlands, an utopian experiment headed by Bronson Alcott, floundered primarily on Charles

Lane's anti-family beliefs. Lane's concern with no family- no ties-no marriage coupled with the refusal to use beasts for tasks and the extreme vegetarian diet destroyed what

27Odell Shepard, The Journals of Bronson Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 19 ), pp. xxvi-xxvii. 2^Shepard, Pedlar's Progress, pp. 519-522. 61

slim chances of prospering and expanding that Fruitlands might have had even with idealists and enthusiasts.

Shepard describes Lane as a zealot with one task, to save the world his way, yet one who thought habitually only in general terms and was not a willing worker.

Lane, his appearance, his beliefs, and his actions must have made a profound impression on Louisa. In only two of Louisa May Alcott’s novels and short stories has she a villain. There are innumerable weak or silly charac­ ters, but only two villains: Helwyse in A Modern Mephis- topheles and the wicked uncle in A Whisper in the Dark.

Sylvia's uncle in that very slight novelette A Whisper in the Dark has already broken up her home by confining her mother, under false pretenses, to a hospital for the insane, and by the conclusion of the story is foiled in his at­ tempts to prevent his son Guy from marrying Sylvia. The uncle is not much more than the standarized cardboard charac­ ter in a soap opera, yet it is interesting that his sins lie in the direction of breaking up happy homes. Helwyse in A Modern Mephistopheles is much more developed as a character than the uncle and physically resembles the English man Charles Lane. Helwyse, aside from the pun that is his name, is a man who stoops to use another human being merely for his own amusement. After Felix sells himself to 62

Helwyse, he becomes more and more deeply involved in a

situation that comes to include his innocent bride. Helwyse

is amused with watching Felix struggle to free himself from

a bondage uglier, stronger, and more demanding than he had

initially envisioned. One cannot help but be struck by

Felix’s similarities to Bronson Alcott. Felix is so will­

ing to let Helwyse solve his problems of food, lodging,

and clothing and is so filled initially with gaiety and

delight over the new situation. On Alcott’s return from

England with his friend Charles Lane, he was not unlike

Felix. Like Alcott's marriage, Felix's is threatened by another man's control over him. Like Mrs. Alcott, Gladys saves Felix. Interestingly enough, it is the young wife, not the debtor Felix who pays the debt. Melodramatically,

Gladys saves Felix by her dying. The touching deathbed scene redeems Felix and Helwyse. Such a deathbed scene reeks like festered lillies beside the fresh-air deathbed scene in Hospital Sketches. One cannot help wondering whatever happened to Louisa May Alcott's critical sense.

She comments that she and her mother both think this novel the finest thing she has done. Perhaps it is because she has exorcised the hatred stored up within her against Charles

Lane. Of course, it is only supposition that the character

Helwyse is written with Lane as a possible model; however, 63

it is not altogether unlikely that the situation and the

characterization of Helwyse may well be rooted in that dis­

astrous seven months at Fruitlands, with Lane's holding

the purse strings and controlling the entire little Con­

sociate family until Bronson Alcott, defeated and powerless,

withdrew from his problems and left Abba May Alcott to

play St. George and cope with getting rid of Lane and re­

storing her husband to life. Unlike Gladys, Mrs. Alcott

certainly did not die for her husband; she goes one better

and dedicates herself to live for her husband and family.

Helwyse, educated, rich, smooth, and selfish, is an interest­

ing portrait of an utopian zealot, seen through the fright­

ened and fiercely partisan eyes of a young girl and limned

later in heavy black crayon in what is essentially a senti­ mental and sensational melodrama, not a realistic novel.

The entire peculiar situation at Fruitlands would seem

to be open to suppositions, speculation, and questions.

Why would Charles Lane want to destroy the Alcott family's closeness and interdependence? It is difficult to under­ stand why Lane seems to want Alcott exclusively for his friend and following strictly his beliefs? Why would Lane

even want to establish financially a Con-Sociate family if he is against marriage and family life? Why did he not go directly to a Shaker community or become part of a monastic 6b

community in England or on the continent. Since Lane was

a widower with a ten year old son and presumably a normal

male, it is hard to discuss this attachment, affection,

and attempts at control of Alcott while maintaining an

obvious animosity toward Mrs. Alcott that amounted almost

to persecution without suggesting that there might have

been certain undercurrents of feelings that were recognized

eventually or suspected by Bronson Alcott and then all

evidences erased by Bronson Alcott in his thorough laun­

dering of the family's journals for this entire period.

Shepard, however, credits much of the journal cleansing

after the collapse of Fruitlands very rightly to Bronson

Alcott's personal discouragement and depression once Lane

withdrew financial support and departed for the Shaker com­

munity. Shepard's conclusions do not seem to account fully,

however, for Alcott's reaction that is nearly suicidal in

its intensity or for Lane's hostility toward Mrs. Alcott

almost from the first. There are all sorts of educated

guesses and surmises possible. Almost all are without a

shred of real evidence; some are far more unlikely than

others. There is still, however, a possibility that Lane

had certain homosexual feelings, unrecognized by himself

and perhaps by anyone else, that led Lane to-behave as he did. This might account for what seems an unreasonable and surely unwarranted persecution of Mrs. Alcott, 65

especially considering that she was, as she described

herself to a friend, the only beast of burden at Fruit­

lands. It seems a pity that there is no concrete corro­

boration to support this suggestion.

It is quite likely that Lane merely had a power-complex

that increased with his position as financial leader of the

project. When thwarted to some degree by Mrs. Alcott, he

disliked her interference so much that he attempted to

revenge himself on what she held dear—her family. At any

rate, Lane definitely seems an idealistic celibate deter­ mined to force his beliefs on his friends and associates.

It is also very probable that Lane's problems were a com­ plex mixture of subconscious homosexuality, power-lust,

and a distorted zealous idealism. Whatever Lane’s personal

emotional and psychological problems, there is no doubt

that it influenced and even frightened Mrs. Alcott and the child Louisa. Threats to the stability of the family leads any child to a fear of abandonment, probably the strongest fear a child has. One can only question how Lane’s be­ havior must have affected Louisa's own feelings toward men.

Louisa surely must have had very strange and complex feel­ ings and misgivings about the male sex with Bronson Alcott for a father, the threat that Charles Lane posed to her family, and that tiresome ministerial toad in Dedham-­ 66

all of which may have influenced the adult Louisa and

perhaps distorted her relationships with men.

In this era of Freudian criticism the homosexual

theory is tempting, especially in the light of the per­

verse power relationship that exists in A Modern Mephis­

topheles . This is not to imply that Louisa May Alcott

was writing of abnormal sexual behavior; however, it is

possible to see in the attachment and control that Helwyse

exercises over Felix a feeling that stops just short of a

homosexual jealousy. If this does indeed exist within

this novel, it is subconscious and rigorously suppressed

by Louisa herself on the conscious level of writing. When

one considers the models for men that Louisa had in life,

it is understandable how very few virile male characters

she was able to create.

One must also bear in mind that Abba May Alcott was

as much a reformer as her husband and probably went along

quite cheerfully at first with the Fruitlands project,

even probably to having welcomed Lane and his suggestions and ideas. The threat that Lane posed to the Alcott family

essentially led to Alcott's taking to his bed to die after

Lane and his son abandoned Fruitlands and its debts and went to join the Shaker community. Instead of allowing Bronson

Alcott to die of starvation and self-reproach and the girls 67

to freeze and die from lack of food in midwinter, Abba

May Alcott set forth in her strongwilled and direct fashion

to save Alcott for his family and from his own selfish

depression. It is indicative of Alcott*s bitter disappoint­

ment with the Gon-Sociate family that he ripped out and

destroyed a great deal from Anna's journal and his own that

deals with Fruitlands. His choice of his wife and family

over Charles Lane seems an agonizing one that is reflected

in a few miserable lines from Louisa's journal. "Father

and Mr. L. had a talk and father asked us if we saw any

reason for us to separate...I like it, /Fruitlands7 but not

the school part of Mr. L....I was very unhappy, and we all

cried. Anna and I cried in bed and I prayed God to keep us all together."29

Shepard insists that initially Alcott was unaware of

the extreme nature of Charles Lane's no family-no marriage

views and that always Alcott's concept of communal living

was based on the family unit and his memories of his child­

hood and its extended family life at Spindle Hill, Connec­ ticut.-^ This is reinforced by the very name chosen to

describe the community, the Con-Sociate family. Alcott viewed communal living as an opportunity for individualism's

2^Cheney, pp. 38-39*

-^Shepard, Pedlar's Progress, pp. 345-464. 68 widest sweep; Lane, as communism. The 1840s saw a rise of utopian experiments. Fruitlands is less famous and was certainly even less successful than Brook Farm and the later Fourierist experiments; however, these experiments indicate a real interest in America in such attempts at communal life. Since the family unit is the model for

William Dean Howells’Altruria, the Fruitlands experience which collapsed completely once the family unit was attacked compares interestingly with the Altruria of Traveller from

Altruria and Through the Eye of a Needle. Howells' uto­ pian nation is familial - centered with the villages the centers of population. The cities are merely repositories for art and business. Cady compares the Altrurian concept to the Ohio villages and family-centered world of William

Dean Howells' youth. William Dean Howells' utopian novels reflect also significantly on the view of society proposed by Fiske, Drummond, and Kropotkin. These social Darwinists saw cooperation as one of the major answers in the sur­ vival of the human being; their definitions of cooperation are not too far from the cooperation and sharing demanded by ordinary family life. Howells' village world which was in many ways a pioneer, frontier world parallels the semi­ frontier, rural Connecticut world in which Bronson Alcott grew up even though Alcott's youth preceded William Dean 69

Howells' by a generation. Louisa May Alcott uses this

same village life of Concord in Jack and Jill. Although

Fruitlands did not prosper and endure, the experiment lives

on in certain novels of Louisa May Alcott. Mr. Bhaer not

only has educational theories very like those held by

Bronson Alcott, but he also puts them into practice in

the Plumsted school-utopia in Little Men and Jo's Boys.

This time there is no Mr. Lane; the security of the family

is unthreatened. Mr. Bhaer establishes a school at Plumsted,

and the school is run as a family, not as an institution.

In Little Men and Jo's Boys, Mr. Bhaer and Jo are both

headmaster and headmistress, father and mother to all

the children who come there. The education of these children

is social as well as academic. Jo hopes that the boys

will be civilized by adding girls to the school. What

started out as a large family of boys and a boys' school

becomes a miniature utopia, complete with both sexes and

modeled on the extended family structure. In some ways,

the family-centered life of the Campbells in Eight Cousins-

Rose in Bloom is another presentation of the extended

family utopia. Rose, an orphan, finds a place, love and

affection, surrogate parents, and normal family life in the

Campbell clan. Although "Transcendental Wild Oats" is an indication of Louisa May Alcott’s own personal assessment 70 of what she saw as a failure in another ’experiment in living,’ she must not have been as bitterly dismayed by it as one might assume or as has been suggested by cri­ tics. One must consider that she created four novels whose plots revolve around a family utopia very similar to what Bronson Alcott probably envisioned for Fruitlands.

Certainly none of these four, Little Men, Jo’s Boys, Eight

Cousins, and Rose in Bloom, are primarily analyses of com­ munal living as are Cooper's The Crater and Hawthorne's

A Blithedale Romance; however, some consideration of the extended family as a unit of physical and emotional sup­ port, education, and entertainment is essential to under­ standing and appreciating these novels. No matter how exasperating and ineffectual Louisa may have found her father and the whole Fruitlands experiment, these novels indicate quite plainly that she was not turning her back on her father's ideals and educational theories just be­ cause they had once been proved unsuccessful; in fact, she was perhaps suggesting that the ideals and the concepts themselves are worthy and might work much more satisfac­ torily another time under slightly different circumstances and leadership. These familial utopias are in several ways a tribute to Bronson Alcott and the Fruitlands project. 71

Bronson Alcott*s own words about his wife in a letter

to Samuel May best describe the kind of woman Abba May

Alcott was, "There are few, I believe, more interested in

home than she is—more devoted to their families--she lives

and moves and breathes for her family alone. Such, as you

are aware, was the companion which I wished to secure for

myself; and such have I indeed found.One of Shepard's

themes in Pedlar's Progress is how very American Bronson

Alcott was; this Shepard supports by the listing of several

characteristics, not the least being the Alcott mobility.

What Shepard does not emphasize is just how much the man

and his family owed to his wife for making each move not

just tolerable, but livable. "’Another experiment in the

art of living.'...the quarters made little difference—

Abba always contrived to make of them the same characterful

home. It was the fine spirit of this home that above all

other things made her daughter's Little Women the immortal book that it is."^2 Salyer attributes Abba May Alcott's

ability to 'make do’ superbly from often next to nothing

to the rare quality of Abba's early home background. Surely,

her sense of practical charity, the only quality which

Morrow allows Mrs. Alcott to have possessed, her fund of

-^^Salyer, p. 49.

^2Salyer, p. 5. 72

common sense, her willingness to work hard, and her sense

of humor were of inestimable value throughout the Alcotts’

married life.

Biographers often introduce Louisa May Alcott by

describing her ancestry and telling of the intrepidity

of these distinguished May and Sewall forebears; however,

few stress the Mrs. Alcott's kind of courage that was

necessary to make appetising meals of only barley and ap­

ples, to clothe the girls and herself in the kind of garments

given to the Salvation Army today, to cook without adequate

fuel, to live in buildings often in a state of disrepair

or in the midst of rebuilding and remaking. Some of the

failure of Fruitlands surely should be attributed to the

inadequate diet and cold house. Any mother will agree that

a cold and hungry child is a cross and difficult one. Per­

haps Charles Lane instead of having abnormal psychological problems and being in need of counseling needed a good,

hot meal of meat soup, a glass of wine, a woolen muffler,

and stout shoes.

Unpleasant though life certainly could be for the

Alcotts, it is not accurate to assume that Abba May Alcott unwittingly and blindly let herself in for it. A letter

to her brother shows that she knew what she was facing from the first. "My husband is the perfect personification 73

of modesty and moderation. I am not sure that we shall

not blush into obscurity and contemplate into starva- . 33 tion." Mrs. Alcott seems to have faced all sorts of

disasters with the redeeming sense of humor. In Louisa

May Alcott's "Transcendental Wild Oats," she tells with

light, but sharply perceptive jabs of irony of the failure

of the Alcott family utopia. "Transcendental Wild Oats" ends with Mrs. Alcott's delightful suggestion to her hus­ band, "’Don’t you think Apple Slump would have been a 34 better name for it"

The education that Abba May Alcott gave her girls was more practical than formal and adademic. Like her husband,

Abba encouraged the keeping of journals, established a family mail system with little personal notes that allowed intimate conversation, gentle remonstrances, and tokens of her love and affection for each girl, and encouraged artis­ tic work of all natures, e.g. Louisa’s writing and May’s painting. The family mail system was established during

Abba's struggle to keep the family united at Fruitlands as an attempt at private conversation amidst a rather full

^^Salyer, p. 41.

^Louisa May Alcott, "Transcendental Wild Oats" in Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands edited by Clara Endicott Sears (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1915)» P- 174. 74 house of strangers. Abba May Alcott also insisted that all her girls learn to do plain cooking, clean, keep house, sew and mend. The girls were all sewing by what is now second grade. Louisa May Alcott set up as a dolls' dress­ maker by the time she was ten. Like her husband, Mrs.

Alcott insisted on plenty of exercise and fresh air daily.

Both were almost faddishly fond, for that time, of baths.

Clara Gowing in her remembrances remarks with what seems disapproval of their showering every day.

Although Mrs. Alcott went along with most of Bronson

Alcott's diet fancies, she was not a vegetarian; however, she did believe in plain foods and warned her daughters against the debilitating influences and effects of rich and spicy foods and of overeating. Mrs. Alcott felt that neither coffee nor any other stimulant was good for child­ ren. From her wide experience as a social worker in

Boston, Abba May Alcott saw all too clearly the disastrous results of drunkenness. Her support of the Temperance

Movement is echoed in all of Louisa May Alcott's books.

Prince Charlie's horse and carriage accident in Rose in

Bloom is one of the few recorded such accidents in nineteenth

-^^Clara Gowing, The Alcotts as I Knew Them (Boston: C.M. Clarke Publishing Co., 1909), P- 75 century American literature although drunken driving must have been a serious problem then, too. Neither Mrs. Alcott nor her husband approved of smoking. Louisa May Alcott throughout her novels, too, warns her readers about smoking.

Both parents advocated a simple diet, plenty of work, plenty of exercise, fresh air, and simple pleasures that one takes part in oneself. Mrs. Alcott's insistence that her daugh­ ters be clad as children as long as possible, providing them with a long growing-up period and not forcing them to be women emotionally before their bodies and minds were really ready is seen repeatedly in Louisa May Alcott's novels and short stories, e.g. An Old-Fashioned Girl.

Like her husband, Mrs. Alcott believed that women had valuable, educable minds that should be fed on real opportunities for learning, not allowed to decay with sensa­ tional novels and highly erotic French novels. She never viewed the American woman as a slightly feeble-minded doll whose sole tasks in life were to marry and reproduce. Mrs.

Alcott's sex education of her daughters emphasized the quality of mothering as a significant index to a good mother, not just the ability to reproduce in quantity.

Mrs. Alcott's participation in both the suffrage movement and the abolitionist movement indicate her essential belief in the dignity of all men and the equality of women with 76

men as human beings. Hers was indeed a precious legacy

of values and beliefs which she passed on to her children;

and Louisa in turn, through her novels, gave to the world.

From a storehouse of proverbs such as 'cast your

bread upon the waters and it will come back buttered,'

Mrs. Alcott lived as an example and taught her daughters

that "no matter how limited one's means, one can always

find a way to help someone needier.The Hummels inci­

dent in Little Women was based on fact. It is also a

commentary on the poverty and destitution of the day that

there were many needier than the Alcotts. Abba May Alcott,

by precept and example, taught her daughters that old

fashioned virtues like faith in God, love of one's neigh­

bors, and love and loyalty to one's family were the essen­

tials in life. What she taught her children became the

basis of the morals and lessons of Louisa May Alcott's

books and stories. Surely, Abba May Alcott's values have

been widely disseminated from Concord.

Possibly the one relationship between Louisa May

Alcott and another person of her acquaintance that has been the greatest source of speculation and innuendo has been the friendship, affection, even love between Ralph Waldo

Emerson and Louisa May Alcott. Just as there is much room

36 Salyer, p. 11. 77 for speculation about the relationship between the

Alcotts and Charles Lane and the impact of the Fruitlands experience and Charles Lane's personality and behavior on the child Louisa as well as on her father, there is also a great unexplored area of interest about the feelings that

Louisa held for the Alcotts' very famous neighbor and sponsor. Emerson influenced his neighbors in more ways than providing financial support and assistance to them.

Louisa describes her early adolescent feelings about Ralph

Waldo Emerson in a delightful passage in her journal.

Louisa fancied herself Bettine to Emerson as Goethe. She wrote letters to him but never sent them, sang under his window in bad German, and left him bouquets.

Not till many years later did I tell my Goethe of this early romance and the part he played in it. He was much amused, and begged for his let­ ters, kindly saying that he felt honored to be so worshipped. The letters were burnt long ago, but Emerson remained my 'Master' while he lived, doing for me,--as for many another--more than he knew, by the simple beauty of his life, the truth and wisdom of his books, the example of a great, good man, untempted and unspoiled by the world which he made better while in it, and left richer and nobler when he went.37

Certainly from reading Emerson's journal, it is safe to say that he was indeed unaware of this adoration until the mature Louisa revealed it to him. One can surmise the

37Cheney, pp. 57-58« 78

attraction that Ralph Waldo Emerson had for Louisa. He

was famous, intellectually stimulating, revered by her

father, and financially comfortable and generous. It is

certainly not unusual for a high-school aged girl even

today to admire extravagantly, to the level of infatuation,

a teacher; however, Louisa’s affection for Emerson seems

to have outlasted her teens and grown from infatuation to

a respect that resulted in her seeing Emerson as a sort

of model among men.

The best indication of Louisa May Alcott’s feelings

for Emerson is found in her novels and short stories. Al­

though Louisa’s male characters are fewer in number than

her female ones and with a few exceptions are not too ef­

fectively delineated, they are generally not young men.

There are three young male protagonists: Laurie, Tom Shaw

in An Old-Fashioned Girl, and Prince Charlie in Rose in

Bloom. In surveying her novels, there is an array of older men, romantic leads and otherwise. Moods has an ineffectual

father, two older suitors, who are financially and socially

established men, and a brother. The hero provides security

and education for the heroine; the brother is a weak-willed,

improvident boy who needs a mother and gets it only in his

choice of a wife. The Little Women trilogy has the magni­

ficent adolescent character, Laurie, who in Little Men 79 and Jo's Boys dwindles into a boring and pompous adult,

the paternal Mr. Bhaer, Dan who is relatively life-like and a host of stereotyped boys who become cardboard dolls as adults. Eight Cousins-Rose in Bloom has the paternal

Uncle Alec, the lively Prince Charlie who becomes too real to stay alive in the plot, a dud Archie who was born thirty-five, and Mac who is an acceptable suitor for Rose only after he becomes very like Uncle Alec, in appearance and actions. It is significant to note that Louisa's heroines always marry the mature, paternal man, e.g. Mr.

Bhaer and Mac. This is further corroborated in An Old-

Fashioned Girl when Polly marries Tom Shaw after he returns from the West, bearded, richer, and wiser than the Harvard scapegrace who left Boston. Louisa May Alcott, not unlike many designing mothers, equates a 'good marriage' with grey hair, a secure financial position, and such obvious emo­ tional stability that is frequently summed up by daughters of marriageable age as 'safe,' 'dull,' or 'fine,' e.g. the hero in Work.

The exceptionally well-drawn character, Laurie, suggests the phenomenal impact that Laddie Wisniewski must have had on Louisa's emotions. Laurie in Little Women is as alive as Jo, a character whom few critics would deny is as nearly alive as any reader. Common sense and a 80

secure feeling of abiding love are the keynotes in the

Mr. Bhaer-Uncle Alec type of character in contrast to the

exciting and vital youth of Laurie. The Mr. Bhaer charac­

ters are men who would never mind if the heroine were to

get fat, as Jo does in Little Men, repeats herself in con­

versation, or snores. In fact it is significant that it

is Mr. Bhaer whom Jo marries instead of her beloved

Laurie.

It would be foolish to suggest that Louisa stayed

a single woman because of an undying love for either Laddie

or Emerson. Louisa May Alcott was too sensible and ration­

al a human being; however, it is not unlikely that she found

it difficult to find another man who came close to providing those characteristics of mind, character, and fortune that

Emerson possessed. It would be equally as foolish to say that Louisa died unwed because of a passionate, seering love affair with Wisniewski. One must accept, bearing in mind Nan and Maud, that Louisa may have chosen to remain a single woman. Wisniewski may have 'swept her off her feet' briefly, but Louisa was very level-headed and realis­ tic about the appeal he must have made to her maternal instincts. Emerson appealed, no doubt, to the need within

Louisa for a steadfast and reliable father-figure. 81

Emerson was as secure and stable as Laddie seems to have

been volatile and little boyish, proudly displaying his

blue and white Polish cavalry uniform on the boulevards

of Paris. It seems a pity that the Uncle Alec-Mr. Bhaer

characters never come off with the eclat and appeal of

Laurie. They seem so prosaic and tiresomely realistic

beside the enchantingly youthful and romantic orphan who

enters into all the fun of the little women next door.

Still these stable men are the balance wheel characters whose qualities Louisa admired in Ralph Waldo Emerson and who give a depth and substance to the reality of her novels CHAPTER II

Louisa May Alcott, writing out of the depth and breadth

of her own family experiences, her own personal knowledge of

the goals and attributes of a truly fine American mother,

Abba May Alcott, of the American girl in the Alcott sisters,

and of the American family from her own family life, and

using fictional Realism as a literary guide, creates in

her novels and short stories the equivalent of the 'how-to-

do-it-yourself' novel on the American family. In the nine­

teenth century the reading audience, for the most part, was

female. In typical pragmatic American fashion, Alcott's

Realistic novels serve as both entertainment and source

book.' As a guide to the middle-class, American, nineteenth

century family, novels like Little Women serve the twentieth century reader also as a microcosm for an investigation of the macrocosm of that concept 'American family structure*« how it functions, what it was like, its goals, and what relation it bears to the twentieth century American family.

Any autobiographical discussion of Louisa May Alcott's novels only serves to highlight the literal, factual side of fiction that in turn operates as a tie between recorded, historical fact about society and the American family of 83

the period and the mythic American family which, like the

social and historical reality, evidenced many changes with the Civil War, the coming of industrialism and technology, and the shift to an urban economy, society, and life.

The mythic American family of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, viewed through twentieth century eyes and accepted with the accretions of nineteenth and twentieth century prejudices and interpretations, was a paternalistic, male-dominated, one-generation structure that stressed success and worldly-financial prosperity as evidences of goodness. The Puritan work ethic was a strong mythic force from the first. Opportunity, abundance, the available frontier--all served to prove the myth right, often enough, that it persisted and does persist to a marked degree in the twentieth century.

The mythic early American woman was a shadow beside the gigantic figure of the adventurer-settler of her hus­ band-brother-son. Only as the male figure left the land and the home for long periods of every day did the woman begin to assume a central role in American society and gain a mythic stature. It is the nineteenth century woman who gains a pedestal in the Valhalla of the myths of the

American way of life. The nineteenth century American woman goes mythically from being a virtuous beast of burden 84

and procreation and a marketable commodity as such to the

'lady-mother* who is the center of the home, educator of

the children and the less fortunate, and the fount of

genteel knowledge. The cliché 'the hand that rocks the

cradle rules the world' epitomizes the shift in the signi­

ficance of the role of the woman. The term 'gentlewoman'

that graced certain of the women of the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries and that reflected along with an in­

herited social position an educated chatelaine quality developed, in America, into the more equalitarian, 'genteel- lady' concept. In the nineteenth century this position was open to any clean, chaste, decent woman who aspired to combining her jobs as hausfrau with some rudimentary knowledge of the 'fine arts' even if this was only having seen "The White Slave" and having read Evangeline.

The genteel American lady of the nineteenth century in her attempts to rear a decent, clean family had to op­ pose swearing, drinking, and extra- and pre-marital sex.

She may oftentimes be a figure of fun to the twentieth century sociologist or debunking writer, but she was the lifeline that preserved the American middle-class family from decay and near-collapse in the shifting, frightening latter half of the nineteenth century. Interestingly, the lower and upper-middle classes took their tone from this 85

determined, generally self-educated, and morally impreg­

nable woman. The mobility of the American social classes

required some sort of short course or at-home study guide

for the girl or woman who aspired to becoming respectable

and rearing her family properly while her husband by his

wits and hard work contrived to finance them up and out

of the lower classes.

The guidebooks were quite often novels like those

of Louisa May Alcott. Everything was covered in addition

to a rollicking good story: how to be an outstanding mother like Marmee, how to be a decent girl like the March girls and Polly, how to make a good marriage like Rose and Polly, and how to rear a family like the Marches.

Like the McGuffey readers that shaped the morality and literary taste of all Americans who used them and contri­ buted to creating Americans, not Northerners, Southerners, or Westerners, the novels of Louisa May Alcott and their impact on the American family via the American female read­ ing public is very great.

In order to understand Louisa May Alcott as a writer and the sources of her material, one has to investigate her life and her family. To see the whole of the impact of these books that she wrote and what they reflected about the American family, one has to survey briefly the 86 sociology and social history of the American family. Since the whole cannot be grasped without at least a cursory glance at the parts, it is important to define those terms to be used most often in this chapter and to investigate how the American family fits within the usual sociological terms, structure-nomenclature, and theories. The term

'family' as used by the United States Bureau of the Census

"refers to a group of two or more persons related by blood, marriage, or adoption who are residing together. From a sociological point of view, the definition may be extended to indicate that these persons are interacting and commu­ nicating with each other in their respective social roles of husband and wife, son and daughter, brother and sister, and that they are creating and maintaining a common cul­ ture."^ The roles within the family that are created by the family's needs and goals are directly related to the needs of society and the functions that a family performs for a society: affection, procreation, protection, educa­ tion, socialization, recreation, religious training, and p economics. The American family has tended from the first to be a relatively small, nuclear structure rather than

^Sr. Frances Jerome Woods, The American Family System (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), pp* 16-17. p Abbott L. Ferriss, Indicators of Change in the Ameri­ can Family (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1970), p. 2. 87

the large, unwieldly extended trustee family of medieval

Europe or dynastic China. The development of the American

family from a domestic structure to an atomistic structure

more closely parallels the Greek and late Roman family

structures than any others and like those seems to he in­

creasingly atomistic as the countries become urbanized.

The urbanization of a civilization seems to relate direct­

ly to the fragmentation of its family structure into small,

economically independent, one-generation families that live

apart from either family of orientation. This is not to

say that there is no kinship system in America, but that

it is quite different from that of the trustee family struc­

ture or even the domestic family structure, especially in

the obligations and controls exercised over individuals

and, primarily, over women. The twentieth century American

family, except for ethnic '’pockets,1' fits within a complex

kinship system that exercises little or no control over any

single nuclear family within the composite 'family' of

relatives both by blood and marriage. This composite

'family' is bound together by affection, need for mutual

assistance, companionship (the closely-knit composite family

is best seen in sociological examples of the small town

family), sometimes by economic considerations in the cases

"Darle Clark Zimmerman, Family and Civilization (New York: Harper and Bros., 1947)» pp. 450-497• 88

of families who own a 'family business,' and frequently as

a social unit that may act as an agent of propulsion for

an individual member or a millstone, according to circum­

stances .

Each individual modal family springs from two nuclear

families, the family of orientation for each spouse; both

of which are generally small units consisting of parents

and siblings and a small assortment of closely related kin

who are not generally influential in deciding family matters:

grandparents, uncles and aunts. From this family is

created the individual unit, the family of procreation

which as the children mature and marry becomes, in turn,

the family of orientation for each of the marrying children.

Relationships are named by the wife and the children of

the family of procreation taking the father's name. There

is little or no precedence accorded on the male's family of orientation in spite of the fact that it is the male’s patronomyic that is the individual family's identifying name. The family of procreation extends to the second generation only in that the children of the next generation are called grandchildren and the assimilated son-in-law or daughter-in-law is generally called 'son' or 'daughter' and the parents of the new family of procreation are called

'mother' or 'dad' by the in-law. The widespread practice 89

of the in-law tactfully refraining from calling the hus­

band's or wife's parents by any name until there are

grandchildren when the names 'grandma' and 'grandpa' can

then be applied by the in-law reflects curiously on the

true lack of intimacy and closeness between the two family

generations.

. . . Such a system places emphasis upon the nuclear family unit, isolating it from the extended family group....Neolocal re­ sidence is set up after marriage...Kinship is traced bilaterally, without giving pre­ ference to either of the in-law families... the most frequent types of mutual aid given by the other members of the extended family are help during illness and mutual baby sitting...Strong, affectionative ties with relatives beyond the conjugal units are practically nonexistent...As a rule, only one woman assumes the maternal role, and only one man plays the paternal role in a specific American family...4

Although there seem to be as many theories of the ori­ gin of the family structure within society as a means of safeguarding, feeding, and caring for progeny as there are sociologists and anthropologists, there are basically only a few approaches to how the family came about. There is an essentially linear approach that can be interpreted positively or negatively according to the scholar's indi­ vidual temperament. This is the straight line theory from the primitive no-family, horde existence to modern nuclear

Sifoods, pp. 108-113. 90

family structure. This evolutionary theory of family

structure development is viewed as the family growing

better and better, progressing to a finer society to those

who see the welfare community as a type of refined primi­

tive horde existence. Scholars such as Goodsell, Le Play,

Folsom and Waller see the family as an active agent in

shaping and changing society. The progressive, evolutionary

view of the role of the family undoubtedly appealed to those

writers and thinkers of the late nineteenth century who

were optimistic, Christian Social Darwinists. Those

writers who view society as changing the family, and general­

ly not for the better are scholars like Pareto, Burgess,

Nimkoff, and Ogburn. Most writers are influenced by those

classical tales of early Greek and Roman families. Although

the myths and legends are discredited as factual, their

impact on scholarly thinking has been considerable. Others,

like Zimmerman, try to align history with sociology and

anthropology and relate the changes within the family

structure to civilization, urbanization, economics, and political power. It is very difficult to separate the history and development of the family from the history of mankind.

There is yet again another basic controversy in dis­ cussing family dynamics: the role of the mother. The 91

traditional approach suggests that motherhood is instinc­

tive within the female of the species; because of this

overwhelming protective drive within the female, the

family unit was devised to protect and care for the child­

ren. Traditionalists like Westermarck and Freud develop

this view of the family as the oldest unit in society

buttressed by marriage into a system, with sociological

implications by which the father is patriarch and the

mother the fountainhead of affection and kindness. In

contrast, the school of Bachofen, Morgan, McLennan, and

Briffault feel that the primitive state of loosely or­

ganized hordes, an almost complete lack of sexual regula­

tion where promiscuity and communal motherhood were more

common than maternal individual attention, and the sole

influence over the children was group achieved in more the natural state of man than what Westermarck and Freud sug­ gest as the natural development of man, given man's drives and emotional needs. Malinowski insists, and rightly so, that these are both extremes. It seems to this writer that neither extreme reckons with other developments within society other than the small area of family.

It is certainly not the purpose of this paper to try to refute these theories in toto nor to develop any start- ingly new theory, but to suggest that the family is only 92

one pane in the window overlooking the Gilded Age. Family

sociology cannot be studied exclusive of history or liter­

ature; these all act together and upon each other and must

be investigated within the context of interaction.

The 1870s-l890s is a significant time in the develop­

ment of the American family. It is a time during which the

mother's assumption of the role of guide and leader and

the corresponding power pertaining to this position in

the family was acknowledged. It is, as well, a time when

the family itself faced many problems and threats to its

stability and power in society, not the least of which were

technology, industrialism, and urbanization. It was a

period of change within the format of the family, change

from the domestic, semi-patriarchal unit of the early nine­

teenth century to an atomistic unit perilously guided and

controlled by the mother. The problems of the twentieth,

century family—divorce, generation strife, 'momism,'

and a decrease in the family's political, social and moral

'clout' amounting almost to dissolution—are rooted in the

struggles and developments in these last few decades of the nineteenth century. Commager's concept of the Gilded

Age as the watershed for the twentieth century holds as true for the family as for the areas of American society that he discusses. 93

Still the basic source for the history and general

sociological surveys of the American family is Calhoun's

A Social History of the American Family.Calhoun seems

accepted as background material for nearly all of the

sociological-anthropological surveys that include a chapter

or two on the history of the family in the United States.

Calhoun stresses, as do most other scholars, that there

has been a tremendous revolution in the American family.

He views the colonial family as still strongly medieval in

its traditions of monogamy, wifely chastity, and of marriage

chiefly for the procreation of children. He further sees

^Arthur W. Calhoun, A Social History of the American Family From Colonial Times to the Present, Vols. I, II, III (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc. ’, 1945« Original Edition was 1917.) ^Ruth Nanda Anshen (ed.), The Family: Its Function and Destiny (New York: Harper, 1959)» Ray Erwin Baber, Marriage and the Family (New York: McGraw Hill, 1953); Howard Becker, Family, Marriage, and Parenthood (Bostons Heath, 1955); Ernest W. Burgess and Harvey Locke, The Family from Institution to Companionship (New York: American Book Co., 1953); Willystine Goodsell, A History of the Family as a Social and Educational Institution TWew York: Macmillan Co., 1926); ~ , A History of Marriage and the Family (New York: Macmillan Co., 1934); Meyer Francis Nimkoff, The Family (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1934); ______» Marriage and the Family (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1947); Andrew G. Truxal and Francis E. Merrill, The Family in American Culture (New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 19^7); Willard Waller, The Family (New York: Dryden Press, 1938); and Woods, The American Family System. Zimmerman, Family and Civilization. 94

the colonial family as a property institution dominated

by the middle-class standards of the Protestant Reforma­

tion, with capitalism operating as an agent of social

control in the midst of an order still dominated by a

forceful aristocracy that had tried and continued to try, albeit increasingly ineffectually, to shape all to its own profit. The seeds of individualism in Puritanism which blossom ultimately into the atomistic family and the decay of parental control to a state bordering on family anarchy begin to show their yellow blooms from the 18?0s on but were previously stayed by the Reformation’s stress on nur­ turing children in religion, the role of wife and mother patterned closely on the industrious German Hausfrau, who was the ideal woman of the Reformation, and the economic well-being derived from monogamy. This is not to say that the roots of the American divorce problems were not present once there were no longer economic reasons for the irre­ fragable feudal marriage that was a basic canon in the trustee family system. Puritan emphasis on sexual restraint and the novel virtue of male chastity furthered economic interests, too, by turning the American male to business interests as a sex substitute. Through the eighteenth century and always on the frontiers the well-being of the

^Calhoun, pp. 39-40. 95

individual depended greatly on the family. If a man were

not married, he was wise to do so for companionship and

creature comforts alone and start a family. The family

became an instrument of social welfare, religious instruc­

tion, often of secular education, and a source of labor.

This type of patriarchism parallels in many ways the Old

Testament families, except that the American pioneer youth

could, and often did, leave his family of orientation and

set off further West to establish himself and his family of procreation. There were large families on the frontier, often products of several or more mothers over a span of twenty years, with the new crop of laborers replacing the older ones who had left their father's lands to settle for themselves. Children labored with their mothers and 8 fathers as soon as they were old enough to be of any help.

Child labor was as much a fact on the frontier as later in the urban factories, but it was less obvious on isolated rural farms than when masses of children were employed in factories. Also the children were working with their families, not in the often undesirable circumstances that seemed to grow like mold in the factories. Calhoun feels that the real work accomplished by the children of the colonial period and of all frontier families saved the

^Calhoun, Vol i, pp. 127-129« 96

individualism of democracy from familial and hence govern­ mental anarchy and kept the family unit whole and decent.

He, like many modern sociologists and child psychologists,

feels that many family problems, as well as those of

society in general, start when worthwhile and meaningful o work ceases to exist. Unprofitable leisure and ennui are more destructive elements than those natural ones the fron­ tier farmer faced. The Puritan ethic’s implication that idleness is a sin combined with economic interest to pro­ duce a strongly-knit and father-dominated family much as seen in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper.

In Volume ii, Calhoun examines in detail the frontier and its effect on the American family. The individualism of Puritanism was allowed its greatest license here. "The advent of the male political democracy consequent on the free life of the frontier went hand in hand with an in­ tense individualism akin to anarchism."10 The need for a cooperating, unified family to do the work necessary to settle and run a frontier farm acted as a brake on rampant individualism. It also might be suggested that high infant mortality and child-bed death rates tended to eliminate the divorce problem. In spite of the need for labor and

^Calhoun, Vol. i, p. 127.

10Calhoun, Vol. ii, p. 37- 97

familial security, at no time does America have an ex­

tended family system comparable to that of the far East

or even of feudal Europe. Truxal and Merrill suggest that

this is because of the phenomenal amount of free land or reasonably available land.11 There was no system of

primogeniture in the United States to perpetuate an ex­

tended family living from generation unto generation on one

area of land as in France and England. American mobility

for the most part kept this type of family system from

occurring even among those immigrants whose heritage was

that of the extended family. Parsons describes the Amer­

ican family as an open, multilineal, and isolated conjugal

system. As had been mentioned before, neither household

arrangements nor the source of income generally bears any

resemblance or relation to the family of orientation of

either spouse. Truxal and Merrill say of the frontier

family "The early democracy of the frontier was supplemented

by the atomistic individualism of the metropolis to dissolve

further the traditional institutional controls holding the

family together—controls that had been weakening since the 13 rise of capitalism and Protestantism." J

11Truxal and Merrill, p. 93-

12Talcott Parsons, "The Social Structure of the Family," Anshen, p. 242. ^Truxal and Merrill, p. 93- 98

The latter half of the nineteenth century is the

watershed, then, for breaking away from the patriarchal

system to the matriarchal en route to what is often

heralded as the beginning of the dissolution of the

family. What was considered by many to be the beginning of the collapse of the paternal American family system, even as many felt the family structure itself, was in all probability more an overt acceptance of a trend that had begun as early as the first colonies. The central position of the mother as authority figure and heart of the family seems to have always been present in the American family in spite of the legal, religious, and economic support of the paternal family system. What may have been a truly father-dominated society during the colonial period became increasingly a mother-controlled one by the late nineteenth century. It is in the 1870s that lipservice to the pater­ nal familial ideal begins to decrease. Louisa May Alcott*s novels are indicators of this trend that emphasizes the importance of the woman as the dominant figure in the family.

The increasing acceptance of the woman as the key figure in the family unit is related to the increasing number of occupations for women. Running the family had always been idealized as a man's job. Once the mother became the 99

accepted authority figure it was possible at least to con­

sider the woman in other fields. Those jobs that were the

natural extensions of the mother role in the family, i.e.

nurse, teacher, and secretary, were the first to be ac­

cepted outside the home. Calhoun sees the position of the

woman in the nineteenth century strengthened by her contri­

butions during the Civil War and the move from the country

to town during the Industrial Revolution. The mother be­

came the center of the family as the father no longer

worked at home but away from the home. As business became

the focal point of the father's life, even if his excuse

were to provide for his family, the father in essence ab­

dicated his central position of authority. As long as

the father and his family farmed, the business of farming

was one of mutual interest to the entire family. Working

together and planning the future together generally drew the family closer and centered their interests on one primary concern in which the father was the focal figure.

Still, it is always of some interest to question how exten­ sive and complete the father's authority ever had been in reality. The only possible answer is that it depended on the personalities of the father and mother, the finan­ cial position of each parent prior to marriage, the 100 contributions of each parent during the marriage, how authoritarian each father was individually, and to what degree there was petticoat government with paternal rubber- stamping of the maternal decisions. A major shift in power came when women's legal rights were changed. The right to own property independent of one's husband was a stride forward toward independence previously only paralleled by the New England and Dutch colonial women and the famous guild-women of medieval Europe. Such legal freedoms only reinforced the tacitly-accepted control of the family functions.

The functions and jobs undertaken by all families are many: courtship and marriage procedures, sex mores, husband-wife relationships, family routines and rituals, child-rearing practices, attitudes toward education of children, and responsibility toward aging parents. The family's attitudes and beliefs about sex mores includes sexual education of the children, sex obligations in mar­ riage, forms of intimate behavior within the family as a 14 whole, and divorce. The family ideally provides emotional nurture through food and affection, education for individual

James H.S. Bossard and Eleanor Bell, The Large Family System, An Original Study in the Sociology of Family BehaviorTPhiladelphia, Pa: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956), p. 15* 101

independence at adulthood, religious instruction, and companionship.

Anshen refers to families as the utopias of this 15 world, a noteworthy metaphor considering the closeness of utopian theories with ideal family goals and the novels of Louisa May Alcott. "The family, epitomizing as it does a microcosm of ordered intimate relationships in which both man and woman can most profoundly fulfill and test their essential nature, is the most elemental and the most universal form of society, containing all the manifold potentialities for actualizing the human personality."1^

This statement neatly summarizes an essential theme through­ out the novels of Louisa May Alcott. The theme is the significance of the family to the individual’s growth and maturity; the development of this motif is done through fiction narratives that show the characters attempting to live out their finest family principles. These stand as examples of the best to the readers. When Louisa May Alcott deals with those characters who are failures emotionally and socially because of an inadequate family life, these then stand as warnings to the readers.

^Anshen, "The Family in Transition," p. 16.

■^Anshen, p. 17. 102

By the 1870s when Louisa May Alcott began writing for

girls and boys, the American father figure had become the

titular head of the home, having abdicated from absolute

authority to make a living away from the home, and the

mother had for the most part become the center of the family

and family life. Louisa May Alcott's personal family life

mirrors the trends of the times during which she lived and

is constantly exploited throughout her novels. Louisa May

Alcott's own father certainly was not the economic head

of the Alcott family. As a provider, he was unsuccessful.

As a source of authority, Bronson Alcott was neither author­

itarian nor single-minded in any attempts to control his

family, yet he was dearly loved by his often-exasperated

and 'pathetic' family. Thus Bronson Alcott did not parallel

completely the busy, single-minded business men who were the

ideal men of the Gilded Age, yet as he was not the controll­

ing power within his own home, Louisa May Alcott's family was not entirely atypical since most of those single-minded dedicated business men were dedicated to their business con­ cerns, not to their families. Here again is another evidence of Shepard's main thesis that Bronson Alcott, in spite of his obvious differences and peculiarities, was a typical American of his time and of ours. 103

Mrs. Alcott was the center of the family. She pro­

vided the household instruction, the emotional nurturing,

and her family of orientation often provided much of the

physical security and nourishment. Together, husband and

wife provided the religious and moral training. It is cer­

tainly no accident that the father of Little Women is away

as a chaplain with the Union soldiers fighting rebels and

that at no time iri the Little Women trilogy does Mr. March

engage actively in fighting his family's relative poverty

nor does he ever exert any other authority or power, except

a moral and ethical force, over his band of little women.

Jo in Little Women when she cuts off her long, beautiful

hair for twenty-five dollars to help out her mother and thus

is sheared of her most conspicuous badge of femininity, is

in authority the 'big brother' with aspirations toward being

the 'father' as best as she can. Marmee is meanwhile very

much the indomitable American woman in the pioneer tradition

of carrying the entire family burden of affection, instruc­

tion, and discipline. Always in Louisa May Alcott's novels

one can survive without a father, but all is lost without a mother.

One is reminded of those larger-than-life statues to

the pioneer mother that dot the entrances to state parks all over the United States. They stand there, homely, rugged 104

tributes to maternity and symbols of determined wives dog­

gedly sustaining those men who kept going West, seeking a

golden return to an elusive, will-o-the-wisp dream of in­

stant fortune and success--next time. The statues are never pretty, feminine women for whom a fleet might be

launched; those must either have stayed back in civilization

or died early in the struggle. The American Adam when, in reality, he finally mated seems to have selected as suitable a spouse for the wilderness as the early midwest farmers' bringing with them those sturdy Belgian horses to till the soil. It is no wonder that those second and third genera­ tion success-stories who toured Europe for culture and wives were struck by the effete and delicate qualities of the upper-class Europeans.

In Louisa May Alcott's novels fathers are sparse in number; usually they are idealistic dreamers of great dreams rather than men of business and power. Hence in Little

Women, Laurie is as dependent on Marmee for comfort and help with growing up as are the girls, and nearly all of

Fan Shaw's problems lie with having the wrong kind of mother

Although in Little Men and Jo's Boys, there is a father figure in Papa Bhaer, at no time does he exercise the auth­ ority and control that Jo does through a combination rule of love and discipline. Uncle Alec in Eight Cousins-Rose 105

in Bloom is a much stronger father figure than either Mr.

March or Papa Bhaer, indeed stronger than Mr. Yule in Moods

or Mr. Shaw in An Old-Fashioned Girl, both of whom have dedicated their lives to the business of making money.

There is no father at all in Jack and Jill and Work; the

only one in Under the Lilacs comes at the end of the book;

there is the only wicked father in A Whisper in the Dark.

Without a doubt, Uncle Alec is Louisa May Alcott's strongest male figure, yet he is hamstrung and henpecked by six aunts and, at times, is a very stereotyped fiction male adult character. The subtitle of Eight Cousins, The Aunt-Hill, was not chosen without a reason. The novels of Louisa May

Alcott surely reflect more than just her own family struc­ tural peculiarities; they seem to show the trend in the family structure in America as a whole. One might go so far as to suggest that in one way these novels are a plea for better mothering in families so that in spite of the male defection from the position of authority, the American fam­ ily will continue to be a going concern.

As the opening chapter has suggested, the novels of

Louisa May Alcott reveal a great deal of Louisa's own per­ sonal family life and the roles and goals of the members of her family. By using her family as the pattern, Louisa

May Alcott reflects the qualities essential in a good family. io6

The little family rituals, the birthday celebrations, the

family post-box, the little talks Marmee had with her

girls—all these are rituals that Brossard and Boll stress

are necessary in cementing family life. ' Marmee fulfills

her role of providing affection and moral guidance to such

a degree that Mrs. March is a model against which female

readers might measure their own mothers and later them­

selves as mothers. The actual Alcott family provided all

the essential ingredients for a successful, loving family.

Louisa May Alcott used her memories and judgments to suggest

an ideal family for the American reader.

It must be made clear in discussing the American family

from the 1870s on as matriarchal that it refers to mother

domination and emotional, psychological control of the

family, not to what is described and delineated as matri­

archies in sociological studies of some of the more unusual

and primitive societies of the world. Briffault defines matriarchy as "literally ’rule by the mother' in the same was as 'patriarchy' means 'rule by the father,' and suggests therefore that in a matriarchal type of society the women exercise a domination over the men similar or equivalent to that exercised by the men over the women in a patriarchal

17 Bossard and Boll, p. 88. 107

social order, the two types of social organization thus

differing merely in the sex which wields dominant power in 1 A each." Briffault stresses that patriarchal social orders

emerge late in the history of civilization. The matri­

archal order was prevalent in the primitive and pre-historic

periods much as it is with other animals except human beings

What Briffault does not say, but what one may suggest, is

that there is an attempt at survival for the family unit

linked with the change from patriarchy to matriarchy in

America even though the men are still in the late nineteenth

century and certainly late into this century 'lords of cre­

ation' as Louisa May Alcott so often refers to them. Even

with much progressive legislation attempting to release the

American woman from a legal bondage and surely a social

bondage, men still control society to a great extent now a

hundred years later. The very shift, however, in familial

authority indicates a breaking up of the old family system.

One must question further: is the substitution of the mother as the authority and center of the family a grasping

at straws to preserve the family and educate the young for

adulthood or is it a recognition of what has always been a

fait accompli in the American family structure but generally

^Robert Briffault, The Mothers (New York: Mac­ millan Co., 1927), p. 179. 108

not trumpeted? Were those deep-bosomed, determined pioneer

wives tactful and cunning enough to preserve a myth of male

domination as well as being hard working beasts of burden?

Although Marmee is the center of the March family as

purveyer of affection, education, and familial stability,

Louisa May Alcott's novels do not suggest that in any way

can Mrs. March or any of her other mother figures manage

exclusively without male assistance in the world outside

the family. Louisa May Alcott makes it perfectly clear that, outside the family, the world is male-dominated.

When Mr. March is ill and someone must go to Washington, it is old Mr. Lawrence who comes forward with money, with as­ sistance in the shape of his secretary, Mr. Brooke, to accompany Mrs. March, and all the plans and assistance necessary to get Mrs. March to Washington successfully.

Without powerful male interference in Washington and assis­ tance along the way, Mrs. March could not have gone as easily and quickly as she did to her husband. She could not have stayed to nurse and care for him without Mr.

Lawrence's knowing how to cut through military red tape.

No one could have realized this better than Louisa May Alcott herself who had nursed the Civil War wounded in Washington.

When determined Nurse Periwinkle in Hospital Sketches re­ sorts to begging help from her brother-in-law, there is no 109

doubt in the reader's mind of the position of men in the

American power structure.

Louisa May Alcott at no time is suggesting that men

have lost their positions of power and control in the

world at large; her novels indeed show just the opposite.

What Louisa May Alcott's novels do show is that in the

American family, the center and force is not the father,

but the mother. Men's roles have expanded by the 1870s

away from the home and family to business and the workaday

world outside the home. This raises questions such as

these: Is the collapse of the American family directly

related to the father's abdication of authority in the

family? Is the replacement of the mother as authority fig­ ure merely an attempt to shore up the dissolution of the

family or a return to the primitive social order to secure

survival for the family? Is the family as a social struc­ ture handicapped because of the male's removal from authority to other spheres? Has the female always lacked and does she still lack the legal, social, and psychological 'clout' to strengthen and control the family as once the 'lord of creation' could and did? Is this why the role of homemaker and mother is considered somehow as inferior to that of secretary or office girl? Did the man's withdrawal from the family as an arena of his concern and control reduce 110

the status of the family and thus deny its social and moral

effectiveness or, at best, dilute it?

The withdrawal of the father as authority figure and

the substitution of the mother as authority figure is ex­

amined by Talcott Parsons and summed up as an anti-mother

revolt in the modern family whether overtly or within the

shadows of family activities. He stresses the boys' break­

ing away from maternal control when in their adolescence,

they become aware that 'women are less valuable than men.'

"The commonness with which a mother fixation is involved in

all types of neurotic and psychotic disorders of American 19 men strongly confirms the thesis." Parsons goes on to describe female revolt in adolescence as related to the

same discovery that security is dependent on male whim and

that the talents mother taught are not necessarily enough

for success in the marriage mart. "This undoubtedly under­

lies the widespread ambivalence among women toward the role of motherhood which is a primary factor in the declining birth rate, as well as toward sex relations and the role of being a woman in any other fundamental respect..emotional rejection of the role of mother, with the most serious consequences for the children...the female role is one of

^Parsons, "The Social Structure of the Family," in Anshen, p. 257• Ill

20 the most urgent needs of the American family."

There is no doubt that Louisa May Alcott would have

agreed with the spirit of Parsons’ plea. She, too, saw the

female role of mother as absolutely essential for the well­

being of society as a whole. In An Old-Fashioned Girl,

Louisa May Alcott shows the results within or upon a family

where the mother has rejected her role. Although Mrs. Shaw

has chosen to become an interesting invalid, a much more

popular sport for women in the nineteenth century than in

the twentieth century with its preference for females as

sex objects, she has rejected her basic female role and

her family suffers. The absolute necessity for children

to have a good mother is one of the major themes throughout all the works of Louisa May Alcott and is reinforced time and again by her realistic and credible delineations of such good mothers as well as by those novels and stories that serve as dreadful warnings by depicting what happens without one.

The female revolt in adolescence against a society that demands a pretty, charming woman rather than a good housekeeper and cook is not shown or is answered by begging the question in such novels as Rose in Bloom and An Old-

20Parsons, Ibid., pp. 260-270. 112

Fashioned Girl. Rose and Polly have all the attributes for successful womanhood. It is a pity that Louisa did not tackle a Fanny Squeers. In developing her theme of the need for fine, dedicated wives and mothers to shape the family and thus society, Louisa May Alcott insists that all her example girls should be good housekeepers, cooks, and home nurses. This insistence is repeatedly seen in her novels and short stories. Although Louisa May Alcott may have been a fervent advocate of women’s rights, she is desperately interested in conserving these aspects of women's education. Interestingly enough, Louisa May Alcott has no characters with a mother fixation. She really does not have a wide enough gamut of sons in her novels to develop this type of character. Although she has a number of good sons in Eight Cousins-Rose in Bloom, they are not neuroti­ cally bound to their mothers and homes. This is really rather strange in considering Prince Charlie; his mother,

Aunt Clara, is just the type of person who in life attempts such neurotic control over her son that he is forever af­ flicted with that dread disease called 'Mama's Boy.' Iron­ ically enough, it is Charlie's wickedness, and poor creature, it is very tepid wickedness indeed, that saves him from his clutching, emotionally starved mother. As Parsons shows with the general adolescent revolt against maternal 113 control, "When he revolts against identification with his mother in the name of masculinity, it is not surprising that a boy unconsciously identifies goodness with family 21 and that being a ’bad boy* becomes a positive goal."

This adolescent Penrod-Tom Sawyer type of American boy is best seen in Louisa May Alcott’s novels in Dan in Jo's Boys and Charlie in Rose in Bloom. Louisa May Alcott has far more girl revolutionaries against prescribed society than boys.

The Civil War, more than any single force, rescued mid­ century American women from the absolute bondage of husband, house, and children. Like the frontier wives, the wives of both the Union and the Confederate men were rescued by the necessities of vital, meaningful work. Again the solution of work gave a new value to the woman. The absentee father off fighting also contributed greatly by his very absence to the increasing trend toward a mother-centered home in the

United States. This habit of authority and leadership ac­ quired by the women of the Civil War era was not to be cast aside but rather strengthened by the returning soldiers and as the following generations moved to the city, into the factories, businesses, and politics. One cannot give the

21 Parsons, p. 258. 114

credit for the change from a father-centered home to a

mother-centered one solely to war, for this did not happen

after the Revolutionary War. The difference in the wars

greatly affects this. The Revolutionary War, although

fought in nearly every colony, was fought as local battles

with the men of that region fighting together, then able to

go home, and the enlistments were shorter than in the Civil

War. The soldiers of the Civil War, especially the Union

soldiers, went a great distance from their families and

stayed away fighting long enough for the mother-domination

to solidify. The tremendous loss of men in the South con­

tributed overwhelmingly to the power of the wife and mother.

The increasing number of free public schools that

were to blossom after the Civil War and grow rapidly in

urban centers and the Sunday Schools that came with the

Social Gospel religious interpretations of the 18?0s and

1880s, too, tended to draw the family apart when the role

of educator of the children, secularly and religiously, was

taken over by someone other than the mother and father. Even

though the mother was still essential in educating the pre­

school child, the 6-16 age children were removed from the

sphere of the family influence for eight hours a day. In many respects, the urban family was lucky whose children were merely at school rather than employed in the sweat shops of 115

the newly industrialized America. The competency and in­ dependence demonstrated by the wives, sisters, and mothers during the Civil War created within them a sense of worth that was a stepping stone for further changes in feminine roles. In spite of the slight reversals for feminism in the Gilded Age, this generally accepted knowledge by both men and women of the contributions of the women during the

Civil War was the necessary platform for more reforms and changes, all of which ultimately affected the American family.

No single group was affected more by the Civil War than the white Southern women. The myth of the Southern woman as a clinging creature, pure, delicate, and wearing high heels, heavy skirts with crinolines, unable even to wash her own pocket-hankie, never mind dress herself, was completely reversed. Many of the fine ladies of the South were delicate, a legacy of the venereal diseases received from their wandering husbands. "Gallantry to women was the gallantry of the harem. Nowhere in the world were women shown more surface respect than in the South, yet degrada­ tion of the sex was obvious. Women of the oligarchy were exempt from menial cares but licentious secrets (or dis­ closures) smothered wholesome comradeship and woman became 116 the chief ornament of the house...softness, gentleness, and grace disguised a chattel." Miscegnation was not the only- problem that the white Southern woman faced. Calhoun quotes from Olmsted's Journey in the Seaboard Slave States to make this point. "Exploitation placed a severe strain on the morals of the poor whites...put a very slight value on fe­ male virtue."2-^ Calhoun then summarizes the significance of the woman, Southern and Northern, as a factor in the

Civil War.

The readiness with which woman did the man's work and kept the family together...the prolonged ab­ sence of the father followed by his return, must have softened and endeared domestic relations to a notable degree; while in cases where he did not return, the family had acquired a new center of union—a family hero—whose memory would hallow the family bond. No doubt many a family received permanent uplift from the idealization of a lost member who would have been only a liability had he remained at home...The shock of war seems to have awakened American women from ladylike fu­ tility. ..the opening of remunerative occupations to women was another positive advance occasioned partly by the exigencies of the War.24

The effects of the Civil War on feminism combined with the new era of urban industrialization led to a new position for women and opened up endless occupational opportunities

22Calhoun, pp. 323-324.

2^Ibid., p. 325-

2^Ibid., pp. 359-360. 117 hitherto undreamt of. The large number of unmarried women after the blood bath of the War, too, created a labor source unparalleled in American history until the twentieth century.

Many, of course, chose to move into homes of sisters and brothers and become unpaid slaves; however, for the first time it was possible to live alone and earn one’s own way by some means other than prostitution, midwifery, or sewing.

The opportunities offered women were small compared with those in the twentieth century, but phenomenal compared with the previous half of the nineteenth century. One cannot imply that suddenly the women in America had un­ limited freedom. This would be grossly inaccurate and ex­ aggerated. in fact, it must be mentioned that the upper middle class woman and the middle class woman of the Gilded

Age suffered somewhat of a setback with the phenomenal in­ crease in material prosperity.

The urban woman, especially one of a reasonably afflu­ ent family, became a charming toy much as one sees in An Old-

Fashioned Girl and Rose in Bloom. Louisa May Alcott with some of her dreadful warning characters is pleading with the girl readers and mothers not to become this type of female nor to allow their daughters to degenerate into being mere decorations and sources of sexual fulfillment solely. It is interesting to note that with affluence, women in the 118

North move from the mother-wife role to that of decorative

ornament in the home much as the oligarchal wife-daughter

of the Southern planter had been. Wealth and increased

leisure time confers on the Northern woman what land, pos­

sessions, and leisure had conferred on the Southern girl.

Leisure seems to be the keynote here. When there is no

meaningful work or purpose for woman to fulfill, she be­

comes no more than a means of passing time and defeating

ennui.

When a man’s wife and his daughters are of no more value to him than any other valuable acquisition that can be kept for personal admiration or traded when in financial difficulties, then the entire fabric of the family struc­

ture is sadly warped. This, in turn, endangers the society

of which the family is a central unit. The "My Last Duchess" attitude towards marriage threatens all of society.

One might almost argue that the immigrant or poor- house and orphan girls who were employed to surfeity in the urban homes were almost as dependent on the Northern woman of wealth as the slaves of the South on their Southern families. This is, of course, only true to a point.

Louisa May Alcott with her own experiences of going into service knew exactly what kind of hell life could be for a serving girl. Fortunately for Louisa, she could always 119

go home to Mrs. Alcott and she did. Even though her un­

pleasant experiences with the minister where she worked

were probably emotionally very destructive and may have in

part, as previously suggested, been responsible for her

not getting married, Louisa May Alcott's personal exper­

iences with the 'master' of a wealthy home were mild com­

pared with what happened to serving girls all the time.

Some of this, based on Louisa's own personal experiences

and also on what her mother learned as a social worker in

Boston, is seen in Work and in An Old-Fashioned Girl.

Rose's and Uncle Alec's treatment of Phebe in Eight Cousins-

Rose in Bloom was an exception rather than the rule for the

treatment of young servant girls. Aunt Clara's shock at

Phebe's being virtually one of the family probably more

accurately reflects the world's general opinion of poor

orphan girls who come to work in a home. Few employers

of these girls would have been dismayed by their illiteracy,

their living conditions, and the waste of their potential.

They and the roaches worked in damp cellar kitchens, and with the rats, they lived in airless, unheated bedrooms.

Very few people wasted a thought on the 'girls.' Although the provision of the cabins and maternal care frequently expended on slaves may seem to mitigate their sufferings and allow for comparisons with hired help, one should never 120

allow oneself to forget the debilitating effects on whites

and blacks of owning and being owned.

The immigrant girls were often no more than flunkeys

and the dependent spinsters, drudges; however, they were

never legally chattel. There was sexual exploitation of

the poorer classes, but there was never the sexual exploi­

tation of the factory-girl and housegirl to the extent there had been in the South where whole second families were spawned, reared, and often sold before the eyes of the le­ gal wife as well as of the black concubine. The exercising of the droits de seigneur resulted in untold cruelty to the wives, both white and black, the demeaning of the value of human life, and a hideous demoralization of the sons of the next generation. Patriarchy in the South was shaken by the

War. The control seized and retained by the hard-working

Southern war wife and daughter paved the way for a matri­ archal control that was in part due to the South's failure to win the war and in part to necessity. Faulkner's novels often reveal the strong, authoritarian, even smothering mother-love and mother-control that exists in many Southern families still today. America simplistically often seems to function by taking cliches and slogans seriously. The

Protestant Work Ethic can be summed up in 'God helps those who help themselves.' The shift in the power structure of 121

the Southern family very aptly fits the old. saw, 'Neces­

sity is the mother of...’ The Southern lady was never so

close in spirit or in reality to the pioneer woman as when

she set out to save her home for her family and soldier-

husband. It seems somewhat silly that so much ink has been wasted in sentimental after-the-war stories in uniting the

North and South by marrying the pretty, helpless Southern girl to the big, rich Yankee who cleverly managed to res­ cue her brother and keep his fine, honest 'yeoman' soldiers from burning her house. That frail female was about as helpless as a mother bobcat. Unity perhaps could have been achieved by drawing the parallels between the real deter­ mination and hard work of the Southern woman and the settler's wife; there is more unity surely in showing the essential similarity among all American women than in the spun sugar romances of this ilk.

Since the novels of Louisa May Alcott are primarily

Northern, and essentially New England, in setting, there is no mention of the way of life of the family in the South or the position of the Southern woman. Although the pattern of family life as seen in the novels of Louisa May Alcott reflects the effects of the war on the dependency of women, the independent girls like Jo, Polly, and Christie who go 122

off to the city to earn their own livelihood, and the family

which as a unit has become mother-dominated rather than

father-dominated, the pattern is too not as far away from

the Southern family pattern after the Civil War as might

be presumed. The popular sentimental novels of writers like

Page praise the brave Southern flowers who in no way repre­

sent the reality of life for the Southern woman. The real

Southern woman was much closer to Marmee, Jo, and Meg.

The patriarchal world of Page is a dream-world that the

romantic Northern and Southern readers both have bought.

The women who domineered and controlled whether by illness,

nagging, fretting, or actual independence and financial

power, are present in the novels of Ellen Glasgow and

William Faulkner and reflect more closely the matriarchies

of the South than the candlelight, strong, silent authori­

tative men, magnolias, and devoted darkies of Page's world.

Louisa May Alcott's world, like Ellen Glasgow’s and Faulkner's, was basically an American matriarchy. The essential sim­ ilarities between the two sections of America can be seen in the family as in other areas.

It would be inaccurate to describe the shift from patriarchal authority to a mother-centered familial social order as primarily a Northern innovation. It is a phenome­ non seen in the South and West after the Civil War and unto 123

the present day. One has only to look at the frontier-

western novels like Kirkland's Zury, Garland's short

stories in Main Travelled Roads, and Cather's 0 Pioneers

and My Antonia. The new woman in Garland's Rose of

Dutcher's Coolly has the confidence and drive to be as

independent as Louisa May Alcott's Jo and Polly. The new woman was an American woman, not a representation of any particular section. The western and southern readers had no trouble identifying with Jo or Polly.

Important as the Civil War was in reshaping the power structure within the American family unit, it cannot begin to compare with the impact of the Industrial Revolution and its handmaiden technology on the American family. Yet again, important as industrialism and the technological developments were and are in American society, these must be seen in relationship to the resulting urban economy and what became an urban way of life. Once again it must be stressed that none of these forces are independent of each other. Like the interrelationship of history, sociology, and literature in any understanding and appreciation of the significance of the novels of Louisa May Alcott, it cannot be emphasized too strongly that the Civil War and its after- math, industrialism, technology, and urbanism was a phenomenal many-sided force on the American family and society. 124

Urbanism grew as the Industrial Revolution mechanized

America. The role of the mother as the central figure of authority, power, and affection in the family that had out of necessity been created during the Civil War seemed to be cemented firmly by the growth of the city and the impact of technology on the American society. Such a sweeping generalization is deceptive. It had its exceptions, es­ pecially in the upper class and lower class mothers. There was an increasing number of working wives in the lower class whom starvation forced a long way from the Marmee ideal.

A very high percentage of upper class wives were more in­ terested in the social whirl, spending money, and filling their gilded leisure time than in their homes and children.

Louisa May Alcott*s mothers became and remain a middle class standard.

Those writers who bemoaned the isolation of the rural farms in American fiction in the latter few decades of the nineteenth century showed that although isolation from others tended, of necessity, to draw the family closer to­ gether for companionship and support, such closeness did not necessarily create happy families who found great joy and comfort in each other. As American Realists have often pointed out, these families often had increased time together to irritate, anger, frustrate, and destroy each other. The 125

rural family still, if a relatively normal and peaceful one, was a more tightly-knit unit, by circumstances, than was even common or necessary for the city family. The

isolation of the farm which was geographic and ultimately surmountable by the automobile cannot compare with the emo­ tional and mental isolation of the city which is described by sociologists like Durkheim as alienation and anomie.

The authority and comfort of the family in the city was constantly undermined by the lack of corresponding authority in the other families with whom one’s children came in con­ tact, the faceless quality of living in the city, the tendency to be anonymous to such an extent that license rather than freedom seemed possible and went unrebuked by neighbors and the community in general, the necessity of the father’s working away from home, and the increasing necessity for the mother to work away from the home to sup­ plement the family income. The kitchen garden, family sewing and knitting, and putting up the fruit and vegetables from one's own orchard and garden were impossibilities for most people in the city. The extra necessities had to be earned by the mother and older brothers and sisters in the sweat shops. The burden of mothering fell to the eldest daughter at home; often their interests were elsewhere.

Some of the mothering fell on the public schools whose 126 interests stopped when the schoolbell for dismissal rang and to the municipally run organizations that failed to keep the children off the streets. As the quality of the mothers declined, the family unit corroded further. The slums and ghettos sucked into their maw those who were un­ able to get out of them and spawned even uglier neighbor­ hoods where neither father nor mother held control and where the municipal police were afraid or bribed. Oppor­ tunities for wickedness flourished like the green bay tree in the cities of the Gilded Age. Louisa May Alcott knew personally of such urban poverty from her mother's own ex­ periences as a social worker in Boston. She knew, too, what a good mother could do for her children in their develop­ ment and formation. With this background one might assume that more of Louisa May Alcott's writings would deal with the impact of the city on families of all classes. In­ terestingly enough, only a few of Louisa May Alcott's short stories deal with the poverty, misery, and deterioration of the American family in the slums of the city, e.g., "A Hole in the Wall," "Ivy Spray and Ladies' Slippers," "Tessa's

Surprises," and the poignant stories about Red Cap, a Civil

War veteran from Maine, who wounded and ill finishes out his life in Boston. Immigration with all of its attendant problems does not seem to have interested Louisa May Alcott 127

greatly, yet she must have heard her mother speak about the

plight of the New Americans. The only level of city life

about which Louisa May Alcott wrote extensively is the up­

per middle class of comfort, prosperity, and plenty. Even

her stories about the independent middle class girl working

in the city are not concerned with lower class life to any great degree.

It is significant that Louisa May Alcott with the ex­

ception of Work and An Old-Fashioned Girl did not lay her novels in the city. All of the other novels have small­

town or village-rural settings. One can perhaps infer that

Louisa May Alcott felt that the city was not a good place

to rear children. In her major city novel, An Old-Fashioned

Girl, when the child Polly arrives in Boston to visit the

Shaws, she has had the proper and decent homelife necessary to form and mold a fine human being. The polite society of the city which dictates to Mrs. Shaw and her daughters has destroyed Mrs. Shaw's values and has stifled any finer impulses within her daughters, Fanny and Maud. What the city did to the American family of the lower and lower-middle classes is seen in novels like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle,

Stephen Crane's Maggi^A Girl of the Streets, and in the twentieth century in James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan.

Work, too, has many city scenes. Christie faces starvation 128

and perhaps even death from illness and having no friends

to help nurse her. Louisa May Alcott’s sentimentalism in

Work prevents any really dreadful and shocking things from

happening to Christie. For the most part An Old-Fashioned

Girl shows how destructive the city is to the upper-middle

and middle class families. Mrs. Shaw does not die from

starvation nor see her daughter reduced to prostitution;

however, her spirit is dead from social stultification.

She would be willing to see her daughter married to anyone

'acceptable' socially and financially, which is not a great

deal different from contract prostitution. The society

matron has ceased to be a mother and a person in her own

right. She and her daughters are rich men's legitimate

amusements. The American family of the latter half of

the nineteenth century was threatened by dissolution from

all sides. Poverty and need drove the mothers of the lower

class families from the home. The authoritarian figure of

papa in the old country or back on the farm had lost ground

and been supplanted by the mother after the Civil War.

Unfortunately poverty and urban problems contributed heavily

to the mother's increasing loss of her authority. The upper middle class families, too, had lost both the mother and

father figures of authority to the twin gods of financial 129

and social success. Only the middle class family attempted

to remain steady in the midst of flux, chaos, and confusion.

The change in the American family and in the role of

the American wife and mother did not then and does not

now entirely square with the ideal American wife-mother

image and the myths that center around the American family

and the American way of life. Possibly the most commonly

accepted myth about Americans and the American way of life

is that of the American farmer as the backbone of America

and its corollary that the rural American has virtues that

cannot be excelled by the poor urban wretch who by the

very fact of his being reared in the city is tainted and

slightly decadent no matter how innocent and virtuous he

might wish to be. This idealization of rural life that

extends, by the way, to encompass small town life and its

modern extension, the suburb* is part and parcel of the agar-

arian myth that is in turn inextricably bound with such

American myths and cliches as any hard-working poor boy can

make good, the virtue attached to rising from log cabin to president of anything be it small insurance company or the

White House, and the Americanization of the Cincinnatus

story that glorifies military heroes to the extent that

they often get elected president of the United States.

Goodness is equated with innocence achieved via isolation, 130

equality via hard work, clean living, and the inspiration

of living next to God in the great outdoors, and decency

that comes from living with unembarrassed, mute animals,

not a myriad of human beings packed into a small area.

How this agararian myth and its tangents are bound

together in American literature is the burden of Lee Marx's

The Machine in the Garden. Although an interesting and

well-written book on the whole, there is a definite bias

in Marx's work that effectively eliminated considering the

American family and specifically the American woman. Paral­ lel to this is Lewis's The American Adam; that, too, is man-centered, with little or no mention of American women either in the context of American society, myth, or liter­ ature. Assuming that the exigencies of time, space, and print have limited these authors, it is of some value to point out that the ideal American woman has a definite place in the agrarian myth and the pastoral form that has developed into the American novel with its double strain of Realism and Romanticism. Throughout the American novel there appears with regularity an Eve-Mary figure with either an accompany­ ing Martha character or frequently a Martha side to this female character. The ideal American woman bears a tangled, double role of being a Romantic-Sentimental figure with the sex appeal and companionate qualities of Greece's prostitutes 131

coupled with attempting, too, to be the ideal wife of

Proverbs. The ideal Kinder-Kuchen-Kirke wife-mother runs throughout all of Louisa May Alcott’s novels. American religious fundamentalism that is so central to grasping an understanding of the small-town-rural American person­ ality and that is pervasive in the ’small-town* mentality of the suburban American whether in Los Angeles, Cheyenne, or New Orleans is a major force in maintaining and con­ tinuing this ’ideal’ American woman.

The agrarian myth finds its natural outgrowth in the small town myth just as the romantic American woman myth is a combination of Mary and Martha, hard-working, beau­ tiful, and laden with sex-appeal while naturally chaste and almost boyish in vitality and youth. This unbeatable combination seems as timelessly appealing as the utopian rural-small town ideals. The American Eve seems designed expressly for the American garden. The machine that Marx sees as changing the fabric of the literary myths of Amer­ ica has been just as active in changing the role and func­ tions of the American wife and mother. Ogburn and Nimkoff stress that the wife-mother after the 18?0s is not chosen for her dowry, housekeeping skills, and domestic abilities but for her companionable qualities and sex appeal. One suspects that the American wife-mother may have been chosen 132

even earlier for reasons other than what would be equiva­

lent today of a degree in home economics. John Alden’s

fascination with Priscilla's spinning surely is not en­

tirely an interest in being well-dressed once he marries

her. Still with the emphasis on love in marriage rather

than procreation, smaller families, the increasing ease

of obtaining a divorce, and the social acceptance of what

is essentially serial monogamy, indestructible families

with authoritarian fathers and housebound mothers whose

job is caring for their husbands, homes, and providing

heirs and workers become a thing of the past and part of

the American myth of yesterday, thus acquiring a nostalgic

glow and distortion. "With the decline of the economic

functions, a wife is selected more on the basis of her

personality, her companionability, and her qualifications

as a mother. It follows that in appraising a personality

for a companionable wife, the factor of sex is important

since mating is a highly important function of marriage...

Thus the romantic factor in marriage has become increasingly

important, in part merely because of the decrease of the 25 economic factor."

Romantic factors seem to be strongest in technological­

ly advanced countries rather than in agrarian and more

2^William Fielding Ogburn and M.F. Nimkoff, Technology and the Changing Family (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin^ 1955)» p. 52. 133 primitive countries.28 The change in the role of the woman in the family seems thus directly related to the develop­ ment of machines that replace female jobs. The labor- saving devices that increasingly changed the home itself resulted in a technologically unemployed housewife. The role of wife and mother had previous to the new machines that began in the 1870s and certainly are omnipresent in the twentieth century changed the woman from housewife, manager, and domestic expert to the woman as companion and sex object rather than child-producer. Ogburn and Nimkoff emphasize that the lessening of the economic demands placed on the woman as laborer in the home contributed to the woman's new role as companion, sex object, or laborer out­ side the home. Consequently, a more romantic view of women became possible or imperative after there was little eco­ nomic-contract need for the female.27 Ogburn and Nimkoff go further and say "Thus the recent decline in the valua­ tion of the economic functions of women in the family is traceable to the technological developments that led to factories and railroads...The city was the locale of the technological changes and the loss of functions of the family as a producing unit is therefore especially marked . ... „28 in cities." 280gburn and Nimkoff, p. 53« 27Ibid., p. 46. 28Ibid., p. 47. 134

The machine provided the American wife-mother with

mechanical maids who neither slumbered nor slept yet who

never chatted nor identified with the family and its pro­

blems and left the wife-mother curiously alone, unneeded,

and unappreciated. Having provided the means of accomplish­ ing the drudgery of housework easily and having quickly opened new jobs away from the house, technological advances tempted the wife-mother into getting away from the house for large portions of every day. Families became smaller as unmarried sisters, daughters, cousins, and widowed mothers and aunts moved away from the home into small apart­ ments entirely separate from any father-brother-son control.

The machine created new jobs and voraciously demanded in­ creased labor. The demand was met by men and women alike.

Freed from the tyranny of the home chores, women over the past one hundred years abandoned many of the demands placed on them, thus freeing them to rush into the control of the mechanized industrial world rather than the generally more easily manipulated control of the husband-father.

The problems that the family faced in the 1870s, and even today, surely have long roots that can be seen in the colonial and frontier families but that were kept under control by the ruthless exigencies of nature and the sheer cooperative effort necessary for survival. The fact that 135

there was so much frontier available in America combined

with the agrarian economy to hold in check for a long while

the fragmentation of the American family.

One cannot underestimate the importance of urbanism

on the change in family life, size, or style nor the impact

of the Civil War on the American family; however, there

have been cities since Ur and wars since the beginning of

recorded time. The catalyst in the change here was the machine. Technology provided new opportunities and horizons

for the American woman at a time when the American male had voluntarily reduced his authority over her and her position in the home. The prestige of being a noted homemaker and mother suffered in comparison with being a humble secretary; after all there is no pay attached to being a wife and mother. In a money economy like the American society, doing something for nothing or for only abstract reasons seems suspect to many. Adam’s success-oriented goals and money ideals only naturally filtered down to Eve and in­ fluenced her thinking and decisions. It seems no coincidence that Cain is turning out the way he is. The machine pro­ vided work, pay, and opportunity for the male and female adult Americans, but it neglected to provide work for the children. Instead it lengthened childhood and provided

American society with a subculture of immature, artificially 136 supported parasites who without meaningful work and pur­ pose have created problems for society that surpass in venom that mechanical snake in the mythic New Paradise.

In spite of the realities of American society, old ideals still persist, are taught, and color all the aspects of

American civilization. American middle-class Eves are still struggling to keep the family alive and functioning, and they are succeeding to a large extent. Certainly

American novels like those of Louisa May Alcott have been a great conservative bulwark in retaining those myths and as society changes irrevocably, in slowly amending the myths to retain the supports of society. CHAPTER III

No understanding of the formative impact of the novels of Louisa May Alcott on the changing American family is complete without looking closely at the individual novels and how they reflect one or several aspects of the functions of the family in society. The jobs that the family per­ forms for the society are many and important. "There is a family culture which takes the form of a pattern con­ sisting of the ways of doing and thinking that cluster around the family and sex aspects of group life. This family culture pattern includes courtship and marriage pro­ cedures, sex mores, husband-wife relationships, status of men and women, parent-child relationships, family routines and rituals, sex obligations in marriage, child-rearing practices, attitudes toward education, responsibility toward aging parents, norms of personal conduct, forms of intimate behavior, divorce,..."1 Many of Louisa May Alcott's suggestions that seemed little short of revolutionary are now commonplace procedures in education and child-rearing practices, especially for girls and women. Although literary purists may see as a disaster the didactic tone that does not stop at preaching to her readers, this

1Brossard and Boll, p. 15 • 138 preaching is invaluable for an investigation of the changes

in American society and the American family. One can easily

identify her beliefs and theories as well as her portrayal of the theories and attitudes of the times. She was essen­ tially a conservative. One may safely say that the basic attitude of Miss Alcott is one of preserving and safeguarding the family as a unit from the changes and corruption of the society of the latter half of the nineteenth century that endangered the family structure within the very fabric of

American society. The changes and suggestions, however, that Miss Alcott proposes through the medium of her fiction seemed to many at that time revolutionary and totally un­ practical and unrealistic, especially given the female's general lack of intelligence and cleverness except for catching a husband and catering to his and his sons' crea­ ture comforts. Louisa May Alcott was indeed a very conser­ vative revolutionary, suggesting revolutionary measures for the essentially conservative concern of preserving and safe­ guarding the family. She always stresses that women, too, are human beings with certain needs such as love, affection, education, and opportunities to develop as an individual with particular talents and abilities. Louisa May Alcott felt that women were as much real people as men. She emphasized always that the family unit is essential to maintaining a decent, 139

democratic society. The families of the United States

shaped the future citizens of their democracy and thus

should be treated seriously as an integral part of society

and as the first and chief educative factor in these citi­

zens’ lives.

Always at the helm of the family was the mother. Miss

Alcott emphasized that the quality of the family as a struc­

ture depends on the quality of the mother. All of the middle class virtues were essential to a fine mother as

well as the Christian virtues of love and patience. Marmee was Louisa May Alcott*s St. Paul. Like her father, Louisa

Alcott feels that education should fit the person and his

individual personality and prepare him to live a whole,

independent life, especially girls.

At no time is it ever suggested or hinted that the job of being mother and running a family is in any way inferior to any other job crucial to the maintenance of society.

Miss Alcott feels that a woman should be honored to be a wife and mother. To her there would be no embarrassment in putting down on any form ’occupation: housewife.' The modern need to call oneself a 'domestic engineer' is a piece of folly that disregards the truth that the woman's job at home can be one of the most essential to the maintainance of society and its ideals. Marmee is a professional. She 140

is educated by experience and her training from her own mother. Her deep sense of personal commitment fits her for the job as much as any doctor who takes the Hippo­ cratic oath seriously. Without mothers like Marmee,

American families risk decay and corruption. Once the

American family collapses, the fabric of American demo­ cracy is threatened, perhaps even weakened to such a degree that the destruction of the American way of life is to be expected.

This is a far cry from the sentimental descriptions of the woman’s place in the Gilded Age society as seen in the writing of the women scribblers of Alcott’s period.

These novels describe women as decorative additions to houses and parasites. Frances Hodgson Burnett's women are typical of this characterization of women. Louisa May

Alcott also differs widely from these run-of-the-mill women writers of aspirinated fiction who help fill in the escape- leisure time of the Mrs. Shaw's of the period by her sug­ gesting that if one did not choose to be a wife and mother, there are many useful and worthwhile careers possible for women. This is indeed revolutionary in the 1870s and 1880s.

There is the implication in her works that to be an inade­ quate, even an undedicated, wife and mother is to denigrate the vocation of motherhood. It is much better to choose 141

to be a good social worker, nurse, teacher, or secretary

and find fulfillment and contentment in this fashion than

to risk ruining human lives. As Louisa May Alcott always preaches, individual human beings have individual needs.

If satisfaction and joy are met in Kinder-Kuchen-Kirke roles, well and good; but if the wife and mother does not dedicate herself with much the same zealousness and whole-heartedness of the crusading knight, then the husband and children suffer to the extent that the woman has perpetrated on them a selfish and wicked act that denies them the develop­ ment and growth possible with the right kind of wife and mother. Louisa May Alcott describes such selfish women in

Mrs. Shaw in An Old-Fashioned Girl and Aunt Clara in Eight

Cousins-Rose in Bloom. With Louisa Alcott's mothers, there must be a sacred commitment to one's family or the mother is the stumbling block for the family, hence society.

Alcott's novels abound in women who have failed as mothers and wives and who are no better than parasites or, at best, expensive, attractive, but useless pieces of furniture.

Frequently, they are hindrances to their families and are her true villains.

Certainly one of the major reasons for marriage is, and has always been, the procreation of children. It is, therefore, understandable that one of the chief jobs of the 142

wife is being a mother. Her occupation as mother is con­

cerned with the rearing of her children. One surely can­

not propose that the Little Women series, the Eight Cousins-

Rose in Bloom novels, and An Old-Fashioned Girl comprise a

handy little survey of child care such as the modern Dr.

Spock with his advice on how and what to feed the baby and

growing child and how to spot and treat childhood illnesses.

Nor should one suggest it is an Ilg-Ames Child Behavior that

treats the various 'normal' stages of childhood. Within the

plots of Louisa May Alcott's novels and short stories are,

however, suggestions, hints, and often downright instruc­

tions on the various aspects of child-rearing and family

life: discipline, family and social behavior, divorce,

education, and ethical and moral behavior.

The goal of every parent should be to help his child

to become a mature, self-sufficient, and self-fulfilling

adult who is capable of living successfully in the adult world without giving way to despair, selfishness, or vio­ lence to attain his own desires. To become mature, every child must learn self-discipline, how to take pride in him­ self, how to work, how to endure boredom and drudgery, how to share himself and his possessions, and how to love others

These aims are not easily achieved and require sacrifice, love, effort, and self-discipline on the part of the parents, 143

Marmee, Aunt Jessie, and Uncle Alec stand as reminders that parents must be self-confident, mature human beings, too, before attempting to rear children.

Very little is said explicitly about discipline or the father's influence in any of the novels of Alcott.

What is preached is that each child must learn self-disci­ pline. "Boys at other schools probably learned more from books, but less of that better wisdom which makes good men. Latin, Greek, and mathematics were all very well, but in Professor Bhaer's opinion self-knowledge, self-help, and self-control were more important and he tried to teach them carefully." All of the girls in Little Women are too old for spankings or for sitting in the corner, but they have not outgrown many of their childish faults. Jo has a terrible temper, gets wildly out of sorts, and says unkind and hurtful things. Jo is a very generous-spirited human being who cheerfully will apologize for hurting someone else's feelings. Jo's good nature helps greatly with Marmee's attempts at helping Jo to learn self-control. Jo's person­ ality and the love and respect she feels for Marmee's judgment help greatly in Jo's learning to accept a curb on her tongue and actions. This love and trust that Jo exhibits

2Louisa May Alcott, Little Men, p. 28. 144

is directly the result of the phenomenal love and trust

that Marmee has always given her girls. Marmee’s not

always being successful the first or the second or the ump­

teenth time, of course, contributes to the realism of the

novel. Jo is always speaking before she thinks; however,

in true maternal fashion, Marmee goes on trying to help

Jo overcome this fault. One of the ways that Marmee re­ minds Jo of her failing without antagonizing her is through the family mailbox and letter set-up. Once a week Marmee writes little notes to her girls. These are full of en­ couragement as well as gentle, but firm, criticism.

Twentieth century child psychologists say that it is less difficult for a child to accept a prosaic, written, realistic account of a problem than the usual curtain lectures that parents seem to have fondness for giving their erring young. Louisa May Alcott did not need to read Ginott to know the value of the written word as a disciplinary device and a means for letting off emotional steam safely. Like the Alcott girls with their mailboxes and journals, the

Marches keep journals also. Ingrained in them early is this character-building habit of self-scrutiny and self­ interrogation that is so much a part of keeping a meaningful journal. Like evening prayers, one reviews the good and bad, the successes and failures of the day that one has 145

just survived. Written down, the problems of the day lose much of their emotional charge, and quite often it is easier to see ways of coping with them that one cannot when one’s mind is running wildly and emotionally. There is sanity and reasonableness about Marmee*s love that keeps her family on an even keel.

All of Louisa May Alcott's 'good* parents listen creatively; they seem to speak Ginott’s 'childrenese' intuitively. "Sympathy is a sweet thing, and it worked wonders here, for each boy knew that Father Bhaer was interested in him, and some were readier to open their hearts to him than to a woman, especially the older ones, who liked to talk over their hopes and plans, man to man.

When sick or in trouble they instinctively turned to Mrs.

Jo, while the little ones made her their mother confessor on all occasions."8 Marmee never tries to impose her will on her daughters just ’because I said so.’ It is tribute to Marmee and later to Aunt Jo that the children do not hesitate to tell her the worst things that have happened.

Marmee seems always to know what has happened and smooths out the embarrassment of telling it. The scene where Marmee and Jo discuss Jo’s affection for Laurie is a good example.

Jo has told Marmee that she refused to marry Laurie because

8Louisa May Alcott, Little Men, p. 42. 146

she does not love him as a woman should love her husband.

Marmee helps Jo accept her own decision and see its wisdom

that a hasty marriage is no cure-all for loneliness. It is cleverly handled with consummate tact on Marmee‘s part.

There is a lovely acknowledgement on Marmee's part that Jo has a real problem and that it is worthy of consideration.

At no time is Jo made to feel foolish, stupid, or wicked;

Marmee helps Jo see that her feelings are normal and natural, and that a marriage between Jo and Laurie would not be truly wise. Jo's first decision was the right one.

Marmee sensibly helps Jo get her mind from herself by sending her to Boston to start out on her writing career.

Leaving the nest is just as much a part of growing up as learning to say 'thank you' and 'please.' Marmee wisely sends Jo off to complete this part of her education at what was an otherwise low point in her youth.

The very word 'discipline' conjures up in the mind of any child and of most adults the bogey of corporal punish­ ment. The latter half of the nineteenth century was still addicted to the axiom of 'Spare the rod and spoil the child.'

The Puritan methods of child discipline had only been diluted slightly by the intervening years between the forming of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the last decades of the nineteenth century. "Parents, teachers, and ministers 147 chanted in solemn and unceasing chorus, 'Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child,' and they believed the only cure for that foolishness lay in stern repression and sharp correction—above all the rod. They found abundant support in this belief in the Bible, their con- 4 stant guide." Louisa May Alcott grew up, too, in a world where children were spanked for misdemeanors and dis­ obedience, lashed with a belt, razor strap, or even horse­ whipped for mistakes, errors in judgment, and downright wickedness. Although the immediate world of the Alcott family did not include such harsh disciplinarians (who seem commonplace and ordinary in Mark Twain's works),

Louisa knew of their existence. There was an increasing movement by the latter decades of the nineteenth century, albeit a slow one, to view children less as miniature adults and appendages of their adult family and more as unformed, but individual human beings, with needs, feelings, and goals that required love, tact, and understanding.

Perhaps the ferment of democracy contributed to this freer view of children and young people as creatures of human dignity and value.

^Alice Morse Earle, Child Life in Colonial Days (New York: Macmillan Co., 1922), p. 191. 148

There was, too, during the nineteenth century a grow­

ing vocal and obvious portion of the population who felt

that their children could be improved upon in no way.

These are the parents whose spoiled and demanding children

seem to have been noticed so often by visiting Europeans.

"Obviously, somewhere between Andrew Jackson and Cotton

Mather, American notions of child rearing had changed

drastically. American children were now readily distin­

guishable from their cousins in the Old World—being as

different, some foreign observers might have said, as poison

ivy from English ivy."-’ Parents in America had begun to

question the authoritarian child-rearing patterns of the

early American settlers and had begun to encourage, at

best, self-reliance and resourcefulness in their children.

At worst, there was a sort of gross overindulgence.

Children were a valuable commodity in the New World; like all valuable items, they were treated accordingly.

"Some began to wonder whether the old ideas of ruling children by the rod might not be as unfair as King George's tea tax. Perhaps a child was something more than a pint- sized and unprincipled adult. Perhaps he was not even

-qviary Cable, Wendy Buehr, et al, American Manners and Morals (New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc 1964), p. 145. 149 born bad. Perhaps he might be better helped by kindly guidance than by a trip to the woodshed."8 Louisa May

Alcott subscribed to this way of thinking as long as it did not become foolish and muddled thinking that allowed the child all privileges without any regard for conse­ quences or character. She emphasized repeatedly that parents are to a large extent responsible for the way children turn out, thus reflecting a trend that in the twentieth century would sweep American child psychology and practice in child-rearing.

The argument 'to spank or not to spank' is a pheno­ menon of the twentieth century. Considerably ahead of her times, Miss Alcott advocated her father's rule of no spanking.

'Did your mother ever whip you?' asked Nan curiously. 'She never whipped me but once, and then she begged my pardon, or I don't think I ever should have forgiven her, it hurt my feelings so much.' 'Why did she beg your pardon?--my father don! t. ' 'Because when she had done it, I turned round and said, Well, you are mad yourself, and ought to be whipped as much as me. She looked at me a minute, then her anger all died out, and she said as if ashamed, You are right, Jo, I am angry; and why should I punish you for being in a passion when I set you such a bad example? Forgive me, dear, and let us try to help one another in a better way. I never forgot it, and it did me more good than a dozen rods.'7 8Ibid, p. 146. ^Louisa May Alcott, Little Men, pp. 211-212. 150

Rarely in Alcott's novels is a child spanked, beaten or

whipped by 'good.' parents. Their patience is admirable,

even if just a shade incredible, at times. The children

respond to love, trust, reasonable limits, and rules with

obedience, consideration for others, and pleasant social

behavior. Fortunately for the realism of Louisa May Alcott's

novels, these marvelous children respond with wilful dis­

obedience and light-hearted mischieviousness often enough

to prevent them from becoming unreal, cardboard doll

characters.

Poor little Nat in Little Men and later in Jo's Boys

lies to himself about himself and to others to save his

skin, to protect himself from any mess he has gotten in,

and generally has a weak character. In Little Men, after

he has lied repeatedly, been remonstrated with and reasoned with repeatedly, Papa Bhaer resorts to an old trick of Mr.

Alcott from his Temple School days to help cure Nat of his bad habit of lying. Nat has to strike Papa Bhaer with the ruler for Nat's lying. The idea is, of course, Nat so loves

Papa Bhaer that striking him is so terrible that Nat will never lie again because he cannot bear to strike Papa

Bhaer. Fortunately, Nat does love Papa Bhaer so much that this does stop him from lying. Nat always has to lean on someone stronger for support: Papa Bhaer in his childhood 151 and Daisy in his manhood. Louisa May Alcott, of course, had seen this type of punishment work at Temple School and with her sisters and the Pratt boys; however, this would be an impractical means of discipline where there was no underlying core of love, respect, and trust. In spite of

Bronson Alcott’s personal results with his children and pupils, this kind of discipline carries with it the frighten­ ing spectre of masochism for the teacher and confusion for the child in a world turned more upside down than Alice's.

Even the most permissive of modern child psychologists feel that most children, unable yet to cope with the chaos and change of the adult world, function best in a secure, stratified situation where the authority rests with the parents.

Probably the best method of discipline that Louisa

May Alcott advocates is allowing the child to live with the consequences. Aunt Jo and Marmee quite often state what the consequences of certain actions may well be. When the child persists in an act he knows is wrong or foolish, the child is disciplined by merely letting him or her live with the results. Nat, when he goes to Europe to study the violin, gets in with a fast, expensive crowd. After living briefly a life of lies, he runs out of money and is forced to come down to playing in a theatre orchestra and taking 152

day pupils to pay for his rooms, food, and lessons.

Having to cope with the consequences of his own actions,

completely on his own, miles from anyone, helps Nat grow

up considerably. One of the most striking examples of

this type of discipline is Dan. Dan will not try to fit

into the Bhaers' way of life and follow the family's rules

that are for everyone's moral and physical safety. Re­

peatedly Papa Bhaer warns him that he endangers the others

in the family-school and that he will have to go somewhere

else unless he mends his ways. Finally, after teaching

the boys to play poker, drink, and smoke cigars, Dan al­

most burns the house down from one of these clandestine

evening-after-bed-adventures. Papa Bhaer sends him away

to a farmer who needs another boy to help on the farm.

"I think Tommy is punished enough, and that sear on his arm

will remind him for a long time to let these things alone.

Nat's fright will do for him, for he is really sorry and does try to obey me. But you, Dan, have been many times forgiven and yet it does no good. I cannot have my boys hurt by your bad example, nor my time wasted in talking to deaf ears, so you can say good-bye to them all, and tell O Nursey to put up your things in my little black bag."

8Louisa May Alcott, Little Men, p. 110. 153

Ultimately, Dan comes back; but when he does, he has

learned from the results of his actions. Papa Bhaer and

Aunt Jo never make empty threats. It is hard in Little

Men not to think sentimentally and dislike Papa Bhaer for

sending Dan away. Dan has so many important virtues like

truthfulness, bravery, loyalty to friends, and love of

children and animals that it is hard to appreciate how

dreadful his other excesses are and how truly hideous the

results of them might have been. At the age of 10, Dan

learns a much-needed lesson in self-discipline and consider­

ation for others by his banishment. The Austrian psycho­

logist, Rudolph Dreikers, preaches repeatedly 'let your child learn by living with the consequences of his actions.'

He is revolutionary only to those who have not read Louisa

May Alcott.

Another of the most important ways the boys at Plumsted and in Jack and Jill learn is by the disapproval or ap­ proval of their peers. Fortunately for Plumsted and the village in Jack and Jill, the big boys like Franz, Emil, and Demi have standards and values of which any mother could be proud and set an example that the little ones try very hard to emulate. The very fine older boys and girls in the village in Jack and Jill shape the actions 154

of the others by their own actions. Louisa May Alcott

only shows the truth of knowing who the child's hero is as

the key to the child himself. Aunt Jo provided live heroes

for her waifs. Franz was a model for all the younger boys

with his "gentle manners, love of children, respect for g women, old and young, and helpful ways about the house."'

Frank in Jack and Jill, too, was an example for his younger

brother Jack. "Mrs. Minot often called Frank the 'father-

boy,' because he was the head of the house, and a sober, reliable fellow for his years...He domineered over Jack and laughed at his affectionate little ways, but now when trouble came, he was as kind and patient as a girl.."10

Everyone in Jack and Jill is influenced by Ed Devlin; his death is as much a blow as Beth's in Little Women. Essen­ tially a realist, Louisa May Alcott cannot allow her splendid heroes to be the mere results of heredity or chance. When describing Demi in Little Men, she has an honest conversa­ tion between Dan and Aunt Jo to serve as explication.

'What a good boy he is!' said Dan, carefully settling the first butterfly and remembering that Demi had given up his walk to bring it to him.

^Louisa May Alcott, Little Men, p. 19.

10Louisa May Alcott, Jack and Jill (Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing Co., 1948), pp. 275-275« 155

'He ought to he, for a great deal has been done to make him so.' 'He's had folks to tell him things, and to help him; I haven't,' said Dan, with a sigh, thinking of his neglected childhood, a thing he seldom did, and feeling as if he had not had fair play somehow.il

' Almost as important in understanding how to discipline a child are the examples of children who were not disci­ plined properly and who have had to grow up in a haphazard fashion without rules or guidelines. Poor Fanny, Maud and Tom Shaw receive discipline and instruction only spora­ dically from their father and ineffectually from their grandmother because she lacks the authority in the Shaw home to go through with her threats. Mrs. Shaw does no disciplining except whining and scolding when life does not turn out as she fancies. Mrs. Shaw cannot accept that life is not a fairy tale in which she is supposed to be the queen. Fanny and Maud are as frightfully spoiled in An Old-

Fashioned Girl as poor silly little Annabel Bliss in Eight

Cousins-Rose in Bloom and for much the same reason; their parents give their children too many "things" and not enough love and attention. Tom Shaw and Prince Charlie are both only sons of doting mothers who foolishly try to buy their love and give in to every whim while excusing the consequences of their mistakes. Charlie dies in a carriage accident

^Louisa May Alcott, Little Men, p. 172. 156

because he does not have the personal courage to say 'No'

to the last one for the road. Charlie never grows any

inner strength because all his life he has escaped the con­ sequences of his actions through the machinations of his overly indulgent mother. Poverty is the scourge that re­ fines and saves the Shaws. Only poverty and responsibility can demand the self-discipline that makes a man of Tom.

Fortunately, he is a strong enough individual to gird up his loins and go out into the world of Western business to do battle, rather than take to drink like Charlie or to his bed, a sodden mass of misery and reproach, like his mother, Mrs. Shaw.

Poor Jack allows himself to be coaxed by Jill into that foolish sledride that ends in an injured back for

Jill and a broken leg for Jack. Fortunately, both Jack and Jill have the kind of mother who helps them accept their mistakes and teaches them to build on them rather than give way to misery, reproaches of others, and cir­ cumstances. Alcott's "good" mothers insist that the way children face and cope with mistakes and trials determines what kind of character the children will develop. There is a fine tinge of Puritanism in this trial-by-fire and pur­ ification-by-misfortune strain in the works of Louisa May

Alcott. Once again the autobiographical elements within 157

a work overlap and reinforce other aspects and interpre­

tations .

The words discipline and punishment are certainly not synonymous, just as punishment is not synonymous with spanking. If anyone is going to learn from any discipli­ nary lesson, then there must be some sort of punishment, whether it is living with the results of one's actions-- which is often called by angry mothers in those famous curtain lectures--as 'learning the hard way' or by spe­ cial acts of penance.

Miss Alcott anticipated the spate of twentieth-century child psychologists whose yearly books on how to bring up children and parents advocate that the punishment should fit the crime. It is astonishing that this idea should be presented regularly as new and startling, since the cliche* was old when Louisa May Alcott incorporated her common- sense notions on child-rearing into her novels. Alcott never suggests that there is any value in the then-popular punishment of writing out 100 times 'I will not do this again' as poor Jack had to do. She feels that if one breaks windows, then one should have to work to pay to put in the new pane. When Nan ran off and got lost with baby Teddy, her punishment was the same as Jo had had meted to her when years before she had run off without permission. "'What 158 did your mother do to you when you ran away that time?'"

•She tied me up to the bedpost with a long string, so that

I could not go out of the room, and there I stayed all day with the little worn-out shoes hanging up before me to re­ mind me of my fault'Do you think my mother's cure for running away a good one?' 'Yes, ma'am'...Nan looked up with such an earnest little face that Mrs. Jo felt satis­ fied, and said no more, for she liked to have her penalties do their own work and did not spoil the effect by too much moralizing." That particular fitting of the punishment to the crime always seems as extreme as sending Dan away; however, the reader must remind himself not to be senti­ mental. A better example of fitting the punishment to the crime is where Jack, a sharp little trader, has sold his belongings very dear and has even stolen some for further trade purposes. He and Papa Bhaer discuss the solution to how he can face the boys once the truth is known. How can he make amends? At first Jack is willing to sell all his things cheaply to show the boys his good intentions. Papa Bhaer suggests, however, '"I think it would be better to give them away, and begin on a new

12Louisa May Alcott, Little Men, pp. 213-216. 159

foundation.' ...It was hard, hut Jack consented, for he

really felt that cheating didn't pay and wanted to win

hack the friendship of the boys. His heart clung to his possessions...Asking pardon publicly was easy compared with this."1-^

Quite often Louisa May Alcott has her parents giving the naughty children a good deed to do to atone for the bad one. These good deeds seem more profitable in charac­ ter-building than perfunctory apologies. There is a delightful example in Little Men where the girls give a party for the boys. The tea party went well at first, but the children got restless and wild and soon the party became a free-for-all, with the boys leading by tormenting the girls verbally and pelting them with the cookies that the girls had so lovingly and carefully made. Aunt Jo stepped in and stopped the riot, but she insisted "No more balls for these boys till they have atoned for 14 this bad behavior by doing something kind to you,"

The boys' treat after much talk and preparation is a kite­ flying party. Although Little Men is laden with tedious

^Louisa May Alcott, Little Men, p. 273«

^Ibid., p. 146. 160 advice and considerable preaching, delightfully realistic

scenes like "Daisy's Ball" redeem the book considerably, rescuing it at least, from the Pollyanna or Five Little

Peppers level.

A sensible attitude toward child discipline includes a knowledge of deterrents to bad deed and problem situa­ tions. Although this can be a time-consuming, worrisome, fretting sort of everyday challenge to parents, there are some suggestions worth reviewing in the novels of Louisa

May Alcott. The old birds-of-a-feather thinking is there in Alcott's emphasis that bad companions should be avoided or neutralized with decent friends and heroes if possible.

Sensible rules that do not expect more than is humanly possible of children and young people allow the parent to avoid boxing himself in by decisions that he has made in a moment of fury and does not later know how to get out of. The old Yankee antidote of hard work as a meaning­ ful and worthwhile way of filling so much of the child's time that he does not have an opportunity for getting into serious trouble is central to Louisa May Alcott's preven­ tative measures. While Dan is taming the colt, he learns to tame himself. When Aunt Jo gives Dan the responsibility of taking the horse and cart into the market for the week's 161 supplies, she is allowing him to mature through judicious choice of responsibility. It makes modern parents yearn for a wood pile to be cut and stacked. Somehow just carrying out the trash does not have the anger-quelling and responsibility-satisfying qualities of attacking the wood pile.

Marvelously, Alcott's fictional parents do not berate themselves when they make mistakes nor excuse their child­ ren’s errors by blaming themselves. When things go awry, these ’good’ parents are superbly confident in their judgment and in their role as authority. There is no anarchy in the ’good* homes. Papa may have been reduced to a fig­ urehead position, but Mama and God are still firmly en­ trenched. There is none of the masochistic, self-flagella­ tion by Louisa May Alcott’s parents that can be presently heard during any coffee hour of a twentieth century PTA.

Ultimately, Miss Alcott is insisting in relation to dis­ cipline that there is no substitute for honest praise and appreciation of what the child has achieved to cement the bond between the parents and the child. Many of Alcott’s suggestions on discipline are practical and worth consider­ ing afresh in 1975- Not the least is her insistence on love and genuine concern for the child's character as the most effective means of disciplining a child. 162

In many ways the novels of Louisa May Alcott are a

protest against the falseness and artificiality of the

code of the genteel family of the latter part of the nine­

teenth century. For Miss Alcott social behavior is

directly related to a person’s moral and ethical values.

Literally, good manners are no more than a positive and

active concern for others. Thus social behavior is far

wider in scope and has greater implications than merely

how to flirt with a fan, how to introduce a bishop to

a Congressman, and how to serve escargot. Louisa May

Alcott shows the family as the practice ground for be­

havior in society in general. If one is to be polite

and charitable to strangers, one must first learn to live

in harmony and peace within the family. Little Women

shows just such a learning situation where courtesy is

from the heart and practiced as readily to one's sisters

as to a caller. The Shaw household in An Old-Fashioned

Girl shows just the opposite situation. All of society's peccadillos are considered, but charity within the family

is strained, not to say occasionally, lost. Poor Mr. Shaw might as well be an armchair for all the love or attention given him by his wife and children. Maud, Fan, and Tom might well be roomers merely renting space in the same 163 boarding house for all of the true family feelings they exhibit.

Miss Alcott's concern with children's learning how to live successfully in society extends to include strictures on peer groups and the need for social consciousness. Al­ ways she preaches that the peer group is not all-wise and must not be all-powerful in the eyes of the young. Alcott, of course, feels that control should be held in the family, primarily by the mother, until the children are adults.

The peer group of which Rose Campbell is a member is shown to be shallow and only concerned with meaningless and world­ ly trivia. Rose as a debutante in Rose in Bloom is a tiresome creature who flits from party to party, trying to remain the sweet, innocent, unworldly Rose of Eight

Cousins, while becoming increasingly more exhausted physi­ cally and emotionally. One of the most realistic scenes of the entire novel is where she comments to Prince Charlie about the lure of the social whirl. "'Ah! but I don't want to get used to it; for it costs too much in the end. I don't want to get used to being whisked about a hot room by men who have taken too much wine; to turn day into night, wasting time that might be better spent; and grow into a fashionable fast girl who can't get on without 164

excitement. I don't deny that much of it is pleasant,

hut don't try to make me too fond of gayety...please

don't laugh me out of the good habits uncle has tried so hard to give me."18 Rose survives her spell as debutante

and emerges from society's silly, stifling strictures on

unimportant aspects of social behavior to immerse herself

in social work. Although Rose as a paragon of good works

can become a trifle wearisome to the reader, still Louisa

May Alcott's essentially realistic attitude toward writing

cannot allow her to obscure Rose's difficulties with in­

gratitude and graspingness among her proteges. "But,

presently, Rose was disturbed to find that the good people

expected her to take care of them in a way she had not

bargained for. Buffurn, her agent, was constantly report­

ing complaints, new wants, and general discontent if they

were not attended to. Things were neglected, waterpipes

froze and burst, drains got out of order, yards were in

a mess, and rents behindhand.... outsiders.... said 'We told you so,'"18 In spite of all Rose's deficiencies as

a well-rounded and developed character, her grasp of the

18Louisa May Alcott, Rose In Bloom (Philadelphia: David McKay Co., 1946), p. 91»

l8Ibid., p. 238. 165

true meaning of good manners is more appealing than some

of the snobs in Fanny's circle or Annabel Bliss whose en­

tire life is limited by Godey's Lady Book and its precepts.

Rose and her orphans, Polly and the girls at Mrs. Mills',

and the Marches and the Hummels are literary examples of

the same sort of practical Christianity that became the

Social Gospel of this period and was preached by Gladden

and others.

One of the most important precepts about social be­

havior in Alcott's novels is that good manners recognize

no class distinctions. People are judged for the most

part on their own value and merits, not on birth, clothing,

appearances, or income. Alcott makes this clear in the

Phebe-Rose friendship that approaches the closeness of

sisterhood. Fine clothes and clever conversation do not make a lady. In this era that glittered with artificiality and gilt-edged gentility, Louisa May Alcott's preachings to her young girl readers to restore simplicity and straight­ forwardness in actions and kindness to all human beings establish a stand for old-fashioned values against those that seemed to be placing self-interest, monetary success, and social distinction above the needs of family and the home. Democracy in social contacts and behavior had no mean proponent in the novelist. 166

Although Louisa May Alcott preaches consistently

that consideration for others and practical Christianity are the roots of good manners and the best test for dis­

tinguishing between a ’lady’ and a poseur, her most con­ vincing support for her didacticism is in the character­

ization of her ’bad* examples and her girls who have to struggle to suppress their innate selfishness in an en­ vironment that would ordinarily encourage self before others. If one considers the rigidity and inhumanity of the social code of the day, one can better appreciate the

’extreme' behavior of Jo, Rose, Polly, Jill, and Christie.

The following description of a typical morning call em­ phasizes the sterility and fatiguing qualities of the life of an upper-middle class girl in the 1870s-1890s.

She descends to the parlor where they have been installed by Katy...waves the ladies to seats on the new rosewood sofa, and summons to mind all she has read about how to con­ duct a conversation. First, she must avoid the five D's: domestics, domiciles, descen­ dants, disease, and dress. She must avoid such phrases as 'immensely jolly' and 'dis­ gustingly mean.' She must not ridicule or satirize. She must avoid scandal and gossip, business, hobbies, religion, and politics. She must display no emotion, nor ask imper­ tinent questions...'Some authorities in etiquette even go so far as to say that all questions are strictly tabooed. Thus if you wished to inquire after the health of the brother of your friend, you would say, 'I hope your brother is well,'...Do not use the word limb for leg. If legs are really 167

improper, let us then, on no account mention them...she must not mention prices nor ask about them, must not contradict, interrupt, make puns, monopolize the conversation, nor give unsolicited advice. Fortunately, the ladies remain but fifteen minutes. At the sixteenth minute, guided by instinct, for it would be a breach of etiquette if they looked at their watches pinned on their y? bosoms, they rise and take their departure. '

Of course, this was the model, stifling as it may sound. Characters like Aunt Clara reveled in it. Natural­ ly, the ideal was rarely met. Eager questions were posed; dress was discussed ad infinitum and ad nauseum; gossip was retailed from call to call. Mrs. Grundy ruled the social whirl with a mind like a sink. Aunt Jane in Rose in Bloom is just such a Mrs. Grundy. No wonder poor, silly, little Kitty is afraid of her august mama-to-be. Kitty

Van Tassel, Amy in Little Women, and Fan in An Old-Fashioned

Girl are affected, frivilous chits who fortunately learn to value hard work, kindness, and simplicity in order to win their rewards—their husbands. The really serious examples of what can go wrong in such a society are characters like

Trix in An Old-Fashioned Girl and Annabel Bliss in Rose in

Bloom. Louisa May Alcott really scourges them with her

18Cable and Buehr, American Manners and Morals, p. 218. 168

dislike and disapproval. They are au fond entirely selfish

and grasping. Annabel does not mind dancing with anyone,

drunk or sober, as long as he is socially acceptable. One

has the suspicion that she is so desperate to marry anyone

that she would marry an orangutang if he had impeccable credentials and a well-tailored dress suit. In fact, she does marry a Chinese student; to Bostonians of the 1880s, that was about as close to an orangutang as possible. Anna­ bel can be heartily disliked and even pitied, but Trix is the nadir to which a human being can descend. Trix gets engaged regularly to acceptable young men without feeling anything more for them than a satisfaction in their sar­ torial presentability and their financial solvency. Trix’s one goal in life is to become the inhabitant of a diamond- encrusted gilded cage. Besides being self-centered and intellectually hollow, Trix is 'fast* which for Louisa May

Alcott, protecting the young girl reader all the way, im­ plies a proclivity to kiss escorts behind the palms. Still one has the feeling that essentially Trix is an American

Mrs. Brookenham or an Ida Farange. Trix uses people re­ gularly for her own ends from the time the reader first meets her at the age of fourteen until the end when she jilts Tom Shaw after his father loses his money. 169

An Old-Fashioned Girl is a good example of the manners,

interests, and activities of upper middle-class women and girls in urban America of the 1870s-1890s. Poor little

Polly on that first visit at fourteen is so confused by

Fanny’s criticism of her clothes and actions, especially her going sledding with Tom. "’I am a little girl; so why shouldn't I?’ and Polly looked at her simple blue merino frock, stout boots, and short hair, with a puzzled air. 'You are fourteen, and we consider ourselves young 1 ladies at that age.' continued Fanny." Louisa May Alcott goes on then to describe Fanny's costume which, even today, sounds more appropriate for a woman of thirty-five than a young girl. Fanny is interested in French because she finds French elegant; music, because she has a tendre for the music master, at fourteen, no less; and in stylish amusements like the theatre, gallery receptions, teas, and dances. Fanny even wears her hair up in a bun with side ringlets. She must have looked absurd at fourteen tricked out like a demimondaine of uncertain age. The implication is, of course, that if Fanny had a decent mother, she would not have been allowed to dress and behave the way she does.

Rose when she comes to the aunt-hill is nearly as bad as Fanny. Rose even wears a corset. Fortunately for her

-J o Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl, p. 22. 170

and the plot of the book, Uncle Alec is her guardian rather

than Aunt Clara, the social clotheshorse. Rose's program

of eating wholesome foods, getting plenty of exercise,

mixing with her male cousins on a free and easy camaraderie basis just as if they were people instead of eligible males, and dropping her little airs, verbal pretensions, and snobberies, is exactly what Miss Alcott is proposing that all girls be allowed to have. This same program is reiterated in Jack and Jill and repeatedly in short stories

Rose’s entering into Uncle Alec’s regimen with zest and good­ will results in a delightful, natural human being. Al­ though Rose is the least real of all of Louisa May Alcott's major heroines, her credibility is enhanced by the way in which she several times succumbs to girlish foibles and feminine vanities. After she has made the transition from headachy-semi-invalidish dressmaker’s doll to little girl, she is tempted by Annabel Bliss to pierce her ears. Her failures to live entirely up to Uncle Alec's, and Alcott's ideal young girl makes her more real than her zealous do- gooding in Rose in Bloom. Rose, Polly, Jill, and all the little women are 'good' examples of good manners that come from the heart, simplicity in behavior and dress, and a generous democratic spirit toward all human beings. This appeal must have been most reassuring to the young reader 171 if she were trying to mold herself into a ’lady' or a salu- atory reminder to those cursed with incipient snobbery.

Although inculcating ethical and moral values in the young is as intimately bound up with social behavior and discipline as it is with educational theory in the novels of Louisa May Alcott, especially with her examples of prac­ tical Christianity in doing good works, there is only one mention of organized religion or specific creed. In An

Old-Fashioned Girl, Polly’s brother Will is at Harvard studying to become a minister. Polly and Will spend every

Sunday afternoon together and talk of their hopes for futures and what they have done all week apart. Polly has some very definite opinions on churches that sound remarkably like the Social Gospel workers.

"’Well, whatever you do, Will, don’t have a great, costly church that takes so much money to build it and support it that you have nothing to give away. I like the plain, old- fashioned churches, built for use, not show, where people met for hearty praying and preach­ ing, and where everybody made their own music instead of listening to opera singers, as we do now. I don’t care if the old churches were bare and cold, and the seats hard, there was real piety in them, and the sincerity of it was felt in the lives of the people. I don’t want a religion that I put away with my Sun­ day clothes, and don’t take out till the day comes round again; I want something to see and feel and live by day by day, and I hope you’ll be one of the true ministers, who can teach by precept example, how to get and keep it. "'19

■^Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl, p. 176. 172

Louisa May Alcott preaches charity in mind and

action through example. Marmee, much as Mrs. Alcott did,

gives of herself, her time, and her worldly goods to

help those less fortunate than herself, yet without

neglecting her family. Because of her self-sacrificing

example, the March girls, too, practice this sort of

living, e.g., the Christmas breakfast for the Hummels.

Helping others is the keynote to Jack and Jill and Rose

in Bloom. Fortunately, none of these are marred with

the sentimental attitude towards doing good that spoils

so many Social Gospel novels of the period where the do-

gooder, if she is female, marries a wealthy, prominent man whose brain seems softened by her often patronizing charity, or if the lead is male, he becomes a respected

shining knight in politics or another prominent field.

In Churchill's Cup of Gold, the hero becomes both a prominent, popular minister and marries a sympathetic rich girl. Rarely does real life allow one to have both spiritual and worldly cake and eat them, too. The

Marches merely keep on going about doing good and sur­ viving in a pleasant, ordinary middle class way. They even have set-backs and disasters from their philosophy;

Beth contracts scarlet fever from caring for a sick, poor family. Even though in some of the lesser novels 173 where sentimentality frequently gallops wildly about the heroines, e.g. Rose in Bloom, Under the Lilacs, and Jack and Jill, still Louisa May Alcott has enough discipline within herself to bring this firmly back to reality on the issues of practical charity. Sentimentality takes a good toss in Rose in Bloom and comes back to reality with a nasty bump once the little old ladies start complaining about Rose's generous apartments and cooking arrangements.

Nothing satisfies the querulous old biddies, and nothing does Rose any more good than learning that she is not loved for her noblesse oblige.

Teaching right and wrong in the novels seems again to rebound on the family, especially the mother, rather than upon an established church and clergy. Although

Mr. March goes with the Union Army as a sort of self- appointed chaplain, he does not ever return to the running of a parish. Even though formalized religion is not mentioned, there is no doubt that conventional,

Unitarian morality is part and parcel of all the charac­ ters of Louisa May Alcott's novels. Christian ethics are a major bulwark against the collapse of the American family in the novels of Alcott. The twentieth century slogan,

"The family that prays together, stays together" surely 174 would have been endorsed by Alcott, Marmee, from her

Puritan, New England background of searching the scrip­ tures for everyday help and consolation, gives each of her girls a New Testament for Christmas as a guide book through the vicissitudes of daily life. They become new pilgrims. Much of Little Women is written with modern-day parallels to Pilgrim’s Progress. The girls take their

Bibles as seriously as their daily examination of their conscience in their journals. They read their Bibles together and talk with each other and Marmee about what they have read.

Those virtues about which Miss Alcott writes most are chastity, particularly female, and abstention from liquor, smoking, and a generally idle life. It should be noted that other virtues and commandments like not stealing, killing, or having false Gods are rarely mentioned. The major exception to this is in Little Men where the little boys who are boarding at Plumsted are little cardboard examples of the seven deadly sins. Louisa May Alcott*s lack of interest for the most part in gluttony, avarice, pride, et al are because these are not such pressing problems for young people as the sins of the flesh. Like her Puritan forebears, Louisa May Alcott worries about 'waste not, 175 want not*, good works as proof of salvation, and 'Idle hands that furnish work for the devil.' To this very seventeenth century catalogue of religious attitudes is added the nineteenth century one of temperance. Unlike other nineteenth century women writers, Louisa May Alcott does not really succumb, although there are weak moments when the reader anticipates it, to the saccahrine sugges­ tion that a good woman's love can redeem a man. Instead with situations like those of Charlie and Rose, Polly and

Tom, and Bess and Dan, she emphasizes the American dream that hard work is the cure-all, especially for wickedness.

Alcott has a tendency to pontificate. Probably the one area on which she preaches the loudest and most didac­ tically throughout all her novels and short stories is the waste of allowing oneself to degenerate through the flowing bowl. For Louisa Alcott, not unlike the majority of popular nineteenth century writers, drinking intoxicating beverages is a major wrong-doing. Temperance is part of establishing good moral tone in the family. Considering what an example

Prince Charlie is in Rose in Bloom, it seems almost a shame that Alcott reinforces her example by resorting to what seems to modern readers a redundant preaching when the plot situation would have sufficed magnificently. One seems 176 almost tempted to side with Charlie. This is a problem of historical perspective. Drunkenness was a widespread problem in the nineteenth century and evoked the kind of response that drug abuse has in the twentieth century.

To the anxious mothers and sisters of the nineteenth cen­ tury, Miss Alcott could not write strongly enough. Heavy drinking seems to have been a problem since colonization.

"Fermented drinks--beer for the lower orders, beer and wine for their betters--and distilled strong waters... seemed to warm and strengthen the drinker...another trait common among the Colonies was thorough-paced drinking...A typical man of the time started the day vzith a pre­ breakfast dram of straight rum, whiskey, or peach brandy...The abstemious..confined them­ selves to a mug or two of hard cider to get the blood stirring. With every meal practical­ ly all, including women and children, clergymen, drank beer, cider or spirits and water mixed rather stiff to be sure of counteracting the ill effects of water...The notion that alcohol at odd times of day was good prophylaxis against the malaria... furthered dram drinking. Presently this seems to have steadied down to the insti­ tution of the preprandial snort, a forerunner of the cocktail ritual."20

Miss Alcott sees in all the problems of city living the invidious tarring of the whiskey brush: prostitution, brutality and violence, poverty, and family collapse.

Louisa May Alcott’s strong feelings were based on the wide

20 ' Joseph Chamberlain Furnas, The Americans. A Social History of the United States, 1587-1914 (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons,1969), P• l4o. 177

experience of her mother as a social worker in Boston, and

no one can deny the role of liquor in complicating and en­

larging the problems of the city and the country as well.

Unfortunately, the fervor of Louisa Alcott tends to put

the modern reader off and blurs other points. The twentieth

century reader feels that she would have done better to

scrap her soap box and leave her message to examples like

Charlie, some of Mrs. Mills’ girls in An Old-Fashioned

Girl, and a few scenes in Work. With judicious editing and

rewriting, Work perhaps could have had the sociological

impact of Maggie, A Girl of the Streets.

Without any philosophical discussion of whether or

not alcoholism or pre-marital sexual relations are legi­

timately ethical or moral problems, suffice it to say that

these were for Louisa May Alcott, and generally for most

dedicated nineteenth century mothers, the moral concerns

in family life. Sex is approached obliquely because of public opinion, the young girl audience, and Louisa May

Alcott’s own personal reticence and perhaps ignorance.

Christie has brief experiences with girls who have ’fallen'

either through ignorance or poverty. Polly, too, meets such girls through the good woman Mrs. Mills. Rose in her social work must know of the plight of the ’soiled doves,' 178 but her social position precludes any detailed discussion.

In Louisa May Alcott's novels, as in the middle class world of which she was a part and for which she wrote, 'nice* girls do not kiss boys, never mind entangling alliances.

Considering the phenomenal amount of prostitution of the period and the attempts at frankness in Work, it is un­ fortunate but understandable that she really says nothing about prostitution or venereal disease. Dr. Sanger, the

Dr. Kinsey of the late nineteenth century, estimated that if all the prostitutes in the United States "'were walking in a continuous line, thirty six inches from each other, 21 they would make a column of nearly thirty-five miles.'"

Only once does Louisa May Alcott warn the reader about loose living and venereal disease. In Jo's Boys, Aunt Jo is ad­ vising some of her former pupils who have gone on to Harvard and are involved with the notorious life of 'college men.'

"The society of such women will unfit you for that of good ones, and lead you into trouble and sin and shame. Oh, why don't the city fathers stop that evil thing, when they know the harm it does? It made my heart ache to see those boys, who ought to be at home and in their beds, going off for a night of riot which would help to ruin some of them

21 Cable and Buehr, American Manners and Morals, p. 230. 179

2? forever." This is as explicit as Louisa May Alcott ever

allows herself. It probably was assumed that Jo's Boys

was really only for nearly grown girls. Naturally, in

Louisa May Alcott's dichotomous view of American life, farm

boys never get venereal disease. In all fairness to her

bias, hard work daily, living at home, and the lack of the

opportunity that seems omnipresent in city life do stifle

a young countryman bent on earning the wages of sin. Pro­

bably Louisa May Alcott was unable by the literary restric­

tions of the times and because of personal unwillingness,

to warn her readers in any forthright and sensible way.

Most of her concern with sexual values for the girls of the middle class family is not with pre-marital sex, extra­ marital sex, or prostitution, but with girls' marrying the wrong type of man for a good husband and father.

Louisa May Alcott, as always, is concerned with the sta­ bility and continuity of the American family.

Modern though Louisa May Alcott frequently seems to the reader about child-rearing and education in general, sexual instruction for the young reader is not something about which she writes. She instead focuses in several novels, primarily in Jo's Boys and Rose in Bloom on

22'Louisa May Alcott, Jo1 s Boys, p. 256. 180

courtship and marriage. Little Women, An Old-Fashioned

Girl, Rose in Bloom, and Jo's Boys all have one engagement

that falls through, not really a common nor socially ac­

ceptable thing at the end of the nineteenth century. All

of these broken engagements fail to end in marriage because

of real and valid social and psychological reasons. Jo

is too dominant and too unconventional a personality to marry the essentially socially sophisticated Laurie; Trix

jilts Tom Shaw when he loses his hoped for inheritance;

Bess is socially worlds separate from the orphan Dan; and

Charlie dies before Rose really is tempted to reform him.

Louisa May Alcott's only contribution to sex instruc­ tion for the young is to insist that boys and girls must play together and know each other as human beings, not solely as potential mates in a social-marriage market.

She insists that courtship be a period of learning about the other person and testing whether or not the physical- emotional attachment that one feels is based on genuine care and concern for the other person. Rose and Mac have just such a period of adjustment and understanding, un­ clouded by sexual commitments. Miss Alcott, always con­ cerned with the conservation of the family, insists on a mutual intellectual appreciation between man and wife. The 181

future children of their union must be protected by the

boy and the girl's being sure that their feelings are deep

enough to last a lifetime and that they will put each

other first in their lives, e.g. Daisy and Nat. Miss

Alcott insists on grown-up mature women marrying mature

men rather than marriages with too great a difference in

age. Kitty Van Tassel must grow up before she marries

Steve in Rose in Bloom. Growing up, according to Louisa

May Alcott, implies learning to consider others and put

oneself last. Duty, always a keynote with the Alcotts,

runs through her marriage advice like a recurring melody.

Although strict chaperonage of unmarried women re­

mained until the eve of the first world war, Miss Alcott

breaks away from that to allow her characters more free­

dom based on their trustworthiness and their common sense,

since they have grown up with boys and have no exotic or

strange fancies about them. Women are never such exciting,

unknown quantities at Plumsted, to the Campbell cousins, nor to the Minot boys, as they are to those boys from small

families who have gone to all-male schools all their lives.

Unlike the writers who followed Alcott and chose young

womanhood as their subject matter, Louisa May Alcott does not create solely one woman who is not made of ordinary

clay and who inspires awe and adoration in the breasts 182 of young men. Bess is the only untouchable in all her novels. All the rest of her heroines have failings. Meg is pretty and charming, but a bore. Jo is a hoyden who has a frightful temper. Amy is a precocious little snob. Beth is too retiring and shy. Jill is a dominating Kate. Polly seems almost too good at times, but she never could be on a pedestal. Rose is a youthful Mrs. Jellaby who needs con­ trolling.

Marriage is not the only goal for a woman in the Al­ cott's novels. This most progressive attitude coupled with her insistence that girls and boys play and go to school together makes her unique in her period. Courtship for Alcott’s heroines is all well and good, but if like

Nan or Maud, the girl does not want to marry, she should not. Self-fulfillment and self-respect are primary con­ cerns in a woman's life, just as in man's. Nan insists,

"My idea is that if we girls have any influence we should use it for the good of these boys and not pamper them up, making slaves of ourselves and tyrants of them. Living and working for it is harder, and therefore more honorable.

Men are always ready to die for us, but not to make our • 23 lives worth having. Cheap sentiment and bad logic."

Louisa May Alcott does not really worry about her girls'

2^Louisa May Alcott, Jo's Boys, pp. 96-99« 183

losing their virginity; she worries more about their

losing their identity—really a more valuable concern

and certainly more modern.

Since there is no doubt that a sex-education handbook

in the form of a novel would have shocked Mrs. Grundy and

Alcott's public and never made it past the editor's trash-

barrel, sex education manuals for young readers had to

come in the next century. When one considers Louisa May

Alcott’s insistence that it did boys and girls good to

play together, to go to school together, and learn of their

common humanity and failings, things usually learned only

in large families, that courtship was not all moonlight

and roses but a learning and questioning time with no

locked gate at the end requiring marriage between unsuited

persons, and that marriage in itself was not the only pos­

sible choice for all women, one must concede that the

novels of Louisa May Alcott spoke indirectly of sexual

values and concerns of the family in a very modern way

indeed.

As intimately linked as courtship and marriage are

with divorce, it is interesting that Alcott said practically nothing about divorce in her novels and short stories.

Naturally, as concerned as she was with maintaining the family solidarity and stability, it is not surprising 184

that she would not approve of divorce. It is surprising,

however, that she did not come out positively against it,

especially as the divorce rate began to climb rapidly in

the late nineteenth century. Divorces became increasingly commonplace in the 1870s-1890s, but they were still not acceptable socially. Divorces were easier to get in the new Western states than in the Eastern and Southern states.

"A divorce was easier to get, although in many states there was still a double standard when it came to divorce for adultery, the man suffering no penalties and the woman 2/l forfeiting property and children." - Schlesinger attri­ butes urban conditions as a factor in the increasing divorce rate. Kling explains the increase in divorce by saying that "Probably the basic one is the emancipation of women-- economic, legal, sexual, and intellectual. One of the con­ sequences of such emancipation is that wives have become increasingly aggressive so that the wives...demand a great deal more from marriage than they did...demands their hus­ bands are often unable to meet. Another powerful reason... 25 is breakdown of religion."

Cable and Buehr, American Manners and Morals, p. 338.

2^ Samuel G. Kling, The Complete Guide to Divorce (New York: Bernard Geis Assoc., 1963)> p. 28. 185

Another factor that is rarely mentioned but should be

considered is the decreasing number of deaths from child­

bed fever. Oliver Wendell Holmes brought back from France

with him information of ways to prevent puerperal fever.

Although he presented his paper in 1843, the medical op-

position to his preposals was not silenced until 1857« °

The Civil War with its attention on the war wounded and

dying interrupted what progress had been made, but by the

1870s the mortality rate of new mothers had declined along

with the stirrings toward the emancipation of women. All

of these factors definitely contributed to a major threat

to the stability and continuity of the family.

In only Eight Cousins-Rose in Bloom is there the most

oblique reference to divorce. Aunt Clara has been separated

from her husband for many years. He has had to go to China

for the merchant-shipping business of which the Campbell

clan is the owner, and she had remained at home. There

is no doubt from Uncle Alec’s comments about Aunt Clara's voluntary widowhood that Louisa May Alcott as well as Uncle

Alec feels that Charlie has suffered from the lack of a father and Aunt Clara has ruined her marriage by her selfish decision to stay in Boston to enjoy the delights of society

¿°Miriam Rossiter Small, Oliver Wendell Holmes (New Haven: Twayne Publishers, Inc” 1962), pp. 52-53• 186

there. "I can hardly blame him for what he is, because his mother did the harm. I declare to you, Rose, I some­

times feel as if I must break out against that woman, and thunder in her ears that she is ruining the immortal soul . . 2 7 for which she is responsible to heaven." ' Midway through

Rose in Bloom, it is almost decided that Prince Charlie and

Aunt Clara will go to China. Charlie is going to avoid bad habits and evil companions. He refuses to go alone with Aunt Clara. At the time of his accident, he has al­ most persuaded Rose to go along. After Charlie's death, broken and discouraged, Aunt Clara goes alone to the Orient.

"The 'Rajah' was delayed awhile,'and when it sailed poor

Mrs. Clara was on board, all thought she had better go to comfort her husband...So with friends to cheer the long voyage, she sailed away a heavy-hearted woman, yet not quite disconsolate; for she knew her mourning was excessive­ ly becoming, and felt sure that Stephen would not find her 28 altered by her trials as much as might have been expected."

There seems to be no doubt that Louisa May Alcott feels that

Aunt Clara’s place had been with Uncle Stephen all along.

^'Louisa May Alcott, Rose in Bloom, p. 158.

28Louisa May Alcott, Rose in Bloom, p. 237« 187

During most of Eight Cousins, Aunt Jessie's husband

has been at sea, but there is no doubt of the eagerness

with which she awaits him and the warmth of his welcome

when he returns. Jem returns on Christmas day. "Archie

suddenly dashed out of the room as if he had lost his

wits..', a present for mother, and here it is'...flinging wide the door to let in a tall man who cried out'Where's my little woman? The first kiss for her, then the rest /children/ may come as fast as they like.'"2^ Jessie and

Jem's marriage is one of those perfect ones that Louisa

May Alcott revels in. It is a marriage based on mutual love, trust, and companionship that is family-centered.

It comes very close to Jo and Papa Bhaer's, and the type towards which all the young couples are to aim.

Although a limited view of education might be con­ strued as meaning teaching solely academic subjects, this does not agree with that of Miss Alcott who, like the Greeks, saw education encompassing and enlightening the whole man.

Throughout novel after novel and short story after short story, Miss Alcott suggests what young women and men should be taught in order to be independent, self-respecting citizens

29 Louisa May Alcott, Rose in Bloom, p. 202. 188

of a democratic society. In an exceptionally slight short

story called "Morning Glories," Aunt Wee tells the toddler,

Daisy, "Education is a long word, dear; but you know what

it means, and as you grow older, you will see what wonders * it can work...for in this country, rich and poor are helped

by it, and no one need suffer for it unless they choose.

It works wonders...it changes little children into wise,

good men and women, who rule the world, and make happy

homes everywhere; it helps write books, sing songs, paint pictures, do good deeds, and beautify the world. Love and respect it..."8° Even though couched in somewhat a patronizing tone that many adults take with children,

Louisa May Alcott's accolade is clear as well as her tremen­ dous optimism and idealism concerning education. She, like her father and so many other Emersonian educators, has a touching faith in the cure-all powers of education.

In spite of the fact that most of Louisa May Alcott’s educational ideas are written with girls in mind, rather than boys, there are two novels with entire sections de­ voted to male education, Little Men and Jack and Jill. The major theme in both is the need for sensible, practical education taught to both boys and girls and taught co-

8QLouisa May Alcott, Morning Glories and Queen Aster (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1904), pp. 26-27« 189 educationally whenever and wherever possible. Louisa May

Alcott, like her father, would like to see fewer boys pre­ pared strictly for a classical education when the lives they must live must be those of American farmers, business­ men, and professional men, not ancient Greeks and Romans.

She also feels that girls should be taught, like Rose, to bake bread, prepare meals, sew clothes, clean house, and handle children and servants. Most of Alcott's re­ marks are aimed at educating the ideal American girl so that she will become the ideal American woman, mother or career girl. "The 'Old Fashioned Girl' is not intended as a perfect model but as a possible improvement upon the

"Girl of the Period,' who seems sorrowfully ignorant or ashamed of the good old fashions which make woman truly beautiful and honored, and through her render home what it should be,--a happy place, where parents and children, brothers and sisters, learn to love and know and help one another.

Louisa May Alcott was not alone in proposing educational reforms nor was she merely hopping on the progressive edu­ cational bandwagon. "The nineteenth century was a century of transformation of American educational thought and

^Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl, p. 11. 190

practice. During this period the structural characteris-

tics of American education took concrete form."-^ Louisa

May Alcott, following the ideas, theories, and practices

of her parents, especially Bronson Alcott, was disseminat­

ing these beliefs through her readers who were, in turn,

to change American education widely once these 'ideal*

American women became vocal and powerful forces in Amer­

ican education. First in creating the FTA and all its

committees and finally on school boards and their committees, those ladies, with the same spirit of those ladies a decade earlier who had shattered the calm of the Northern War Of­ fice by establishing a voluntary nursing corps, became the ’do-it-yourself* American educators bustling forth to argue over why ’Johnny can’t read* and staying to revise the curriculum, the buildings, and the extracurricular activities. Most educational theorists and historians stress that the change from the elitist-classical educa­ tion offered throughout the eighteenth century in American private schools and continued in many places, especially in the South, until after the Civil War was the result of social conflict within society that demanded changes and opportunities for the flexible, mobile, and expanding middle

-^-Clarence J. Karier, Man, Society, and Education, A History of American Education and Ideas (Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1967), p. 43. 191 classes. "With the extension of the suffrage, Jefferson’s argument that the survival of a democratic republic depen­ dent on an educated citizenry took on new meaning...One of the great beliefs Enlightenment leaders carried into the nineteenth century was that society as a whole could be reconstructed and that education might be so directed 33 as to lead the way.M>>

The tremendous philosophical idealism of the eighteenth century plus the nineteenth century confidence in the common man to improve himself were instrumental in causing this educational ferment to bubble and boil over into the progressive educational theories that start with a few references to Jefferson to lend tone and progress imme­ diately or, should perhaps one say, soar into exuberance about the improvability of man. To this brew is added a large measure of potent Bronson Alcott, marvelously vague enough to cover any point of view except the old medieval- classical approach, and it is stirred by overwhelmingly popular material with direct instructions on ’how-to' prepare your child for life by Louisa May Alcott. Hand in hand with the burgeoning public school system in America

33'Karier, pp. 46-47. 192

went Alcott's novels. "In practice, the common school

was used to integrate the immigrant into American society,

curb social radicalism, protect republican institutions, and teach these necessary social skills, attitudes, and values so necessary for a growing bourgeois culture."8^

Miss Alcott's educational theories are really very prag­ matic ones, concerned with improving the average middle- class American child, and preparing the American middle- class girl for womanhood. This practically, but satisfac­ torily educated, wholesome, healthy American girl was to save the American family. Naturally, it seemed to follow, to Louisa May Alcott and others, that once the American family was secure, the American democracy would also sur­ vive .

Louisa Alcott*s ideal school is the village school, the most democratic of institutions. "Common schools in­ creased opportunity; they taught morality and citizen­ ship; they encouraged a talented leadership; they main­ tained social mobility; they promoted responsiveness to social evolution." There is a great similarity between the functions of the common school of the late nineteenth

^Karier, p. 66.

88Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School, Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 iNevz York: Random House, 1964), p. 16. 193

century and those of the family. The village school for

Miss Alcott has become an extension and support of the

family.

Like Jefferson's educational theories, there is

tremendous practicality in Louisa Alcott's educational

suggestions. The American girl must be able to read and

write and do basic arithmetic. When Rose learns that

Phebe cannot read and is teaching herself to do simple

sums from the butcher's bills, she is appalled by Phebe's

ignorance, and takes her in hand and teaches her to read.

Phebe is no doubt not much different from a large number

of lower class children of this period who, especially

in the city, had to work rather than go to school. In

Jack and Jill and Under the Lilacs, everyone learns to

read; however, that is to be expected from Louisa Alcott's

educational ideal, the village school. In spite of Miss

Alcott's obvious partiality for the village school and

an allowance for distortion because of personal prejudice,

it does seem that the village and small town common schools

did educate a larger percentage of students, drawn from

all classes, than the city schools at this time. She is most scornful of the type of school that Fan Shaw attends

and that Rose had attended before she moved to Uncle Alec’s.

"Fanny went to a fashionable school, where the young ladies 194

were so busy with their French, German, and Italian, that

there was no time for good English...she had nothing to

do but lounge and gossip, read novels, parade the streets,

and dress; and before a week was gone, she (Polly) was heartily sick of all this, as a healthy person would be who attempted to live on confectionery.Rose takes offense when her elegant school is criticized. When

Uncle Alec has the temerity to compare it with Aunt

Plenty's dame school of the 1850s, Rose's indignation knows no bounds.

’Miss Power did not teach anything so old- fashioned as writing, I see. Now look at this little memorandum Aunt Plenty gave me, and see what a handsome plain hand that is. She went to a dame school and learnt a few useful things well; that is better than a smattering of half a dozen so-called higher branches, I take the liberty of thinking.' 'Well, I'm sure I was considered a bright girl at school...Lulu and me were the first in all our classes and specially praised for our French and music...' 'I dare say; but if your French grammar was no better than your English, I think the praise was not deserved...I vzant my girl to be what I call well educated, even if she studies nothing but the 'three R's for a year to come. Let us be thorough, no matter how slowly we go...that is considered an excellent school...and I dare say it would be if the benighted lady did not think it neces­ sary to cram her pupils like Thanksgiving turkeys instead of feeding them in a natural wholesome way...the poor little heads will go on aching until we learn better.37

^Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl, pp. 20, 43.

Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins, pp. 79-80. 195

In a series of short stories that revolve around girls at

school, Alcott describes a very fashionable boarding school

of the day.

While they pull down their jerseys and take up their books, we will briefly state that Mme. Stein's select boarding school had for many years received six girls at a time and finished them off in the old style. Plenty of French, German, music, painting, dancing, and deportment turned out well-bred, accom­ plished, and amiable young ladies, ready for fashionable society, easy lives, and entire dependence on other people. Dainty and deli­ cate creatures usually, for, as in most schools of this sort, minds and manners were much cultivated, but bodies rather neglected. Heads and backs ached, dyspepsia was rather a common ailment, and ills of all sorts afflict­ ed the dear girls.38

The new games mistress changes all that. She says sensibly,

"I was not brought up to believe that I was born an invalid

and was taught to understand the beautiful machinery God gave me and to keep it religiously in order."8^ Sophie,

a little Swiss-American girl, comes to visit her relatives

in America and makes a few shrewd observations about Amer­

ican women's education.

Their free and easy ways astonished her, the curious language bewildered her; and their ignorance of many things she had been taught made her wonder at the American education she had heard much praised. All had studied French

88Louisa May Alcott, "Jerseys, or the Girls' Ghost," Spinning Wheel Stories (Boston: Roberts, 1884), p. 164. 891bid., p. 167. 196

and German; yet few read or spoke either tongue correctly, or understood her easily when she tried to talk to them. Their music did not amount to much, and in the games, they played, their want of useful information amazed Sophie ...Yet all were 15 or 16, and would soon leave school 'finished,' as they expressed it, but not furnished as they should have been with a solid, sensible education. Dress was an all- absorbing topic, sweet-meats were their delights; and in confidential moments, sweethearts with great freedom. Fathers were conveniences, mothers comforters, brothers plagues, and sis­ ters ornaments or playthings according to their ages.4D

Louisa May Alcott wants the ideal American girl to have a wide, general knowledge in what is generally thought of as liberal arts today as well as a practical, working knowledge of how to run a home and family. Always con­ cerned with the moral development of American womanhood, she warns over and over about the evils of smoking, drink­ ing, and general moral laxity; especially pernicious is the effect of reading French novels. The short story

"Pansies" is devoted entirely, to improving the general education and manners of three girls, by a very proper

Boston matron. Much of the dialogue is limited to Mrs.

Warburton's lecturing these three girls on the wrong kind of reading. Girls should not read too serious a material

^°Louisa May Alcott, "Sophie's Secret," Lulu's Library (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1930), pp. 118- 119. 197

nor too much; that is the way to headaches. Louisa May

Alcott decries sentimental nonsense as adamantly as William

Dean Howells in The Rise of Silas Lapham♦ French novels,

however, come in for the heaviest fire, such as Uncle

Alec's lecture in Rose in Bloom.

Ah, my dear! if the fine phrases won't bear putting into honest English, the thoughts they express won't bear putting into your innocent mind. That chapter is the key to the whole book; and if you had been led up to, or rather down, to it artfully and artistically, you might have read it to yourself without seeing how bad it is. All the worse for the undeni­ able talent which hides the evil so subtly and makes the danger so delightful...only remember, my girl, that one may read at forty what is unsafe at twenty, and that we never can be too careful what food we give that precious yet perilous thing called imagination.41

Just as important as what is taught academically and morally is what is being taught physically. Physical out­ lets for children and young people are mandatory in Miss

Alcott's curriculum. Growing children and young people need as much exercise as puppies. Uncle Alec advises the sickly, wan little Rose who comes to the Campbell clan to get out more and study less. "This is part of the cure,

Rose, and I put you here that you might take my three great remedies in the best and easiest way. Plenty of

¿^Louisa May Alcott, Rose in Bloom, p. 182. 198 sun, fresh air, and cold water, also cheerful surroundings and some work; for Phebe is to show you how to take care . 42 of this room." Uncle Alec sounds like an early pro­ ponent of Montessori teaching methods.

Miss Alcott feels also that American education is too hurried for the necessary maturing of young people.

Like many modern psychologists, she sees that boys develop less quickly than girls and stresses that educators ought to take this into consideration. Mrs. Minot in Jack and

Jill insists that Frank stay home a year or two from col­ lege just to grow up sufficiently to stand the pressures and, naturally with Miss Alcott, the temptations that college life presents. "Eighteen is young enough to begin the steady grind, if you have a strong constitution to keep pace vzith the eager mind. Sixteen is too young to send even my good boy out into the world, just when he most needs his mother's care to help him be the man she 43 hopes to see him." Miss Alcott would have been appalled at the hothouse forcing of young people to finish high school and college in as few years as possible. She stresses always that education is more than academics and that the

bp Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins, p. 66. bO D Louisa May Alcott, Jack and Jill, p. 316. 199

primary educator is the family. "Ah, Mac, that’s just what

I keep lecturing about and people won't listen. You lads

need that sort of knowledge so much, and fathers and mothers ought to be able to give it to you. Few of them

are able and so we all go blundering,...Less Greek and

Latin and more knowledge of the laws of health for my boys, if I had them. Mathematics are all very well, but morals are better, and I wish, how I wish that I could help teachers and parents to feel it as they ought."

A long leisurely adolescence is to give the young person ample time to learn to handle responsibilities not to provide an amusement period such as so often happens today. "There are to be some lessons, however, for busy minds must be fed, but not crammed; so you boys will go and recite at certain hours such things as seem most important.

But there is to be no studying at night, no shutting up all the best hours of the day, no hurry, and fret of getting on fast, or skimming over the surface of many studies without learning any thoroughly."^8

Part of Miss Alcott's interest in physical well­ being of young Americans is an interest in diet as well as exercise. She advocates plenty of wholesome food, milk,

■Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins, p. 192.

¿^Louisa May Alcott, Jack and Jill, p. 317• 200

no stimulants, alcoholic or caffeinated, no smoking, and

plenty of rest, fresh air, and cold showers. Her ideal

girl is a combination of Jo and Meg, feminine and home­

body while athletic enough to stay in good health. Rose

is an example of a girl saved from the debilitating ef­

fects of the schools of the period. Rose is restored to

health, sanity, and cheerfulness by a combination of good

health rules, sensible rules of conduct, and reasonable

doses of hard work.

Little Men and Jo's Boys might well serve as texts

for courses on how to establish the. perfect coeducational

school. Jack and Jill by the second half becomes merely

an extension of Miss Alcott's educational theories as

directed from the bosom of the family.

Just as modern as many other of Miss Alcott's ideas

is her awareness that an education is not complete until the fledgling has tried his wings. Jo, Phebe, and Polly all go to the city alone to try independent survival.

The mature adult has learned by the end of each novel

that she can live independently, endure loneliness, and accept personal responsibility for her actions. This to

Miss Alcott is as important for girls to learn as for boys

"Would you be contented to be told to enjoy yourself for 201 a little while, then marry, and do nothing more till you die?" •

Louisa May Alcott insists that her young people all must learn by experience. In Rose in Bloom the lure of

partying and leisured entertaining soon palls. Rose has learned that boredom and ennui can be conquered only by meaningful work. Tom Shaw, likewise, learns that life’s real pleasures come from doing a job well and living in­ dependently. Like Christie, Tom Shaw has learned life's lesson painfully, but thoroughly.

Miss Alcott's educational handbooks, disguised as novels, are based on what she had learned from her parents, from her three experiences with village schools, and from what her family and friends' children did and did not learn in the popular, expensive schools and academies of the times. To this she has added the dictates of common sense, the strong Puritanical cliches of hard work and clean living, and her own personal observation of the suffering and degradation that can come from alcoholism, hedonism, and irresponsibility. Miss Alcott’s educational blueprint for the family is for the average, middle-class American and is nearly so practical that any midwestern county

46 Louisa May Alcott, Rose in Bloom, p. 23. 202 school board will still endorse it. It would undoubtedly prepare the ordinary citizen still to become a decent family member and participant in a democratic society. CHAPTER IV

Little Women, like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, has

become part of the body of American myths that begin

shaping American children from their earliest reading.

Little Women has become as much a creative force for the maturing American child as folk lore and fairy tales in continental Europe. The universality of the characters in Louisa Alcott's novels rests on a bedrock of eternal dreams. There is Jo, the American ugly duckling, the

Cinderella whose stepmother is only the grown-up world and its price extracted for learning and experience, and the little Red Riding-Hood whose journey from childhood to adulthood is threatened only by the wolf of loneliness during a bid for independence in the city. Little Women is truly a juvenile classic in the Realistic tradition as it weaves together the many strands of American myths and ideals about the American girl, the American family, and the American way of life. This chapter is an examination of the literary impact of the novels of Louisa May Alcott on the books, films, and television programs that were to follow and which either obviously or obliquely reflect the significance of Alcott's works. The very widespread nature of the reading and viewing of these works in turn have 204

played not an inconsiderable role in the direction of the

ideal American family.

Louisa May Alcott began writing at a time when the

change in the American family from an authoritarian pa­

triarchal system to a mother-dominated one was recognized

and acknowledged. The role of the mother is significant

in all of Alcott's works and reflects the trend of the

times in which Louisa Alcott lived and wrote as well as her own family structure. The instructional quality of the books provided a guidebook for the middle-class American girl and the struggling would-be middle-class girl through the rites of passage from protected, innocent childhood to womanhood and gave her an ideal and a goal as a future

American mother. Certainly one cannot claim that Little

Women and the other novels of Louisa Alcott had such an impact on the American reading public that these alone pre­ served the American family structure. The writer can only point out that these books mirrored the changing society and suggested a way to safeguard the structure of the family. This chapter deals specifically with the influence of these novels on American reading and viewing and serves as a recapitulation of the three previous chapters while reinforcing the thesis that any historical and sociological study of the American family must also take into consideration 205 what people read and what they saw at the theatre and now

see on television and at the cinema. The literary impact

of Alcott's works are most significant in view of the books

and films to come out of the family novels and from the

all-American girl character, Jo. Whether in comparison with Alcott's other works, one views Little Women as an

artistic fluke, as evidence of artistic promise not ful­ filled, or merely an unexpected pleasure, it is one of those major works that have changed and affected the course of subsequent literary works as well as shaping the way in which Americans ideally view childhood and family life.

Just as Mark Twain began a tradition of literary boy heroes who still emerge in modern fiction, cinema, and television, so did Louisa May Alcott provide American fiction writers and filmmakers with the 'Jo' character.

Jo, the ordinary American girl with brown hair and eyes, coltish, and warm-hearted, has become the 'girl next door' of American fiction and films. Jo is the first American girl character to go out into the world on her own and be a human being first and an eligible female second. She is not a romantic figure with beauty or allure. Instead she is just the type of girl to be anyone's sister.

Until Little Women neither adult nor juvenile American fiction produced an ordinary, credible female character. 206

Certainly no one could accuse Cooper of knowing and por­

traying the female of the species. Charles Brockden

Brown has several overwhelming and super-educated females.

Melville’s women are mostly symbolic and exotic. Hester

in Lhe Scarlet Letter is as ordinary as Antigone. Although

Hester is a memorable character, none of Hawthorne's other

women are much more than symbols and plot-supporters.

Simms surely succeeded with only one woman, the Indian

mother, in Yemassee. Like Cooper's, his women are weari­

some clothespegs cloaked in sentimentality and unreality.

Until the literary realism of the latter half of the

nineteenth century, the woman character simply lacked

vitality and credibility. Louisa May Alcott's Jo, how­

ever, has many progeny on all levels in American fiction.

Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer, and Milly Theale are

among the finest and most refined artistic renderings of

the spirited American girl. The Gibson girl described

by Richard Harding Davis with such adjectives as 'splen­ did' and 'free' may come across to the modern reader as

a rather boring health and physical education enthusiast,

yet she, too, is an heiress of the Jo tradition. The un­

fettered 'new' woman of the twenties was simply yet another variation on a basic theme with more cynicism and sexual

experience thrown in than family training. The Irises, 207

Campaspes, and Bretts were just the independent Jo run

amok without the hand of Mrs. March and the strong family

circle.

In addition to many such adult heroines, Jo was the

forerunner of a whole new series of American girl heroines

in children’s fiction. In spite of the cloying senti­

mentality of many of these novels and many writers’ in­

sistence on giving their fine American girls too much

money and social position, these heroines had all the

essential traits of their model: independence, spirit--

sometimes to the point of wilfulness, charming frankness,

and a warm and generous heart. Anyone reading the

children’s novels of the past one hundred years can easily

pick out the American tomgirl in the Pollyanna series,

Elsie Dinsmore, the Maida series, the Patty-Blossom

series, Honeybunch, and Gene Stratton Porter’s Limberlost

series. Now and again out of this treacle-sweet reading comes a book with real characters who, although they are definitely in the Jo tradition, become also real characters in their own right, viz. Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Under­ stood Betsy and Carol Ryrie Brink’s Caddie Woodlawn.

The independent girl with lots of grit and get-up- and-go merges with the American love of the mystery and adventure story to create juvenile mystery heroines like 208

the unquenchable Nancy Drew, Judy Bond of the thirties,

and the modern Kay Tracey.

The ’girl-next-door' tradition is one of the staples

of the American film industry and television as well as

a fictional tradition. The Doris Day, Disney family films,

and situation comedies of the "My Little Margie"--right

down to the modern "Get Christie Love" type series on

television provide content for the continuing of the tra­

dition via the nonreaders of America. Versions of Jo on

television and movies still are easily available for girls

to model themselves after. Weekly trips to the Saturday

matinees and quick perusals of what children are reading

still show that, like Tom Sawyer, Jo March is part of the

American mythic heritage and the mental storehouse for

future American juvenile novels, films, and television programs. It may well be that the permanency of the Jo

character is part of the American veneration of youth.

The Tom Sawyer-Penrod character, too, is a perennial favorite in juvenile fiction. The eternally adolescent hero, like the Jo character, appears quite often in adult literature as well. Although Commager in The American

Mind comments on the paucity of American villains, neither he, nor anyone else, has mentioned the small range of 209

types of American heroes and heroines: the American girl,

a few Eves, the overprotective mother, the perennial ado­

lescent, and the tough, restless, and independent American

Adams. This is an interesting, but narrow, range of

humanity and certainly a fascinating commentary on the

American mind.

Little Women is the progenitor for a tradition of

American family novels as well as for the Jo character.

Mother-dominated families, after the 1870s, seem popular in the American roman fleuve tradition, but few Mrs.

Marches appear, except in juvenile fiction. The Alcotts* neighbor, Margaret Sidney Lothrop, created a weak and saccharine version of Little Women in the Five Little

Peppers series. No doubt she was influenced by the Al­ cotts and Louisa Alcott’s novels, at least the success of

Miss Alcott’s novels. The Five Little Pepper books were very, very popular and are still available and read in spite of babytalk, heavy moralizing, and stomach-turning, sugar-sweet endings with the glorious gilding of money brightening the entire narrative.

In The Five Little Peppers and How.They Grew, the

Pepper family shows many similarities to the Alcott-March family: a large family in which Mrs. Pepper is the center and director of activities, a constant emphasis on 210

traditional middle class values and goals, and a family

circle where love and affection bring more happiness and

contentment than riches and social position. The Peppers

in spite of their financial problems are portrayed as much happier than the poor little rich boy Jasper King who be­ comes their friend. In many ways The Five Little Peppers

is a blurred photograph of Little Women. Jasper King becomes as influential in the Peppers’ lives as Laurie does in the Marches. Mr. King eventually assumes finan­ cial and paternal responsibilities for the Peppers as

Mrs. Pepper becomes the surrogate mother to Jasper. Mr.

King’s actions are an extension of Mr. Lawrence's kind offices in Little Women; Mrs. Pepper has less independence than Mrs. March and is only too willing to thrust her problems into the hands of a practical male. Louisa May

Alcott manages to keep the Lawrence-March relationship within the framework of credible behavior, but Mrs. Lothrop does not seem able to resist the fairy tale ending that destroys the realism of The Five Little Peppers. She does not bother with realism in any of the succeeding volumes.

Like Miss Alcott, Mrs. Lothrop relies heavily on didacticism.

Of Mrs. Lothrop's series, the only volume that does have any sociological-historical material of interest is

The Five Little Peppers. The first half of this work shows 211 a small-town American family reduced to near poverty.

The Peppers fortunately have a home of their own, hut there is often barely enough to eat and often not enough fuel. The everyday problems of shoes and clothing are presented very realistically. The Jo-figure, Polly, is the one who contrives and frequently succeeds in solving the problems that beset the family and threaten its con­ tinuance. Jo is more a surrogate father figure in Little

Women than Polly is in The Five Little Peppers. Polly is portrayed as a cheerful, inexhaustible Mrs. March or Mrs.

Pepper. Once the Peppers meet Jasper King who is starving for a normal family life with healthy, wholesome, decent brothers and sisters, the Peppers’ monetary problems are over. The Peppers provide the affection and family cir­ cle, complete with little traditions and childish anxieties that are so necessary in binding together a family; the

Kings provide the food, shelter, and education for the family to continue together once they have merged into one circle. The obnoxious Phronsie Pepper is a highly senti­ mentalized and childish version of Amy. Just as Bess stars in Jo's Boys, so does Phronsie in later volumes.

There seems an obvious link between Amy and Phronsie, again between Phronsie and Elsie Dinsmore and even later the 212

'littlest colonel.* Interestingly enough, it is Polly who marries Jasper in The Five Little Peppers Grown-Up.

The similarities between the Little Peppers series and the Little Women trilogy are surface ones and do not reveal as much about the American family as do the basic underlying differences. The Little Peppers books empha­ size the need for the monetary and physical protection by the male-father figure in a family. Although the Pepper novels show many direct connections with Miss Alcott's works, this underlying assumption that the Peppers are on the verge of collapse without a father figure differs widely from Miss Alcott's thesis that the Marches were doing "fine, if not better," without a man around. Mrs.

March and Jo can rally round and preserve the family.

Comparing Mrs. March vzith Mrs. Pepper is like comparing a matriarch with a 'brave, little vzoman. ' Mr. King and his money save the day. Polly can marry Jasper because

Polly never doubts that Jasper knows best and she knows her place always. Laurie gives Amy wealth and social posi­ tion; Jasper gives Polly protection. Mrs. Lothrop has definitely not written a book to equal Little Women, but her books should force the reader to question some of the conclusions about the family that one might draw from reading 213

Little Women. Surely the structure of the American family

as a mother-dominated structure is obvious by the 1870s,

whether or not one argues that this is an American trend

which has always existed and only then surfaced. Works

like those of Margaret Sidney Lothrop emphasize that the

belief of the ideal paternal family structure dies hard.

In the following volumes--The Five Little Peppers

Midway, The Five Little Peppers Abroad, and The Five

Little Peppers Grown-Up--Polly Pepper is transformed from

a self-sufficient Jo-figure, a family leader, to a wealthy

girl concerned as a volunteer with society's misfortunes.

As such, she is much closer to Rose in spirit than to Jo.

Mrs. Lothrop works hard to convince the reader that the

Pepper family is just as democratic and hard-working rich

and socially prominent as they were poor, but the reader

knows all along that this is just sentimental dream-wishing.

Unlike the works of Louisa May Alcott, Mrs. Lothrop*s many

later volumes are not packed with detail and photographic

realism. They are out and out wish-fulfillment in prose

form and as such give no fresh insights into the Gilded

Age.

Another series that owes a great deal to the Little

Women tradition, one that seems inexhaustible in length

and popularity, is the Bobbsey Twins by Laura Lee Hope. 214

After reading what seem like thousands of similar volumes,

one might suggest that Little Women has proved a curse to

the juvenile novel, if The Bohbsey Twins series is any

example. The middle-class American family was never so

boring, conventional, and unrelievedly joyous as that

tiresome, tedious, and very busy Bobbsey family.

The Bobbsey Twins series is based on a family with

two sets of fraternal twins and the conventional mother

and father. It is a twentieth century version of The

Five Little Peppers without any moments of poverty or any

lack of a guiding paternal hand. Mrs. Bobbsey is por­

trayed as a dedicated mother and center of the entire

family. As such she looms largest throughout the stories

while Mr. Bobbsey is industriously making money to pay for

all the Bobbsey family adventures. The Bobbsey children

do all the things that all middle-class American children

do. If Laura Lee Hope were still writing, there would be

a volume of the Bobbsey twins at Disneyworld. Although

the family does everything and goes everywhere and never

wants for anything, it is strictly middle-class in values,

interests, and achievements. In spite of the soporific quality of the writing, the series provides an interesting look at the middle-class American family. Mr. Bobbsey works hard; and like Mr. Shaw, he is gone all day at the office. 215

Mrs. Bobbsey's life revolves around her family. Unlike

Mrs. March, she is not interested in society's problems.

She would give generously to the Heart Fund but she would

not visit the Hummels. The children go to public school

in a small town in New England, have a dog, go on vaca­

tions, learn to play musical instruments, are active in

sports, have good manners, and in general learn how to

behave so that they will in turn have nice families that

brush their teeth after every meal, inhale through their

noses, and help little old ladies across the street.

There is a static Dick and Jane quality about the Bobbsey

twins that probably gives the ordinary middle-class white

American a feeling of kinship and identification which must to a large degree account for their continuing popu­

larity.

The Bobbsey Twins series makes The Five Little Peppers

seem exciting. For all the sameness in the Nancy Drew

series, Nancy Drew seems vital and thrilling when compared with Nan Bobbsey. The young children in all these novels are, from a modern adult viewpoint, the worst characters to tolerate. Little Phronsie Pepper and the baby Bobbsey talk babytalk. The only possible conclusion one can draw is that if children eat a bushel of dirt in their growing-up years, they also read a bushel of fictional waste matter. 216

One of the most interesting variations on Louisa May

Alcott's theme that all children need a good mother and a stable family environment is in the Maida series. This series appearing in the thirties, features an invalid girl,

Maida, whose mother is dead. Maida needs friends, family, and mother. Fortunately, her father, though never a prom­ inent character in the series, has wealth unlimited. Maida ultimately recovers from her illness, and her father gathers all her new friends, from a little town where she has been recuperating, into a pseudo-family. He is able to hire a man and his wife who are teachers and who act as surrogate parents to supervise and instruct this interest­ ingly acquired 'family.' Although these books are no longer published and not read except when it rains at the seashore, the theme attests to the eternal popularity of

Miss Alcott's theme.

The presently popular Laura Ingalls Wilder family series, both widely read in paperback and watched weekly on television, has its roots in the Little Women family tradition. The Little House on the Prairie series like

Caddie Woodlawn, Understood Betsy, and the Pollyanna books features a tom-boy girl like Jo. All of these books stress the importance of an affectionate family life as the cen­ tral force in molding the child and helping the child learn 217 to live in society. Like The Bobbsey Twins, The Little

House on the Prairie series has the usual family structure of father, mother, and children. As in Caddie Woodlawn, the father in The Little House on the Prairie is a much stronger figure than in these other family series.

It is not too unlikely that the family in Little

Women, informative though it is about the middle-class

American family of the 1870s, is not as normal and or­ dinary as the Pepper-King menage of the 1890s, the frontier family of Laura Wilder, or the Bobbsey family in the twentieth century. One might argue that the frontier setting demands a strong father figure. On the other hand, as suggested before, the Alcott-March family is really atypical in spite of the insights this family pro­ vides for the student of the American family. How often did one get in one family an inexhaustible, hard-working, cheerful mother willing to take on all the burdens of the family, an idealistic father whose concerns were other­ worldly, and a second daughter who was eager and willing to be surrogate father and provider? The lines from books like The Little House on the Prairie, The Bobbsey Twins series, and The Five Little Peppers to the Little Women series are surface connections of family concerns; the essential difference is in the way the father as authority- 218

provider-protector is perceived. Like Little Women, these

are all readable children’s books that revolve around

basic American myths and ideals. These family-centered

books stress that the American family is essential to the

stability of society.

Spawned by these family-oriented books are family

situation comedies on television, as well as Walt Disney

family movies that generally substitute sugary, senti­ mental pap for realism. There are available daily oppor­ tunities to see shows like "The Waltons," "Family Affair,"

"The Brady Bunch," and "Father Knows Best." These are merely televised updated versions of The Bobbsey Twins and The Five Little Peppers. Unfortunately, the realism is distorted by sentimentality and the morality by cater­ ing to wishfulfillment.

If imitation is truly the sincerest form of praise, then the vitality and popularity of Little Women cannot be challenged since there has been a spate of creations that owe so much to Little Women and Miss Alcott's other works. Like the clich'es of the McGuffey Reader, Little

Women has become absorbed into the fabric of American literature and life. There is no way to estimate the influence of Louisa May Alcott's major work on the Am­ erican family. Little Women and her other novels and 219

short stories served from the late 1870s until the first

world war as guidebooks and instructions for maintaining

the family unity, for rearing a family, and for being a good mother. Although Little Women has lost some of its initial popularity, it has remained widely read.1 It is difficult to meet an American woman who has never read some of Little Women. The novel has a way of creeping into the reader’s heart and mind. It remains an outstand­ ing ’how-to’ book for the American girl.

Rarely is anything said of the literary quality of the other Louisa May Alcott works, probably because they run the gamut from readable and enjoyable to really dread­ ful. In spite of the deserved and continuing popularity of Little Women, it is unfortunate that An Old-Fashioned

Girl is not more widely read as it is nearly as good as

Little Women and infinitely better than many other very popular children’s books. Like Little Women, An Old-

Fashioned Girl is in the Realist tradition and utilizes a

Jo-figure named Polly. The plot moves rapidly; the dialogue is good enough to sound like human beings talking; the characterization, excellent. It is an outstanding source

1Frank L. Mott, Golden Multitudes (New York: R.R. Bowker and Co., 1947), p. 102. 220

for everyday life detail for the middle-class Northern

urban family in the Gilded Age.

Although An Old-Fashioned Girl is a source for

descriptions of the types of clothing worn by adults

and children and interiors of comfortable middle-class

homes as well as city flats, it is also a guide to the

education available to the American girl and young woman

of the 1870s-1890s. This was discussed at length in

Chapter III. This novel is also literally stuffed like

a Thanksgiving turkey with detail from everyday family

life. In chapters like "Little Things," "Scrapes," and

"Brothers and Sisters," the reader can see exactly what urban American girls and boys did with their time, the games that children played, and the after-school and week­

end activities of that period in American life. In "Needles and Tongues" one can see that gossip has not changed nor has the adolescent interest in talking about the opposite

sex. On general subjects the tenor of the book can be A for the reader ’la plus la change, la plus la meme.’ When studying the details, it is like looking at old photographs and not noticing that essentially everyone is alike but instead remarking on the differences in dress.

An Old-Fashioned Girl is an urban book vzhich dwells frequently on the problems of the family in the city. The 221 problems of loneliness, anomie, and alienation are best seen in the examples of Mrs. Mills' girls who are virtually without any families in Boston. Their lives have also been touched by the prevalence of crime and violence that seemed to stalk the streets of Boston in the 1870s as much as it does in any American city in the 1970s. With the general didactic tone of all of Alcott's novels, these incidents were probably intended as warnings for the 'nice' girl readers, but they must, too, stand as eye-openers and bids for Christian charity towards these girls who must make their way alone.

The social life of the middle-class American family can be seen clearly in An Old-Fashioned Girl. There are two charming chapters filled with the social delights to enchant any girl reader. "Good-by" and "Forbidden Fruit" show Polly at a children's dance and party at fourteen and then going vzith the Shaw family to the opera and a party once she is grown-up. All the party clothing detail of the two experiences are there complete vzith the conveyance of that marvelous experience of dressing up, looking one's best, and having a splendid, delightful time with ordinary responsibilities forgotten for the evening. Rose in Bloom, too, is replete with details of social evenings, parties en famille, a coming-out ball, and a New Year's Day 222 reception. Such chapters cast a shimmering, irridescent glow over the didacticism of many of these lesser read novels. This timeless appeal to the ordinary girl reader accounts for modern readers' interest while re­ vealing much of the life and activities of the middle class adolescents and their families during the Gilded

Age.

Eight Cousins-Rose in Bloom is a compendium of what girls and young ladies wore, what they talked about among themselves and in the bosom of their families, their re­ lationships with their brothers and male cousins, what they went to see, what they did with their spare time, and how they filled their days. Eight Cousins-Rose in

Bloom is an earnest call to young ladies to set aside time every day to learn to do practical, worthwhile things like baking bread and mending. Louisa Alcott urges her reader to spend less time reading French novels, gossip­ ping, and dancing and more time learning how to be good housewives and mothers. Rose in Bloom might be a manual on good behavior in Boston society in the 1870s: calling, parties, volunteer work, reading, conversation, and techniques for catching a husband. Making a good marriage that will last and will provide a stable family life is one aspect of family life that is discussed at length in 223

Rose in Bloom and in Jack and Jill. Alcott presents a

vocational ideal about being a wife and mother that is

refreshing and appealing to the girl reader, x The family--

its obligations to its children, its responsibilities,

pleasures, and continuance—is at the core of these novels.

An Old-Fashioned Girl is marred less by didacticism

than any other of Alcott's novels and short stories ex­

cept Little Women. Although there is much preaching and

teaching by example in An Old-Fashioned Girl, the out­

right sermonizing that blights many of the other works

and short stories is fortunately missing. Miss Alcott

does not allow herself to succumb to sentimentalizing her

characters and their plights in An Old-Fashioned Girl as

she does so often in Jack and Jill and Rose in Bloom.

Like Little Women, An Old-Fashioned Girl can be read with pleasure by both boys and girls as well as by adults.

Another work that is undeservedly ignored is

Hospital Sketches. It is an excellent, humorous, and realistic account of Civil War nursing and its problems.

It cannot compare in artistic form with Walt Whitman’s

Drum Taps nor with the stark, moving realism of Ambrose

Bierce's Civil War short stories; however, Hospital Sketches is devoid of sentimentality and filled with detailed, 224

realistic, and often entertaining reminiscences. One can

see the world of the sick and dying, smell the stenches,

and feel the cold of the scarcely heated rooms. Although

Hospital Sketches does not deal directly with individual

American families, it touches obliquely on the obligations

of mothers and sisters to the fighting men who can be seen

as a ’larger family,’ the Army. Nurse Periwinkle is really

a mother figure striving to save her children. One of the

aspects of motherhood is nursing the sick and dying. There

are remarks that reflect poignantly on the mothers, wives,

and sisters who come to the hospital and risk losing their

health to nurse the wounded. The book is a shocking com­

mentary on the state of the vocation of American mother­

hood where there were so few wives, mothers, and sisters

willing to come.

Both little Men and Jo1s Boys are, as far as liter­

ature goes, pretty thin novels. They lack nearly all

the essentials to make them lasting works. They are

seriously flawed by didacticism, poor characterization,

and are probably generally read only as sequels by a

reader who has become an ardent Louisa May Alcott fan

from reading Little Women. If, however, one is interested

in Miss Alcott’s views on education, child rearing, and general family life, these novels are loaded with material 225

(see Chapter III). It is only as literature that they

are such disappointments. Unfortunately for Louisa May

Alcott*s literary reputation, Little Men and Jo * s Boys

are equalled by Jack and Jill. The boy-girl romance that

is at the center of the book flowers at the end into a

somewhat-adult romance that leaves the reader with a pe­

culiar taste in his mouth. There seems almost something

incestuous about the brotherly-sisterly relations of Jack

and Jill. That, combined with the repellent Mrs. Minot,

who as a mother ’always knows best,' creates a plot that

only a monumental tragedian could make real.

Compared with An Old-Fashioned Girl, Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom--manuals on urban manners and education—

Jack and Jill is an excellent source on American village education. Mrs. Minot, irritating though she is as a character, has very farsighted and advanced views on child­ ren's education, co-education, diet, and adolescent psychol ogy. Mrs. Minot’s insistence on allowing children plenty of time to be children and mature at their own pace and on never forcing a person into a career that he or she does not want relate closely to the advice of modern child psychologists and educators.

To the modern reader the importance of a good mother has become a distorted theme because these novels are 226

singularly without adult male figures. At least in Little

Women, there were Mr. March and Mr. Lawrence. An Old-

Fashioned Girl has Mr. Shaw who, for all his business

interests, is the father and authority in the Shaw house­

hold. Tom Shaw, returning from the West, returns as an

adult male and assumes the responsibilities and privileges

of one. Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom have Uncle Alec,

Charlie and the grown-up Mac. Rose does not rule the roost

unchallenged. The matriarchal world of Jack and Jill and

Under the Lilacs to modern readers distorts the realism

of the books and merely adds to their other liabilities.

To the readers of Alcott's times, however, the realism was

much less distorted. Many of these readers were living

in families mutilated by the Civil War and deprived of their

fathers and brothers as protectors, providers, and guides.

The woman's world and all the obligations devolving upon

the wives and mothers was commonplace enough, both North

and South.

To slough through Work, Moods, or A Modern Mephis­

topheles , one must be dedicated to Louisa May Alcott. As

literature, they are not even minor works. Moods is a good preliminary testing ground for characterization that will emerge polished and real in Little Women. Themes,

too, appear in embryo for much of Alcott's other works. 227

The need for each woman to decide her career for herself

and to know herself before committing herself to marriage

first is seen in Moods. The independent, career girl is

a new character in American literature in the 1870s. The

idea of a girl having a career other than marriage is al­

most unheard of that early. Throughout Moods is the theme

that everyone needs a good mother and a normal family life

in order to become an independent, wholesome adult. The

tightly-knit family circle held together with mother’s

love and common sense is necessary to provide the children growing up with basic values and true goals. The importance of the family unit is the central theme in Moods and is reiterated regularly in every other novel and short story.

There is almost nothing redeeming to say about A

Modern Mephistopheles. It is probably better for Louisa

May Alcott's literary reputation that it remains forgotten.

It is a puzzle why she and her mother were so delighted with it. Perhaps writing it was a cathartic experience.

Perhaps she found its subject matter serious and daring.

There certainly are no socio-historical details of value, no characterization, nothing.

Work at best is a badly flawed novel with some rele­ vance to the study of city life for the working girl in 228

the Gilded Age. At one point, Work shows Christie in a

city at the mercy of hunger, illness, and solitude.

The city here is like a voracious predator waiting to

devour the weak. Christie, without the support of her

family, must find a family who will include her and shore

up her defenses against corruption, decay, and perhaps

even death.

The characterization in Work is incredibly poor; the

men characters whom Miss Alcott never at the best of times

handles well are the nadir of her male characterizations.

Christie is such a tiresome heroine that one would be

glad of a bit of fluff like Sylvia. Work is the most ex­ asperating Alcott novel because the urban setting and

themes offer such promise and the subject matter could have been the source for a realistic urban novel which anticipated The Jungle or Maggie, Girl of the Streets.

Its importance now rests with the overflowing details of everyday life in rooming houses, near slums, backstage at the theatre, and amidst the activity of the streets of the city. Had the same artistic fervor inflamed Work as it did Little Women, Work would have been the making of Miss

Alcott*s literary reputation. It did not, of course.

Probably Work was never infused with the same degree of realism as Sinclair or Crane because Louisa May Alcott was 229

au fond a very conventional middle-class New Englander

with a strong sense of propriety. She feared, and right­

ly so, financial loss with the writing of such a book.

Perhaps she feared even more importantly that such frank

writing might damage the innocent girl reader.

The short stories have their ups and downs, but mostly

downs. One can regret the promise of Work, dislike some

of the novels like Jack and Jill, Under the Lilacs, and

A Modern Mephistopheles, wish for a reassessment of Hospital

Sketches and An Old-Fashioned Girl, tolerate Eight Cousins,

Rose in Bloom, and Jo * s Boys; but one can only be grateful for

Little Women. Even though Louisa May Alcott’s literary

reputation rests securely on Little Women, nearly the en­

tire body of her novels is worthy of rereading and study­

ing in search for the light they cast on the changes and

directions of the American family. Nearly all of Miss

Alcott’s novels center around the family unit. Some show

by example the actions and successes of a family with a

strong and loving mother figure. Others show how badly families go awry when there is no dominating mother figure.

As the family is the central unit of society, the family that produces misfits and malcontents only serves to weaken the fabric of society and threaten the continuation of democracy. 230

Little Women and the other works of Louisa May

Alcott appeared at a crucial time in the history of the

American family. Although it had been for all practical purposes mother-dominated from the beginning, the ideal

American family was presented as paternalistic and generally accepted as that in a male-controlled world.

By the 1870s, with the aftermath of the Civil War, its loosening of restrictions on females and their position in society, the urban industrial-technological explosions that took the man even farther away from the home and weakened his role in the family, the mother’s position as educator, rearer of the young, arbitrator, and fount of love and affection rose to the forefront and was openly acknowledged.

Little Women with its matriarchal family unit was an overt manifestation of the changes in the family structure.

Louisa May Alcott combined progressive, for her times, even radical beliefs about the role of vzoman in society: her need to be an independent, self-reliant human being first and a female second, with an essential conservatism which stresses that the vocation of wife and mother is central to the preservation of society. Using her own family background which was surely atypical of most families in the middle-classes in the United States in the 1870s as 231

source material for her works, Louisa May Alcott con­

structed novels that served as 'how-to' manuals for child

rearing, children's education, social and behaviorial

training, and for general information on family life.

The American mother faced all the problems of child rearing

and family life compounded with the problems of urbanism,

the absentee father, and the temptations and threats to middle class morality that came along with the golden dreams of the industrial revolution. She felt that the

future of America rested in her hands, with her children, and that she, practically alone, would have to equip them

to live in this new world.

No wonder the zealous vocational idealism of Louisa

May Alcott had an audience. The old calling of the Puritan work ethic refined in the fire of maternal zeal and pride, reared its head in Massachusetts' own Louisa May Alcott.

Prom within the pages of factual, detailed realism soared the romantic idealism of saving American society through creating better mothers and finer families. Relegating man to the unmentionable role of cooperating in reproduc­ tion and the respectable role of producing financial sup­ port for the family, this romantic ideal sailed forth personified as a brave, independent young girl eager to 232

tilt at windmills built by men in a masculine dominated

world or as a sturdy figure in a worn grey cape with a

warm, welcoming smile. Such romanticism does infinite

credit to the American dream. With what seems typically

American bravado, this romantic spinister taught American

women by means of very realistic novels how to mother and

rear their families.

There is still a crisis with the American family.

Twentieth century sociologists and psychologists question and query the stability of the family unit and plead for

its survival. The middle-class mother still fears the future and worries and muddles along by reading aloud to her daughters, "'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,' grumbled Jo, lying on the rug." The old magic holds, and little girls in blue jeans still play at being Jo. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary

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______. Odell Shepard, editor. The Journals of Bronson Alcott. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1938.

Alcott, Louisa May. Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag. 6 vols. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872-1879«

______. Eight Cousins. New York: World Publishing Company, 1948.

______. Flower Fables. Boston: George W. Briggs, 1855-

. A Garland for Girls. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1888.

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______. A Hole in the Wall. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1899«

______. Hospital Sketches. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, i960.

______. Jack and Jill. New York: World Publishing Company, 19^-8 •

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______. Jo's Boys, A 'Sequel to Little Men.' New York: World Publishing Company, 19^9«

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Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. New York: World Publishing Company, 1946.

______. Lulu's Library. 3 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1930.

______. Meadow Blossoms. New York: Crowell, 1879.

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. Proverb Stories. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1882.

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Secondary

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Cable, Mary and Wendy Buehr, et al. American Manners and Morals. New York: American Heritage Publishing Company, Incorporated, 1969.

Calhoun, Arthur W. A Social History of the American Family, From Colonial Times to the Present. 3 vols. New York: Barnes and Noble, 19%5• Original edition was 1917«

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Cremin, Lawrence A. The Transformation of the School, Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957• New York: Random House, 1964.

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Earle, Alice Morse. Child-Life in Colonial Days. New York: Macmillan Company, 1922.

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______. Understood Betsy. New York: Henry Holt and Company, T916.

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______. Plan for Marriage. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1934.

Fuchs, Lawrence H. Family Matters. New York: Warner, 1974.

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______- A History of Marriage and the Family. New York: Macmi1lan, 1934.

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Harper, Fowler Vincent. Problems of the Family. In­ dianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952.

Hess, Robert D. Family Worlds: A Psychological Approach to Family Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959•

Hill, Reuben. Families Under Stress. New York: Harper Brothers, 1944.

Hope, Laura Lee. The Bobbsey Twins Series. 38 vois. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1923-1955-

Ilg, Frances L. and Louisa Bates Ames. The Gesell In­ stitute's Child Behavior. New York: Harper and Row, 1955•

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Kirkpatrick, Clifford. The Family as Process and Insti­ tution. New York: Ronald Press, Company, 1955*

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Leslie, Gerald R. The Family in Social Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973«

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______-and Merle E. Frampton. Family and Society, A Study of the Sociology of Reconstruction. New Yorks D. Van Nostrand Company, 1935*