Connections: Stowe, Alcott, Fields, Jewett, Cather

They knew each other, those 19^th and early 20^th century writing women. Harriet Beecher Stowe knew Annie Fields. Annie Fields knew Louisa May Alcott and Sarah Orne Jewett. Willa Cather knew Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields.

I have been reading the new The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout) and find that Cather not only knew Fields and Jewett; she knew Sinclair Lewis and Robert Frost and Alfred Knopf and Yehudi Menuhin and everybody else. The links of women writers Cather knew, however, all chain back to Annie Fields, the wife and then widow of James Fields, the Fields of Ticknor and Fields, the distinguished Boston publishing house.

I myself met Annie Fields years ago in the pages of her Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe. It’s a wonderful book, a little short on scholarly apparatus, but full of the flavor of Stowe’s life. Fields quotes Stowe as she remembers her mother’s death when little brother Henry was too young to attend the funeral:

They told us at one time that she had been laid in the ground, at another that she had gone to heaven; whereupon Henry, putting the two things together, resolved to dig through the ground and go to heaven to find her; for, being discovered under sister Catherine’s window one morning digging with great zeal and earnestness, she called to him to know what he was doing and, lifting his curly head with great simplicity, he answered, ‘Why, I’m going to heaven to find ma.’

After her husband’s death, Fields and Jewett lived together for many years – a “Boston marriage” – until Jewett’s death. Fields maintained a hospitable setting in Boston for writers and their friends. Cather, who admired Jewett and later edited a book of her stories, met her there. Alcott also enjoyed the Fields’ support and sometimes stayed with her, especially when money was tight. So far as I can tell, Cather never met Stowe or Alcott, but she had opinions, especially about Alcott. In 1938, she writes to Henry Seidel Canby:

Now, another thing: I want to thank you for your review of Katherine Anthony’s book on Miss Alcott [titled Louisa May Alcott]. I see the Freud fanatics on getting on your nerves, as they are on mine. It happened that my old friend Mrs. James T. Fields, born a May, was a cousin of Louisa May Alcott. Several years before she died, Mrs. Fields asked me to destroy a number of more-or-less family letters, which she did not wish to leave among her drawers-full of correspondence. There were a great many from Miss Alcott, who used often to come for long New England visits at her cousin’s house. Anything more lively and “pleasant” and matronly you could not imagine. She was often a good deal fussed about money, because, apparently, she was practically the only earning member of the family….

If the “naked bodies” of the men she nursed in her hospital experience left any “wound,” it was certainly not perceptible to her relatives, or in her litters—or in her very jolly books, as I remember them. Catherine the Great might be called fair game for Miss Anthony’s obsession, but certainly that warm-hearted and very practical New England Spinster was not. I wish now that those letters to Mrs. Fields had not been destroyed.

I can’t comment  on the Anthony book, but I have seen plenty of similar ones. When a woman writes, especially if she writes successfully and even more if she makes money doing so and, worst of all, if she wants to make money doing so, then she must be proceeding out of some personal deficiency  or “wound.” They say that Elizabeth Gaskell wrote because of grief over the death of son (except that she was writing stories even before she married) and George Eliot wrote because she was homely (since pretty women don’t need to achieve anything on their own) and Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote sensationally about slavery because of her religious upbringing (except that the family was also broke and she needed to sell something). Cather knew better. She was one of the writing wounded.

If Alcott’s letters had survived they would buttress our picture of an ambitious and successful author who did not set out to write a feminist tract, but to produce a salable book at the request of her publisher. I am glad that — despite her express wishes — not all of Cather’s letters were destroyed. They also show us a woman who loved to write and enjoyed being successful, artistically and financially.

What I Read in April 2013

Robert Graves, I Claudius. Graves’ historical novel takes us into the world of the early Caesars — Julius, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula — as interpreted by the next emperor, Claudius. He tells the tale in his old age. This distillation of fancy from fact was the basis for the public television series starring Derek Jacoby as Claudius. Hail Caesar!

Graham Greene, The Comedians. This novel, set in the 1960s Haiti of Papa Doc Duvalier, brings us Smith, Jones and Brown. They are three “comedians” who do not always amuse, even as they continue to play their various parts.

P.D. James, Innocent Blood. This novel by the creator of Inspector Adam Dalgliesh contains neither Dalgliesh nor his female counterpart. It is tangled web of family and revenge with a couple of neat plot twists. Unfortunately the principal character, the self confident adopted daughter of an academic star, never became believable to me.

W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants. Immigrants come in; emigrants go out. These four emigrants all went out from Germany during the 20th century. Sebald’s account may be a novel or it may be a memoir; the uncertainty of his intention is part of the story. Illustrated.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society. Much of what Galbraith wrote in 1958 and updated in 1998 is still applicable. We are affluent in things, but not in services or the requirements for good community living. How did this happen and why do we continue to misinterpret? He explains.

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot. Flaubert had a parrot — not a live one, but a stuffed bird who became a character in one of his novels. Geoffrey Braithwaite, the narrator here, wants to be sure about the residual museum parrots. Which one was the original and authentic inspirational bird?

David Lodge, Deaf Sentence. We have another satisfying novel by David Lodge which starts out light and funny, mostly, and ends on a more serious note. Deaf/death is the implied pun in the title and it seems a bit overdone at time, except that I have the same problems myself — currently deaf and subject to death.

Michael Connelly, Angels Flight. In this sixth book in the Harry Bosch series, the L.A. Detective unpicks a complex knot of murder, murder, more murder, and riot. Los Angeles and its discontents is part of the story.

Eva La Plante, editor, My Heart is Boundless: Writings of Abigail May Alcott, Louisa’s Mother. This collection of letters and journal entries by Louisa May Alcott’s beloved “Marmee” gives us a compelling woman who survived great difficulties in her life.

Abigail Alcott, Practical Philosopher

A little more money, fewer wants, or better economy would free us from dependence or obligation. Abigail May Alcott

Abigail Alcott was the wife of Bronson Alcott and the mother of the well-known author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott. It was her Concord neighbor, Henry David Thoreau, who said that “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” Abigail, however, could not let it alone. Married to the benignly philosophical and totally impractical Bronson Alcott, she had to provide for herself and their four daughters – and often for him as well.

In the months before they were married, Abigail saw in Bronson the ideal person, whose contrasting qualities would contribute to their life together.

 I do think him in every respect qualified to make me happy. He is moderate, I am impetuous. He is prudent and humble, I am forward and arbitrary. He is poor, but we are both industrious. Why may we not be happy?

Still, she finishes the thought with, “We talk little of heaven, but are already busy in schemes for our future independence and comfort.” Raised in comfortable circumstances herself, she hoped for comfort, but that was never Bronson’s goal. Abigail reminds me Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, marrying her idealistic vision in haste. Abigail then repented, not in leisure, but in grinding hard work for more years than Dorothea had to endure.

In My Heart Is Boundless, Eva LaPlante has brought together the writings of Abigail Alcott – the letters and journal entries which were scattered in various collections. A journal keeper all her life, many of Abigail’s entries were destroyed or truncated after her death. From what remains, one can see why.

 I wish all philosophers could consent to admit in their domestic arrangements a financier. They require this agent more than any people in the world. They are often (for lack of this) reduced to the most humiliating dependence. Wisdom must be fed and clothed, and neither the butcher [n]or tailor will take pay in aphorisms or hypotheses.

Abigail, the four Alcott daughters and, to a considerable extent, Abigail’s relatives served as financiers to Bronson Alcott’s impecunious household. Some of the most moving letters in the collection are from Abigail to her loyal brother Samuel. After the birth of a stillborn son, she wrote,

 Our plans are all undefined. We seem to be floating along, sometimes rough, then smooth, then becalmed, sometimes high and dry, then engulfed in an ocean of difficulties. But I am getting hardened, toughened, indifferent. I care less for this world than ever….

In the end, she could not turn away from the man she still termed her “excellent husband” and her four needy children. She understood clearly by then what Bronson was.

 Wife, children, and friends are less to him than the great idea he is seeking to realize. How naturally man’s sphere seems to be in the region of the head, and woman’s in the heart and affections.

And somewhat more bitterly,

 He [brother Sam] seems quite at a loss himself, and feels dissatisfied that Mr. A[lcott] finds no means of supporting his family independent of his friends. They have to labour, why should not he? It is a difficult question to answer.

Many of Abigail’s entries in My Heart Is Boundless are concerned with the intellectual and moral development of her daughters. She taught them not to depend on their father, but to act for themselves. To aspiring writer Louisa, she said,

 Your temperament is a peculiar one, and there are few or none who can intelligently help you. Set about the work of formation of character, reformation of habits, and believe me you are capable of ranking among the best….

This advice sounds very like that offered by the Marmee depicted in the pages of Little Women.

Abigail at times sees her problems in relation to the position of women in the society she knows.

 I had a curious speculation on the condition of woman the other day. Told Mr. Alcott I thought there was some mistake when she was created. It was an afterthought, indeed Adam’s fancy for a companion first suggested it to the Almighty power, and she was called in to being after all other animals were made and pronounced good, but no such benediction was pronounced on her, but a tacit curse.

In her last years, Abigail was able to live in greater comfort and security, due to the success of Little Women and the books which followed. Ironically, even Bronson began to produce some income. Conversation audiences were now willing to hear his stories about his author daughter and other Concord neighbors, wrapped in a little philosophy, of course.

Abigail respected Bronson for his interest in the issues engaged her: “The great questions of right and wrong, of expedient right and necessary wrong, have always puzzled me.” Her final judgment of herself was mixed:

 I fear little, I hope much, for malice finds no place as an element in the composition of my character. I am impulsive but not vindictive. I love long, love much and hope to be forgiven. My education was defective. My married life has been filled with trials. I was not prepared for [it], and hardships I resisted rather than accepted or mitigated. I writhed under the injustice of society, and mourned my incompetency to live above it.

What is it that the spiritual sings? Keep your hand on the plough, hold on! Abigail’s married life was “filled with trials” and she never answered the great questions, but she held on, held on. It was the best practical philosophy she could command.

Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia

The Fruitlands farmhouse as it looked when I visited. It has been spruced up and is now part of the Fruitlands Museum at Harvard, Mass.

Bronson Alcott was the father of Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women. He was a man of ideas – of spirit, he would have said – and one of the sages of Concord, Massachusetts. Alcott’s friends included Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, as well as Charles Lane and other English followers.

Bronson Alcott was unable to work for a living for any length of time or to hold on to his money when he had some. His wife – Abba, the model for Marmee in Little Women – and the four Alcott daughters pitched in to keep the family going.

 “His unwillingness to be employed in the usual way produces great doubt in the minds of his friends as of the righteousness of his life,” [Abba] noted in her journal, “because he partakes of the wages of others occupied in this same way.”

Exactly. What he was too pure in spirit to do himself he permitted others to do on his behalf.

Emerson and Lane helped out financially also, and the most dramatic example was the Utopian experiment at Fruitlands in 1843. I have read about Fruitlands in Louisa May Alcott’s light-hearted account, Transcendental Wild Oats, as well as some pages from her journal of those years. John Mattson describes the adventure in Eden’s Outcasts, his joint biography of Bronson and Louisa. In that version of the story, when Fruitlands failed Bronson collapsed emotionally, and Abba took over management of the family finances.

What Richard Francis brings to us in Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia is a full account of how Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane joined to buy the farm which became Fruitlands, how they conceived its purpose, and why it lasted only a few months. Francis provides an absorbing account of the ideological and personal conflicts which doomed the experiment. He believes that Bronson willingly withdrew, hoping to try again, elsewhere. Even if a whole-hearted unity of purpose had prevailed, however, there was not sufficient food and fuel for several adults and five hungry children to spend a New England winter in a ramshackle farmhouse.

Besides the practical limitations of supporting the utopian group on a poorly-developed farm – despite its name, Fruitlands had only a few ancient apple trees – the experiment was doomed by the overabundance of ideas, many supplied by Alcott and even more by Lane. Emerson’s view of Lane was wary:

In his article Emerson surveyed the blizzard of material Alcott had sent him from Ham. “Here are Educational Circulars, and communist Apostles; Alists; plans for Syncretic Associations and Pestalozzian Societies, Self-Supporting Institutions, Experimental Normal schools, Hydropathic and Philosophical Associations, Health Unions and Phalanterian Gazettes, Paradises within the reach of all men, Appeals of Man to Women, and Necessities of Internal Marriage illustrated by Phrenological Diagrams.”

Francis’ book spells out in great detail the many goals of the utopians, so many that some were mutually exclusive. Must a new generation of men be created before we can “reproduce Perfect Men” or can we improve what we have now with the right education? What must we give up, for example, good things to eat, so that we can find true abundance is what is left? How can we live self sufficiently without money and still pay the mortgage? These issues were accompanied with certain obsessions like rejection of dung to improve the fertility of the land. They favored green manure, but I can say as one who has spent time on a farm that cow manure is every bit as natural as clover, all being part of the same cycle.

Francis tells an interesting story and brings us a full-range of believable characters. Despite the elements of farce, the story ends sadly.

The Fruitlands fiasco was the product of misunderstandings and mistakes on every level, practical, personal, philosophical.

Louisa May Alcott and the Wise Woman

This is my second contribution to this month’s discussion of Little Women at the Year of Feminist Classics.

One issue which is seldom discussed when appraising feminist themes in literature is the role of women in old age. Too often older women are invisible, just as Doris Lessing observed in her novel The Summer before the Dark.

Nice picture, but not yet a “wise woman.”

Last year, when we discussed Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman at A Year of Feminist Classics, I was impressed by Gilman’s description of an all-female society where older women are both honored for the lives they have led and employed for their wisdom and self-control. Here the male visitors are greeted:

“If they were only younger,” he muttered between his teeth. “What on earth is a fellow to say to a regiment of old Colonels like this?”

In all our discussions and speculations we had always unconsciously assumed that the women, whatever else they might be, would be young. Most men do think that way, I fancy.

“Woman” in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether. But these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother.

Although Louisa May Alcott is writing about a real 19^th-century world – not a fantasy like Herland – she also recognizes the powerful role older women can take in understanding and counseling the young as they try to make their way in life. Marmee in Little Women is a clear example. Her opinions are usually conservative.

“Learn to know and value the praise which is worth having, and to excite the admiration of excellent people by being modest as well as pretty, Meg.”

Also,

“I’m not ambitious for a splendid fortune, a fashionable position, or a great name for my girls. If rank and money come with love and virtue, also, I would accept them gratefully, and enjoy your good fortune; but I know, by experience, how much genuine happiness can be had in a plain little house, where the daily bread is earned, and some privations give sweetness to the few pleasures.”

At the same time, Marmee unites with Mr. March in not accepting poverty passively. When the girls propose to find work,

“Believing they could not begin too early to cultivate energy, industry, and independence, their parents consented, and both fell to work with the hearty good-will which in spite of all obstacles is sure to succeed at last.”

What is most striking to a modern parent is not that the girls’ mother gives advice – all mothers do that – but that the girls take the advice so seriously.

Alcott’s next successful children’s book after Little Women was An Old Fashioned Girl. In it, Alcott continues to show the strong role an older woman can take in a sometimes dysfunctional household. Young Polly – pretty, gifted and poor – comes to stay in the Shaw household. The Shaw children are friendly but spoiled. Polly receives understanding and support not from their mother, but from their grandmother. When they meet, unsophisticated country Polly is praised by Grandmother Shaw because she is still a child:

“Well, dear, I’ll tell you. In my day, children of fourteen and fifteen did n’t dress in the height of the fashion; go to parties, as nearly like those of grown people as it’s possible to make them; lead idle, giddy, unhealthy lives, and get blas, at twenty. We were little folks till eighteen or so; worked and studied, dressed and played, like children; honored our parents; and our days were much longer in the land than now, it seems to, me.”

But children were not idle at all:

“Yes, and we all learned to make bread, and cook, and wore little chintz gowns, and were as gay and hearty as kittens. All lived to be grandmothers and fathers; and I’m the last, seventy, next birthday, my dear, and not worn out yet; though daughter Shaw is an invalid at forty.”

“That’s the way I was brought up, and that’s why Fan calls me old-fashioned, I suppose,” said Polly.

This function of advice giver and reinforcer of conservative family values is given to Uncle Alec in another successful children’s book, Eight Cousins. But still, the many aunts in the story sometimes get a word in and the elderly great aunts, Peace and Plenty, stand firmly for the good old days and good old values.

Even in her adult novel, Moods, Alcott finds a place for a wise woman. When Sylvia is grieving over the unfortunate marital choice, she has a “sudden memory”:

“If ever you need help that Geoffrey cannot give, remember cousin Faith.”

This was the hour Faith foresaw; Moor had gone to her in his trouble, why not follow, and let this woman, wise, discreet, and gentle, show her what should come next.

Faith diagnoses that Sylvia has two spirits contending in one body, and “…each rules by turns, and each helps or hinders as moods and circumstances lead.” Advice and comfort are then given and gratefully received.

Louisa May Alcott wrote two sequels to Little Women. In Little Men and Jo’s Boys Marmee does not completely disappear, but Jo is now clearly in charge of the family destiny. Whereas she was once the harum scarum tomboy who wanted independence of action, now she follows the fortunes of others and guides them on their various ways. Jo is now the wise woman.

Double Trouble: A Pair of Eyes

Sitting on my shelf has been A Double Life, thrillers written by Louisa May Alcott (anonymously) and collected here by Madeleine B. Stern. I don’t care much for this sort of thing but, in the interest of research, I needed to sample one and I share my findings with you

The story “A Pair of Eyes” was written in 1863, five  years before Little Women, and published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Alcott had returned from her first trip abroad and found finances were “behind hand when the money-maker was away.” Her story was illustrated with wood cuts and the publisher asked for more.

Reading it now, I can see why. The plot is melodramatic and improbable, the language unnaturally high-flown, but the people are surprisingly real and the setting is timely, as Alcott combines her own love for the theater and Shakespeare’s Macbeth with the popular interest in mesmerism and spiritualism. Her characters don’t just talk, they act . The “pair of eyes” are those of Agatha Eure, who exercises her powers on the artist she wishes to control. Alcott doesn’t explain exactly how it is done, but the results are dramatic, and the clear triumph of woman over man is striking:

I saw a smile break over the lips, something like triumph flash into the eyes, sudden color flush the cheeks, and the rigid hands lifted to gather up and put the long hair back; then with noiseless steps it came nearer and nearer till it stood beside me.

There ensues a struggle between the two for control of the artist’s will. As Stern comments,

Any observant woman of the time was aware of the inequality of the sexes in the economic world, in government, in law, in marriage, and in the home. Taxed but not represented, the woman in mid-nineteenth-century America lived in an antifeminist world in which the war between the sexes could be carried on far more successfully in fiction than in life. Most of the narratives in A Double Life are basically exercises in that struggle.

While the magazines of Alcott’s day were looking for melodramatic stories to draw readers, perhaps the readers — the female ones at least — were looking for a vicarious satisfaction that Alcott understood because she also wanted it for herself.

Little Women – Feminist Novel?

During the month of July I am hosting the discussion of Little Women at A Year of Feminist Classics. Here is my initial contribution.

I would like to open the discussion of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel for girls, with a proposition. Some readers find in the book a feminist message of independence and self-expression, while others find a message of social conformity. So which is it – a liberating view of female possibilities or an imposition of community expectations? My proposition is that Little Women delivers both messages. The tension between them is what makes the book so real and so memorable.

Let’s start with the conformity message. In Little Women, Mr. March is the absent father, leaving the four sisters and their mother to fend for themselves while he serves as a military chaplain in the Civil War. His presence is strongly felt, however, as he presses for the girls to grow up in accordance with his ideals.

 “I know they will remember all I said to them, that they will be loving children to you, will do their duty faithfully, fight their bosom enemies bravely, and conquer themselves so beautifully, that when I come back to them I may be fonder and prouder than ever of my little women.”

The March sisters receive a letter from their father in which he expresses his ideals for his “little women.”

If they must fight their bosom enemies and conquer themselves, then they must suppress their true natures in favor of a standard set by him, the father. This is reinforced when, near the end of part one of the book, Mr. March comes back from the war and proclaims:

“I see a young lady [Jo] who pins her collar straight, laces her boots neatly, and neither whistles, talks slang, nor lies on the rug as she used to do. Her face is rather thin and pale just now, with watching and anxiety; but I like to look at it, for it has grown gentler, and her voice is lower; she doesn’t bounce, but moves quietly, and takes care of a certain little person in a motherly way which delights me. I rather miss my wild girl; but if I get a strong, helpful, tender-hearted woman in her place, I shall feel quite satisfied.”

A “strong, helpful, tender-hearted woman” is no bad ideal, but it is Mr. March’s ideal, not Jo’s. Alcott realistically shows that when a girl is as energetic and ambitious as Jo, she can expect loving parents will try to get her to conform. Most books for girls at that time would leave it there, with Jo seeing the error of her ways and finding happiness in meeting family expectations. Alcott is a better writer than that. She depicts a Jo who is fully appreciative of love and support; she is not rebelling against her family but against the role of a girl:

“It’s bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boys’ games and work and manners! I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy; and it’s worse than ever now, for I’m dying to go and fight with papa and I can only stay at home and knit, like a poky old woman!”

After she publishes her first story, Jo does not reject her family role, but desires to be independent within it, to support those she loves as – dare we say it! – a boy would have been expected to do.

 Jo’s breath gave out here; and, wrapping her head in the paper, she dedewed her little story with a few natural tears; for to be independent, and earn the praise of those she loved were the dearest wishes of her heart, and this seemed to be the first step toward that happy end.

By the time she wrote Little Women in 1868, Louisa May Alcott was establishing herself as a professional writer. Like Jo, she wanted to support her chronically-needy family, by any honest means. She did, in fact, try various jobs including teaching, sewing and serving as a paid companion. Writing paid best, besides being satisfying in other ways. She wrote plays, poetry, short stories, thrillers, and an account of her nursing experiences in a Civil War hospital – whatever would sell. Her greatest affection was for her “adult” novels, such as Moods, with their emphasis of emotional states and high romance. She wrote Little Women on assignment so, rather than trying to move the reader as in Moods, she told the story, as in Hospital Sketches. When the story is told – drawing on her own experiences growing up with three sisters in the poor but worthy Alcott family – her true values are expressed in the story itself and the choices she made in telling it.

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

People talk like that. These are real girls, not models of perfection. Whatever your concept of feminism may be, for me it is the belief that women define their own natures; they are not defined for them by the male half of humanity. If women are entirely noble and good or entirely evil and dangerous, that is a patriarchal construct which separates females from the rest of the human race where everyone is a mixture of good and bad characteristics.

Jo does want to make money for her family, but she also knows that with money comes power, and she wants that too.

 …Jo was satisfied with the investment of her prize money, and fell to work with a cheery spirit, bent on earning more of those delightful checks. She did earn several that year, and began to feel herself a power in the house….

Jo enjoyed a taste of this satisfaction, and ceased to envy richer girls, taking great comfort in the knowledge that she could supply her own wants, and need ask no one for a penny.

She also has ambition for herself, for her own sake.

“I want to do something splendid before I go into my castle, — something heroic or wonderful, that won’t be forgotten when I’m dead. I don’t know what, but I’m on the watch for it, and mean to astonish you all, some day. I think I shall write books, and get rich and famous: that would suit me, so that is my favorite dream.”

This is important because so often, in stories about girls or biographies of women, their accomplishments are portrayed as done entirely for the sake of others, to fulfill a helper role. Jo does not reject being a helper, but she also wants her own satisfactions and achievements. Within the realities of 19^th-century life, Jo gets them. She rejects the suitor she does not love, she leaves home to support herself, she sells her stories, she writes a good book, and, finally, she does marry, but it is an unconventional union which enables her to become the manager of a school.

1. Which is the stronger message within Little Women – conformity or independence?
2. What other messages to you find there?
3. What are the roles of Marmee and of Jo’s sisters?  Do they support or deny feminist values?

For more information about Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, and the interesting town of Concord, visit my blog page: http://silverseason.wordpress.com/courses-and-presentations/little-women-by-louisa-may-alcott/

What I Read in June 2012

Cornelia Meigs, Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women. This biography for young people, written in the 1930s, is accurate and insightful, if somewhat incomplete. No romance here, but a solid sense of Alcott’s accomplishment.

Sara Paretsky, Total Recall: A V. I. Warshawski Novel. The Chicago female private investigator, Victoria Iphigenia Washshawski, meets schemers and crazies in this suspenseful novel of Holocaust victims, survivors, and the immoral insurance companies who rip them off.

Honoré de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low. Free at last, after 554 pages. Click here for my comment on the first half of the book. The second half is concerned with the structure of the French criminal justice system; the layout of the prisons and the courts (no corridor or staircase is omitted); the lawyers, magistrates, procurators, chaplains, turnkeys, police, detectives, detectives in disguise, spies, criminals — major, petty and demented. He puts forward some interesting theories about criminals. Instead of marijuana as an entry-level drug, we have the sex-obsessed man who steals a shawl for his girlfriend and goes on to a life of crime. It will be a long time before I persist to the end of another Balzac.

Peg Bracken, The I Hate to Housekeep Book. Peg understands. It’s not so much that I hate housekeeping. It’s not like war or mosquitoes — I do admit its necessity. It’s just that I have better things to think about, much less do. Written in 1962, the technology has changed somewhat, but the principles are as true as they ever were.

Richard Russo, The Risk Pool. The risk pool is where you have to get your insurance when you have had so many accidents no insurance company will have you as a customer. In this early novel, Russo tells the story of Sam Hall — energetic and smart, but also uneducated, sometimes alcoholic and always a risk taker.

Barbara Pym, A Few Green Leaves. By five pages in I knew that I had read this one before, but it was all so pleasant that I just kept going. No surprises in this tale of a young woman who settles — temporarily? she is not sure — in an English village, but a lot of worthy characters and amusing incidents.

Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life. To tell of the life of Cleopatra, Schiff must also tell of Caesar and Pompey and Octavia and Mark Antony, especially Mark Mark Antony. The life is skillfully told in a book dense with history and rich with the images of ancient Egypt.

Peg Bracken, I Didn’t Come Here to Argue. The switch from Cleopatra to Peg Bracken is to go from queenly edicts in ancient Egypt to American middle class commentary. These diverse essays are a follow on to The I Hate To Housekeep Book (see above). A little dated, but a welcome diversion after Ptolemaic troubles.

Susan Cheever, Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography. Just the facts about Alcott’s life with personal commentary by the author of American Bloomsbury. Cheever sees Alcott within her world, not ours. I hope to have more comments on the book in July.

Concord: Emerson, Alcott and Thoreau

I love Concord, but even more I love its people: Emerson, Thoreau and the Alcotts. I have added a slideshow to the page devoted to my upcoming course on Louisa May Alcott. The slides accompany a lecture and discussion about what these Concord people contributed to life and literature in their time and ours. Video slide show.

The video links do not work in the slide show. Here they are:

• Bill Clinton reading The Concord Hymn
• Ralph Raldo Emerson’s poem Forbearance
• Ralph Waldo Emerson and Transcendentalism
• Bronson Alcott, How Like an Angel Came I Down
• Thoreau and Walden, Civil Disobedience
• Sorry, you can’t play the music at the present time.

Conversations with Children on the Gospels

In 1836, Amos Bronson Alcott, the father of author Louisa May Alcott, was conducting the Temple School in Boston. His teaching method was Socratic. By conversation and examination, he believed he could lead the children to express moral truths which they already “knew” because they resided within every person.

When the record of these conversations was published, Alcott’s reputation suffered so much that he lost most of his pupils and finally had to close his school. (He retreated to Concord, where Louisa May Alcott grew up and wrote Little Women, based on their lives there — but that is another story.) Several things seem to have aroused opposition. First, by discussing religious texts and beliefs with the children, he opened those texts to interpretation, rather than simply telling the children what was true. Next, some of Alcott’s own interpretations were not conventional. And finally, and probably worst of all, he edged around the dangerous topic of sex.

Reading these conversations now, some of the exchanges with the children are charming, as here where he wants them to understand that small beginnings may have big results.

Despite his Socratic intentions, at times Alcott is quite authoritarian in his explanations:

If you can keep that all straight, you are ready to continue the conversation! The emphasis on spirit is typical of Alcott, who leads discussion of the birth of John the Baptist and of Jesus with an entire emphasis on the birth of spirit. The children don’t always get it. When one child suggests that baby John was brought by angels to his mother while she slept, another protests that that babies are usually born during the day.

Having thus confused physical and spiritual birth, perhaps Alcott could have passed on, but he seems unable to leave the topic alone.

In the midst of all this high thinking, occasionally a refreshing bit of childish realism appears. When they discuss how the boy Jesus stayed at the Temple, causing Mary to be concerned, Alcott wants to explore the concept of “God’s business.” The children, on the other hand, live in a world where parents know their rights.

You can read what shocked Boston now at Google Books or in a new edition entitled How Like an Angel Came I Down.