Eden's Outcasts (12 page)

Alcott's intentions were pure. Although he did raise issues like conception and circumcision that a more prudent teacher would have left undisturbed, he referred to them only in a deeply respectful manner. When discussing birth with the children, he explained, “God draws a veil over these sacred events, and they ought never to be thought of except with reverence.”
⁷⁵
Declaring that every birth was as sacred as that of Jesus, Alcott began his discussion by asking whether any of the children had heard disagreeable or vulgar things about birth. He did not proceed before expressing the hope that none present would ever violate the sacredness of the subject.

Alcott's discussions of the scriptural passages were in strict keeping with his general philosophy of interpretation. Alcott regarded every aspect of the physical world as a spiritual symbol. If he were to be consistent in this view, then even (perhaps especially) the most intimate facts of life must have their metaphysical lessons to teach. When he conversed with the children about circumcision, he asked them not about the physical ritual but rather, “Was there any spiritual meaning in it?” He used the episode as an emblem of self-sacrifice and a means of illustrating “that pain is of no consequence, if it makes us better.”
⁷⁶

Alcott's commentary on birth had a similar object. Indeed, the passage from the
Conversations
that lay at the heart of the ensuing scandal was an attempt, not to lead the children into contemplation of sexuality, but to unveil the spiritual truth that Alcott assumed to exist beneath every physical fact:

Apart from this passage, most of the stir destined to arise from the
Conversations
resulted from the line that Elizabeth Peabody wanted to excise: the comment by one of Alcott's most insightful pupils, six-year-old Josiah Quincy, about the naughtiness of other people. Asked by Alcott to share his understanding of birth, Josiah had replied:

The hostile members of Alcott's readership were to seize on the phrase “naughtiness…of other people” as if they had found decisive evidence. Surely, they supposed, if Alcott's pupils had fixed their minds on naughtiness, then the schoolmaster had put it there, and certainly naughtiness could mean nothing other than sex. Alcott, far more brazenly than Socrates in ancient times, was corrupting the youth of the American Athens.

Yet Josiah Quincy's remarks had nothing to do with sexual intercourse. Rather, he was striving to create some mythology to explain how an infant's spirit, which he had been led to think of as perfect, came to be housed in an imperfect, sinful body. His explanation, quite logical in view of the Christian teaching that Jesus took upon himself the sins of the world, was that each originally blameless infant spirit draws into itself at birth some of the “naughtiness” of the human race, thus partly cleansing the surrounding world of its evil. This evil, Josiah reasoned, must be the stuff from which bodies were formed. The proper minds of Boston, in their prurient reading of Josiah's speculations, showed a good deal more naughtiness than either the boy or his questioner had in mind.

Yet Peabody rightly divined that no one would pause to consider this fact. This was the Boston where, in 1834, citizens had stripped the clothes from the back of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and led him through the streets with a rope around his neck. It was the Boston that, during that same year, had looked on as an anti-Catholic mob burned down a convent in neighboring Charlestown. It was the city where, a few years later, a freethinker named Abner Kneeland would be sent to jail for ridiculing the Immaculate Conception. It was also the city across the river from a still-conservative Harvard, which, in 1838, was to banish Emerson for daring to suggest that ordinary people might be as divine as Jesus. In short, it was a city that assumed that shared religious beliefs lay at the foundation of the social order and public morality. It tolerated free inquiry so long as the questioners did not appear to strike at the beliefs that, it was thought, gave structure to social and moral existence. However, once the line was crossed, Peabody realized, Boston's liberalism melted like April snow.

Peabody pleaded with Bronson to remove the potentially controversial passages. Bronson would compromise only by placing the questionable portions in a separate section in the back of the book. Almost at the same moment as this professional disagreement was unfolding, a personal quarrel brought a precipitous end to Peabody's association with the Temple School. She came home to the Alcotts' apartments one day to find Bronson and Abba waiting for her and seething with anger. Straying into Peabody's room, Abba had uncovered letters from Elizabeth's sister Mary in which the latter had criticized Alcott's methods and had advised Elizabeth to free herself from any participation in her employer's “mistaken views.” To the Alcotts, the letters were evidence of treason. To Elizabeth, the fact of their having read them was an inexcusable trespass. The desire for a break was mutual. In almost no time, Elizabeth had given notice and packed her bags. Almost as promptly, little Elizabeth Peabody Alcott was renamed Elizabeth Sewall Alcott. When the first volume of his
Conversations
was published in December 1836, Bronson had no one with whom to share either credit or blame.

The credit turned out to be scarce. The blame was thunderous. The
Boston Daily Advertiser
ran two full pages of editorial denunciations, calling the book's doctrines “radically false and mischievous.”
⁷⁹
The
Boston Courier
's editor, Joseph Tinker Buckingham, had never seen “a more indecent and obscene book ([to] say nothing of its absurdity).” Pronouncing Alcott “insane or half-witted,” he advised the schoolmaster's friends to “take care of him without delay.”
⁸⁰
Andrews Norton, a highly influential former professor of divinity at Harvard, echoed this view, calling the
Conversations
“one third absurd, one third blasphemous, and one third obscene.”
⁸¹
When the editor of the more liberal
Christian Register
mildly called for sensible criticism of the generally excellent work of a “pureminded, industrious, and well-meaning man,” he was, by his own account, threatened with the Inquisition.
⁸²

Beneath this condemnation, the Temple School promptly withered. Only months after Alcott's
Conversations
were published, the once-thriving enrollment dwindled to ten pupils. Some of the families whose august social positions made them less vulnerable to criticism, like the Shaws and the Quincys, stayed longer than the first wave of defectors, but they, too, eventually found it not in their interest to continue. In April came the sad spectacle of the auction described in the prologue of this book. It had taken Bronson Alcott more than a decade to establish his reputation as a visionary educator. It took fewer than a half dozen pages of dialogue to destroy it.

Even so, he was not without friends. One of his most loyal defenders was Margaret Fuller. Only twenty-six when the Temple School scandal erupted, Fuller had not yet won fame as the editor of
The Dial
or as the author of her work on women's rights,
Woman in the Nineteenth Century.
Nevertheless, she was already highly respected among the leading transcendentalists and had acquired some personal interest in Alcott's reputation, having briefly taken over as his teaching assistant after Elizabeth Peabody resigned. Although she had once written privately of her “distrust” of her employer's mind, Fuller now championed Alcott as “a true and noble man…worthy of the palmy times of ancient Greece.”
⁸³
When she found out that Frederic Henry Hedge was planning to write an essay that would “cut up” Alcott, she wrote him a sharply worded letter. “There are plenty of fish in the net created solely for markets,” she told him, “& no need to try your knife on a dolphin like him.” She expressed her fervent wish that Hedge would not side with “the ugly, blinking owls who are now hooting…at this star of purest ray serene.”
⁸⁴
A few months later, Fuller further showed her appreciation of Alcott by taking a job at the Greene Street School in Providence, where the children frequently began the day with a “sacred” reading from
Conversations on the Gospels.
⁸⁵

Peabody herself, despite strong reasons for no longer liking Alcott personally, stood up for his professional reputation. She wrote to the
Christian Register
in support of Alcott's
Conversations,
which she considered an important statement of resistance against “tyrannical custom, and an arbitrary imposition of the adult mind upon the young mind.”
⁸⁶
Emerson wrote a brief but spirited defense of Alcott and his book. He insisted that, if one were actually to read the
Conversations
, one would discover “a new theory of Christian instruction,” emanating from “a strong mind and a pure heart.” To Alcott himself, Emerson wrote, “I hate to have all the little dogs barking at you, for you have something better to do than to attend to them.”
⁸⁷

But it was not only dogs that were barking. A host of creditors soon added their voices to the uproar. In his firm confidence in his school's continued success, coupled with his desire to make it an educator's paradise, Bronson had borrowed and spent with abandon. At a time when one could live comfortably on two thousand dollars a year, Bronson Alcott owed approximately six thousand. There seemed no way out.

It got worse. On Friday evenings at the temple, Alcott had been hosting a series of conversations for Sunday-school teachers. As the furor over his book reached its peak, word circulated that, on an appointed Friday, a mob would descend on the temple. It had not been in Alcott's nature to fight back directly against his detractors. He was convinced that, as a man of honor and dignity, he should preserve “unbroken silence” in the face of slander.
⁸⁸
And yet, he was not a man to back down. As Emerson later wrote of him, “If there were a great courage, a great sacrifice, a self-immolation to be made, this & no other is the man for a crisis.”
⁸⁹
Alcott continued to hold his conversations, not knowing if the door might suddenly burst open or the windowpanes suddenly shatter. In the end, no attack took place, and Alcott observed with relief that “the minds of the disaffected” were at last “settling into quietude.”
⁹⁰

Louisa may have been responding to tensions in the home or, perhaps, to the spirit of adventure that never entirely deserted her. Whatever the cause, around this time she developed a fondness for running away from home, a practice that she later called one of the delights of her childhood. She had, it seems, a preference for straying to the poorest neighborhoods, for her adult recollections were filled with images of great ash heaps where Irish beggar children shared their crusts, cold potatoes, and salt fish with their wayward visitor. At least once, she became lost. As the city streets darkened, the only ally that came to her side was a large curly-haired Newfoundland dog, which watched over her as she sobbed into its fur. At nine o'clock, the town crier found her fast asleep on a doorstep, snuggled comfortably against the still-vigilant animal.
⁹¹

Episodes like this must have added some gray hairs to Abba's head, and they were assuredly the despair of Bronson. With the conviction that a carefully monitored environment was essential to the shaping of his children, he had tried to shield his daughters from the destructive influences of the city, a place that he described as “feculent” and infested with “seventy plagues.”
⁹²
He insisted that his girls were “suffering for the want of purer air” and that the corrupt urban landscape was making them “morbid in sensitivity.” But whatever pollution or morbidity Louisa encountered on her flights from home, she evidently wanted more of it.

Louisa was at an age when girls tend to love their fathers desperately, when the mist of infallibility that encircles one's parents has not yet dissipated. Louisa lived with a father whose best friend called him an archangel and who did not bother to correct another man's child who compared him to Jesus Christ. Whether or not she knew these things, Louisa was given every encouragement to see Bronson as a godlike being. He was not a god who dispensed blessings freely. Whereas Bronson sought always to impose discipline on himself and his environment, Louisa seems to have sensed from the earliest age that her education lay partly in the rough and tumble precincts of the world. Her love of adventure struck her parents as curiously masculine. Within the family, she acquired the boyish-sounding nickname “Louy.”

Louisa's unscheduled excursions were far from the greatest of Bronson's worries. Disgraced and penniless, he sank into a depression. Emerson tried to rally his friend, urging him to hone his writing skills and find his true vocation as an author. “Whatever you do at school or concerning your school,” Emerson advised, “pray let not the pen halt, for that must be your last & longest lever to lift the world withal.”
⁹³
Obligingly, Alcott turned his energies toward refining the ill-starred manuscript of “Psyche.” He labored so furiously that Abba feared that, in giving life to “Psyche,” he would cause the death of his own body. He expectantly handed the fruits of his labors to Emerson. Turning over the pages, Emerson sadly discovered that the work was not only filled with rhapsodic excess, but that Alcott's tone now reflected the bitterness of his recent experiences. The wounded self-righteousness of the following passage was all too typical: