Eden's Outcasts (21 page)

Thoreau, who had moved temporarily to Staten Island, never visited Fruitlands. Others did, though, in unexpected numbers. Throughout the summer and into the fall, the farm welcomed a stream of travelers who came to indulge their curiosity or to pay their respects, but almost never to stay. Abba recorded an impressive list of the visitors: George Ripley, having lately established the idealistic community of Brook Farm, had come to compare notes on utopian living; the poet Ellery Channing, the nephew of the great Unitarian minister, had come from Concord. Abba's brother Samuel arrived with his whole family. William Russell, Bronson's old teaching partner, brought greetings from Andover. Theodore Parker, the radical minister, also paid his respects. The visitors came from New York, Philadelphia, Ohio, even North Carolina. Abba wrote in amazement, “I did not think so much curiosity could have existed among our friends to see our new home.”
¹⁶

But the attention was a mixed blessing. To be sure, it was flattering, and there was always the hope of recruiting some of the visitors. In reality, though, all the guests were draining the community's resources. Struggling to feed themselves, the Fruitlanders were frequently obliged to lay extra places at the kitchen table. Already burdened with all the sewing, cleaning, and mending, Abba was also expected to see to the casual wants of outsiders. Abba came to a sobering realization:

At Fruitlands, Alcott had dreamed of escaping the world. Ironically, however, the world had followed, and it had followed in the least useful manner—not with its hearts and minds, but only with its inquisitive eyes. Having sworn to use no work animals except when strictly necessary, Alcott now found himself feeding and watering the horses of strangers.

Meanwhile, it was on Abba's shoulders that the running of the “Hotel” principally fell. Alcott had a far stronger sense of gender equality than most of his countrymen. At least occasionally, he helped with the cooking, and as always, he devoted more of himself to his children than almost any other man of his generation. Nevertheless, there is no record in the annals of Fruitlands of a man washing a dish or mending a tunic. For the first two months of Fruitlands' existence, and for much of the time thereafter, poor, beleaguered Mrs. Alcott was the only adult female member of the community. Occasionally, she had assistance from her aunt Hannah Robie, whom Bronson deemed “a lady of great good sense and character” and who served Abba as “a loving and judicious counselor, a quiet, energetic friend.”
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However, Mrs. Robie had only so much time to donate. According to Louisa in “Transcendental Wild Oats,” a visitor once asked Abba if the Fruitlands farm possessed any beasts of burden. The witty but rueful reply was, “Only one woman.”
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Sometime in August, a modest amount of relief arrived from Providence, Rhode Island, in the buxom person of Miss Anna Page. Miss Page was brave enough to withstand the persiflage that no doubt followed a single woman who joined a wilderness community of freethinking men, even one that openly despised the pleasures of the flesh. No consistent portrait of her emerges. Louisa hated her, and she said so in her journal. In “Transcendental Wild Oats,” only Charles Lane is subjected to more scathing treatment. In the story, Miss Page becomes Miss Jane Gage, a plump, egocentric character whose chief contribution to the community is to scribble an endless stack of inferior poems on lofty themes. Page attempted to teach the children their lessons, but since her method was different from Alcott's and Lane's, Louisa recalled that “the result was a chronic state of chaos in the minds of these much-afflicted innocents.” In other respects as well, Louisa considered Page worse than useless: “Sleep, food, and poetic musings were the desires of dear Jane's life, and she shirked all duties as clogs upon her spiritual wings.”
²⁰
In Louisa's fictionalized account, Miss Gage also provides the focus of the ripest moment of pure comedy, when her clandestine weakness for animal protein is called to the attention of the rigidly inflexible Timon Lion:

Following this incident in Louisa's story, Miss Gage leaves the community in disgrace. The reasons for the real Anna Page's departure are less clear, and whether or not the battle of the fish tail actually occurred cannot be proven. Perhaps the story is a bit of wish fulfillment on the part of the adult Louisa, using her pen to gain some belated redress for the condescension and uninspiring lessons Miss Page had visited on her so long ago.

In Louisa's tale, Gage's carnivorous foibles are exposed by one of the children, who, according to the text, experienced “the naughty satisfaction of [a] young detective.” It is worth supposing for a moment that the anecdote of the fish tail was at least partly founded on truth. It is easy to imagine the Alcott sisters, eager as always to please their father, appointing themselves the unofficial spies of the commune. It is entirely possible that Louisa, despising Miss Page as she did, played the role of detective in the episode, simultaneously advancing her father's aims and undermining a perceived antagonist. The chance to do Miss Page a nasty turn in the name of upholding the community's virtue may have been too tempting an opportunity to be missed, no matter how naughty Louisa knew she was being. At the age of ten, she seems to have known something about making foul seem fair.

A far different portrait of Anna Page, however, emerges from the journal of Abba, who was delighted to have her company and assistance. She described her new friend as “an amiable active woman whose kind word and gentle care-taking deed is [
sic
] very grateful to me.”
²²
Perhaps better than any other observer at the time, Page seems to have felt the difficulties of Abba's position. Whereas Alcott received praise from some quarters for the purity of his vision, it was Abba's unacknowledged toil that daily kept that vision from dissolving. Abba told her diary in late August:

Given the free access the Alcotts had to one another's journals, Abba's quotation of Anna Page can be seen as a calculatedly rebellious act; she might as well have written it on her husband's chalkboard. If Bronson had ever been a god in Abba's eyes, he was not now. She had had a fair idea of her husband's weaknesses before Fruitlands began, but she had hoped that, once the sordid world of the marketplace had been left behind, Bronson might flourish as he would never do so long as he was judged by worldly measures. Her hopes were not being rewarded.

Fish tail or no fish tail, Anna Page was gone from Fruitlands by late November. As summer turned to autumn, many of the other Fruitlanders were finding the rigors of consociate life harder to stomach, and not all the complaints concerned Charles Lane. For the first time in his life, Bronson Alcott was discovering what it was like to lead a group of adults in something more serious than a discussion, and he was bearing the responsibility uneasily. His task was complicated by the very philosophical ideals he was striving to uphold. At the heart of the transcendentalist impulse was the belief that one's own conscience was sovereign and that all should live according to the dictates of their own spirit. How, then, could Alcott and Lane legitimately object if the inner dictates of one of their followers called for a taste of meat or fish?

Like Rousseau in his
Social Contract
, Alcott and Lane would have insisted that humankind, at times, “must be forced to be free.” They assumed that one could not develop one's mind and spirit properly without first learning to discipline the wants of the body. The problem, however, was that the pilgrims who had made the journey to Fruitlands had left society precisely because they had found its rules unacceptably confining. Samuel Bower with his penchant for naturism and Joseph Palmer with his law-flouting facial hair had already proclaimed their hostility toward forcing of any kind. Each Fruitlander had a particular view of truth and righteousness. Together, they formed a bedlam of good intentions. Emerson offered his diagnosis in the lecture “New England Reformers,” which he delivered less than two months after the fall of Fruitlands.

In these reform movements, Emerson quipped, “nothing was more remarkable than the discontent they begot in the movers.”
²⁵
It seemed that the phrase “transcendentalist community” was something of an oxymoron.

To prevent his own congress of kings from degenerating into utter chaos, Alcott could think of no other response than to pull tighter on the reins. Even Lane was astonished at Alcott's rigor. He confided to his friend Oldham, “Mr. Alcott makes such high requirements of all persons that few are likely to stay, even of his own family, unless he can become more tolerant of defect. He is an artist in human character requiring every painter to be a Michael Angelo.”
²⁶
Robert Carter, a friend and business partner of James Russell Lowell, wrote that Alcott had become “very strict, rather despotic in his rule of the Community,” and that at least some of the members were able to stay the course only by defying his prohibitions in secret.
²⁷

Inevitably, Fruitlands witnessed rebellions against moral authority. At first, at least, they were small and furtive. Anna Alcott remembered that “when starving with the apple and bread diet, the disciples retired to drink milk in the barn.” These milk parties doubtlessly took place clandestinely, without the knowledge of Alcott or Lane. When those two moral monitors were present, all remained piously vegetarian. But when their work took them out of sight, or perhaps while they slept, exhausted by the day's efforts, an odd, quiet procession made its way toward temptation. As time passed, though, the search for nourishment became less of a laughing matter. As the autumn drew on, clashes of wills became frequent, tearing at the community's former serenity, and Abba began to fear that her children might starve before the coming winter had run its course.
²⁸

The high hopes with which seekers of peace and beauty came to Fruitlands—and the disappointment with which they one by one departed—are both typified in the experiences of young Isaac Hecker, the only adult rank-and-file member of the group who left a written record of his stay at the farm. Hecker was unusual among the Fruitlanders in that he had known success in the larger world. Along with his brothers, he owned an extensive baking and milling enterprise. Even today, a brand of flour bears his family's name. Hecker pursued a deeper meaning in life by joining a succession of utopian projects. Before arriving at Fruitlands, Hecker had been at Brook Farm, where he would have enjoyed the company of Margaret Fuller and a genteel writer-turned-pig-farmer named Nathaniel Hawthorne. At Brook Farm, Hecker had been pleased to find “refining amusements and cultivated persons,” and he had found himself growing deeply attached “to the company of those [he loved]” there.
²⁹
But, “called with a stronger voice” that urged him toward sterner self-denial, Hecker decided to try Fruitlands. Hecker had another, more private reason for leaving Brook Farm. In the journal he wrote there, Hecker confessed an attraction to “one who is too much for me to speak of.”
³⁰
The pronoun Hecker used to describe this “one” was first written as “her,” but then it was somewhat clumsily rewritten as “him.” Whether the object of his crush was male or female, Hecker was unable to face up to his emotions; they did not agree with his self-image as an ascetic worshipper of the spirit.

Hecker stoically believed that “all our difficulties should be looked at in such a light as to improve and elevate our minds.”
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At first, Hecker thought that he had found elevation at Fruitlands, and his first diary entries from the farm speak enthusiastically of the “very fine things” that Lane and Alcott said to him. During those first few evenings, the men conversed long into the night about such topics as friendship, the role of clothing in society (the contributions of Samuel Bower would have been most intriguing), and the highest aim of earthly existence.
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Hecker took an eager part in these discussions, and Lane, at least, looked on him as a member of bright promise.