Eden's Outcasts (53 page)

Yet Louisa's freedom to write part 2 as she chose was circumscribed in another, unexpected fashion. As her fans clamored for a sequel, they expressed a virtually unanimous opinion: they demanded that Jo should marry Laurie, the boy based on Alf Whitman and Ladislas Wisniewski and given the character name of Theodore Laurence, or “Laurie.” Louisa, who had wanted her book to show what girls could accomplish for themselves, read with deepening disappointment the letters sent by “girls [who] ask who the little women [will] marry. As if that was the only end and aim of a woman's life.”
³³
To her annoyance, Thomas Niles sided with public opinion, and she complained acidly about “publishers [who] wont [
sic
] let authors finish up as they like but insist…on having people married off in a wholesale manner.”
³⁴
She felt that Roberts Brothers had compelled her to finish her novel “in a very stupid style.”
³⁵
The profusion of romantic pairings-off that Niles demanded led one of her friends to quip that the sequel might as well be called “Wedding Marches.”
³⁶
As happened more than once in her career, Louisa found herself torn between popular taste and artistic integrity.

Not quite daring to defy both public and publisher, she offered a compromise. While remaining firm in her determination not to “marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone,” she contrived a “funny match” for her with the kindly, philosophical Professor Bhaer.
³⁷
Laurie, too, finds wedded bliss in the sequel, but in the seemingly unlikely arms of the youngest March daughter, Amy. Even as Louisa adopted this middle course, she feared that it would please no one.

As it happened, however, Louisa's decision neither to write a safe, predictable denouement nor to give Jo the ending she thought her heroine deserved is largely responsible for the artistic triumph of
Little Women
, part 2. Part 1 had concluded with resolute cheerfulness, with Beth evidently recovering from her bout with scarlet fever, Mr. March safely home, and Meg engaged to her true love. What gives part 2 its enduring power is that not one of the March sisters gets what she had once believed would make her happy and that none of the visions of the future expressed in the “Castles in the Air” chapter are realized. Materialistic Meg, though happily married to the virtuous John Brooke, has fallen far short of her dreams of luxury. Jo and Amy have deferred their artistic ambitions and settled down with their respective husbands. Even Beth, who modestly wished only “to stay safe at home with mother and father,” has been denied her wish by death.
³⁸
Marriage is the quintessential happy ending to a children's tale. Yet subversively, Alcott disposes of Jo's and Amy's weddings in the most anticlimactic fashion possible. Amy and Laurie cheat the reader by marrying offstage. Whereas Alcott has earlier devoted an elaborate description to Meg's wedding, she treats Jo's marriage in a solitary, perplexing sentence. As a single woman, Jo has been forthright and energetic. Her wedding, to the contrary, finds her dazed and passive: “Almost before she knew where she was, Jo found herself married and settled at Plumfield.”
³⁹
By spurning Laurie and marrying the professor, Jo has avoided being stifled by conventional romanticism. Her marriage to Bhaer will eventually lead, in some sense, to fulfillment and freedom. Nevertheless, those who feel shortchanged when Jo's bold opposition to matrimony crumbles have a right to their reaction. The defeat of opportunities for women seems complete when it is revealed that Plumfield, the school that Jo and her husband establish, admits only boys. Both Jo and Amy still hope to find a place in their lives for artistic achievement, and Jo reflects, rather unconvincingly, that the life of literary glory she once imagined for herself seems “selfish, lonely and cold to me now.”
⁴⁰
Nevertheless,
Little Women
appears to end as a story, not of dreams come true, but of dreams at best compromised and at worst thwarted.

The wisdom of part 2 asserts that happiness can be both serendipitous and self-denying. Meg, Jo, and Amy do not find selfish gratification; rather, they find contentment by renouncing their immediate individual ambitions and returning to the interdependence of family. It is an ending that Bronson Alcott must certainly have appreciated. Indeed, one can see in Professor Bhaer some of Bronson's outlines: they are both threadbare, philosophical men with an altruistic love of children and a contempt for the kind of cleverness whose chief virtue is its profitability. Alcott describes Bhaer and Mr. March as sharing a “kindred spirit.”
⁴¹
In marrying Jo to Bhaer, Louisa endorsed her father's ideals. She also repeated a pattern in her love plots that began with
Moods
and was to resurface in her other full-length adult novel,
Work.
In all three novels, the heroine faces a choice between a man who stirs her passion and one who speaks eloquently to her sense of moral duty. The latter figure invariably prevails.

Modern readers, conditioned to equate happiness with personal achievement and, perhaps, less inclined than Alcott's original audience to regard duty and domestic bliss as sufficient objectives in life, are likely to view the last chapters of
Little Women
as a defeat for the March sisters, whose brave, happy beginnings seem to have led only to conventionality and subservience. For many of us, Jo's and Amy's settling into matrimony seems a betrayal of their earlier promise and courage. Jo, however, seems not to think so. She believes that her dreams have not been lost, but rather transmuted into a more charitable form. If, as Alcott evidently intended, we regard Jo's matronly life at Plumfield as a triumph, we can understand a key tenet of Alcott's feminist ideal. Women's rights, for Alcott, was never an end in itself. Rather, expanding opportunities for women was the great and necessary means by which previously neglected talents and energies might be made available to benefit a societal family, such as Alcott embodies in Plumfield. Jo learns that abilities used to benefit only oneself are thrown away. Used to advance only one's biological family, they remain largely wasted. Only when one gives freely to all do talent and effort attain their highest value.

Although this altruism lies at the root of Alcott's feminism, it is also the reason modern readers sometimes misconceive her as antifeminist. It can be argued that women historically accepted a subservient position precisely because of their willingness to sacrifice for the perceived greater good of the family. If Alcott was proposing a social order in which women were educated to feel a sense of family obligation to the entire community, might not her vision deepen, rather than diminish, the problem of sexual inequality? Perhaps the best answer is that Alcott expected the self-sacrifice of good men as well as good women. Her ideal of equality touched principally on opportunities to serve rather than any presumed right to seek one's individual happiness.

Apart from its confrontation of gender issues, another ethical ambiguity haunts the pages of
Little Women
. Earnestly intent on inculcating spiritual and moral lessons, the novel nevertheless steers away from conventional theism and toward the more material concerns that began to obsess America after the Civil War. It has been aptly observed that, even though their father is a clergyman, the March sisters never set foot in a church. Moreover, Jo's famous opening grumble, “Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,” is the lament of a child who needs no persuading that the true spirit of her culture is commercial, not ecclesiastic.
⁴²
Of course, Alcott's father and his transcendental brethren had striven to retain a reverential view of the world while discarding outward forms and unbending dogmas, and Louisa was bound to inherit the philosophical problem that their heresies had raised: how, in the absence of a sturdily organized faith, does one preserve both the feel of a religious life and the ideal of an ethical existence? Lacking a system of either rituals or sacraments through which to practice their piety, the March sisters are pressed repeatedly in the direction of good works. Indeed, few books narrate more acts of unselfish generosity than
Little Women
. However, it is this impulse toward charity that exposes Beth to scarlet fever, and the power of the Marches to do good is generally restricted by their limited means. Although one feels deep admiration when the girls give up their Christmas breakfasts to a more abject family, the greatest acts of philanthropy in the novel, for instance the founding of Plumfield, are made possible only by the accumulated capital of wealthy people like Grandfather Laurence and Aunt March. To cynical eyes,
Little Women
may be a novel of the Gilded Age after all.
⁴³

Part 2 of
Little Women
was every bit as successful as its predecessor. It is a matter of some irony that
Little Women
, Alcott's hymn to genteel poverty, put a permanent end to the real Alcott family's days of chronic want. Flush with royalty checks, Louisa paid all the family's debts and, to her astonished delight, had money left over to invest. As Roberts Brothers readied part 2 of
Little Women
for release, she had dared to tell her journal, “My dream is beginning to come true.”
⁴⁴
As a turning point in the fortunes of the Alcott family, the publication of
Little Women
cannot be overestimated. Yet at virtually the same moment that
Little Women
was making Louisa the most renowned female author in America, Bronson was enjoying a success that was, in its way, also extraordinary. More than thirty years had passed since the publication of
Conversations with Children on the Gospels
. In those years, the public careers of his great literary contemporaries—Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville—had risen to their highest glory and subsided. Few would have expected the elder Alcott, now aged sixty-eight, finally to present the world with a completed book. Yet in the marvelous year of 1868, there were suddenly two bestselling authors residing under the roof of Orchard House. Both
Little Women
and
Tablets
were published in September 1868. Born thirty-three years apart, father and daughter achieved their most significant literary breakthroughs in the same month.

Bronson Alcott in his sixties. After decades of obscurity, he won respect as a writer, speaker, and “the Father of
Little Women.”

(Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

Tablets
had nothing in common with the hallucinatory manuscript of the same name on which Bronson had labored during his period of precarious mental health in 1849. In that abandoned work, Alcott had striven to unlock cosmic secrets. Now, his greatest desire was to offer his readers peace. In the headlong scramble that society had rapidly become, Alcott's calm, measured tones and his virtually complete refusal to acknowledge the world of toil and trouble were refreshing and welcome. The
Boston Daily Advertiser
caught the spirit of the book accurately when it observed, “[Mr. Alcott's]
Tablets
are like windows through which the busy worker, pausing for a minute in the rush and distraction of his thousand little cares and duties, may look out into great spaces and draw a deep, full breath, may look far into the past, far forward into the future, and far up into the heavens.”
⁴⁵
Bronson himself took great satisfaction in the book; he felt that its diction came nearer to his ideal of good writing than anything else he had ever produced.
⁴⁶

Tablets
is organized into two large sections, each designated by the author as a “book,” although both were contained in the same volume. Anyone who knew Bronson would have been surprised to see that the first of the two books was titled “Practical.” Surely one might have supposed that the author would find himself more at home in book 2, titled “Speculative.” Even if Alcott's ideas of practicality differed from those of his neighbors, however, there is a wisdom in book 1 which, if not strictly pragmatic, gives the reader a sense of steadiness and comfort that few writers can easily achieve. Instead of embracing just one theme, Bronson set forth his thoughts on a series of subjects that, to him, comprised the core of earthly contentment: The Garden; Recreation, Fellowship, Friendship; Culture; Books. Among his “practical” observations, he also presented his ideas on women, family, and children. Significantly, however, he chose to classify all of these under the broader chapter called “Friendship.” Bronson was now well past thinking about the family as an object for utopian experimentation, and he no longer saw children through the eyes of a behavioral psychologist. In
Tablets
, he reflected not on what adults might consciously do for children, but rather on what children unconsciously do for us. Without them, he wrote, “The world were a solitude, homes desolate, hearts homeless…. Children save us.”
⁴⁷
He gently reproved adults who, in seeking to initiate children into the world grown-ups think best, pull them down into a lower, sadder state. Better, perhaps, for the child to lead the parent, than the reverse. In Bronson's mind, the voice of a child whispered reverently: