Eden's Outcasts (7 page)

Anna Alcott enjoyed a pleasant, if highly scrutinized, babyhood. When she was almost two months old, the family moved into the house that Haines had promised them, a “little paradise,” as Abba called it. There was a charming walkway lined with fruit trees, pines, and cedars. The furniture was new and of good quality. Busts of Newton and Locke, as well as flower vases, adorned the mantelpiece.
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To make his experiment in child development as controlled as possible, Bronson took steps to minimize outside intrusions into the nursery. The family's serving girl was entrusted with maintaining the house, but the Alcotts reserved Anna's care for themselves. Bronson conducted his school at home, so that work would not call him away from wife and daughter. The Alcotts tried to insulate Anna not only against frightening faces, but also from sudden movements, loud voices, and “incessant prattle.” They took pains to speak to her with “cheerful countenance…soft tones and deep interest.”
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Abba nursed her daughter frequently and on demand. She also confessed, “I am a great one to do what she indicates to have done.” The idea was to anticipate Anna's wants and to address them quickly, in order to spare her from potentially damaging emotions. Reluctant to resort to discipline except when absolutely necessary, Bronson submitted to letting Anna pull his hair.
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When Anna did raise a howl of protest over some imposition or other, Bronson reacted with a certain amount of approval: at least Anna was not fearful and passive like other children he had observed!
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It was not that the Alcotts wanted to impose no restrictions on Anna's behavior, nor did they set out to spoil her. Their reluctance to introduce unpleasantness into Anna's world stemmed from their hypothesis that choices, even for an infant, should not be coerced, but should arise from an inner moral spirit. Alcott believed that the triumph of the child's higher nature must be voluntary and achieved through affection and reason, not fear of punishment. He desired a perfection of the will, not its subjugation. He was, therefore, thrown somewhat off balance when, around the age of six months, Anna began to behave in ways that seemed inconsistent with her supposed heavenly origins. She objected violently to having her mother even momentarily out of her sight. In general, she started displaying such imperious behavior that Bronson feared her will was surrendering to “passion,” a word that, in this context, he equated with the worst aspects of animal nature.
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Thus troubled, Bronson resorted to discipline, only in accord with his theories. When Anna pulled his hair, he gently pulled hers. When she acted in an unloving manner, he withheld his own affection. By repaying her in kind, he meant for her to learn to do unto others as she would be done to. On the whole, this approach seemed to work better than unremitting indulgence. When Anna was twenty months old, Bronson boasted of her affectionate and intelligent nature. He felt that his daughter was manifesting her mother's heart and her father's mind—a combination he evidently considered optimal. Bronson also took pride in Anna's physical vigor, which he expected to serve her well as she confronted the trials of life.

One such trial was soon to arise. In October 1831, Reuben Haines unexpectedly died. The loss was catastrophic. Not only had Haines paid the rent for the Alcotts' home, but he had also underwritten the tuition of many of Bronson's pupils. Without these subsidies, the school's enrollment immediately declined. With determined effort, Alcott kept the school open for most of the following year, but the school was doomed. Abba called the philanthropist's death a “paralyzing blow” that “has prostrated all our hopes here.”
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About the time they celebrated Anna's first birthday, the Alcotts learned that Abba was pregnant again. As he anticipated Anna's new sibling, Bronson was very much under the influence of his fellow pedagogue William Russell, who argued that children were beings of celestial origin and destination. Begotten by the stars, they were destined to return to them and to do so, one hoped, in a better, worthier condition than the one in which they had come. The role of the teacher was not only to prepare children for life in this world, which they entered as spiritual strangers, but to ready them for the celestial world, which was their eternal home. The prospect of welcoming another visitor from the heavens excited Bronson greatly.

It is fair to say that birth seemed more wonderful to Bronson than it did to Abba. As the due date neared, Abba again became depressed. This time, her feelings of dejection were so unusually severe that she never forgot them. Almost a decade later, struggling to manage the fitful temper of this second daughter, Abba wrote that her own dark frame of mind prior to delivery “accounts to me for many of her peculiarities and moods of mind, rather uncommon for a child of her age.”
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Bronson acknowledged that Abba had suffered a good deal during the summer months. Nevertheless, she seems to have done well at concealing the dimensions of her despondency from her husband. Bronson indeed believed that Abba had been “unusually cheerful amid the cares and anxieties of life, and of her situation.”
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During these months, Alcott was less interested in Abba's condition than he was in a new piece of reading, which was raising him far beyond the immediate concerns of life. Two months before Louisa was born, he read for the first time
Aids to Reflection
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a book that soon rivaled
The Pilgrim's Progress
in its importance to him and, in his view, marked a new era in the life of his mind.
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Though now chiefly remembered as a poet, Coleridge exerted a profound influence on American transcendentalism through his philosophical prose. He was the most eloquent English spokesman of an idealist movement that attempted to refute the conclusions of empiricist philosophers like John Locke. Locke had argued that human beings entered the world with their minds as empty slates and that the experience of the senses was the only source of human understanding. Locke's view might logically be taken to show that there was no relevant reality beyond the physical world. To understand themselves, human beings needed to look no farther than the data of their natural faculties.

Locke's thesis was understandably upsetting to those who believed that there was some deeper reality in the cosmos. His theory left no room for intuition or for the divine spark that, according to religious believers, animates and sanctifies the soul. Coleridge agreed with Locke that human beings were limited to their natural faculties. However, he argued, there existed a human faculty, reason, that was superior to mere physically based understanding. Reason emanated from the single, indivisible divine word of God, perfect and unchanging. Coleridge declared that this ability for perceiving divine truth was the highest capacity of human thought. Coleridge's concept of the reason resembled the Puritans' idea of grace; it was the regenerate portion of the person, the part that enabled a mystical communion with heaven. Despite Alcott's overall dedication to the life of the spirit, his thinking about child development had heretofore been basically Lockean. His emphasis on behavior and the senses is evident in the “Observations” he wrote regarding Anna. After reading Coleridge, though, Alcott never again supposed that empirical understanding and the life of the senses were paramount in human existence. Ironically, he was swept up by the tide of idealism at the very moment that his wife was about to give birth to the most intensely practical of his children.

On November 29, 1832, a half hour past midnight, Abba gave birth to a second daughter, whom Bronson described as “a very fine healthful child, much more so than Anna was at birth.”
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To his mother, he described the baby as “a very fine, fat, little creature…with a firm constitution for building up a fine character.”
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As Bronson had selected the name for his first daughter, it was Abba's turn to name the second. She chose Louisa May, in memory of her departed sister. To Abba, it was a name that, according to Bronson, connoted “every association connected with amiable benevolence and exalted worth.” He hoped that its present possessor would rise to equal attainment.
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Bronson, a man not indifferent to signs and portents, found it “a most interesting event” that Louisa May shared her father's birthday, entering the world on the day he turned thirty-three. When he wrote to his mother that Louisa had been born, Bronson underscored the words “on my own birth-day.” Was there to be, perhaps, a supernatural bond between them that, from the first, transcended that of father and daughter?

If so, that bond was not to be one of physical similarity. In marked contrast to her blue-eyed, flaxen-haired father, Louisa had the dark features of her mother. She had something of an olive complexion and eyes that some called gray and others thought were black. The differences went deeper still. Even when Louisa was an infant, Bronson observed qualities in her that, in his own character, were all but absent. He noticed her “unusual vivacity and force of spirit” and the “wild exuberance” of her “powerful nature.” In her father's eyes, she was a girl “fit for the scuffle of things.”
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On the day Louisa was born, Bronson thought deeply about what family meant to him. It tied him to the physical world. Without a family, it seemed to him, his inner wants would have become morbid, and his affections would have been “dimmed and perverted.” He concluded that few could find happiness if they were “shut out from the Nursery of the Soul.”
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However, the happiness of Louisa's birth almost crumbled into tragedy. Abba did not begin to lactate until Louisa was five days old, and the child's weight declined ominously. Making matters worse, the nurse hired by the family neglected to bathe the baby, so that the meconium was not washed from her body for several days. Nevertheless, even as a newborn, Louisa possessed unusual vitality, which neither hunger nor the threat of infection could fatally diminish. Soon she was thriving, a “sprightly merry little puss—quirking up her mouth and cooing at every sound.”
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Bronson now commenced a second set of “Observations,” dedicated to Louisa. New babies, of course, tend to draw attention away from their older siblings. Whereas he had filled more than 300 pages of observations on Anna during her first year, he wrote only about 120 pages on her in each of the two following years. His record of Louisa reached nearly 300 pages in the first twelve months, though it was palpably different from what he had written about Anna. His writings about Louisa are more the work of a philosopher than a behaviorist. Continually, his observations on Louisa go spiraling off into general reflections on the nature of the spirit. His recording of detail is far less meticulous.

The tone and focus of this set of “Observations” reflect the change that reading
Aids to Reflection
had wrought on Bronson's mind.
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He was now more inclined to regard the visible human body as the mere outer clothing of the soul. During Louisa's infancy, Bronson was devouring idealist philosophy, particularly Coleridge and Plato. Although his lack of German prevented him from reading Kant, he did his best to absorb his thought through commentaries written in English. It would have been surprising if Bronson's writings about Louisa did not reflect this redoubled enthusiasm about unseen worlds, emphasizing the spirit over the body.

Anna did not take well to the new intruder, who seemed to have displaced her from the center of the family. The attentions once lavished on her were further eroded by the fact that, having lost the support of the late Mr. Haines, the family was compelled to take in boarders. Anna's behavior generally worsened, and she developed a habit of hitting her mother and of striking and scratching her sister. Believing that a twenty-month-old could be successfully reasoned with, Bronson responded by lecturing Anna, firmly but gently, on the impropriety of her conduct. After one such conversation, Bronson left the room. Anna promptly struck Louisa again and ran out after her father, entreating, “Father, punish! Father, punish!” Alcott saw the episode as evidence that Anna's conscience had awakened. It seems more likely that Anna, with a child's need for structure, was asking for a firmer boundary than her father had cared to set. Perhaps, too, she preferred negative attention to none at all. In any event, the scratching and hitting continued.
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Meanwhile, the Germantown school was breathing its last. Only eight pupils remained, far short of the twenty that, at a tuition of eighty dollars each, Bronson thought minimally necessary to support the family. William Russell had already decamped, returning to Boston. Alcott, for his part, decided to have one more go at Philadelphia. There, at least, he would have access to the excellent Loganian Library, and Abba might find more stimulating neighbors. Life in a boardinghouse would liberate Abba from the kitchen, enabling her to spend more time with her daughters. A wealthy Philadelphia acquaintance, Roberts Vaux, agreed to sponsor a small school in the city. On April 10, 1833, the Alcotts journeyed back to the City of Brotherly Love.

Unfortunately, Bronson's new school of fifteen pupils failed to inspire him. He had never had more than “limited faith in the moral intelligence of the Philadelphians as efficient patrons of early education.” The above-average minds of the city seemed devoted to pecuniary gain. They were interested in “physiology and natural science,” not psychology and ethics.
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Unexpectedly, the move to Philadelphia had cast Alcott's career into the doldrums. It had also thrust his plan for raising the perfect family into chaos. His ideal of child culture required freedom of movement, and his cramped city apartment made such freedom impossible. Having no separate room for his study, a luxury he had enjoyed in Germantown, Alcott found that a “positive want of [his] being” had been taken from him.
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The effect on Abba and the girls was just as bad. Bronson later recalled: