either.”
That statement about sums up Louisa’s complex relationship to the only constants in her life: work and ambition. What we today associate with clocking in, sitting in meetings, or standing behind a counter meant something very different in the 1840s, when Louisa was a girl. To the Alcott sisters, “work” was the backbreaking labor expected of a woman, shorthand for the hours of sewing, mending, fitting, and patterning a girl had to perform simply to have clothing to wear in a world that lacked washing machines, detergent, or ready-made anything. “Work” was scrubbing a blackened hearth, kneading bread, lugging heavy buckets of water into the house from an outdoor well. For Louisa, this drudgery distracted from her true ambitions, desires born as much from deprivation as dreams.
When the family moved to Fruitlands, a utopian community in Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1843, their workload only increased. The community was the brainchild of Louisa’s father, Bronson, and his deluded apostles, men with an insatiable, albeit impractical, need to put their lofty philosophies into action. When they moved to the rocky farm, the “consociate” family took a vow never to use any product of an animal’s life or toil, be it wool, silk, or fields plowed by horses. Louisa and her siblings starved together on sour apples (potatoes and other root vegetables were off-limits due to their “toxic” downward-pointing tendencies) and watched their parents’ marriage nearly fail, unable to withstand suggestions of celibacy or wife-sharing. Over the course of that dreary year, Louisa and her sisters watched their father reduced to a shell of his former self, a man even more unfit for honest labor than he had been in the early days when he wandered the country as a peddler of household goods, living on the kindness of strangers and the less-than-edible fruits of his complex philosophical tenets.
In those days, a father unable or unwilling to provide for his family exposed them to the very real prospect of illness, imprisonment, and starvation. Abba Alcott and her girls had long lived side by side with debt and dependence; they’d relied on family members and the charity of Bronson’s more stable Transcendentalist friends. Now they themselves had to go out to work, taking on positions as teachers, governesses, and social workers.
Herself the prisoner of complex ambitions and overwhelming insecurities, Louisa longed to prove herself. She had already tried and failed to sell her sewing and her stories; now, despite her mother’s misgivings, she agreed to work as a maid in the home of James Richardson, a family friend. Eager to see something, anything, of the world, she arrived at the Richardson house ready to earn a living.
The position was a bit more than she had bargained for; in addition to her stated work, she was apparently expected to act as a sort of paid girlfriend to Richardson, who regaled her with long philosophical ramblings and sexually harassed her. When she objected, her language tart and charged with anger, she paid the price. Her new tasks included shoveling snow and withstanding the abusive notes Richardson shoved under her door. She drew the line at blacking her inappropriate employer’s boots, fleeing at the first possible opportunity. In exchange for two months of boring, humiliating, and unsatisfying labor, she was paid just four dollars. She sent the money back, traumatized and embittered by her first real experience working outside the home.
From then on she teeter-tottered between pride in her efforts and hatred for work itself. The ugly realities of a woman’s work were sometimes offset by her anxiety to make something of herself. But the women she saw all around her never got that opportunity. Ultimately measured by their ability to marry well, the women in Louisa’s life were limited to “ladylike” pursuits that were inevitably lowly and poorly paid. Sewing and tutoring, cleaning and governessing, were like torture for Louisa, who grew into a gangly, twitchy young woman with a decided lack of good grace. She knew she was a disappointment. Though she was the natural helpmeet of her industrious but harried mother, her headstrong and passionate nature had always confused Bronson, who wrote judgmental notes in her journals and publicly decried his daughter’s untamed willfulness. Unlike her sisters, Louisa could not check her impulsive temper, her tomboyish nature, or her inner critic. Uncertain of her place in her family, she buried herself in books and writing.
When the Civil War began in 1861, it both reflected and spurred on Louisa’s directionless anger, dejection, and angst. She was still mourning the dual loss of one sister to scarlet fever and another to marriage when the idea came to her: perhaps a woman could go to war. Motivated by her thirtieth birthday and a surge of patriotic fervor, she volunteered as a nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington. Work had a different meaning altogether in the hospital’s bloody halls. Surrounded by the chaos of death and battle, she drowned her own worries in merciful acts, neglecting her own health even as she dressed others’ wounds. But her strong constitution was no match for the typhoid epidemic that swept through the hospital like a forest fire. Soon the nurse was a patient herself, engulfed in delirium and dosed with calomel, a mercury compound used to treat the fatal fever. She was too feeble to protest when Bronson arrived unexpectedly to take her home.
As she struggled through a slow recovery, she realized that her nursing experience had resulted in nothing but poverty and bitterness. Weak and listless, she turned inward again, struggling to make sense of what she had seen through writing. Dramatic Louisa had always thrown herself into her work with an almost Byronic passion, and writing was no exception. After months of dormancy, she would let a writing “vortex” take over, sucking her down and in until she was preoccupied and unfit for mannered conversation of any kind. Armed with her pen, she angrily denied her family access to her quarters, writing day and night until completely drained and depleted. She rested, socialized, then did it again, repeating the cycle until she had a piece of salable writing that she swiftly translated into a carpet for her mother’s sitting room or a bonnet for her sister. She had no way of knowing that her stint at the hospital would forever deprive her of her health. Bent over her work, she was barely strong enough to survive the physical pain that accompanied every vortex.
It’s unsettling to realize that it’s in this state of mind—anxious, overworked, unhealthy, and tired—that Louisa set out to write a story so familiar it’s as if it were written by a family member. It’s even worse to acknowledge that
It’s almost unthinkable that a woman as spirited and funny as tomboyish Jo would be a de facto outcast in her time, someone to be subdued and suppressed. But in a world of matching gloves and strict codes of womanhood, Jo’s a worrisome anomaly. Proper girls sit up straight and are silent; Jo stretches out on carpets, singes dresses, and loses her hairpins running down hills. Real women work without a word of complaint. But while there is substantial work for Jo to do—she must sew all of her own clothing, help with the household chores, and serve as a companion to her crotchety Aunt March—she complains lustily while doing it. At the heart of Jo’s protest is overwork: can’t she be a carefree girl a little while longer? At the same time, she objects to the inanity of needle-pushing and primping when all around her there is
Myself a feminist as staunch as Louisa, I can’t help but wonder if my affection for
But look again. Once you drop the desire to see suppression in every page, it’s easy to find Jo’s rebellion. In a move that’s outraged readers since 1869, she refuses to marry Laurie, a young man with the advantages of being dashing, rich, hotheaded, and adoring. But Jo isn’t ready to lay down her arms and take up her needle (or put on a wedding ring) just yet. By refusing to indulge her best friend, she is a better friend to herself, a self in need of air and freedom, the liberty she’d never possess in the expensive trappings of a Mrs. Laurence. Though she cries when she sells her luxurious hair to help her mother reach her wounded father, it’s something she abandons with an eye toward unencumbered movement. In the past, I always thought of these gutsy moves as idiosyncratic ones, little quirks designed to make me say, “Oh, Jo!” and smile and get back to my self-denial. But when I really read the
