Louisa May Alcott

From Philosopedia

Alcott, Louisa May (29 Nov 1832 - 6 March 1888)

The author of Little Women (1868)—the daughter of educationalist and transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, a friend of Emerson, and a women’s suffrage activist—was a nominal Unitarian.

Alcott is said to have had a lifelong fear of one day going mad, and it is possible that she did suffer from deep anxiety and may once have had a nervous breakdown at the time of her Civil War nursing service. Recovering from typhoid, which she contracted while working in a Washington hospital, she often dreamed she had married a handsome Spaniard who whispered to her, “Lie still my dear!” The experience likely led to the creation of one of her fictional characters, Philip Tempest, a modern villain in mid-nineteenth century dress: “I seem a brute, but it is my love which drives me to such harsh measures,” he moans.

Her publisher may have thought Little Women was boring, as she once was quoted as believing, but the work was a publishing success and continues to be her best known. In it, Professor Bhaer lectures her, the one of four sisters who aspires to be a writer, about the sensational tales she wrote for journals. “I would more rather give my boys gunpowder to play with than this bad trash,” the priggish and repulsive man tells her. Alcott observed later, “I almost wish I hadn’t any conscience; it’s so inconvenient.” And, as noted by novelist Stephen King, her reflections are followed “by what is surely the most horrible sentence in Little Women, the one that finishes ‘and Jo corked up her ink-stand.’ ” King also liked her A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866), in which Rose, the heroine, disguises herself as a boy and a nun, stays in an asylum (called a madhouse in those days), discovers that Baptiste is a notorious escaped criminal, and in many heated pages arranges a chaste romance with a priest. The work, King noted, “ends on a darker note than any modern editor would be comfortable with, I suspect, but one in chilling harmony with any contemporary newspaper’s front-page story of domestic abuse escalating into madness and murder. Dying by his own hand, Phillip gathers Rose’s sodden corpse in his arms and voices the novel’s creepy last line: ‘Mine first–mine last–mine even in the grave!’ ” King notes that “this is quite a distance from the sunny sensibilities and high moral tone of Little Women.”

Marylynne Diggs has written about the homoeroticism in two of Alcott’s stories. In Work: A Story of Experience (1873), Christie and Rachel’s romantic friendship involves a “vaguely described sin.” And in An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Rebecca and Lizzie are “mannish and rough,” a “different race of creatures.”

Unlike Emerson, Alcott believed in a personal God, even had paranormal experiences. When her sister Lizzie died, she wrote, “A few moments after the last breath came, as Mother and I sat silently watching the shadow fall on the dear little face, I saw a light mist rise from the body, and float up and vanish in the air. Mother’s eyes followed mine, and when I said, ‘What did you see?’ she described the same light mist.” Grief-stricken, she went to Theodore Parker’s church after her sister’s death. Alcott was greatly influenced by Parker and by Henry David Thoreau. (One would be hard put now, a hundred years later, to find a Unitarian who has seen light mists rise from the deceased, remarked a Manhattan wag.) Yet, Alcott did not believe in the Christian Trinity.

E. D. Walker’s Reincarnation: A Study of Forgotten Truth (1888) quotes Alcott as saying, “I must have been masculine (in my previous life) because my love is all for girls.” According to a biography by Katharine Anthony in 1938, “The Alcott family were what is known among the orthodox as without religious affiliation.” Mrs. Alcott “clung to her old King’s Chapel faith. . . . The family had no orthodox church.”

Alcott is buried on a rising ground called Authors’ Ridge at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. Nearby are the remains of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. {CE; Marylynne Diggs, “Romantic Friendship, Female,” CL; EG; Stephen King, “Blood and Thunder in Concord,” The New York Times Book Review, 10 September 1995; PE; PUT; TYD; U; UU}