Louisa May Alcott: The Heroine Builder

Portrait of Louisa May Alcott by Lance Austin Olsen.

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship. Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations.”

Louisa May Alcott

Alcott was not quite the quaint homespun lady who wove utopian fables of blissful childhood dreams that her writings, or at least one segment of her complex literary persona, would have you believe. She was not afraid of storms, true enough, but that was mostly because she was a storm herself, albeit a secret storm. Unlike the writings of either Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters, Alcott was not so very interested in what she defined as domestic fiction, a term she used to categorize, though not necessarily to critique, literary works that focus on family dynamics in contrast to the dynamics of female social perspectives, despite the fact that her most famous work, Little Women (1868), would appear to do just that, at least on the surface anyway. She even defined her own alternative literary position, as distinguished from the other writers mentioned, as having a preference for what she called “sensation stories and novels” as opposed to tales of domestic intrigue or turbulence. Some readers of Little Women, Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871), or Jo’s Boys (1886), might be especially surprised to hear her declare, albeit in a quiet voice, “I fancy lurid things.” and to acknowledge a literary debt to Johann Goethe’s turbulent Sorrows of Young Werther and his diabolically beautiful Faust drama. Active during one of the most tumultuous and horrific times in American history, when the nature and even existence of that country was in perilous question, Alcott started writing for The Atlantic Monthly in 1859, and upon the outbreak of the Civil War became an active nurse at the Union Hospital in Georgetown. A fervent anti-slavery activist and advocate of complete equality and freedom in all its forms, she was so supportive of the Union cause that she enthusiastically rushed off to enlist in its army, only to be rebuffed, for what to her was that most inane of reasons: because the military did not accept female soldiers. This enraged her, not only as a devoted patriot but also as a avid supporter of the cause of suffrage and equality for women in every walk of life. To say that she was ahead of her time would be a drastic understatement. She was an unalloyed feminist, during a time when what she wanted, though simple enough to our modern eyes, was incomprehensible to not only the government but also to family and friends in her circle. Her dispatches were featured in the anti-slavery newspaper Commonwealth and her advanced thinking, often belied by the obvious charming quality of her fiction, propelled her to the forefront of a then gestating suffrage movement. This courageous dame had guts galore, not to mention the literary skill to captivate readers with her apparent coming-of-age stories, which cleverly concealed in their charms the author’s suggestions for improving our mutual existence.

Moods (1864) was a semi-autobiographical novel based on her own experiences in hospital management, and her vastly popular Little Women tetralogy was loosely based on her own childhood experiences with her three sisters. She has rightly achieved classic status and never lost it. Less well known are the rather captivating Gothic thrillers – at least thirty-three of them – that she penned for popular magazines, in addition to a raft of books and articles under various aliases. Often mistakenly accused of writing what came to be called “chin music,” narratives with pronounced domestic dialogue her human relationship explorations are no more akin to chin music than, say, those of Thomas Hardy or Henry James. Nonetheless, her works are often still clustered in the public mind with those of Austen and the Brontë sisters. But Alcott also shared with us the tenor of her ghostly distaff soul and still continues to invite debate and discourse as to the appropriate priorities for managing a civil society, let alone a democratic nation. Far from being a homespun teller of lighthearted tales related to childhood fantasy, she was actually a serious modernist who displayed genuine existentialist tendencies throughout her life, most notably in her obvious belief that we are free to define the meaning of our life through the choices we make and actions we take.

The more we know about Alcott’s background and personal interests, and especially her other books, which are in a dramatically different tone from the ones she’s most famous for (what she cheekily characterized as lurid), the more we come to realize that she was not quite the quiet and quaint lady in the parlor penning tomes for young readers. Her own interior was a broiling cauldron of intense feelings and philosophical speculation. In addition, her most popular works, though contained within a vortex of family and home life involving young protagonists trying to make their way into the outside world, were not children’s stories. There’s a big difference. Her other private works were popular with a different reading audience. That was exactly as she wanted it, though posthumously they have invited intense analysis owing to the apparent gulf between these two kinds of fiction. The narrative content in the latter mode, strongly influenced by the works of Fredericka Bremer, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Friedrich Schiller, explored themes of incest, murder, suicide, psychology, sexual conflicts, women’s rights, secret identities and sensuality, with characters who were often involved in opium experimentation and mind control.

The editors and publishers of these dark and taut thrillers frequently begged her to allow them to use her own well-known authorial name, but she consistently refused to erase the boundaries either between her public and private personas or between the genres she used to express them. As a matter of fact, her 1865 mystery V.V. Plots and Counterplots, have been credited as one of the earliest works of detective fiction in American literature, preceded only Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Her “sensation fiction” remained undiscovered until the 1940s and was not even published together in collections until the 1970s, a full century after she had composed it.

Her more secretive side came naturally to her, stemming as it did from her upbringing in a culturally advanced circle. Raised in New England by canny transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Alcott, who operated the experimental Temple School, she grew up in the company of several of the most advanced intellectual figures of her era, including Margaret Fuller, Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau. In many ways she is the American counterpart to George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans). Both strongly influenced the speculative fiction of modern figures such as Ursula Le Guin and Margaret Atwood. Alcott was deeply impacted by her exposure to military violence during her early hospital service during the Civil War, and she subsequently experienced a host of health-related challenges due to her exposure to the severe conditions of the battlefield.

She was eventually confined to her room and diagnosed with typhoid pneumonia, at which point she was bizarrely dosed with calomel, a poisonous mercury compound then commonly, and mistakenly, used as a cure. She never fully recovered from either her illness or its so-called cure and lived with chronic pain throughout her life, for which she tried a wide range of experimental remedies including homeopathy, hypnotism, Christian Science, electromagnetism, hydropathic baths and even what was called a “mind cure.” By 1888, she had a stroke and lost consciousness forever. The larger-than-life Louisa was only 55.

The 1949 film version of Little Women. From left: Margaret O'Brien as Beth, Janet Leigh as Meg, June Allyson as Jo, Mary Astor as Marmee, and Elizabeth Taylor as Amy.

The first of five films of Little Women arrived in 1933, followed by four television versions, two anime versions, and even a 2005 musical play. I’m fascinated, as so many other readers and appreciators are, by the long lasting impact of her deeply touching works, especially the tetralogy but also the anonymous novels A Pair of Eyes (1863), A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), and those published under the name A.M. Barnard such as A Marble Woman (1865), Behind a Mask (1866), The Abbot’s Ghost (1867), and A Long Fatal Love Chase (unpublished until 1995!). This partial listing doesn’t even take into account her seventeen novellas, nine short story collections, twelve poems, and five posthumous publications. The core question, then: just exactly what is her secret appeal to the human heart? I personally believe that Alcott was literally of two minds, one of which was so far ahead of its time that it could barely find a residence in the world her other half occupied. As such I suspect that she was creating a simulated life in her domestic family fiction and a projected existentialist struggle in her sensation fiction.

Good Wives opens with a chapter called “Gossip”:

In order that we may start afresh and go to Meg’s wedding, it may be well to begin with a little gossip about the Marches. And here let me premise that if any elders think there is too much “lovering” in the story, as I fear they may (I’m not afraid that young folks will make that objection) I can only say with Mrs. March, “What can you expect when I have four gay girls in the house, and a dashing young neighbor over the way?” To outsiders the five energetic women seemed to rule the house, and so they did in many things. The girls gave their hearts into their mother’s keeping, and their souls into their father’s. They gave a love that grew with their growth and bound them tenderly together by the sweetest tie which blesses life and outlives death. Jo never went back to Aunt March. As long as The Spread Eagle paid her a dollar a column for her “rubbish,” as she called it, Jo felt herself a woman of means and spun her little romances diligently.

Meanwhile, her considerably darker and more existential (and anonymously penned) A Modern Mephistopheles opens with an instantly captivating contemplation of the main character’s suicide:

Without, a midwinter twilight, where wandering snowflakes eddied in the bitter wind between a leaden sky and frost-bound earth. Within, a garret; gloomy, bare and cold as the bleak night coming down. A haggard youth knelt before a little furnace, kindling a fire, with an expression of quiet desperation on his face, which made the simple operation strange and solemn. A pile of manuscript lay beside him and in the hollow eyes that watched the white leaves burn was a tragic shadow, terrible to see, slowly the charcoal caught and kindled, for he was offering the first born of heart and brain as sacrifice to a hard fate. “Poor little book, we’ll go together, and leave no trace behind us.” Throwing himself into a chair, he laid his head down upon the table, where no food had been for days, and closing his eyes, waited in stern silence for death to come and take him.

Louisa May Alcott was a permanent puzzle. Paradoxically, those highest aspirations of hers that she referenced, which she described as far away in the sunshine, would come to pass mostly in the vastly more free life experiences of her inheritors in the future: feminist literary titans such as Simone de Beauvoir, Clarice Lispector, and Marguerite Duras, all of whom claimed her as a progenitor. De Beauvoir felt a strong connection to Jo and said that reading Little Women gave her an exalted sense of herself as a woman. Cynthia Ozick identified so powerfully that she called herself a “Jo of the future,” and perhaps most surprisingly of all, the punk rock poet and gritty musician Patti Smith asserted that it was Alcott who provided her with a positive view of her female destiny. Alcott was equally esteemed by writers as diverse as Gertrude Stein and JK Rowling, and by a wide range of women leaders of note, including Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Hillary Clinton and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Indeed, many of her secret storms definitely made it possible for those women who either wrote or led following in her wake to set sail.

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.