II.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Louisa May Alcott’s family was her life and work, for her fifty-six years were spent in the bosom of a family that she supported by writing and that provided the inspiration for her art. At the same time, however, that family was situated in the midst of and connected with most of the major social and intellectual movements of the day. Her mother, Abigail May, came from a prominent Boston family of judges, scholars, clergymen, and reformers, and her uncle, the Reverend Samuel May, became a leader of the antislavery cause. Alcott’s father, Bronson Alcott, had more humble origins, but even before his marriage, he had gained a reputation as a progressive educator. When Louisa was a small child, her father founded the Temple School in Boston and was aided in his work by two remarkable women: bookseller Elizabeth Peabody, sister to Sophia, who was to marry Nathaniel Hawthorne and become the Alcotts’ neighbor, and Margaret Fuller, soon to become editor of the Dial, the Transcendentalist journal, and to conduct her “conversations”—meetings that provided women (and, occasionally, men) with cultural and consciousness-raising opportunities. When the Temple School eventually failed, Bronson’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson invited him to move with his family to Concord. There, during her formative years, Louisa had daily contact with the Emerson family as well as with Henry David Thoreau. Inspired by the model of George Ripley’s Brook Farm and other utopian communities, Bronson founded his own, smaller experimental community at Fruitlands. Back in Boston during the 1850s, Bronson participated in protests against the Fugitive Slave Law and held “conversations” of his own, attended by such figures as Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Theodore Parker, a minister whom Louisa especially admired. When the Civil War broke out, the Alcotts hosted John Brown’s daughters, and, during it, Louisa corresponded with and about the younger brothers of Henry James, one of whom was wounded at Fort Wagner, where he served with Robert Gould Shaw’s all-black regiment. Thus, however claustrophobic and ingrown Alcott’s family life appears to us today, it was never insulated from the ideological ferment and turbulent events of the mid-nineteenth century.

Louisa May Alcott’s life was framed by that of her father: she was born on her father’s birthday in 1832, and her death, in 1888, followed his by two days. He undoubtedly had a profound effect both on her work and work habits, but whether the influence was positive or negative, whether it represents emulation or rebellion, are questions much debated. During her childhood, her relationship with Bronson was stormy. He preferred her docile sister Anna, whereas Louisa felt a stronger bond with her mother, Abby. As a professional educator, Bronson took great interest in his children’s development, keeping detailed journals of their intellectual and moral progress, and requiring them to keep their own journals as soon as they were able to do so. Both parents read and wrote in these journals, and Louisa appears to have cherished Abby’s notes, even though they placed contradictory demands on her for purity and candor.The intense moral scrutiny to which Louisa was subjected, and her difficulties in withstanding it, may have taught her at an early age to write for two audiences—herself and others—simultaneously.

If, as biographer Martha Saxton has argued, Bronson’s disapproval gave Louisa a sense of herself as dark, deviant, and demonic, his impecuniousness gave her a strong determination to be financially independent. The failures of the Temple School and Fruitlands, where mother and daughters did most of the physical labor and the family almost starved; the lecture tours from which Bronson returned penniless; and the family’s dependence on the generosity of the Mays and Emerson, all instilled in Louisa a relentless work ethic that probably contributed to her relatively early death. From an early age, Alcott worked to support the family, whether with needle or pen, and gradually, in her twenties, she became its principal breadwinner. In the last decade of her life, after the death of her mother, she seems not only to have supplanted her father as head of the family but also to have supplanted her mother as his partner.Throughout her adult years, Alcott seems to have had a wry but genuine affection for her father, to have been both protective and proud of him as a wholly impractical but visionary thinker. Her use of his favorite Pilgrim’s Progress in Little Women, her depiction of Plumfield and Professor Bhaer’s educational practices in the sequels, have been interpreted variously as tributes to her father, unwitting betrayals, or conscious critiques of a well-meant but repressive regime. The involvement of her heroines with much older men—from Jo’s marriage to the fatherly Professor Bhaer to the blatantly incestuous relationships in The Marble Woman, one of Alcott’s most bizarre sensational stories—has prompted speculation about her Oedipal desire for her demanding, emotionally distant father.

The great love of Alcott’s life, however, was doubtless her mother, whom she idealized as Marmee in Little Women. Alcott seems never to have contemplated the possibility of marriage, perhaps because of the obligation she felt to support her family, perhaps because she had witnessed her mother’s marital difficulties, or perhaps because her emotional needs were better satisfied by her mother and, to a lesser degree, her sisters than they could have been by anyone else. From an early age, Alcott aspired to win her mother’s approval, and even when she failed to achieve it, as she occasionally did, she felt that her mother understood the temperament that was similar to her own. Observing her mother’s economic hardships, the embarrassment of her reliance upon her May relatives, and, especially, the physical and emotional toll taken by her labor at Fruitlands, where the family was almost destroyed by Bronson’s infatuation with his disciple Charles Lane, Alcott resolved that as an adult she would make her mother’s life secure and comfortable. But she did not simply regard her mother as a victim. Abigail May Alcott, when she found that her husband could not or would not support their family, attempted to do so herself. She undertook paid charitable work in Boston and opened an “intelligence service” or employment agency for women. And, shortly after the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, she embraced the suffrage cause and, for a time, was actively involved. The demands of marriage and motherhood, however, mitigated against any sustained commitment, and it remained to her daughter to bring that feminist legacy to fruition.

Louisa’s relationship with her older sister, Anna, was a close one despite their initial rivalry for their father’s affection. Bronson had always encouraged recitation as well as writing, and when the family returned from Fruitlands to Concord, Anna and Louisa transformed the barn of Hillside, their new home, into a theater where they performed melodramas like the one Jo writes in Little Women or scenes from Dickens.When the family moved again, to Boston, and then to Walpole, New Hampshire, Anna and Louisa continued to pursue their passion for the theater, joining the Amateur Dramatic Company of Walpole. On the Alcotts’ third and final remove to Concord, they joined the Concord Dramatic Union, through which Louisa became close friends with Alfred Whit-man, one prototype for Laurie, and Anna met her future husband, John Pratt, the model for Meg’s John Brooke. A more melancholy event immortalized in Little Women, however, was in preparation for the family. Elizabeth Alcott, one of Louisa’s two younger sisters, was slowly dying of consumption. The special relationship that obtains between Jo and Beth in Little Women has not been substantiated by Alcott biographers as having existed between Louisa and Lizzie. But her loss, coinciding as it did with the engagement of Anna and John, left Louisa feeling bereft, and it was not long after this that Alcott left Concord for Boston, where, despairing at her inability to find work, she was briefly tempted to throw herself into the water of the Mill Dam, a temptation that she later placed before her heroine, Christie Devon, in Work.

Alcott’s most interesting and complicated sororal relationship was with her younger sister Abigail May, the Amy of Little Women.The baby of the family, as fair as Louisa was dark, May was predictably petted and spoiled. Too young to remember much of the demoralizing Fruitlands experience, May had a sunny disposition and seemed always able to dissociate herself from the family’s problems. In important ways, however, she did resemble Louisa, for she was talented and willful. Louisa, when she began to support the family, gave May the advantages she had never had, sending her abroad to study art and sharing an apartment with her in Boston. May, unlike Amy, did not discover that “talent isn’t genius” and marry young; instead, she cheerfully persisted in her career as a painter, enjoying some success in Paris. Finally, in her late thirties, May met and married a young Swiss businessman, only to die a year later shortly after giving birth to their daughter. Louisa was devastated by this loss, following fast upon the death of her beloved mother, and promptly volunteered to adopt her namesake, Louisa May Nieriker. Thus once again Alcott stepped in to assume a surrogate role, this time as mother. Not only had she, as breadwinner, been a surrogate husband to her mother, she had belatedly assumed the same role in regard to Anna, for when John Pratt died in 1871, she began supporting her and her two sons.

It is fascinating to see how these family relationships are transformed in Little Women as well as in other Alcott works. On the surface, at least, of Alcott’s most famous novel, her parents and sisters, with the possible exception of May, are idealized. For one thing, the March family’s poverty, which is attributed to the father’s high-minded disinterestedness, is genteel, and he is physically distant—serving as a Union army chaplain—rather than emotionally withdrawn. Although it was Louisa, not her father, who went to Washington to work in an army hospital, where she fell ill, in Little Women Jo despairs at her inability to contribute to the war effort. And just as Alcott transfers her own participation in the war to Mr. March, so she shifts responsibility for her sister Lizzie’s Illness from Abby to Jo. In Little Women, Jo’s selfish refusal to visit the indigent Hummels exposes Beth to the fever that fatally weakens her constitution,whereas in fact, it was Abby who contracted the disease from one of her charity cases and thus infected the entire family. In the sequel Little Men, John Brooke’s death leaves his wife, Meg, financially independent rather than another burden for her sister to bear.

Other aspects of the March saga, on the other hand, are lifted directly from life. Jo’s play, Norna, was one of Louisa’s; a poem Jo writes for Beth was written by Louisa for Lizzie; Alcott, like Jo, did publish a story entitled “The Rival Painters”; and in Little Men, Professor Bhaer requires a student to ferule him just as Bronson Alcott is reported to have done. More significantly, Louisa, like Jo, did view Anna’s marriage as a defection, and she often regarded May as Jo does Amy—as someone who always gets what she wants without effort. But a decade later, Alcott was to render a more flattering portrait of May in “Diana and Persis,” the novel or novella on which she was working at the time of May’s death. Portraying the Jo and Amy characters, Diana and Persis, as two friends and fellow artists, Alcott once again combines idealization with literalism—describing paintings of May’s that can be seen in the Alcotts’ Orchard House today and devoting a chapter to her virtually unaltered letters. And once again Alcott’s sleight of hand, her mysterious alchemy, works. The story, though unpublished at the time and possibly left unfinished, constitutes a moving meditation on the obstacles—both external and internal—still confronting the woman artist and on the different ways the Alcott sisters chose to meet them.

III.

Any anthology necessarily represents a partial portrait and reflects the editor’s interpretation of the author. In choosing selections for The Portable Louisa May Alcott, I wished to give an overview of her oeuvre, including samples of the various genres in which she worked in the course of her thirty-year career. In doing so, I wanted to convey both her wide range and the characteristic themes and techniques that consistently cross the boundaries of genre and audience. In addition to transcribing and transforming material from her own life, Alcott exploited her preoccupation—indeed her obsession—with the theater. As the narrator of her last novel, Jo’s Boys, says, it was “impossible for the humble historian of the March family to write a story without theatricals in it.” These theatricals range from the “Plays at Plumfield” presented in Little Men and Jo’s Boys to amateur and professional performances of Shakespeare in her adult fiction. Most fascinating, perhaps, is the way in which Alcott’s heroines, whether professional actresses or not, must perform offstage as though womanhood itself is a demanding role. This postmodern notion of gender as performance, surprising to find in a writer long deemed old-fashioned, is supported by other motifs in Alcott’s fiction, such as the fluidity of gender roles and actual androgyny. Alcott’s insights into the way in which gender is constructed, to use our modern parlance, strengthened her support for women’s rights, which she overtly champions in such novels as Work, Rose in Bloom, and Jo’s Boys. More subtle, however, is her exposure of women’s wrongs, not only in her sensation fiction, such as A Modern Mephistopheles, but in realistic novels such as Moods and Little Women. An important way in which she does this is through her allusions to other writers, allusions that sometimes take the form of enactments of their work.

The 1881 edition of Moods, the centerpiece of this collection, embodies almost all of Alcott’s preoccupations and illustrates many of her characteristic practices.Written between 1860 and 1864, when it was first published, and revised in 1881, it is a product of Alcott’s early maturity later seasoned with the experience of more than fifteen years of successful authorship.The story of an ardent young girl who marries for lack of any other vocation and then suffers the consequences of her mistake, it understandably met with mixed reviews, including a scathing one by the youthful Henry James. Revising the novel in 1881, Alcott restored chapters she had omitted from the first edition, eliminated a melodramatic subplot, and substituted a happy ending for the original tragic one. As though anticipating a revival of the earlier criticism, she added a somewhat disingenuous preface, implying that the work had been written in her teens and that its faults were those typical of juvenilia. Given the amount of critical attention the work has received since its rediscovery and the important place it holds in Alcott’s career, it is surprising that only one modern edition has become available, Sarah Elbert’s reprint of the 1864 edition with the chapters added to the 1881 addition printed as an appendix at the end.

Moods is not as autobiographical as many of Alcott’s other novels. The indulged and childlike heroine, Sylvia Yule, bears little resemblance to Alcott or her sisters. In one respect, however, the work more than any other evokes Louisa’s Concord girlhood: Sylvia’s friendship with and attraction to Geoffrey Moor and Adam Warwick replicates Louisa’s feelings for her father’s friends Emerson and Thoreau. The epigraph to the 1864 edition was a sentence from Emerson’s essay “Experience,” in which he likens life to “a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.” The comparison doubtless appealed to Alcott, who, as she recorded in her journal, suffered from moodiness throughout her youth, an affliction shared by Sylvia and attributed in part to her home, which, like Alcott’s, is inharmonious. Seeking a friend upon whose stability and wisdom she can rely, Sylvia gravitates toward Moor, who, like Emerson, inhabits an “Old Manse.” Just as Louisa did, Sylvia identifies herself with Bettina, whose correspondence with Goethe was supposedly published in Countess von Arnim’s Letters to a Child, and thus prepares herself to become the protégée of a male mentor. Moor’s home, especially his library and garden, provides a refuge for Sylvia, whereas the natural settings she explores in the company of Adam Warwick give her a seductive and, as it turns out, misleading sense of freedom.Warwick, the “strong, free, self-reliant man,” rich “because he makes his wants so few,” is obviously an idealized version of Thoreau; the river journey he conducts is doubtless based on Louisa’s own outings with Thoreau and perhaps his published accounts of such journeys.

The contemplative and the active man, the poet and the hero, Moor and Warwick constitute a tribute to her father’s friends, but at the same time each is weighed in the balance and found wanting. Only at the end of Moods, when they publish a book combining Moor’s poetry with Warwick’s prose, do the nurturing qualities of the one and the crusading qualities of the other offer the possibility of psychic wholeness. Alcott’s androgynous vision, similar to Margaret Fuller’s in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, is anticipated at the beginning of the 1864 edition, when Moor observes Sylvia working in her garden and takes her for a boy. Henry James in his condescending review seems to have interpreted Sylvia’s male attire as a seductive ruse:“One of [Sylvia’s] means of fascination is to disguise herself as a boy and work in the garden with a hoe and wheelbarrow” (Elbert, Moods, 219). Alcott, perhaps remembering this gibe, dressed Sylvia more conventionally in the 1881 edition.What James failed to see in the novel, however, is that Sylvia’s cross-dressing points to a significant theme—that characteristics we consider male and female are not exclusive to one gender or the other. In the revision, Alcott retains the sense of Sylvia’s androgynous potential: “If she had seemed strong-armed and sturdy as a boy before, now she was tender-fingered as a woman.” But Sylvia, ironically advised by the self-reliant Warwick to forget herself and live more for others, sacrifices any opportunity she may have had to develop masculine strength and sturdiness, committing herself prematurely to the marital custody of Moor. Of the novel’s major characters, only Faith Dane, the heroine of Alcott’s earlier story “My Contraband” and a figure possibly based on Fuller herself, combines, as Moor initially appears to do, the strength associated with a man with the tenderness associated with a woman.

Throughout the novel, Sylvia’s plight is universalized by Alcott’s literary allusions. As we have seen, Sylvia confesses to having envied Bettina her intimacy with Goethe, one of Alcott’s favorite authors. Shortly thereafter, Moor compares Warwick, whom Sylvia has not yet met, to Goethe. Further, Sylvia borrows from Moor’s library Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, in which the hero rescues Mignon, an elflike girl, who later dies of unrequited love for him. Soon Moor begins to regard Sylvia as “this modern Mignon.” In an early scene, Moor shows Sylvia his herb garden, and in cataloging his herbs, he paraphrases Shakespeare’s Ophelia. On the river journey Sylvia takes with Moor, Warwick, and her brother Max, Sylvia entertains her male companions by enacting roles from Shakespeare, including Ophelia as well as Lady Macbeth, Rosalind (another opportunity for cross-dressing), and Juliet. Max, a painter, later has Sylvia pose as Clytemnestra. The association of Sylvia with famous literary victims and villains suggests the power and passion pent up within her. Later,Warwick warns that further concealment of their love from Moor, to whom Sylvia is now married, would be tantamount to murder, and shortly thereafter Sylvia inadvertently reveals their secret by walking, like Lady Macbeth, in her sleep.

Other significant allusions are to Tennyson and Hawthorne. At the end of the idyllic river journey, in which Sylvia falls in love with Warwick and both men fall in love with her, Sylvia gazes back to the “charmed river,” and the narrator explicitly compares her to the “fairy Lady of Shalott,” who, “sick of shadows,” left her web and loom only to die on contact with the real world. Henry James’s indignant response to the river journey—“it is hard to say whether the impropriety of this proceeding is the greater or the less from the fact of her extreme youth”—lends support to Jennifer A. Gehrman’s interpretation of “The Lady of Shalott” as a cautionary tale, admonishing woman not to “stray from her sphere, to seek direct interaction with the world beyond hearth and home” (Elbert, Moods, 220; Gehrman, 123).The river journey harms Sylvia because it offers only a temporary escape from the shadow life she has been living and to which she seems condemned; the men who appear to include her in their active, adventurous life ultimately encourage her to return to the loom. The Golden Wedding celebration at the heart of the river journey introduces Sylvia to the crippled “daughter Patience,”“who seldom see[s] what’s going on outside four walls,” an admission that connects her with the Lady of Shalott and thus, ominously, with Sylvia. But perhaps the most telling allusion occurs late in the book when Sylvia, separated from both her husband and Warwick, is compared with Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. Although she has narrowly escaped Hester’s sin of adultery, her searing experience has permitted her, like Hester, to detect a legion of fellow sufferers. Even Faith Dane, living in the “virgin loneliness” that Margaret Fuller saw as a necessary stage in women’s struggle for equality, is reminiscent of Hester, who, upon returning to America, served as confessor to troubled women and prophesied a “brighter period, when . . . a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.”

Margaret Fuller wrote in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, a work that seems to have influenced Alcott profoundly, that “the life of Woman must be outwardly a well-intentioned, cheerful dissimulation of her real life.” On the river journey, Sylvia proves herself a gifted actress, but once the journey is over, she must begin acting in earnest. First, she must conceal her love for Warwick, after he leaves without declaring his love for her. As though seeking inspiration for the role that she must play, Sylvia finds the theater “both a refuge and a solace . . . and Shakespeare’s tragedies became her study.” Although she never affects a passionate love for Moor, she must, upon accepting his proposal, feign contentment. When, after her marriage, she learns that Warwick does indeed love her, dissimulation becomes still more difficult. Sensing her unhappiness, Moor encourages her to pretend that she is “little Sylvia” again, a role she finds it impossible to sustain. When Warwick and Faith visit unexpectedly, Sylvia must hide her emotion from both husband and friends. At first, she succeeds in deceiving Warwick, for “men seldom understand the subterfuges women instinctively use to conceal many a natural emotion which they are not strong enough to control, not brave enough to confess.” He, in contrast, is described as one who “could act no part,” “hating all disguises,” for he has never been called upon to live the double life that, to a woman, becomes almost second nature.To escape her husband’s detection, Sylvia rearranges her hair so as to hide her face, then, in a show of openness, tells him she has done so from a different motive. Coyly, she asks him,“Did you think I could be so artful?” and, unsuspectingly, he answers, “Your craft amazes me.”

Sylvia’s “craft” is one that she shares with most of Alcott’s heroines. In the sensation story “La Jeune; or, Actress and Woman,” reprinted in this volume, the private life of the heroine, a professional actress, proves to have been a more brilliant performance than any of her theatrical roles. In fact, in order to create the glamorous image necessary to succeed on the stage, “La Jeune” must conceal her nationality, marital status, financial need, physical condition, and, especially, her age. Her purpose in doing so, however, is not a matter of worldly ambition but of survival for herself and her dependent. The plight of Jean Muir, the heroine of Behind a Mask, is no less desperate than La Jeune’s, and she too fabricates an identity for herself. Like La Jeune, she conceals a previous marriage and the ravages of time upon her aging body, but she also obliterates from the record any traces of her acting career. In her impersonation of an eighteen-year-old governess, Jean adopts many of the stratagems used for more innocent purposes by the young Sylvia Yule. In fact, so subtle is her performance that she even feigns adopting stratagems when she senses that they are expected of a woman in her position. But when asked by her employers to participate in an evening of amateur theatricals, Jean as the biblical Judith enacts her rage at those who both necessitate and condemn feminine duplicity.

The subtitles of “La Jeune” and Behind a Mask—“Actress and Woman” and A Woman’s Power respectively—suggest that acting for Alcott and her heroines is paradoxical.The narrator of “La Jeune,” on hearing her confession, declares that “never in her most brilliant hour, on stage or in salon, had she shone so fair or impressed me with her power as she did now. That was art, this nature. I admired the actress, I adored the woman.” Acting implies an art or artfulness, a craft or craftiness, at odds with the feminine ideals of innocence, purity, and truth.Yet her vulnerability, dependence, and the impossible ideals themselves virtually mandate the development of a double consciousness. The narrator’s belief that the actress can be readily distinguished from the woman is discredited by Alcott in tale after tale. Whereas he may believe that La Jeune’s power derives from her conformity to an ideal of womanhood, he would never have become obsessed to discover what lay behind her mask had it not been for her consummate acting, both offstage and on. A similar obsession motivates Jasper Helwyze in Alcott’s sensational novel A Modern Mephistopheles.The heroine, Gladys, dissembles her anxiety about her husband’s mysterious relationship to Jasper and feigns contentment. Only under the influence of the hashish he administers does Gladys, in enacting scenes from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, express both her passion for her husband and her determination to free him from Jasper’s toils. Free in the role of Vivien to cast off her guise of purity and innocence, Gladys reveals a sensuality that awakens her husband’s dormant desire and serves notice to Helwyze that hers is a power with which he must reckon. Louisa May Alcott, now her many masks and disguises have been at least partially penetrated, must also be reckoned with as an author of craft and artistry. Whereas generations of children have long adored the woman who created Little Women, adult readers are now free to admire the actress who played that woman.