I had e-mails from people with whom last week’s column about my mother resonated. As I have often written, “I am you, and you are me.” Everyone has a mother! Of course, there have been mothers who were horrible, abusive individuals. In mythology, the dreadful Medea who murdered her children to spite her husband, Jason, was the worst! Little Women’s Marmee was the best. Most of us have warm fuzzies when we think about dear old ma. Perhaps we idealize our mothers, but my mother truly was the fictive Marmee’s real-life equal.
When I rummage around in the dusty trunks stored in my mind’s attic, I come across one that contains May memories of my mother and Mother’s Day and my mother’s birthday. I don’t open this trunk often as it causes me to be swept with longings that I know I cannot assuage.
Virginia Woolf pointed out that the lives of ordinary women are ignored in history books and that the novels lie. Little Women is one of my favorite books, and other women love it, also. It has a reality of its own that equals Conan Doyle’s stories about Sherlock Holmes or Clement Clark Moore’s poem about Santa Claus. We forget that it is fiction.
Louisa May Alcott’s Marmee, Abigail Alcott, is a saint. So, too, is Bronson Alcott, the father who is revered by Marmee and their four daughters. The fictive Marmee is always tranquil, forgiving and free of temperament. In real life Abigail Alcott was a suffragist, temperance supporter and outspoken, fervent abolitionist. Fleeing slaves visited the Alcott house that was part of the Underground Railroad.
If I had been she, I would have kicked Bronson Alcott’s posterior. He was a moon-dreaming mystic, avant-garde educator whose progressive schools failed and a transcendentalist philosopher who lost jobs, didn’t support his family and moved them from place to place. His brother-in-law and Ralph Waldo Emerson bailed him out, and Louisa supported them once she was successful.
In a crackbrained scheme he and another man started Fruitlands, a ninety-acre farm. It was to be a new Eden. Its very name was a misnomer since the fruit consisted of ten old apple trees. They established various rules: no coffee, tea or warm bath water. They would eat only plants that grew upward i.e. no potatoes. (Duh!) They were predecessors of today’s vegans. They would eat no meat, use no beasts to work and wear no leather. The only woman to join the group was kicked out because she was caught eating fish. Cotton, wool and silk clothing was forbidden because it was produced by slaves. (What were they to wear? Fig leaves?) Most of the land wasn’t arable, and without animal labor could not be farmed in any case. The men spent a few days digging, but Louisa wrote that they rapidly lost their enthusiasm. They went off on lecture tours or spent their time philosophizing.
Guess who was expected to do the work. Abigail had a belly full and announced that she would take the girls and live elsewhere. Eden fell apart after seven months. Emerson helped them get a home in Concord where Louisa May spent her happiest years. However, Abigail finally insisted that they move to Boston because Concord was “cold, heartless, brainless and soulless.”
My granny rebelled against Grandpa’s refusal to let her have money. She became a cook at Jimmy McFarlane’s restaurant in Knightstown — certainly not the “done thing” in those days. Daddy was intelligent and a hard worker, but financially unreliable. He straightened up and became a paragon of economic virtue after Mother threatened to leave him when I was a little girl.
Modern women might well ask why women like Abigail Alcott, my mother and others whom I could tell about put up with their husbands. They accepted society’s view that that was the way things were supposed to be. Also, they had few job opportunities and economic choices. wclarke@comcast.net