Happy is the son whose faith in his mother remains unchallenged.

― Louisa May Alcott

_____________________________________________________

Louisa May Alcott:

Excerpts from the article Louisa May Alcott’s Transcendentalism

March 19, 2019      Live Ideas Journal.org    Read entire article . . . 

_____________________________________________________

Louisa May Alcott was serendipitously surrounded by the greatest thinkers of her time and transcendentalism in general. Her father, Bronson Alcott, showed her an idealistic and ultimately unworkable version of the movement. One of Bronson’s essays showcases his idealistic notions by discussing the person of Jesus, and how the ideal of Jesus’ humanness must be brought forth. “It is the mission of this Age, to revive his Idea, give it currency, and reinstate it in the faith of men. By its quickening agency, it is to fructify our common nature, and reproduce its like…it is to reproduce Perfect Men” (Alcott 2000, 170).

Throughout Louisa’s childhood, Bronson pursued philosophical ideas by establishing the Temple School where he sought to teach children according to his transcendental ideas. His goal was to teach students to “learn to feel rightly, to think rightly, and to act rightly” (Alcott 2000, 58). The Temple School, like most of Bronson’s experiments, ultimately failed due to lack of parental support. Some of Bronson’s ideas were too much for parents to handle (Alcott 2000, 80). He was simply not practical enough to make his ideals last.

Soon after the closing of the Temple School, the family moved to a farmstead to establish a utopian society dubbed Fruitlands. There, they attempted to live off the land, follow a strict vegetarian diet, and more fully implement the ideas that Bronson deemed important (Matteson 2007, 126). Fruitlands was a terrible failure. The Alcotts were subjected to backbreaking work but barely survived the winter. After a little less than a year on the homestead, they left (Matteson 2007, 163). Although Louisa had seen her father’s transcendentalist projects fail, she still believed in the philosophy as much as he did, and blamed the setbacks on poor planning and execution. In her books, she would correct his mistakes.

 Louisa’s mother Abba was as radical as her husband in terms of her belief in the values of transcendentalism and the need of social reform. “My life is one of daily protest against the oppressions of abuses of Society,” she wrote to her brother, Samuel May (Matteson 2007, 212). She became mentor and provider for many “lost girls, abused wives, friendless children, and weak or wicked men” (Matteson 2007, 212). She was a strong advocate of women’s suffrage, and it was her lifelong dream to vote. But after Fruitlands and the Temple School, Abba had gone through much at the hands of Bronson. She had less interest in a complete ideology and more in what practical tools transcendentalism offered to achieve happiness. It was her attitude of cheerful perseverance that inspired Louisa most of all. “Two of Abba’s favorite maxims were: ‘Love your duty and you will be happy’ and ‘Hope, and Keep busy,’ an instruction she tucked into Louisa’s journal in 1845 and which the March sisters adopt as their motto in a moment of family crisis in Little Women” (McFall 2018).

 Louisa lived through the idealized experiments of Bronson and his cohorts. She had watched her mother be the workhorse of Fruitlands and the constant bridge between Bronson’s ideas and their family’s survival. She valued the ideas of transcendentalism, but valued still more the practical method of applying them. This was more akin to Emerson’s ideas than Bronson’s; and also tied in her own experiences.

To her, self-reliance and self-reform were the fruit of work. Self-reform was the active method of becoming self-reliant, and work would provide both values. Louisa herself was something of a workaholic, and understandably so – she nearly single-handedly kept her family financially afloat when she was old enough, and was able to provide a comfortable retirement for her mother and pay back her family’s debts (Matteson 2007, 388).

This value of hard work as the path to meaning and self-reliance, and ultimately, happiness, is evident throughout Louisa’s works of fiction. It’s woven into her novels and outright argued in many places. She uses children’s’ stories as the platform to improve upon the transcendental ideas ingrained into her and focus on their true outcome, that of happiness. Specifically, Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl, published within a year and a half of one another, showcase Alcott’s ability to translate transcendentalism into a children’s novel without losing the integrity of either subject matter. 

Louisa invited her readers simply to feel as she felt through her writing. A reader who understood and believed Alcott’s message accepted transcendentalism, even if they didn’t know the term. Her writing is a form of literary activism, promoting progressive ideas about women’s rights, gender roles, and the best and most healthy way to live (Lenahan 2012, 28). Alcott’s writing is full of people experiencing happiness by changing their emotions rather than changing the world around them – the basic message of anti-intellectual transcendentalism.