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Bronson Alcott, Worst Father Ever
Dec. 17th, 2013 01:08 pmI ran out of time to read Richard Francis’s Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia when I was writing my utopias project, so I’m catching up now. It’s quite well-written - given how much I disliked Francis’s earlier book about Transcendentalist utopias, it represents a stunning improvement, because he’s stopped imposing his heavy-handed analysis on everything and is simply reporting what happened.
What happened, mainly, is Bronson Alcott being an ass. Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May) is the most maddening man, so self-centered, so incapable of seeing himself as in the wrong, even when he does things that are obviously beyond the pale like reading his fellow teacher’s private correspondence with her sister.
This is probably the inevitable outcome of his unforgiving creed. Here, for instance, is one of Bronson’s “Orphic Sayings”: “He who is tempted has sinned; temptation is impossible to the holy.”
So not only could he not believe that he had acted wrongly, he couldn’t even believe that he had been tempted to act wrongly, because that would make him unholy. All his thought is like this: it’s so high-falutin and impractical and rarified that it would be impossible to argue with him, because neither logic nor feeling nor practical considerations are ever going to reach him.
I feel so bad for Louisa May Alcott and her sisters, having Bronson Alcott for a father must have been terrible. The whole household revolved around shaping the girls’ souls, which must have been stifling. Bronson was in the habit of editing or outright censoring his children’s diaries in order to explain to them that the way they felt wasn’t really the way they felt.
To do him what little justice he deserves, many people in the nineteenth century didn’t see diaries the way we do today, as a place to sort out one’s private and personal self, but as a kind of moral accounting book. It makes perfect sense to share a moral accounting book with someone else. Without outside perspective you might very well beat yourself up unnecessarily for small sins or, alternatively, let yourself off the hook for everything on the grounds that you didn’t really mean to be bad.
HOWEVER. When you choose an auditor for your moral accounting book, it very definitely should not be someone as self-centered as Bronson Alcott.
What happened, mainly, is Bronson Alcott being an ass. Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May) is the most maddening man, so self-centered, so incapable of seeing himself as in the wrong, even when he does things that are obviously beyond the pale like reading his fellow teacher’s private correspondence with her sister.
This is probably the inevitable outcome of his unforgiving creed. Here, for instance, is one of Bronson’s “Orphic Sayings”: “He who is tempted has sinned; temptation is impossible to the holy.”
So not only could he not believe that he had acted wrongly, he couldn’t even believe that he had been tempted to act wrongly, because that would make him unholy. All his thought is like this: it’s so high-falutin and impractical and rarified that it would be impossible to argue with him, because neither logic nor feeling nor practical considerations are ever going to reach him.
I feel so bad for Louisa May Alcott and her sisters, having Bronson Alcott for a father must have been terrible. The whole household revolved around shaping the girls’ souls, which must have been stifling. Bronson was in the habit of editing or outright censoring his children’s diaries in order to explain to them that the way they felt wasn’t really the way they felt.
To do him what little justice he deserves, many people in the nineteenth century didn’t see diaries the way we do today, as a place to sort out one’s private and personal self, but as a kind of moral accounting book. It makes perfect sense to share a moral accounting book with someone else. Without outside perspective you might very well beat yourself up unnecessarily for small sins or, alternatively, let yourself off the hook for everything on the grounds that you didn’t really mean to be bad.
HOWEVER. When you choose an auditor for your moral accounting book, it very definitely should not be someone as self-centered as Bronson Alcott.
