Bronson Alcott, Worst Father Ever

[osprey_archer]

I 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.

Comments

[eglantine-br.livejournal.com]

I never liked him. Poor Mrs Alcott struggled to keep the girls fed and clothed, and he just swept around making philosophical pronouncements. Totally self centered.

Mrs A was dedicated to many good causes too, abolitionist, education for women, charity, and all kinds of good things, but she worked toward them, he was mostly talk.

You can see exactly how she was the basis for Marmee having a wicked bad temper. Living with BA would make anyone bad tempered!

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I've gotten to the part where Bronson's wandering around the countryside, trying to pay for things with philosophical statements, while Abba and the girls are at Fruitlands trying to bring the hay harvest in single-handedly.

It's not wonder that Marmee is so saintly in Little Women - mentions of bad temper aside - because she must have been a saint to put up with Bronson Alcott for all those years!

[athenais.livejournal.com]

After reading Marmee and Louisa I find myself completely incapable of cutting Bronson any slack at all. His self-centeredness was epic. He was a really terrible father and husband, although not a particularly unusual one. I'm sure Emerson was a pain in the ass, too. He changed his wife's name because he thought Lydian sounded fancier than Lydia. And, of course, he was in on Fruitlands, a utopia that only worked as long as the women did.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Another fun Alcott fact: apparently he told Henry James Sr. that he (Alcott) had never sinned. Which means in his mind, not only had he never done wrong, but he'd never been tempted to do wrong - he was purer than Jesus, who was tempted by the Devil in the desert.

Apparently he had a picture of Jesus hung above his head when he taught at the Temple School, to help his pupils make this connection. OH ALCOTT. It's surprising that Louisa was not a total basket case.

[goldjadeocean.livejournal.com]

HOW IS LOUISA SO SANE? Like really! She even came away with a version of her father's philosophy that was compassionate and humane!

LMA is the best. ever.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Abba Alcott. Also, Bronson spent a lot of time noodling around the countryside philosophizing to people, which doubtless gave his benighted children some breathing space. Also, possibly just her native awesomeness?