Victorian Domesticity: Families in the Life and Art of Louisa May Alcott

1945.

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Alcott’s Heritage: The Sentimental Revolution

Louisa May Alcott’s life and art provide an avenue along which to approach that most difficult task faced by historians, which is to assess the quality of an era even as they attempt to describe and explain it. When the era in question is the Victorian, the task is doubly hard because our Victorian ancestors have not been treated kindly by later and more skeptical generations. At some point in the twentieth century, as historian Henry May has observed, Americans passed through a cultural revolution that made the Victorian era a completely vanished world.¹ It has been difficult for modern American intellectuals and writers to comprehend, let alone admire, the Victorians or their ways. To modern sensibilities they seem straitlaced, intolerant, narrow, sexually repressed and, worst of all, hypocritical. Robert Falk has pointed out: Few periods of American thought, taste, and literary expression have been subjected to such a parade of disparaging epithets and historical idols. In its social character, its art and architecture, its manners, morals and literature, the period has been portrayed in many a colorful and perjorative term. Common to them all is the concept of decline.² To this broadly based cultural revolt has been added in recent times the specific dissatisfactions expressed by feminists, who have singled out Victorian values and Victorian family life as among the more formidable obstacles to the achievement of sexual equality.³

There is, as we shall see, some justification for the twentieth century’s dissatisfaction with Victorian culture, but it is important not to allow this dissatisfaction to cloud our comprehension. It will require an extraordinary effort of research and imagination not only to understand the world in which Victorians lived, but, more importantly, to understand how they perceived it and how they felt about it. Fortunately, that effort is underway. Insofar as family life is concerned, a consensus seems to be emerging among historians that profound changes were occurring during Alcott’s lifetime (1832–1888) in relations between husbands and wives, in relations between parents and children, and in relations between the home and the marketplace.⁴ Carl Degler has called attention to the increasing importance of affection and mutual respect between marriage partners, the increasing influence of women within the home (even as they seemed to lose influence outside it), the growing emphasis on the role of the woman in child-care and in home maintenance, the decline in rates of fertility, and the consequent decline in the average size of the household.⁵ Focusing on a single community—Oneida County, New York—Mary Ryan has found a similar transformation in middle-class domestic arrangements from 1800 to 1865, marked by less emphasis on patriarchal authority within the household and more emphasis on affection, by the growing influence of women within the home, and by sharper sex-role segregation. Ryan also suggests that the early nineteenth century produced a greater emphasis on sexual restraint, temperate habits, maternal socialization, and extended education.⁶ Most of these observations apply, of course, only to the urban, white middle class, and research on the family life of rural Americans, black Americans, immigrants, and the working class is only beginning to emerge.⁷ Nevertheless, we seem justified in assuming that these changes in domestic arrangements among the urban middle class represented the wave of the future and eventually described the norms against which all American families were to be judged during the Victorian era.

Alcott’s experience is certainly relevant to this ongoing inquiry, for if we are to understand more than the hard surfaces of family life in the nineteenth century we must probe beneath statistical charts and tables. In particular, we will benefit from the experience of an insider, someone whose life was shaped by these domestic changes and who, moreover, left a monumental body of fiction exploring its meaning. Having been a child, having been a woman, having felt in her life the lash of poverty, and having decided opinions about men, Alcott provides a unique perspective on nineteenth-century family life and in particular about that cultural expression of it we have labeled Victorian domesticity. There is, however, still another sense in which Alcott’s life and art are important to us. As a writer, and an extremely influential one at that, she served to perpetuate the values of Victorian domesticity to subsequent generations. Rare is the American girl who did not read one or more of Alcott’s books during the highly impressionable preadolescent or adolescent years. Alcott’s fiction thus has served to shape the attitudes of subsequent generations of women toward the sensitive issues of women’s roles and family life. Her influence may in fact serve to explain, in part at least, the strange persistence of Victorian values among Americans, despite the nearly unanimous declaration of intellectuals that those values are no longer relevant to life in the twentieth century.

The key to understanding the values of Victorian domesticity in general and Alcott’s rendering of them in particular, is to grasp an intellectual and literary movement that gave birth to those values and that shaped her early life. This movement, which has sometimes been called the sentimental revolution, brought about during the early years of the nineteenth century a transformation in the opinions of the American social elite on such sensitive matters as courtship, marriage, religion, education, and child-rearing.⁸ As we shall see, Alcott broke free of sentimental conventions in certain critical ways, especially in her view of women and children, but sentimentality remained a profound influence on her attitudes toward courtship and marriage, on the proper rearing of children, and on such political and economic questions as the relationship between the nuclear family and the community. What we here are calling Victorian domesticity was a product of a confrontation between the ideals of sentimentality and the reality experienced by nineteenth-century Americans.

Even before Louisa’s birth, the sentimental revolution was well underway as a host of women took up the pen, usually under the pressure of necessity, to turn out novels, articles, and books of advice.⁹ They were joined by clergymen who found in popular publication a new pulpit from which to make known their views on family matters. Together, the clergymen and the women were able to reach a wide audience, thanks to innovations in the print media after 1830 that made possible the publication of cheap books, newspapers, and periodicals for mass consumption. Much of it took the form of fiction. Between 1830 and 1850 more than a thousand works of fiction by American-born authors were published in the United States. That was more than five times as many as in the preceding sixty years. Most of this fiction was by women and for women and most was concerned with domestic themes—courtship, marriage, religion, home management, child-rearing, and education.¹⁰ Whether fiction or not, the flood of literature was profoundly didactic, for it was widely understood by the authors that even novels were supposed to teach, and that every episode should be followed by a moral lesson.

The transformation in values that the women and clergymen created was a revolution in the sense that this body of popular literature called for a new way of looking at courtship, marriage, and family life, and it pointed to new sets of relations between husbands and wives, between parents and children, and even between the family circle and the marketplace. It has been called a sentimental revolution because of the emphasis the popular literature placed on sentiment, not merely in the sense that it attempted to set readers awash in a flood of tears, but in the more profound sense that the authors declared allegiance to sentiment, or feeling, as the preferred guide in perceiving reality and acting on it. Specifically condemned was the old reliance on prudential reasoning about human affairs, and exalted instead were the reasons of the heart which would henceforth govern relations between the sexes and between the generations.

While offering a new way of looking at domestic matters, however, the sentimental revolution was also conservative in the sense that it advocated new forms of family life to promote what were essentially traditional institutions. More specifically, the sentimentalists were anxious about the secular and egalitarian tendencies of the Jacksonian era. The decades preceding the Civil War were marked by a ferment of reform, aimed at winning converts to the cause of the abolition of slavery and the abolition of war (two contradictory crusades as events proved), at promoting equal rights for women, reform of prisons, reform of the treatment of the insane, temperance, religious revivalism, vegetarianism, public education, and the founding of utopian communities.¹¹ There was not, Ralph Waldo Emerson reported in 1840, a kingdom, town, statute, rite, calling, man or woman, but is threatened by the new spirit.¹² The toleration—if not the enthusiasm—which antebellum Americans displayed toward social reform was astounding and not to be matched by an American generation before or since, with the possible exception of the cultural revolt of the 1960s. The sentimental writers themselves enlisted in many of these causes, most notably religious revivals, temperance, and the cause of abolition (if they happened to live above the Mason-Dixon line). But at the same time they worried that the currents of reform might go too far. They feared that in moving so quickly toward an unknown future, Americans were leaving behind the solid virtues of an earlier, simpler society. If the Jacksonian era was opening up vistas of human progress, it also provoked worry about law and order in a nation that seemed ungoverned and ungovernable. Many Americans worried in particular about the materialistic and secular tendencies of the age, and about what they perceived to be the declining authority of the church.¹³ Likewise the future of the family was a matter of great concern, for, in a sense, the sentimentalists were carving out a new and more ambitious role for this most basic of human institutions. It was to serve as a moral counterweight to a restless, materialistic, individualistic, and egalitarian society. The family was, in fact, to serve many of the functions formerly reserved for the church. Religion, which had been disestablished in the public sphere during the upheavals of the eighteenth century, would now be reestablished in the private sphere of the family and placed in the keeping of women. For this reason, more than any other, most sentimentalists opposed the movement for women’s rights, for they perceived it as a threat to the very institution upon which they counted for moral redemption.¹⁴

The irony of the sentimental view should not be ignored. The sentimentalists often talked as if they were attempting to restore domestic life as it had been in a more traditional, simpler society, when in fact they were calling for a new kind of domesticity, one which envisioned novel ways of looking at courtship and marriage, at the roles of husbands and wives and at the relations of parents and children. In the course of advocating these changes, the writers reinforced a series of cults, all interrelated and all dealing with aspects of marriage and family life. The cult of romantic love dealt with the formation of families, and specifically with the rituals of courtship and marriage. The cult of domesticity was a way of marking boundaries between the nuclear family and the world outside it. Finally, the interrelated cults of motherhood and childhood specified the central purpose of family life and the place women were to occupy within it. Together these sentimental cults provided the cultural context within which Alcott came of age and the literary heritage with which she had to come to terms in working out her own views of family life.

THE CULT OF ROMANTIC LOVE: UP ON THE PEDESTAL

The cult of romantic love inculcated in readers a set of lessons concerning the preferred relationships between sexes: No sexual intercourse without love, no love without marriage, and no marriage without love.¹⁵ Although stated here as rules, the cult of romantic love centered around a new image of woman emerging in the eighteenth century and given currency by a new form of literature, the novel.¹⁶ The venerable notion of woman as Eve the Temptress gave way to the notion of woman as the Persecuted Maiden, who was the victim of seduction rather than its perpetrator. It was a theme particularly popular in Protestant lands, perhaps, as Leslie Fiedler has suggested, because Protestants sought to invest in ordinary women the virtues reserved in Catholic tradition for the Virgin