Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (review)

John Matteson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Eden’s Outcasts is a fascinating study of the relationship between Louisa May Alcott and her father. Unlike Madelon Bedell in her maudlin Freudian reading of their relationship, Matteson analyzes the ways that their lives informed one another, for both good and ill, to create a study about two interdependent people whose lives cannot be fully understood in isolation from one another. Matteson succeeds brilliantly in creating a balanced portrait of two complementary lives.

For scholars familiar with the basic timeline of Louisa May Alcott’s life, the overall structure of the book will offer few surprises—but for most of us, the book does offer many intricate details that are not standard fare in every other biography about her. Matteson has mined Bronson Alcott’s letters and journals for information about the educational philosophies at work at the Temple School and the daily life and atmosphere at Fruitlands, Bronson’s ill-fated foray into utopian living. Bronson’s flirtation with the Shakers, Charles Lane’s powerful and often negative influence over the Alcott family, and quotidian details about what Louisa’s life at the commune must have been like flesh out the biographical material previously available in work by Madeleine Stern, Martha Saxton, and Sarah Elbert. Matteson draws a forceful picture of John Brown and Bronson Alcott’s admiration of him, and the particulars of Louisa’s service at the Union Hotel Hospital are also finely drawn. Matteson depicts the tensions that must have pulled at Bronson and Abba Alcott’s marriage, just as he demonstrates how difficult it must have been to be the daughter of such an idealist. Indeed, Matteson’s ability to convincingly analyze the agonizing nature of the obsessive-compulsive disorder from which Louisa almost certainly suffered provides a much-needed balance to the myth of Alcott’s writing “vortexes” as beneficial to her. This information is particularly compelling in light of Bronson’s inability to understand “mental states that the individual could not control” (306, emphasis in the original).

Matteson has a keen eye for such types of irony, especially as he juxtaposes Bronson’s and Louisa’s lives. For example, he notes that Bronson was an educator who did not teach school from 1840 until his death in 1888. Instead, he educated his daughters—largely in such principles as self-denial that led Louisa to despise poverty, despite the fact that with the Fruitlands enterprise, “Bronson had hoped to teach his children that money was meaningless and dispensable” (154). Moreover, Matteson observes that “it is a matter of some irony that Little Women, Alcott’s hymn to genteel poverty, put a permanent end to the real Alcott family’s days of chronic want” (349). Far more disturbingly, Matteson underscores the menacing contradiction between Bronson’s idealized, militant abolitionism and his racism. Bronson once told Emerson privately that African American males should be neutered “en masse” (190). Bronson tended to think of the universe in hierarchical terms, and he believed nothing to be morally neutral, not even vegetables, which helps to explain his rigid vegetarianism. He could, therefore, justify his own racism in terms of moral hierarchies. Other biographers have accounted for Bronson’s tendency to link Louisa’s tempestuous (and thus sinful) nature to the dark complexion that she shared with her mother. Matteson points out, however, that at least one friend of the family described the eldest March daughter—the one whom Bronson typically associated with his own fair nature—as having the darkest skin of the four daughters. Matteson explains that daguerreotypes and the extant locks of the families’ hair bear out this fact. Bronson’s prejudice against Louisa’s coloring appears to be based on both faulty reasoning and faulty perception.

Although many of the ironies in the Alcotts’ lives were difficult ones, Matteson does interpret some of these tensions with gentle humor. The Alcotts all valued poetry—and wrote plenty...