The Artist at Home: The Domestication of Louisa May Alcott

THE ARTIST AT HOME: THE DOMESTICATION OF LOUISA MAY ALCOTT Veronica Bassil* In the "Ode to Psyche," John Keats presents the goddess of the soul as a figure of sexual and artistic power.1 In Louisa May Alcott's short story "Psyche's Art," however, the heroine, Psyche Dean, finds neither artistic nor erotic fulfillment. In contrast to Keats' poet, she learns that it is duty, not love or art, that must "feed heart, soul, and imagination."2 Alcott's Psyche instead accepts the credo oí domesticity: I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke, and found that life was duty (p. 7). In Psyche Dean, as in Jo March of Little Women, Alcott depicts an artist who must, paradoxically, give up her art in order to achieve it. These fictional artists mirror Alcott's own dilemma as a woman torn between the desire to create and the desire to serve, one who channeled the dangerous and potentially immoral energies of the artist into the apparent safety of the home. Yet home is not safe, and the character of the dying younger sister, Beth in Little Women and May Dean in "Psyche's Art," reveals the artist's sacrifice, the stunting and starving of her potential under the demands of domesticity.3 Alcott's fiction thus reflects a profound tension between dependency and independency, between the domestic ideal and the need for artistic freedom, between love within the family and the romantic love that lies outside it. Although Alcott supported women's rights and spoke out in her fiction in favor of a new woman who could combine motherhood and independence, including artistic endeavor, her female artists do not demonstrate this combination. Often they dedicate themselves to art only to reject it later for a life of love and duty.4 Once Jo March becomes "Mother Bhaer," she gives up her writing and contents herself with telling stories to her domestic circle; Alcott reports that Jo still enjoyed life "heartily, and found the applause of her boys more satisfying than any praise of the world."5 Amy March also confines her art to the domestic realm after marrying Laurie: "I don't relinquish all my artistic hopes. . . . I've begun to model a figure of Baby" (p. 553). Similarly, in "Psyche's Art," Psyche, acting on the advice of a male artist, Paul Gage, ''Veronica Bassil is an Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York at Geneseo. She has previously published articles in the Emerson Society Quarterly and Texas Studies m Language and Literature. She is currently at work on a book on Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson. 188Veronica Bassil destroys her sculpture, a bust of Venus, and abandons the art studio for her neglected home duties: "With an expression of great contempt for the whole thing, she suddenly tilted her cherished Venus on to the floor, gave the classical face a finishing crunch, and put on her hat in a decisive manner, saying briefly to the dismayed damsels,—'Good-by, girls; I shan't come any more, for I'm going to work at home hereafter' " (p. 8). Although Psyche later completes a statue of her deceased younger sister, as with Jo and Amy, her art stays within the family circle and outside the public domain: "While Paul won fame and fortune, . . . Psyche grew beautiful with the beauty of a serene and sunny nature, happy in duties which become pleasures, rich in the art which made life lovely to herself and others" (p. 16), that is, rich in the art of domesticity, the art of "patience, love, and self-denial" (p. 15). It is remarkable that Alcott, one of the most successful female authors of her time, depicts her fictional artists as yielding up their energies to the demands of domesticity; that the stormy, independent, and freedom-loving Jo gives up the stories that made her life "blissful" (p. 305); and that Psyche Dean abandons her art studies to go about the house "pale and silent with a hungry look in her eyes" (p. 13). While economic pressures to publish and the Victorian cult of true womanhood clearly affected her fiction, Alcott herself...