Honeybees and Discontented Workers: A Critique of Labor in Louisa May Alcott

How doth the little busy bee / Improve each shining hour, / And gather honey all the day / From every opening flower!¹

—Isaac Watts

Ever since Isaac Watts immortalized the “little busy bee” in his 1715 lyric “Against Idleness and Mischief,” the female honeybee, or worker bee, has assumed an iconic status within children’s literature. A symbol of diligence and discipline, the “busy bee” serves as a convenient pedagogical tool, and as such it proved popular among nineteenth-century American authors intent on shaping the nation’s vulnerable youth. Louisa May Alcott, writing primarily for younger audiences, was no exception. In Little Women, for example, the March girls form a “Busy Bee Society” which requires each member to perform a useful task such as sewing or knitting. By spending their leisure time wisely, the young ladies earn the praise of their mother and emulate the ever-industrious insect. The figure of the bee, however, does not always occupy a benign space in Alcott’s imaginary world. Little Women’s Beth, described as “by nature a busy bee,” eventually dies from a fever contracted while performing her mother’s charity duties.² Additionally, the heroine of Work, who appears “like a bee” tending her garden, attempts suicide after a particularly grueling stint as a pay-for-hire seamstress.³ Alcott’s writing, in fact, recognizes the negative symbolic value of the bee as often as it celebrates its positive potential. Although typically understood as endorsing the “busy bee” ethos of her day, Alcott’s fiction also provides an ideological critique of nineteenth-century laboring habits. In her stories for children and adults, she ponders what happens when a reasonable work ethic gives way to oppressive labor conditions and workers fail to respect the limits of human stamina.

Much of Alcott’s writing, in fact, investigates the distinction between obsession and oppression when it comes to work. As someone who labored almost incessantly in order to support her family, Alcott well understood the complex joys and unavoidable hardships of employment, not to mention the conflicting goals of financial need and personal fulfillment. As the daughter of a well-known reformer, Bronson Alcott, she also engaged with work on a social level and became involved with debates on mass production and industrial practice. Thus the commonplace understanding of Alcott’s stance on labor politics might read as follows: like her father, she opposed unjust working conditions in factories and other industrial settings; and, following Emerson, she idealized a world in which individuals could pursue a vocation that brought spiritual fulfillment. However, I suggest that Alcott’s thinking on employment was more complex, riddled with inconsistencies and self-doubt. Her fiction contemplates not only horrid jobs plagued by cruel overseers but also meaningful occupations that nevertheless bred hardship. Indeed, what is unusual about her writing is that it locates a negative potential within even the most uplifting forms of work. In other words, no employment is free from the strain of exhaustion, and even (or, perhaps, especially) vocational careers run the risk of leading to obsessive behavior. While it is undeniable that a major part of Alcott’s political agenda revolved around protesting unjust working conditions for the lower classes, another aspect of her thinking centered on uniquely middle-class concerns about the contours, temptations, and dangers of work for those who had some degree of choice in how they spent their time.

Recent critics have pushed Alcott scholarship beyond its traditional purview of separate spheres ideology and the nineteenth-century “woman problem” into arenas such as gender, sexuality, race, and class; however, few have addressed concerns of labor.⁴ Joy Kasson, Lynn Alexander, and Carolyn Maibor are notable exceptions, and they have succeeded in establishing Alcott’s involvement with labor politics in her later career. Nevertheless, these scholars continue to portray the author in fairly conventional terms: Alexander argues that Work supports “the concept of separate spheres and womens’ essential domestic nature,” and Maibor contends that Alcott’s only real concern with Emersonian labor theory was to “translate the philosophy of the self-reliant young...