1 The Forbidden_Apple Experiment 1832-1834 She has withstood the temptations of the appetites through a whole morning, and though they triumphed, at last, the triumph was not without a struggle. --Amos Bronson Alcott, journal, 1833 Louisa May Alcott never liked her birthday. "On a dismal November day I found myself," as she put it, and "began my long fight." Her mother remembered that day in 1832--and her daughter--differently. The infant Louisa was a "sprightly, merry little puss," Abigail Alcott wrote, "quirking up her mouth and cooing at every sound." Louisa the fighter found herself in the heart of an unusual family. Amos Bronson Alcott, Louisa''s father, was an educator and philosopher fascinated by human nature. Louisa''s mother shared his ideals and was fiercely committed to social change.
When Anna, the first of four Alcott daughters, was born on March 16, 1831--twenty months before Louisa--Bronson wrote grandly, "A child is given. May we guide it in the paths of truth." He saw the new baby as an invitation to a great experiment: What is human happiness? Can it be built from the ground up? Can parents limit outside influences and raise a perfect child? How do children learn? To find out, he took scrupulous notes on his firstborn''s mental and moral growth. He looked and listened, like any attentive father, but also exposed Anna to stimuli, like a scientist. What faces would she make? What sounds and gestures? His laboratory was built on gentleness and reason, but Bronson''s curiosity sometimes got the better of him. What would happen, for instance, if he made a scary face? (That experiment "must not be repeated," he concluded. Fear, however mild, only subtracted from a child''s happiness.) He called his journal "Observations of the Life of my First Child" and intended it to be no less than a "history of the human mind .
faithfully narrated." Louisa arrived in the world on Bronson''s thirty-third birthday, and she too became part of the family experiment. The sisters were in every way a study in contrasts, their father observed. Bronson believed in the divine purity of young children: newborns came into the world still in touch with instincts and intuition from the spiritual realm. Mild, sentimental, and eager to please, Anna was fair and serene like her father. She fit his concept of the ideal infant. Louisa, with her "vivid, energetic" power, individuality, and force, did not. An active, fretful baby, she challenged her father''s theories from the beginning (and would challenge him all her life).
Louisa was practical and proud, with a fierce will, imagination, and temper. She had storm-dark eyes--some said gray, others black--and her mother''s olive skin. In a letter to his own mother, Bronson praised his wife''s maternal devotion. She "lives and moves and breathes" for her family, he wrote. But at the same time, he gave Abby full credit, or blame, for the baffling phenomenon that was Louisa. Overworked and in poor health during the formative early months of her daughter''s life, even Abby looked back and blamed herself for Louisa''s moodiness. Born with "the wild exuberance of a powerful nature," Louisa was certainly "fit for the scuffle of things," as Bronson put it, and their household was nothing if not a scuffle. Clamoring for the attention of two intellectual, socially active parents, toddler Anna lashed out at her mother and sometimes struck her.
Anna slapped and scratched Louisa the intruder one minute--though she always agonized afterward--and slathered Louisa in kisses the next. Not to be outdone, tiny Louisa mastered the art of the tantrum, learning to howl and collapse into a heap on the floor, wedging her head between her knees and screaming bloody murder. Sobbing before bedtime became one of her "most confirmed habits." Trying to mold the perfect family in crowded chaotic conditions wore on Bronson. The family lived at the time in Germantown, Pennsylvania--about six miles outside Philadelphia--while he tested his radical educational methods at a suburban school funded by wealthy Quakers. His roles as father and educator were hard to separate, and with his suburban experiment on the wane and bills piling up, Bronson closed the Germantown school. He rented an apartment in the city of Philadelphia, leaving Abby to manage the girls and the household alone. Bronson disappeared into the hallowed halls of Philadelphia''s public library collections to study educational tracts and philosophy, and walked six miles each way on weekends to spend time in Germantown with the family.
On April 22, 1833, he opened a new school in the city with fifteen students, and while Abby and the girls occupied a series of boardinghouses in Germantown and then Philadelphia, Bronson kept his distance. When he visited the family, he and Abby argued over responsibility. His absence kept her mind "in a state of excitement," she confessed. He was "unkind, indifferent, and improvident," and when he was present, he held "too closely to the ideal" of a family, leaving no room for error. Bronson saw educational reform as both "duty and right" and argued that in order to make a difference in the world, he had to live and defend a serene life of the mind. "Sacrifices must be made to the spirit of the age," he reasoned. "My family must feel the evil of this to some degree, but this should not deter me." Louisa and Anna continued to be subjects of their father''s intellectual inquiry.
One of Bronson''s child-development experiments featured a shiny, forbidden apple. He sat his daughters down one day and asked, "Should little girls take things that do not belong to them without asking their fathers or mothers--things to eat or drink--things they may like?" "They should not," asserted four-year-old Anna. Did the girls think that if they should see an apple, they would ever take it without asking for it? Anna shook her head. No. Never. Louisa agreed. Bronson then set an apple out where the girls would see it and quit the room. At dinnertime he returned to find a browning core on the table by Louisa.
Once the family finished their meal, Bronson asked about the object near her plate. What was it? "Apple," Louisa said. "Where did you get it?" Her eyes darted to Anna, who could barely contain herself. "I told her she must not," blurted the obedient older sister, "but she did!" They had both taken a few bites before Anna had thrown the apple into the fireplace grate. But Louisa had seized it and finished it. "I was naughty," Anna confessed. "I didn''t ask you, as I ought to--shall you punish me father, for it?" Bronson had put the apple there on purpose to "try" them, he explained. "I rather thought you would take it; but I hoped you would think of what I had said and that you would not take it.
Did you think you were doing right?" "No," said Anna, "my conscience told me I was not." "And shall you mind it next time?" he asked. "Yes, I think I shall." "Well, Anna, always mind that, and then you will do right." Louisa toddled over, and he pulled her up onto his knee. Had she eaten some of the apple? "Yes, I did." "Why did you take it before father said you might have it?" She smiled ear to ear. "I wanted it.
" Louisa''s turn at playing Eve to her father''s Jehovah didn''t end there. Bronson conducted at least one other such test with her as subject, leaving an apple conveniently in sight while he hid nearby to watch. Faced with the forbidden fruit, Louisa scolded herself: "No, no--father''s--me not take father''s apple--naughty!" But her plump little hand reached out. Louisa didn''t eat the apple at first. She played with it and nearly ate it--several times, her father recorded--but in the end, temptation won, and conscience lost. "Me must have it," she told the air, biting into the apple''s crisp flesh. Bronson didn''t punish Louisa. (He had seen his "spiritual principle" in action: his youngest had struggled with the question, and that was enough.
) Though surely she felt the wages of her sin. For not the first time, Louisa had disappointed her father. But she was not one to be daunted. By the time she was eighteen months old, Louisa and her sister had already lived at four different addresses while their father was looking for a foothold as a teacher. The new school struggled on for a year, though Bronson no longer saw Philadelphia as fertile ground for educational reform. The people there seemed to him material-minded, "not deeply interested in intellectual and moral subjects." In the end, this project failed like the other. The parents of Bronson''s pupils continued to find his methods--such as asking children to keep diaries of their spiritual and intellectual progress--unconventional and unsettling, and pulled their children out.
Philadelphia might not be ready for an experimental classroom, Bronson supposed, but maybe Boston was. The family had "continued at this place 2 years," Abby wrote in her journal, "with uncertain and vacillating prospects of success." They decided to return, without delay, to her home city. Over the years and decades to come, Abby would master the art and particulars of relocating her family, and once a decision was made, plans would develop quickly. On the day of the move, Abby--"Marmee" to her girls--dressed Anna.