Louisa May Alcott

Coming of age just as Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared, Louisa May Alcott occupied a particularly strategic position from which to comment on the sentimental revolution and to trace its relevance to life in nineteenth-century America . Her parents -- Bronson and Abigail -were among the cultural avant-garde who embraced sentimental views about domestic life even before Louisa May was born, and they worked zealously to live by them. Growing up in such a sentimental family and then coming to know the humiliation of poverty as an adolescent, Louisa was also in a position to assess the sentimental revolution and its relevance to a dynamic, restless, materialistic society. Finally, in her art, she drew upon her experience to sort out the meaning of the sentimental revolution, attempting to salvage its strengths and strip it of its ludicrous excesses.

The sentimental revolution provided the cultural context within which Louisa May Alcott came to maturity. Her parents were in crucial respects adherents of the sentimental revolution, attempting to make the Alcott household a model by the emerging standards of the sentimentalists. It was a family formed in 1830 by the union of a man and a woman who had repudiated conventional standards of a courtship and who married without regard for prudential advantage. During the succeeding years, Amos Bronson and Abigail May Alcott struggled, as the cult of domesticity demanded, to make their household into an enclave against the materialism and conformity of Jacksonian society. As for sex roles, Bronson played a larger role in the internal affairs of the family than the sentimental literature contemplated, and both he and Abigail endorsed a somewhat less conservative position on the subject of sexual equality than the sentimentalists would allow.

After Louisa May Alcott's appearance in November 1832 the protective screen which the Alcotts erected was expanded to include her as well. As the two girls grew, their parents began to monitor their friendships and, of course, the books they read.

This idealistic regime proved demanding on both parents. Abigail did not care much for housework, and if she had a choice, she left it to a maid or, in later years, often chose lodging in a boarding house. Motherhood, however, suited her exactly, and she shared Bronson's fascination with observing the growth and development of the girls. As Bronson reported at the occasion of Louisa May Alcott's birth, his wife "lives and moves and breathes for her family alone." As the girls grew older, Abigail established herself as their chief confidante, rarely too busy to listen to their complaints or to sympathize with their difficulties. The girls were not lacking in attention from their father either. Despite his duties as a breadwinner during the early years, he devoted an extraordinary amount of attention to his offspring, motivated in part by his hope that the publication of his extensive observations of their development would eventually establish a reputation for him in philosophy.

Alcott already sensed what later investigations would confirm, that a love-oriented discipline is usually associated with the early appearance of conscientious behavior. As we shall see, Alcott's child-rearing strategy proved in this regard to be extraordinarily successful, not only with Anna but with Louisa May Alcott as well.