Louisa as Celebrity

When Little Women became a sensation, Louisa May Alcott became the ultimate literary celebrity. Fans were waiting out on her lawn and knocking on her door, and her life was suddenly not her own. Although she had always yearned for fame, she was surprised to find it costly and unpleasant. Still, her celebrity opened new doors for her. It gave voice to her causes, and it may have even spurred her creativity. In this episode, we unpack how Louisa's celebrity status defined the last twenty years of her life, whether it's possible to separate the artist from their art, and how Louisa's celebrity has continued into the 21st century.

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Transcript

Welcome to Let Genius Burn, a podcast series about the life and legacy of Louisa May Alcott. I’m Jamie Burgess and I’m Jill Fuller. In today’s episode, we’re looking at the psychology behind fame, and how Louisa’s life changed dramatically once she became a well-known authoress--and not always for the better. This is Louisa as Celebrity.

By 1884, Louisa May Alcott was an accomplished author whose reputation preceded her wherever she went. That year, a book profiling notable women was published—it was called Our Famous Women: An Authorized Record of the Lives and Deeds of Distinguished American Women of Our Time. Louisa May Alcott’s profile is the first in the book--which is partially due to its loose alphabetical structure--but I like to think it was also because of the extent of her fame. Among some twenty other women, the only others who rivaled Louisa in name recognition were Harriet Beecher Stowe and Julia Ward Howe.

In the profile of Louisa May Alcott in Our Famous Women, Louise Chandler Moulton writes, 

In the literature of our own country and time, there are few more picturesque figures than Louisa May Alcott; since we must consider not only her own distinguished achievement, but also the surroundings of her life. Unless hereditary were a word without meaning, the world had a right to expect much of Miss Alcott by virtue of inheritance, and the highest of these expectations she has certainly fulfilled.

Louisa May Alcott’s literary gifts were descended from one truly gifted writer--her mother, Abigail May Alcott--and one accomplished author of questionable talent--her father, Amos Bronson Alcott. Perhaps this was the “hereditary” of which Moulton writes. Yet Louisa May Alcott was also raised among the Concord literati, some of the most notable minds of the nineteenth century.

In Concord, Massachusetts, the Alcotts’ closest friends were well-known writers and thinkers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Emerson in particular achieved an unusually high level of recognition. Today, his aphorisms appear on everything from notebooks and keychains to t-shirts and breath mints.

Louisa called Ralph Waldo Emerson neighbor and friend. She also called him “the god of my idolatry,” and in remembering her childhood, she describes how, upon borrowing Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child from his library, she was “at once fired with the desire to be a second Bettine, making my father's friend [Emerson] my Goethe. So I wrote letters to him, but was wise enough never to send them, [and] left wild flowers on the doorsteps of my ‘Master.’”

Humans have a natural impulse toward admiring others, which leads to celebrity as part of our culture, according to modern philosopher Alain de Botton. In an essay entitled “Don't despise celebrity culture” he writes that we should not ignore or try to kill off the impulse to admire others. Instead, he suggests that people should try to channel their admiration in “optimally intelligent and fruitful directions,” which is what Louisa May Alcott did, in admiring Emerson.

As a young woman, Louisa witnessed her father’s colleagues earning a living with their thoughts and pens—and they could afford to move freely through the world. Freedom and liberty were primary concerns to Louisa, who felt restrained by her family’s economic status and her status as a woman. The Alcotts, who had hardly ever had the means to lift their heads from poverty, found themselves among the likes of Henry David Thoreau, who had the financial safety of a nearby family, so he could engage in elective poverty by his experiment at Walden Pond, for which he became so well-known. Thoreau spent a year living by the pond, chopping his own wood and living without any conveniences; he wrote the famous treatise Walden from these experiences. Louisa was thirteen when Thoreau went to “live deliberately,” though Louisa knew keenly this deliberate life was not something she had the freedom to choose.

About a year after Thoreau’s famous experiment ended in 1847, the Alcotts were in such dire need of money they decided to return to Boston so Abigail and the girls could find work. Louisa recalled this moment as pivotal for her future life as an author.

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It was a gloomy November day in Concord when Abigail and Bronson broke the news to Louisa that the family would be leaving their leafy hamlet for another stint in the city.

The family needed money, desperately, and though Concord offered camaraderie, it did not offer income, least of all for the two oldest daughters, who were now of working age. Anna and Louisa would need to teach to bring in money for the family as well. In Concord, Louisa had enjoyed her own space, a house big enough where she could have privacy and freedom of thought. She needed this now, as she processed the news that they would return to cramped quarters and city life.

She took a brisk run over the hill to her favorite thinking spot, an old cart-wheel half-buried in the grass. It was the place where she’d often escaped to write stories when she should have been doing her sums. She sat perched on the wheel and looked at the “leafless trees, sere grass, leaden sky, and frosty air” of November.

Despite the cold, Louisa felt the hot-blood of a teenager full of ambition and hope inside of her. She raised her fist to the sky. 

"I will do something by−and−by. Don't care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I'll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won't!" 

When she shouted, a crow flew away and the old wheel creaked as if she had set it in motion. This was the moment when Louisa became an adult, put aside her love of liberty and took family duty first.

Fame was her earliest desire in this new stage of adulthood. It’s the seminal moment in her young life, and it’s similar to a speech that biographer John Matteson gave at Orchard House in 2009. His talk was entitled “Waldo on the Common, Margaret on the Stairs,” and he described the Transcendentalist moments that changed these philosopher’s lives. Ralph Waldo Emerson stood on the common in Concord and imagined himself as the all-seeing eye that understands the one-ness of man and nature. Margaret Fuller stood on her staircase as a young woman and had a similar revelation about herself and the world. For Louisa, I propose “Louisa on the Cart-Wheel”--this gloomy November afternoon was when Louisa truly saw her fate clearly ahead of her for the first time. She was not a Transcendentalist, so it was not a Transcendentalist epiphany. Louisa was a material philosopher, her life shaped by lack of money and difficulty--her epiphany reflects this lack.

Alain de Botton tells us that “the desire for fame has its roots in the experience of neglect, in injury,” where “being known to strangers emerges as a solution for the hurt.”

We prefer to think of Louisa May Alcott as a pillar of strength. She was capable; she worked hard. Yet in this moment, because of her poverty and her youth and her womanhood, she is disenfranchised, helpless. Her family was constantly at the mercy of wealthier families, of the Emersons and the Mays. Her father admired these wealthier, more well-known people—even women, such as Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller—and his lack of approval for Louisa always stung. A path began to emerge that could soothe all of these aches at once, and it would give Louisa the control and liberty she so desired and the respect she deserved: it was to become a famous author.

She had breathed the words “rich and famous and happy” in one breath, as if they were contingent one upon the other. Perhaps, based on her experiences in Concord, Louisa could see no distinction between money and fame. After all, these wealthy people were also in the public eye. By the end of her life, she would learn that fame and happiness could be mutually exclusive.

By the time Louisa published Hospital Sketches in 1863, the Alcotts were back in Concord. The sketches first appeared in the Boston Commonwealth, and Louisa was pleasantly surprised by the success, writing in her journal, “I find I’ve done a good thing without knowing it.” Her reputation as Tribulation Periwinkle in these stories brought her joy. But if Hospital Sketches was a ripple in the pond, Little Women, published five years later in 1868, brought a tidal wave of attention. Quickly, fame became something insufferable for Louisa.

In a letter to the Springfield Republican in 1869, signed by Tribulation Periwinkle, Louisa wrote of the hoards of Concord tourists: “No spot is safe, no hour is sacred, and fame is beginning to be considered an expensive luxury by the Concordians.”

This sentiment was repeated almost exactly in her journal in 1875. “Fame is an expensive luxury. I can do without it. This is my worst scrape, I think. I asked for bread and got a stone, in the shape of a pedestal.”

Louisa had lived through poverty and had come close to death in a Civil War hospital, yet she called fame her “worst scrape.” And she deliberately used this metaphor of money: fame is too costly. Louisa had worked so hard for what she earned. She would not easily give it up.

One summer, exhausted by having twenty-eight visitors in one week, Louisa imagined spraying the fans off her lawn with a garden hose.

There are several such anecdotes. At Orchard House, we loved to tell this: when fans would come knocking, Louisa would come to the door dressed as a servant and tell them in her best Irish brogue that Miss Alcott was not home.

Or, for example, in January 1875, Louisa May Alcott was invited to Vassar College. The New York Graphic in December of that year reported: “The girls, as usual, asked for a speech, and when [Louisa May Alcott] also, as usual, told them that she had and never intended to make one, they requested that she would place herself in a prominent position and turn around slowly. This she consented to do.”

In September or October of 1875, Louisa recorded in her journal another experience: 

Write loads of autographs, dodge at the theatre, and am kissed to death by gushing damsels. One energetic lady grasped my hand in the crowd, exclaiming, ‘If you ever come to Oshkosh, your feet will not be allowed to touch the ground: you will be borne in the arms of the people! Will you come?’ ‘Never,’ responded Miss A., trying to look affable, and dying to laugh as the good soul worked my arm like a pump-handle, and from the gallery generations of girls were looking on. ‘This, this is fame!’

These examples and anecdotes tell us that Louisa May Alcott was irritated by her fame. She felt poked and prodded, invaded and uncomfortable. Yet fame was what she had sought, so single-mindedly, for so long. Wouldn’t accomplishing this important life goal lead to happiness?

In Eden’s Outcasts, John Matteson writes, “It can be argued that, ever since she was a child, Louisa’s two dominating raisons d’etre had been to earn her father’s approval and to assure her mother’s comfort.” Through her writing, and earning money for her writing, she had always been doing this for her parents—to win her father’s approval, and to win money so her mother could live comfortably.

Some studies in the desire for fame shed a little more light. In a study at UCLA, two researchers spoke with adolescents about their desires to be famous. In every age and ethnic group they studied, fame was the primary value they sought. One of the motivations they described was “prosocial motivation,” that is, to better the lives of others: to earn money for their families, or to help people learn from their ideas.

Fame and creativity have this prosocial motivation as a link: it is a reason, also, why people create. In a study about creativity called “The Two Dimensions of Motivation and a Reciprocal Model of the Creative Process,” the authors Foregeard and Mecklenburg attempted to understand whether and how prosocial motivation, that is, desiring to better the lives of others, increases creative behavior. They believed that if they could understand the link between the two, they could even help people come up with new methods to practice their creativity.

Louisa May Alcott combined these two perfectly: she had a strong creative drive, the vortexes we heard about in the episode “Louisa as Scribbler,” and an unstoppable desire to better the life of her family. We can see how these traits merged into a powerful force to help her find her voice as a writer and to finally achieve fame and wealth even beyond her own imagination.

Though 1875 seems a particularly “bad” year in Louisa’s writings for fame, her celebrity was still on the rise. From here, some one hundred and forty-five years later, it would seem her fame has no upper-limit. The year with the most visitors at Orchard House was 1995, after the release of the Little Women film with Winona Ryder and Susan Sarandon, with some 90,000 visitors. The house nearly collapsed under the weight and had to be completely restored from underneath in 2001. Undoubtedly visitation would have reached a new height in 2020 as well, if not for the need to close the museum during the COVID-19 epidemic, with the release of the Greta Gerwig film at the end of 2019.

Louisa May Alcott did not necessarily contribute to this fame. She did not, for example, leave an endowment to create Orchard House as a museum or to leave a lasting charitable foundation for women authors.

But she also did not stop writing. Even when they had “enough” money, Louisa pushed herself to keep spinning stories for her publishers. She fanned the fire of her fame with page after page of stories.

John Matteson writes that Bronson Alcott’s appetite for fame continued to grow in his old age. Louisa recorded in her journal that he was “flourishing about the Western cities.” His letter to her said, ‘I am riding in Louisa’s chariot and adored as the grandfather of ‘Little Women.’ Louisa valued that she was able to give Bronson what he had long desired: fame and recognition--no matter that he hadn’t earned it himself.

Alain de Botton’s study of celebrity tells us that underneath the desire for fame is the desire to be understood. He says, “What is common to all dreams of fame is that being known to strangers emerges as a solution to a hurt. It presents itself as the answer to a deep need to be appreciated, and treated decently by other people.”

Even in her fifties, when she was asked to write adult fiction for the Christian Union, Louisa May Alcott took the chance. Matteson writes, “She had her aspirations. She still dreamed of winning a reputation as an author of serious novels for adults.” Perhaps this was her desire to be seen and appreciated and valued. Her fame might have been worth more to her if she had earned it for something she also prized, like a reputation as a serious literary author, rather than a writer of sentimental children’s stories.

Let’s return to the profile from Our Famous Women. Louisa Chandler Moulton writes, “The last twelve years have been for Miss Alcott full of triumphant prosperity. She has orders so numerous that she cannot fulfill them—her books go through edition after edition…”

We also have to consider that in those twelve years referenced in the quote, Louisa lost her beloved mother. She lost her youngest sister. Her father had suffered the first of a series of strokes that would render him childlike. The Alcotts left the family homestead and spread out between Boston and the suburbs. Louisa suffered immensely with her health: headaches, joint aches, dizziness, exhaustion. 

No number of books could fill the void. It could not fill years of poverty as a child, years of seeking her father’s approval. It could not restore Louisa’s health.

We must consider juxtaposing all of these very public achievements with all of these very private hardships. These were twelve prosperous and prolific years for Louisa May Alcott’s writing career. Fifteen-year-old Louisa on the cart-wheel did exactly what she’d promised. Yet she was suffering. Without her mother, she had lost so much of her purpose. Her aches robbed her of any enjoyment of her fame she might have felt.

Notably, the book is titled Our Famous Women—because once you achieve the level of fame of Louisa May Alcott, you cease to belong to yourself—you belong to “us,” to the public. Little Women itself is in the “public” domain—all the money garnered by the new film stays in the hands of its executives. I doubt Louisa would be pleased to know this. We know how shrewdly she handled her affairs to keep control over publishing rights for her family even after her death. For example, Louisa eventually adopted her oldest sister Anna’s son John, so she could pass on her copyrights to him and keep them in the family. Fame was costly, and its price would not make life more comfortable for her parents and sisters or spoil her niece and nephews.

Louisa May Alcott’s legacy belongs now to those of us who admire her. Who turn her works into films. Who write books about her life or her work. Who make podcasts. As de Botton says, it’s healthy to choose people to admire. Those of us who have chosen Louisa May Alcott for our impulse to admire have chosen wisely, especially when we look beyond her notoriety as a children’s author and see her life through the lens of activist or provider or daughter--or even celebrity--we see someone noble and compassionate. He says, “To refuse to admire, to take no interest in what distinguished others are up to, is to shut ourselves off, grandly and implausibly, from important knowledge.” I, for one, would not willingly give up the knowledge I have gained by admiring Louisa May Alcott, the ultimate literary celebrity. Even if she claimed to hate it.

See you next week for Episode 7, “Louisa As Woman.” For more about Louisa, follow us on Instagram and Facebook @letgeniusburn. Finally, in the spirit of the Alcott’s beliefs in social justice, each week, we are highlighting an organization we believe in and asking for your support. For this episode, we are supporting . You can find information and links to donate in the show notes or on our website. You’ll find more information, including the resources used for this episode, in the show notes and on our website at www.letgeniusburn.com. 

Works Cited

Alcott, Recollections of My Childhood. http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/80/87.pdf 

Alcott, Selected Letters.

Alcott, Selected Journals.

de Boton, Alain. School of Life. “Improving Celebrity Culture.” https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/improving-celebrity-culture/ and https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/31/dont-despise-celebrity-culture-angelina-jolie 

de Boton, Alain. School of Life. “Desire to be Famous.” https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/your-desire-to-be-famous-and-the-problems-it-will-bring-you/

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Fame” https://www.infoplease.com/primary-sources/poetry/ralph-waldo-emerson/ralph-waldo-emerson-fame

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Emerson. “Legacy.” https://www.iep.utm.edu/emerson/ 

Matteson, John. Eden’s Outcasts.

Moulton, Louise Chandler. “Our Famous Women.” https://books.google.com/books?id=wWfisieeSRQC&q

Unis & Greenfield, The Value of Fame https://www.cdmc.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/170/2018/04/The-value-of-fame-11.pdf

Foregeard & Mecklenburg, Two Dimensions of Motivation. http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Two-Dimensions-of-Motivation.pdf