LibGuides: Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women: Transcendentalism

TRANSCENDENTALISM IN THE SOUTH

Emerson's Southern Critics, 1838-1862 by Matthew Guinn
Call Number: Resources for American Literary Study 25.2 (1999) 174-191
Even a cursory examination of Ralph Waldo Emerson's contemporary reviews indicates that 19th century readers often perceived him as a reckless iconoclast, an enemy to tradition. This animosity was nowhere more pronounced than in the South. The southern press tended to perceive Transcendentalism as a dangerous, alien force with Emerson as its figurehead-the preacher of an egalitarian philosophy that threatened the foundations of the South's hierarchical slave-holding society. The rise of his national stature, coupled with the country's mounting sectional differences, intensified the southern reaction to Emerson.

TRANSCENDENTAL WILD OATS

"Each member is to perform the work for which experience, strength, and taste best fit him," continued Dictator Lion. "Thus drudgery and disorder will be avoided and harmony prevail. We shall rise at dawn, begin the day by bathing, followed by music, and then a chaste repast of fruit and bread. Each one finds congenial occupation till the meridian meal; when some deep-searching conversation gives rest to the body and development to the mind. Healthful labor again engages us till the last meal, when we assemble in social communion, prolonged till sunset, when we retire to sweet repose, ready for the next day`s activity.

"What part of the work do you incline to yourself!" asked Sister Hope, with a humorous glimmer in her keen eyes.

"I shall wait till it is made clear to me. Being in preference to doing is the great aim, and this comes to us rather by a resigned willingness than a wilful activity, which is a check to all divine growth," responded Brother Timon.

"I thought so. And Mrs. Lamb sighed audibly, for during the year he had spent in her family Brother Timon had so faithfully carried out his idea of "being, not doing," that she had found his "divine growth" both an expensive and unsatisfactory process.

Here her husband struck into the conversation, his face shining with the light and joy of the splendid dreams and high ideals hovering before him.

Transcendental Wild Oats: A Chapter from an Unwritten Romance is Louisa May Alcott's satire about her family's involvement with the Transcendentalist community Fruitlandsin the early 1840s. She portrays the father figure as a dreamer and intellectual, and the mother as the one who has to do all the work to meet worldly needs such as food and shelter.

Read Transcendental Wild Oats online at:

American Transcendentalis Web
Free Romantic Novels (read online or download text)
Classic Authors

Photograph of Fruitlands courtesy of Fruitlands Museum

"'Transcendental Wild Oats' or The Cost of an Idea" by Claudia Durst Johnson
Call Number: American Transcendal Quarterly 12.1 (1998): 45-65
"Transcendental Wild Oats" is a story within a story, its plan and publication the tale of an impending crisis of power and gender in what was already a complicated daughter-father relationship--and not an unexceptional pair; the father was one Of the most notable transcendental reformers on the New England scene, a philosopher and largely unpublished man of letters, a national presence whose name would likely be recognized when referred to by Nathaniel Hawthorne in the preface to The Scarlet Letter, one whose theories had reached English and European intellectuals and had formed the foundation of an educational institution in London which bore his name. The daughter, one of the most celebrated writers in post civil-war America, succeeded fabulously where her father had failed, in gaining both recognition and revenue from her writing. The larger story of the plan, composition, and publication of "Transcendental Wild Oats," one of a lacerating struggle between daughter and father, is precipitated and clarified by her published account of the struggle between mother and father, the feminine and the masculine, in the embodiment of the father's grand idea--the social experiment he christened Fruitlands.
Letter A.Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane wrote to The Dial in June, 1843 about the Fruitlands experiment.
Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia by Richard Francis
ISBN: 9780300140415
The first definitive account of Fruitlands, one of history’s most unsuccessful—but most significant—utopian experiments. It was established in Massachusetts in 1843 by Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane, under the watchful gaze of Emerson, Thoreau, and other New England intellectuals. Alcott and Lane developed their own version of the doctrine known as Transcendentalism, hoping to transform society and redeem the environment through a strict regime of veganism and celibacy. But physical suffering and emotional conflict—particularly between Lane and Alcott’s wife, Abigail—made the community unsustainable. Drawing on the letters and diaries of those involved, Richard Francis explores the relationship between the complex philosophical beliefs held by Alcott, Lane, and their fellow idealists and their day-to-day lives. The result is a vivid and often very funny narrative of their travails, demonstrating the dilemmas and conflicts inherent to any utopian experiment and shedding light on a fascinating period of American history.
Web of American Transcendentalism
An interlinked hypertext first created in 1999 by Virginia Commonwealth University graduate students in a class in Studies in American Transcendentalism.
American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work by Susan Cheever
ISBN: 0743264614
A request to write a new introduction to Louisa May Alcott's Little Women inspired Susan Cheever to explore the literary atmosphere of Alcott's childhood. A daughter of one of the free spirits intellectually supported and financially subsidized by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alcott intermittently lived in Concord, Massachusetts, where Cheever sets her intimate narratives. She explores the interpersonal relationships linking the prospectively famous writers Emerson drew in. In the transcendentalist florescence of the 1840s and 1850s, the aspirant writers tried out their ideas and idealism in conversation at Emerson's house, alongside Concord's roads, or afloat on its creeks. Moving among descriptions of such haunts, Cheever constructs a many-layered contemplation of this distinctive collection of American literary icons in their formative periods, and encompasses day-to-day events and the character of their attractions, as between a married Emerson and Margaret Fuller, whom Emerson lodged in his house. Emotionally warm and critically engaged, Cheever's history successfully evokes the incubation of Concord's literary glory.

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women: Transcendentalism

TRANSCENDENTALISM IN THE SOUTH

TRANSCENDENTAL WILD OATS

FURTHER READING