An article in the most recent issue of The Atlantic draws attention to the varied ways in which Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is read. The main suggestion is that knowledge of Alcott’s biography can drastically change a reader’s interpretation of the text. This knowledge about the author’s biography, one of many types of topic mastery I discussed in my post last week, illuminates greater meaning for the novel. One can read it either as a reproduction of sentimental feminine domesticity or as a criticism of that mode of understanding the place of women in society.

In much the same way that the protagonist, Tribulation Periwinkle (a fictionalized version of Alcott herself), is forced to reckon with her understanding of wartime heroism and gender roles, the reader is forced to come to terms with the same notions.

This theme of simultaneous reproduction of and resistance to conventional frameworks of knowledge is prevalent in much of Alcott’s work. It is undoubtedly the subject of the lesser-known Hospital Sketches, a semi-autobiographical account of an experience in a Civil War hospital. It is possible to read this text in the same vein of most Civil War memoirs: as a sort of valorization of patriotism and male courage. However, attention to the formal details of the text, particularly the military language and metaphors that pervade it, reveals that it is better considered as a reflection on these commonsense values. The text is, at its core, about the disappointment of expectations. In much the same way that the protagonist, Tribulation Periwinkle (a fictionalized version of Alcott herself), is forced to reckon with her understanding of wartime heroism and gender roles, the reader is forced to come to terms with the same notions.

The opening chapters of the text describe Tribulation’s decision to travel from Concord to Washington, DC to serve as a Civil War nurse. From the very start we get a sense of her grossly romanticized notion of what the experience will entail. These chapters largely focus on the mundane processes of obtaining train tickets and traveling from one city to the next. Despite the mundanity, we see Tribulation with her head full of “heroic purposes ‘to do or die,’ — perhaps both,” speaking with “martial brevity,” and viewing her actions in decidedly militaristic terms.

While it is worth noting that much of her “heroic” outlook is structured with reference to her reading — newspaper articles about “our brave boys” and romantic poetry like Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” — I will not linger on that point. What I wish to emphasize is that the text introduces militaristic language and metaphors to emphasize a stark contrast between the domestic (typically synonymous with femininity) and the heroic (associated with masculinity). Tribulation constantly tries to leave her domestic behaviors behind in order to inhabit an entirely different sphere: heroic nurses absolutely do not cry on the train after leaving their mothers. This dynamic being established, the text proceeds to emphasize the ways in which Tribulation’s perspective on these categories shifts throughout her service. The deployment of military language and metaphor soon ceases to signal the sharp distinction between what constitutes domesticity or heroism. Instead, it signals a reflection on what such rigid ways of understanding the world occludes.

The third chapter begins with a frantic exclamation that “they’ve come!”, causing Tribulation to spring to action. Convinced that the Confederate soldiers have arrived to take the hospital by storm, she prepares to do battle. In doing so, she evokes a romantic poetic reference describing her willingness “‘To gird my woman’s form, / And on the ramparts die,’ if necessary.” Her heroic expectations are immediately undercut by the reality of the situation: it is not the rebels, but a group of wounded soldiers coming from the Battle of Fredericksburg. Her task is not to stand and fight, but rather to wash their bodies. While Tribulation is “staggered” and bewildered by the seeming mundanity, and there is a humorous element to the scenario, the point here is not to laugh at her naivety. Rather, this scene raises a more pointed question that the reader is asked to consider: what are the aspects of warfare that typically aren’t considered? What is ignored when all of the discursive emphasis is placed upon heroic deeds of manly valor?

The sequence that follows, then, is an effort to acknowledge these crucial yet oft-neglected features of war. What results is a breakdown of conventional cultural frameworks, a space in which the heroic and the domestic, the masculine and the feminine, are able to blend together. This blending is emphasized through the continued usage of militaristic language: a bar of soap can be “manfully” taken up and the washing of soldiers is accomplished “vi et armis” (that is, “by force of arms”); rough soldiers can blush “like bashful girls” while being scrubbed; the serving of a meal can be described as a “skirmishing” of utensils and a “marching and counter-marching” of rushing plates back and forth. Whereas in the first section Tribulation attempts to abandon the domestic, we see here the domesticating of the heroic military world.

Her illness manifests itself as a more acute sense of what was always present to her, but what she did not always pay attention to.

The text ends with Tribulation’s removal from the hospital, brought on by a bout of typhoid fever. Significantly, her illness produces in her “a painful consciousness of my pleura, and a realizing sense of bones in the human frame.” In other words, her illness manifests itself as a more acute sense of what was always present to her, but what she did not always pay attention to. In this way, Tribulation’s bodily illness mirrors her mental processes. While she hasn’t “learned” anything in the strictest sense, she undergoes a re-orientation of consciousness.

A similar re-orientation is possible for attentive readers, but it is by no means guaranteed. A reader lacking mastery of literary conventions may miss the close reading outlined above with its attention to specific language usage. Even readers aware of the importance of such details are likely to miss out. I expect students to pick up on Alcott’s word choice, but I know that they will likely need guidance while considering the overall effect. Guiding students through this reading is, in a way, an exercise in mastery. It serves as a sort of model for moving from minor details to the overall meaning that I discussed last week. However, my hope is that it serves another purpose. Even if students don’t get to this reading on their own, very few feel like they don’t understand the text. With that in mind, in offering this explanation I am implicitly posing a question; one that hopefully leads to a moment of “recognition.” What is actually happening in this text that seems so straightforward?

Wil Marple is a PhD student in the English Department at Syracuse University. He studies American literature of the long nineteenth century with a particular interest in the Transcendentalists and other authors of the mid-century “American Renaissance.” He hopes that his current fascination with the notion that expectations shape perception will lead him to produce a project titled Great Expectations that has absolutely nothing to do with Charles Dickens.

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What are the circumstances that would compel a family to imprison one of its members in an iron cage for the rest of his life? In the case of Josiah Spaulding Junior, born 1787, the answer given by his preacher father, Reverend Josiah Spaulding of Buckland, Massachusetts, was that his son had “lost his reason” and was a danger to the family. Later census records on the Spaulding family state that Josiah was insane. Perhaps he was, perhaps he wasn’t. I uncovered this story during my time as an archival researcher for a private archive in North Syracuse, where we received one hundred and forty-four letters written by four generations of Spaulding family members. In researching this story, I have been unable to find evidence for violent mental illness, but I have found evidence of many other things. Josiah was kept in a cage by various family members in their homes for fifty-seven years. He was put into it when he was about 23 years old, and it is there that he died.

Josiah Spaulding, Jr., the son of a prominent reverend, was expected to follow a certain life path. He was the only surviving infant of a triplet birth, born to Mary Williams of Taunton, Massachusetts and Reverend Spaulding, originally of Plainfield, Connecticut. Josiah’s sister Mary, the firstborn child, had been born the year before. The two maintained a close friendship for many years. Both of Josiah’s parents were from respected lines of New England families who were among the first white settlers of the region, and their genealogies span to the early seventeenth century in America.

Reverend Spaulding was a staunch Calvinist, and obtained his Doctor of Divinity from Yale in 1778. He was ordained as a minister in 1782 and had gone to Uxbridge, Massachusetts to begin his career as the local minister. He was married there, as well. However, as would occur repeatedly until his arrival in Buckland, the reverend was dismissed from his position in part because of “unpopularity due to his Calvinist theology”, according to the Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, and the fact that he was thought to be eccentric. Hardline Calvinism, which had long been the established religion in New England, was slowly starting to fall out of vogue during this period. According to records, parishioners had a hard time believing that God “foreordained every thought, word and action” of human beings, as Calvinism and the Reverend taught. However, Reverend Spaulding deeply believed in the doctrine and would not renege even a little. As a result, he had to move around a few times until the family settled in Buckland, where he remained minister for twenty-eight years and was widely loved by the townspeople. Josiah was eight years old when the Spauldings arrived in Buckland. Daughters Nancy, Deborah, and Lydia had been added to the family, with Lydia being the youngest, born in 1799.

Letters between Josiah and his older sister, Mary, demonstrate a close relationship between the two. Mary’s 1801 letter to Josiah, written when she was sixteen and he around fourteen and away at a conference in Goshen, spoke heavily of religion and repentance but also of local gossip:

PS I will inform you of the death of Betsy Stinn, she died not long before thanksgiving  & it is expected that Lydia her sister is or will soon be married to the gentleman that courted Betsy. & What do you think of that, it has occasioned considerable talk here…

As a young woman of this era, Mary would not have been groomed for a career in the way that Reverend Spaulding was doing by bringing his son to a religious conference. Unlike her mother and namesake Mary Williams, Mary Spaulding was taught how to write and had beautiful penmanship. She and her sisters attended the local one-room schoolhouse in Buckland where a peer of theirs was Daniel Forbes, famous for his penmanship and friends with the Spaulding family. There is little doubt that the Spaulding children learned penmanship in some measure from Daniel, and in the Spaulding collection there are letters written by him to Mary. However, the Spaulding daughters’ education did not go much beyond their years at the local schoolhouse, as they were expected to excel instead in the domestic arts and get married.

Josiah, also expected to marry and raise a family and continue the Spaulding lineage, could attend college. Neil Perry’s 1966 article on Josiah for the Springfield Morning Union, based on Victorian era articles from one hundred years prior, states that Josiah was violent and rebellious in his youth, and was not accepted to college. These descriptions are from 1866, just before Josiah’s death. However, the language of articles like these is typical to language of the Victorian era when describing or reporting on mental illness, and Josiah is referred to as “deranged.”

The family letters indicate otherwise. Josiah was an articulate and intelligent young man who worked as a teacher, and had the most beautiful penmanship in the family. The story of Josiah will continue in a three part series on this blog. Perhaps he did have some mental illness, and he did seem to be rebellious for the era. It is my estimation that his aversion to Puritan based norms and expectations and his conflicting ideology from his father’s was the real reason that he was caged, along with what does seem to be some kind of possible psychiatric issue. However the description of him as violent and deranged was sensationalized, and is not an accurate description of those with psychiatric disabilities on the whole. There has long been, and continues to be a disparity in power between those who are considered to be able bodied and minded, and those who aren’t. The Spaulding family was absolutely dominated, as most Puritan lines were, by the patriarch. It is not Josiah that should necessarily be looked to as defining derangement, but his Calvinist father, who not only was the patriarch of the family, but of the entire village of Buckland and much of western Massachusetts.

[I will continue my exploration of Josiah and his family in next week’s post.]   

Kate Corbett Pollack is a graduate student in Cultural Foundations of Education and Disability Studies at Syracuse University.  Her scholarship has grown from Josiah’s story, and has led to an interest in prisons, mental illness, social reform, education and disability. She wrote a monthly blog for almost three years, which can be viewed at americanpomeroys.blogspot.com, the blog for the American Pomeroy Historic Genealogical Association. She has also written for and done work with the Landmarks Society of Greater Utica on the history and families who lived in a few of the beautiful old mansions in that area. Prior to coming to the university, she lived in Brooklyn, and before that Eugene, Oregon where she was born, and Utica, New York. Her family in Syracuse goes back one hundred years, and she has lived here over the years on occasion.

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