Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to read and write.
Before I learned to write, I scribbled in old composition books my mom had given me, squeezing in marks representing my imagination between recipe clippings my mom had glued down onto the pages.
LITTLE WOMEN
In later years, my mom gave me a copy of Little Women where I was drawn in to the Orchard House attic, where the girls pulled out costumes from a trunk and read their own literary paper and acted out various melodramas.
Is it any wonder that I have my family don costumes and perform recitations, plays and interpretations?
A few years ago, we visited Orchard House where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women.
Originally the book was published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869.
The March family, as many know, was patterned on her own family.
Since some were accurate representations and others were a bit fictionalized, it was fun learning which was which.
Meg represented Louisa’s oldest sister, Anna, who loved to perform.
If Louisa could make our sides ache with laughter, Anna could cause handkerchiefs to come out and much swallowing of lumps in the throat. –visitor to Alcott home
That is me! When interpreting a person from the past, I much prefer to make the audience cry.
When we studied the Napoleonic Era, I portrayed Lafayette’s wife and I had my audience nearly in tears.
ROMANTIC WITH A TOUCH OF TRANSCENDENTALISM
Tonight we watched Little Women with Wynona Ryder, a close depiction of Alcott’s book.
It is Romantic in tone, basically meaning moments of darkness and an appreciation of nature.
It also had notes of transcendentalism in it.
In fact, before we turned the movie on, I told my son to look for transcendentalism in the movie.
Although I hadn’t remembered it from previous viewings, I was certain it would be there.
After all, when we visited Concord House, the tour guide mentioned transcendentalism quite a bit, because Louisa’s father taught the philosophy in his school, and their near neighbors of Emerson and Thoreau heavily discussed it.
Sure enough, towards the end of the movie, Jo and Frederick Baer discuss transcendentalism.
Jo doesn’t expect this recently immigrated German professor to understand this unique way of thinking from the little town of Concord, Massachusetts.
However, he surprises her in his understanding, since he has read Goethe and is a professor of philosophy and lover of books, after all.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Although we met with the literary mind of Nathaniel Hawthorne, he was not a transcendentalist.
When we met him, he told us that his house of Wayside was once owned by the Alcotts, although they were currently (in his time) living next in Orchard House.
So, in real life, the adventures that Louisa writes of growing up with her sisters in Little Women did not happen at Orchard House, but at Wayside.
By the way, the Nathaniel Hawthorne interpreters has a masters in American literature, working as an employee in National Park Service costume most days of the week, and on rare moments he haunts the halls of the legendary homes of famous 19th century poets.
WHAT IS TRANSCENDENTALISM?
To visit Concord, as we did, is it meet with the transcendent minds of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott.
Transcendentalism…what is it?
When I sat down to research this unbeknownst topic, I learned I’m in good company with the experts, who argue among themselves as to the precise definitive statements of this group of literary poets who set themselves apart in Concord, Massachusetts.
Yet everywhere we turned in Concord, the authors’ haunts eked of literary thought and opinion which seemed most unique to any of my own literary travels.
There was something…transcendent about it.
Can’t quite pin it down, yet to me it seemed to include nature, individualism, yet an esprit de corps.
So certain I was that I had a misleading in my own literary thought into the matter, I found a few clues that helped me grasp a tangible hold upon the matter.
Whether right or wrong, since this is all debated by all the scholars, I liked the Texas A&M literary website which not only gives a bit of a tangible definition, but gives everyone else’s’ tangible definitions too!
How is that for individualistic esprit de corps?
From what I’ve read, the transcendentalist movement was formed in part by Emerson, who forged the way, after a disagreement in Unionist thought, which has its own beginnings, or break, in Puritanism.
