Alcott's Psyche and Kate: Self-Portraits, Sunny-Side Up

Abstract

ALCOTT ' S PSYCHE AND KATE : SELF-PORTRAITS , SUNNY-SIDE UP Janet M. Alberghene When readers and critics hear the phrase "the relationship between life and art," often their first impulse is to look for parallels between a particular writer's life and passages or themes in that writer's work. The impulse is especially strong when the author creates a character who is an artist or writer herself. It is not surprising, then, that finding parallels between Louisa May Alcott' s own life and that of Little Women ' s author, Jo March, not only fascinated Alcott' s contemporaries but also continues to fascinate her most recent biographers and critics. Looking for biographical parallels is a useful activity when it serves to further our sense of the writer as a maker who transforms experience. The problem with looking at Jo March, however, is that the parallels between Jo and Alcott are so numerous that we are tempted to look at Jo as a thinly disguised translation, not as an artistic transformation. No such problem exists with the two other self-portraits Alcott wrote within a year of writing Little Women. The first of these portraits is the figure of Psyche Dean, the eponymous heroine of "Psyche's Art," one of the three, tales in the Three Proverb Stories volume that Alcott published in 1868. The second is the character Kate in An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), the book that followed the publication of Little Women . Like Jo March, Psyche and Kate were drawn from Alcott' s own experience, but the transformations that Alcott effected in the latter two characterizations are thoroughly realized. When these two self-portraits are seen with the familiar one of Jo, they demonstrate that the imperatives of being a children's book author shaped not only Alcott' s presentation of herself but also, and more importantly , her presentation of the vocation of artist. Oddly enough, Alcott' s psychobiographical critics have overlooked "Psyche's Art" although it provides another instance of Alcott' s life's furnishing material for her fiction. For much of the story, Psyche shares center stage with May, her fragile, then fatally ill, younger sister. May was Alcott' s mother's maiden name, as well as the given name of Alcott' s youngest sister; Psyche was Bronson Alcott' s name for Elizabeth, the sister Alcott nursed with supreme devotion through her final illness, much as Psyche cared for May. Finally, Psyche is interested in sculpture, one of May Alcott ' s enthusiasms . Piecing through the above biographical data can lead one to read "Psyche's Art" as a specific response to Elizabeth's death, but I prefer to see the story as a more general expression of Alcott' s view of the artist's proper balancing of her relationship to her art and to her family, especially since Louisa drew upon both herself and her youngest sister for her portrait of Psyche. Louisa's sense of duty is Psyche's; the author's faithful performance of family obligations demonstrates that she held herself accountable to the high standards that we shall see that Psyche faced. May Alcott' s sculpting outlines the heroine's particular artistic vocation. In contrast to this close connection with the story, May Alcott did not serve as a model for Psyche's role as nurse. May's tending of Elizabeth was minor compared to Louisa's. It is tantalizing to conjecture that in making Psyche a sculptor, like May, instead of a writer, like herself, Alcott gently reproached her sister with a model of what she could have been to Elizabeth. Alcott begins "Psyche's Art" with a satiric sketch of the day's varieties of fashionable pseudo-artists; she ends the story with a portrait of the American Adam and Eve as artists who, ennobled by pain and loss, successfully fill the voids caused by death in this fallen world. In this story Alcott defines the essence of being an artist. She distinguishes the true artist from the poseur, and she cuts across the boundaries of sex to show what is central and irreducible in the experience of both a male and a female artist, while a± the same time suggesting...