What Makes a Home: The Effects a Space can Have on its Inhabitants, and How a House Can Become a Monument of Progress

        The year is 1860. The scene opens on a bustling town. Carriages fill the streets, and classic New England houses mark the countryside. What should these homes look like? How well do their exteriors reflect what is going on inside? Is the trope of “traditional” American houses skewed by what is presented and left out in novels and history books? In her 1868 novel, Little Women, Louisa May Alcott uses aspects of her childhood home to give vitality to the fictional March family, portray her opinion and experience in a Northern town in the late 1800s, and give a voice to women writers, who typically had to use creative methods of gaining recognition for their work.      

In late 1857, Amos Alcott moved his family to Concord, Massachusetts, due to his passion for the growing Transcendentalist movement and his intrigue at a small orchard belonging to a local house. Adopting its homely atmosphere and naming it “Orchard House,” Amos, along with his wife and four daughters made the estate a home. The Alcott family lived there until 1877, and it marks the place where the Alcott daughters grew into their own personalities. It was during this time that Louisa started writing short stories, alternating between amusing her own ambitions as an aspiring writer, and what was popular in the public sphere, as she sold her stories to support her family after Bronson quit his job (louisamayalcott.com). During the height of her fame as a growing writer, Louisa wrote the infamous Bildungsroman, Little Women, at a shelf desk her father built for her in Orchard House. The first part of the novel (about 400 pages) was finished in under six weeks! While some of Louisa’s abolitionist, and early modern feminist sentiments are clearly reflected in the novel’s main character, Jo March, elements of Orchard House and what the March’s brought to it are also woven into the fabric of the March family’s comforting sense of community. Although it is obvious that some of the novels’ characters reflect Jo and her sisters, it is speculated that the March’s house in the novel is an idealized version of Orchard House and its potential for Louisa.

Throughout Alcott’s novel, the omniscient narrator follows four sisters as they grow into their own personalities, while always being able to return to the comfort of their childhood memories in their house. Although the family is lower class and recently impoverished due to their father joining the Civil War effort, they enjoy the privileges of a comfortable home and each other’s company. The March house emits a warm glow in the memories of readers, as each room is associated with the laughter, play, melancholy, and familiarity of childhood. The memories explored throughout Little Women are what bring the house to life, taking it from a stoic replica of Louisa’s childhood to an idealized scene with a life and potential all its own. It was in this manner that Alcott found a form of escapism in Orchard House, and in the novel form itself. 

The novel follows Jo as she comes of age in the Civil War era, while exploring the dynamic nature of the evolving domestic sphere of the time. Alcott recounts a similar tale of growing up, as well as what makes her house a home as she writes about the March house, “December snow fell quietly without, and the fire crackled cheerfully within. It was a comfortable room, though the carpet was faded and the furniture very plain, for a good picture or two hung on the walls… a pleasant atmosphere of home peace pervaded it” (Alcott, 8). Although she acknowledges the house’s lack of luxury, Alcott paints a rich picture of home through its people, and their separate personalities that leave books, music, and art floating about the home. The elements and rooms of the house interact with the March sisters as they mature. As historian Patricia West argues in Gender Politics and the ’Invention of Tradition,’  “Orchard House provided ’conclusive and definitive proof that,  after all, the story [of Little Women] was true,  and not made up out of the author’s head’” (West 463). As seen in the figure, the sitting room reflects an air of family sociability and music. The house’s orientation highlights the importance of Beth’s character to the family in the novel, as she was the glue of the family by bringing everyone together through music. Overall, Orchard house made a clear impact on Louisa and her writing, but Orchard House’s impact did not end with Louisa’s success. 

Although Alcott’s appeal to readers’ pathos is extremely effective due to her own experiences with making Orchard House a home with her sisters, the physical building protects more than just fond memories. In 1912, the estate was opened as a house museum. One of a rare few house museums in the United States that commemorate women’s work, the battle to create “Orchard House” stands as a reminder of the importance of a house’s afterlife. West explains the House’s interaction with the gender politics of the time, as it was a taboo in the time it was established because of Luisa’s reputation as a single, working woman supporting her family (West 456). Although the house reflects the themes of an almost palpable “sphere” of influence in which women are pressured to remain in, it also explores the possibility that some might explore beyond that sphere, much like Jo does. This theme largely contrasts with the theme of a sphere revolving around a man in Rebecca Wests’ The Return of the Soldier. Where Kitty’s character largely revolves around Chris’ acknowledgement of her, Jo’s character largely revolves around her identity as a writer. Although both novels explore different themes, they overlap in the language used to speak around which boxes society pressures different demographics into. Rather one’s ambition is to be a wife or a writer, both authors show a character’s complexity through where she finds solitude and escapism within the domestic sphere, and how her surroundings may influence her decisions. Overall, Orchard House stood for many comforts and ventures for the Alcotts and the Marches, and while it is preserved today, its representation has shifted over time toward the reluctancy to credit women writers of the time as estimable and ambitious as their male counterparts.

 

Works Cited

Alcott, Loisa May. Little Women. Union Square & Co., 2023.

“Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House.” Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, 2023,

louisamayalcott.org.

West, Patricia. “Gender politics and the ‘Invention of Tradition’: The Museumization of Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House.” Gender & History, vol. 6, no. 3, 1994, pp. 456–467, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0424.1994.tb00214.x. 

“7 Surprising Facts about Louisa May Alcott.” PBS, WGBH Educational Foundation, 2019, www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/specialfeatures/little-women-7-surprising-facts-about-louisa-may-alcott/.