Roundtable: Teaching Little Women

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Notes

¹ Other texts include Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” Bronson Alcott’s “Human Culture,” Charles Lane’s description of Fruitlands, the dueling constitutions of Brook Farm, and Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance. In effect, Fuller and Alcott together—one in theory, the other in practice—spring open the whole question of what Transcendentalism might mean in living experience.

² This question inspired by my quest for the origin of Fritz Bhaer. Alcott modeled him on Charles (Karl) Follen, an intimate friend of Bronson Alcott and Samuel May. Evidence includes nearly identical passages, both of them introducing Bhaer/Follen, from Little Women and from the memoir of Follen’s life by Boston writer Elizabeth Cabot Follen. Charles Follen, an important early Transcendentalist and abolitionist activist, was killed in a steamboat explosion in 1840 (Walls 430–435).