Perfectly Miserable by Sarah Payne Stuart

Author:Sarah Payne Stuart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2014-06-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

MRS. EMERSON AND MRS. PAYNE AND MRS. STUART

Emerson brought the world to his table, but it was his melancholic wife who worried about what would be served upon it.

LOOKING BACK, through the mellowing detachment that has descended upon me, it is hard to grasp why my domestic duties as a mother should have filled me with so much angst. It is nice to think that I was desperate to create a kind of utopian childhood for my children. But it is hard not to believe that I was at least equally driven by the hope of an approving word. For when anyone came to my door—the random neighbor, Twinky Warren with yet another petition to sign, the former babysitter, the other mothers, the census taker, the storm-window guy, my parents’ friends, my parents—I felt queasy with fear, waiting to be judged by the state of my house. “There’s nothing I hate more than a messy sink,” my mother said once. It is a statement that still guides me through my every day.

And yet, even more than I, my mother feared moral judgment on the state of her house—yet another legacy passed down from the fierce but frightened New England women who came before. Part of the Puritan creed had been that every activity, even the most minor domestic drudgery, should be carried out in grand piety of those who knew they were God’s Chosen, so that even the state of one’s bureau drawers was under the keen eye of Him. This is why my mother and her friends cleaned the house before the weekly cleaning lady came. And why even a woman with full-time servants, like Emerson’s second wife, Lidian, could be paralyzed with fear about running her house. Emerson may have brought the world to his table, but it was the melancholic Lidian who worried herself, sometimes into a deep depression, about what would be served upon it.

—

LIDIAN WAS RIGHT to fear judgment on her domestic practices. When Emerson urged the half-starved Alcotts to move in after they moved to Concord, Bronson, ever the mooch, was all for it. Emerson, who refused to join Fruitlands and another nearby commune, Brook Farm, had the mad dream of other families living communally at his house at his expense. But Marmee had refused, very probably because she virulently disapproved of Lidian’s household regime. So much so that when five-year-old Waldo Emerson died, Marmee couldn’t bring herself to write Lidian a condolence letter. “I cannot offer sympathy to these dear suffering Mothers,— for I see so much culpable neglect of the means of living,” Marmee wrote. Marmee was so obsessed with being good herself, she sometimes forgot to be kind. (Still, perhaps no condolence note was better than the one Thoreau wrote: “Do not the flowers die every autumn? He had not even taken root here. I was not startled to hear that he was dead. . . . It would have been strange if he had lived.”)

But Lidian—brought up among “the religious terrors” of a chilly Calvinist family—was unkind only to herself.

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