I have spent the past several days with Alma Whittaker and find myself still thinking about her. I am moved by her delight in the wonders of nature and by her resiliency in the face of disappointments and heartbreak. And I am inspired by her final assessment of her life—her understanding of how and why she could call herself “fortunate.” Her self-assessment has compelled me to explore the ways in which I can call myself “fortunate.”
I almost didn’t meet Alma. I had read another book by her creator and not liked it; I wasn’t sure I wanted to give Elizabeth Gilbert another chance. I’m very glad I did. “The Signature of All Things” is long, driven by the tireless energy of its protagonist. One can almost imagine Gilbert begging Alma to just call it quits. With a fairly unremarkable plot, the novel is propelled by its characters and by the discoveries of the unending wonders of the natural world. I was bothered by a few aspects of the book, but nothing’s perfect–which is one of the points of the book itself.
A remarkable character
The book is set in Philadelphia in the early-to-late 1800s. Part of its appeal for me is its historical setting. Scientific discoveries, the rising abolitionist movement, separate expectations for women, the lifestyle of the very rich—all are the backdrop against which Alma ages. (There’s even mention of Bronson Alcott.)
Alma Whittaker is a truly remarkable character. As a child she is bright and an excellent conversationalist at her father’s dinner parties, where the prominent men of science of the time gather. She is not, however, at all pretty, as her father often points out to her. Her mother, a stern Dutch woman, gives Alma a nightly rundown of self-improvements she needs to make. Amazingly, Alma accepts the weaknesses in herself and moves forward with her strengths—an unquenchable love of knowledge and an enviable resiliency. She becomes a noted botanist; in fact she is a female counterpart to Darwin.
Faced with disappointments, Alma grieves but manages to eventually rebound by taking action. One wonderful scene describes how Alma, face down in water and slowly succumbing to the force holding her down, suddenly knows that she “had not been put on this earth to drown in five feet of water.” She will be the survivor, no matter what she has to do to save her own life, and she emerges from the sea with arms raised in affirmation.
The spiritual versus the scientific
One of the central issues of the book is the disparity among people. There are those who want only to know this world, to understand what exists, and to apply scientific methods to better comprehend the observable. On the other hand are those who are fascinated by the unknown, who believe more in intuition, and who want to better understand the spiritual. Alma is definitely of the former group, and though she loves one who thinks differently, it is a struggle for her to comprehend him.
Alma, through her decades-long study of mosses, theorizes that all living things compete for existence and it is those who “win” that go on to perpetuate themselves. Life is a fierce struggle for survival. For years she hesitates to publish her “theory of competitive alteration,” because she knows it isn’t perfect. Her theory does not account for the altruism and sacrifice that people are capable of making. She knows firsthand the sacrifice her sister made for her, and she cannot make it jibe with what she sees as man’s true nature of selfish violence. She keeps searching for an answer to what she calls the Prudence Problem.
In her ninth decade, Alma is almost blind and has trouble walking. Still, she tends to her moss garden and continues to delight in meeting new people. She invites a fellow scientist to visit her, a man who believes in her theory of competitive alteration, though he calls it by another name. It is in the fellowship of this man, with whom she has such a deep intellectual kinship, that she assesses her own life.
A ‘fortunate’ woman
Alma calls herself fortunate because, unlike her guest and others she has known, she has never felt the need to find significance beyond this natural world. Although she suffered heartbreaks and disappointments and lack of intimacy, she never felt the need to invent a world beyond this one. Alma says, “This world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me. I have wondered why it is not large and beautiful enough for others.”
