A Double Life Part 1

A Double Life.

Alcott Louisa May.

Acknowledgements

ALL THREE editors are grateful to the staffs of the American Antiquarian Society, Brown University Library, the New York Public Library, and the University of South Carolina Library for making available the original printings of the texts in A Double Life, and to the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and the University of Virginia Library for permission to publish material from their collections. VVe also wish to thank Armida Gilbert for her help in preparing the texts used in our edition. Joel Myerson acknowledges the support of Carol McGinnis Kay, Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of South Carolina. Daniel Shealy is grateful to G. W. Koon, Chairman of the Department of English, and Robert A. Waller, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, of Clemson University. Madeleine B. Stern acknowledges the unceasing support of her partner, Dr. Leona Rostenberg, m ho originally discovered many of Alcott's pseudonymous works.

Introduction.

BY MADELEINE B. STERN.

NEVER AGAIN will you have quite the same image of this particular 'little woman.'"

[1.] In a Publishers Weekly reie oi Behind a Mask: The Uiikiiowii Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Madeleine B. Stern (New York: William Morrow, 1975). Other quoted review's are from Los Angeles limes and Neu' York Times.

This remark, made in 1975 when the first volume of Louisa Alcott's sensational thrillers was published, was prophetic. The picture of the exemplary spinster of Concord, Ma.s.sachusetts, who had created the perennial cla.s.sic Little Women was shattered for all time. With publication of her anonymous and pseudonymous page turners, an amazed public learned that America's best-loved author of juvenile fiction had led a double literary life and that the creator of the greatest domestic novel of the New England family had also been the familiar of a world of darkness. Readers devoured her stories of madness and mind control, pa.s.sionate and manipulating heroines, has.h.i.+sh and opium addiction. Some recalled that Jo March herself, the independent heroine of Little Women, had also written sensational stories in secret to earn money and enjoy an emotional catharsis. But most simply reveled in narratives whose themes were "deceit, sin, death," and whose heroines were "forceful, independent, s.e.xually demanding, and don't do housework." And, during the decade or so that followed, between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, the scholarly world, depending upon the implications of her fiction, a.n.a.lyzed and psychoa.n.a.lyzed the author, burrowed into her biography, and occasionally changed the biography to conform with the stories.[2]

All this was fascinating, but never so fascinating as the stories themselves, which were narrated with professional skill, insight into character, and a revelation of intimacy with satanic themes. And always, to those aware of the author's enormous productivity, there was the hope that more sensational thrillers would emerge from behind the mask of Louisa May Alcott, more stories written in secret, dispatched to a sensational newspaper, published anonymously or under a pseudonym, revolving about other macabre subjects.

That hope has been realized. Louisa Alcott's double literary life was even more productive and varied than had been estimated, and out of her inkstand have appeared five "new" astounding tales, discovered in 1986, that can be traced to her indefatigable pen. These tales will further alter her image, give fresh food for thought to literary scholars, but above all they will enthrall an avid readers.h.i.+p.

Louisa Alcott's newly discovered thrillers were all published anonymously during the 1860s before she began Little Women. Why should a struggling young author hide her name from the public? Stephen King has written that "all novelists are inveterate role- plavers" and find it "fun to be someone else for a while."[3] The novelist's "someone else" may be nameless. Seeking money to support the Alcott family, which included her philosopher father Bronson, her beloved and long-suffering mother Abbv May, and her artist sister May, Louisa a.s.sumed the role of breads inner. She also found it "fun" to be an anonymous someone else for a while, and the someone else who was able to turn sensational stories into fifty or seventy-five dollars was a writer who dwelled among shadows, pursuing strange and exotic themes of sadomasochism, mesmerism, East Indian Thuggism. These were no themes for Concord, Ma.s.sachusetts, where Alcott's neighbors included the revered Ralph Waldo Emerson; indeed, they were no themes for her own family, especially not for her father, w ho could have conversed w ith Plato. They were themes to be embroidered in secret into melodramatic tales that were unsigned.

[2.] See, for example, Judith Fetterley, "Impersonating 'Little Women': The Radicalism of Alcott's Behind a Mask,'' Women's Studies 10 {1983): 1-14; Martha Saxton, Louisa May: A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977)- [3.] Stephen King, The Bachman Books (New York: New American Library, 1986), p. viii.

Because these "new" stories were all anonymous, their authors.h.i.+p was extremely elusive and, but for clues in unpublished journals and publisher's correspondence, would have remained unidentified.

The first hint surfaced in an examination of the 1863 journal entries made by Louisa Alcott, who, thanks to Bronson Alcott's pedagogical guidance, was addicted throughout her life to journal w riting. In August 1863, having recently recuperated from a severe illness sustained when she served as an army nurse in the Giv il War, she was more aware than ever of the need for contributions to the family treasury.[4] Her account of her experience at the Union Hotel Hospital had been well received as it appeared serially in the pages of the Boston Commonwealth. But neither the serialization nor the subsequent book appearance of Hospital Sketches would add appreciably to the Alcott coffers. Sensational stories paid better. And so, in August 1863, the author of Hospital Sketches w rote tersely in her journal: "Leslie [Erank Leslie, publisher of periodicals] sent $40 for 'A Whisper In The Dark,' & wanted another - Sent 'A Pair of Eyes.'"[5]

[4.] For biographical details throughout, see Madeleine B. Stern, Louisa May Alcott (Nornnn: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950, 1971, 1985).

[5.] Louisa May Alcott, unpublished journals (bv permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University), August 1863. I am indebted to my co-editors, Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealv, for transcripts of the journals.

"A Whisper in the Dark," a fairly innocuous story of mind control, was later to he acknowledged by its author and so is recognized as part of the Alcott canon. "A Pair of Eyes" turned out to be another matter altogether - a strange, extraordinary narrative focused upon a very particular kind of mind control. Searchers after unknown Alcott thrillers could be certain, then, that in August 1863 the author had indeed sent a tale ent.i.tled "A Pair of Eyes" to Leslie. But had it been accepted? Had it ever appeared? The reader of the journals found the answer under the date of November 1863: "Received $39 from Leslie for 'A Pair of Eyes' not enough, but I'm glad to get even that & be done with him. Paid debts with it as usual."[6] If the publisher Frank Leslie had paid for a story, the chances were he had published it. Another anonymous Alcott thriller now had a name and, somewhere in the pages of one of the Leslie periodicals, awaited the eye of the literary sleuth.

The Leslie correspondence - such as has survived - would supply the responses to the Alcott journal entries. In an undated letter, the editor of Frank Leslie's Ill.u.s.trated Newspaper wrote to the "Dear Madam" who was Louisa May Alcott: "Mr Leslie informs me that you have a tale ready for us, and for which he has already settled with you by check. Will you be kind enough to let us have it at the earliest moment in your power." Beneath, the author, who was becoming quite pleased with herself, jotted: "Made them pay before hand."[7] Another sensation story might now be endowed with a t.i.tle. In June 1864 Louisa supplied it, recording in her journal: "Wrote 'The Tale Of The Forrests' for Leslie who sent for a tale. Rubbish keeps the pot boiling." [8] "The Fate of the Forrests" might have helped keep the Alcott pot boiling, but, as its reading would reveal, the story was not rubbish. In a way, it would turn out to be the most singular addition to the Aleott oeuvre.

[6.] Ibid., November 1863.

[7.] "Editor of F.L. 111. Newsp. to [Louisa May Alcott]" (Louisa May Alcott Collection [#6255], Ma.n.u.scripts Department, University of Virginia Library). The imprinted letterhead date is New York 1863, but the letter may well have been written later. My thanks to my co-editor Daniel Shealy for transcripts of Leslie letters. See also Daniel Shealy, "The Author-Publisher Relations.h.i.+ps of Louisa May Alcott" (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 1985).

[8.] Louisa May Alcott, unpublished journals (by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University), June 1864.

And so a close perusal of Louisa May Alcott's unpublished journals produced the stunning revelations. In April 1865, having announced, "Richmond taken on the 2nd Hurrah! Went to Boston & enjoyed the grand jollification," the ex-nurse of the Union Hotel Hospital added a succinct paragraph: "Sewed, cleaned house & wrote a story for Leslie, 'A Double Tragedy."'[9] The very next month, the author, glorying in her double life, made the following journal entry: "after I'd done the scrubbing up I went to my pen & wrote Leslie's second tale 'Ariel, A Legend Of The Light-house.'"[10] The puzzling expression "second tale" would become clear as soon as the story of the lighthouse and its legend was located.

The final, and perhaps the most powerful, new discovery contained in A Double Life did not first manifest itself until December 1866. By then, Louisa had returned from her first journey abroad, where she had served as companion to a young invalid. In August she confided to her journal: "Soon fell to work on some stories for things were, as I expected, behind hand when the money-maker was away." In December she was more specific: "Wrote ... a wild Russian story 'laming a Tartar.'"[11] An unpublished letter in the Leslie archive embroidered Miss Alcott's unadorned statement. On 13 June 1867, an a.s.sistant in the Frank Leslie Publis.h.i.+ng House reported to "Miss L.M.Alcott": "Dear Madam: Your favor of the 10th inst acknowledging the receipt of $72 for 'Taming a Tartar' came to hand this morning."[12] As the Alcott bibliography expanded, Alcott prices rose. And so, the brief entries in the writer's unpublished journals, counterbalanced by statements in the Leslie business correspondence, have yielded up fresh secrets. I he prolific author of Flower Fables, Hospital Sketches, and Moods, the future creator of Little Women, was even more prolific than had been believed. She was also, as the reader of these stories will discover, more skillful in her narrative development, more varied in her literary motifs. As her already extraordinary productivity increased, her frame of reference widened. The stories in A Double Life add still a new dimension to the image of Louisa May Alcott.

[9.] Ibid., April 1865.

[10.] Ibid., May 1865.

[11.] Ibid., August and December 1866.

[12.] "Benj. Ci. Smith for Frank Leslie to Miss L.M. Alcott, New York, 13 June 1867" (Louisa May Alcott Collection [#6255], Ma.n.u.scripts Department, University of Virginia Library). Smith went on to discuss an apparent misunderstanding about "the amount paid per page. ... I was not aware that any agreement existed between you and Mr. Leslie binding him to pay $100 per story. ... To avoid difficulty in future you might mark the price on the first page of the MS."

All those stories were published anonymously, and all appeared in the pages of Frank Leslie periodicals.[13] Louisa had had dealings with the House of Leslie before the August 1863 journal entry that announced the dispatch of "A Pair of Eyes." Actually her first known sensation tale had been submitted to a compet.i.tion announced by Frank Leslie's Ill.u.s.trated Newspaper, offering one hundred dollars for the best story. "Pauline's Pa.s.sion and Punishment," a fast-paced narrative revolving about the manipulating heroine Pauline Valary, had won the prize and in January 1863 appeared in the weekly, where it was ascribed to "a lady of Ma.s.sachusetts." To most ladies and gentlemen of Ma.s.sachusetts and other states of the Union in those Civil War years, Frank Leslie's Ill.u.s.trated Newspaper was a familiar journal. Indeed, Frank Leslie was a household word.[14]

[13.] For the original discovery of Alcott's anonymous and pseudonymous stories, see Leona Rostenberg, "Some Anonymous and Pseudonymous Thrillers of Louisa M. Alcott," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 37 (2d Quarter 1943)- [14.] For details about Leslie and his publis.h.i.+ng empire, see Madeleine B. Stern, Purple Pa.s.sage: The Life of Mrs. Frank Leslie (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953, 1970).

Frank Leslie was also a pseudonym - a fact probably unknown to the author of "Pauline's Pa.s.sion and Punishment." In all likelihood she never met the short, broad, black-bearded newspaperman who exuded dynamic magnetism, although she may well have seen his published likeness. Born Henry Carter in Ipswich, England, a glove manufacturer's son, he had turned his back on the family business and early evinced the artistic propensities that would dominate his career. As Frank Leslie he pursued the skills of engraving and pictorial printing for the Ill.u.s.trated London News until 1848, when he immigrated to America. By the mid-fifties he had begun to establish a place for himself in the field of ill.u.s.trated journalism. Within ten years he had become a colossus on New York's Publishers' Row.

The flags.h.i.+p of his fleet of weeklies and monthlies was Frank Leslie's Ill.u.s.trated Newspaper. That weekly catered aggressively to most facets of popular taste. Murder and horror, executions and a.s.sa.s.sinations, prizefights and revolutions - every cause eelebre, every sensation, every exposure - were grist for its mill. Leslies emphasis was pictorial. His approach, since he was basically an artist, was visual. And so his weekly ran just enough text to float the pictures that reanimated contemporary history (especially its gorier aspects) for the American household. In single woodcuts or in huge double-page engravings, the Ill.u.s.trated Newspaper reproduced for its vast readers.h.i.+p authentic Civil War battle scenes, volcanoes and earthquakes, private scandals and public revelations. In addition, it ran the ill.u.s.trated serials that lured the old from the fireside and the young from their play - serials that appeared anonymously under such t.i.tles as "A Pair of Eyes," "The Fate of the Forrests," and "Taming a Tartar."

The remaining two thrillers in A Double Life were dispatched to yet another Leslie journal. Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner was planned, started, and edited by the femme fatale Miriam Squier, apex of a melodramatic triangle, soon to become the w ife of Frank Leslie. This fascinating beauty was also an astute editor, and she planned her Chimney Corner as an ill.u.s.trated fireside friend that would provide American mothers with domestic stories, their daughters with romances, their sons w ith dramatic escapades, and youngsters with adventures and fairy tales. On 3 June 1865, in the w ords of the editor: We present herewith, just as the aurora of peace irradiates the horizon, the first number of The Chimney Corner . . . which shall be a welcome messenger of instruction and amus.e.m.e.nt to the young and old, in the family and by the fireside - that altar around which cl.u.s.ter our holiest and most cherished recollections. ... We give a story a day all the year around, some to touch by their tragic power, some to thrill with love's vicissitudes, some to hold in suspense with dramatic interest. . . . Come then, and welcome, to our Chimney Corner, sure of a feast of good things.[15]

Part of that feast had been requisitioned from the Leslie prizewinner Louisa May Alcott, who wrote in her journal: "Leslie asked me to be a regular contributor to his new paper 'The Chimney Corner,' & I agreed if he'd pay before hand, he said he would & bespoke two tales at once $50 each. Longer ones as often as I could, & whatever else I liked to send. So here's another source of income & Alcott brains seem in demand, whereat I sing 'Hallyluyer,' & fill up my inkstand."[16] And so "A Double Tragedy" was given a place of honor on page 1 of the first issue of America's "Great Family Paper," while "Ariel. A Legend of the Lighthouse," the author's "second" Chimney Corner tale, followed in July.

All five stories in this collection reveal Louisa May Alcott as a writer sensitive to the cultural and social currents of her time. She employs as themes art and the theater - two lifelong pa.s.sions - as well as the contemporary interest in what might now be termed the occult. Always present, too, are examples of the struggle between the s.e.xes, reflecting the rise of feminism.

Alcott's preoccupation with the art theme is thoroughly understandable. Her sister May was an eager art student, who ill.u.s.trated her sister's effusions, studied at the School of Design in Boston, served as drawing teacher in Syracuse, and took anatomical drawing lessons under the distinguished Dr. William Rimmer. [17] Eventually she would go abroad to study art, and after her tragie death her box of paintings would be sent home to Concord. Now, in the early 1860s, the two young women shared their excitement over literature and art just as they shared lodgings in Boston. Between May's enthusiastic reports and her own exposure to art exhibitions, Louisa May Alcott was enabled to inject the art motif into at least two of these tales, "A Pair of Eyes" and "Ariel."

[15.] Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner i:i (3 June 1865); Stern, Purple Pa.s.sage, pp. 45-46.

[16.] Louisa May Alcott, unpublished journals (by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University), March 1865, printed with deletions in Ednah Dow Cheney, -Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, andJournals {Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1889), 'p. 165.

[17.] It is interesting to note that Rimmer was drawn to Shakespearean subjects. His paintings include scenes from The 'Lempest, Macbeth, and Romeo andJuliet. See Jeffrey Weidman et al., William Rimmer: A Yankee Michelangelo (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985).

In the former, published in Frank Leslie's Ill.u.s.trated Newspaper in October 1863,[18] the black-bearded artist Max Erdmann (who, curiously, bears a close resemblance to Erank Leslie) finds a model for his portrait of Lady Macbeth in Agatha Eure, whom he later marries. Agatha, however, jealous of Max's better-loved mistress Art, practices mesmeric pow ers upon him and so subdues him in one of Alcott's more remarkable versions of the pow er struggle between man and woman.

In "Ariel," Philip Southesk, a poet-artist, sketches the nymph Ariel, making "the likeness perfect with a happy stroke or two,"[19] a tribute to economy in brushwork. In "A Pair of Eves," Max Erdmann creates a far more arresting painting. Erdmann is the artist incarnate, going far beyond Erank Leslie or May Alcott in his devotion to a muse that was to him "wife, child, friend, food and fire." And the portrait of Lady Macbeth for which a mesmerist acts as model sets the w'eird and sinister tone of this tale. Alcott describes the portrait in detail: "the dimly lighted chamber, the listening attendants, the ghostly figure with wan face framed in hair, that streamed shadowy and long against white draperies, and whiter arms, w'hose gesture told that the parted lips were uttering that mournful cry - 'Here's the smell of blood still! / All the perfumes of Arabia wdll not / Sweeten this little hand - '"

[18.] "A Pair of Eyes; or, Modern Magic," Frank Leslie's Ill.u.s.trated Newspaper (24 and 31 October 1863), 69-71, 85-87.

[19.] All quotations are from the stories that follow, unless otherwise indicated.

Was the portrait a copy, or a Louisa Alcott original? The great eighteenth-century Sw iss artist John Henry Fuseli produced a pen and gray wash of Lady Macbeth sleepwalking that has much in common with Max Erdmann's portrait, including the listening attendants, the gesture of Lady Maebeth's arms, her long streaming hair. But Fuseli's work was in the British Museum, which Louisa had not yet visited, and unless she had seen a reproduction of it somewhere, she probably had transposed her own vision of the sleepwalking queen into a net of words.[20]

The vision was of course an outcome of Louisa Alcott's lifelong fascination with the theater; the theme of theatricality in general, and of Shakespeare in particular, run markedly through nearly all these tales.

The plays the young Louisa had co-auth.o.r.ed and coproduced with her sister Anna for performance in the barn before the Concord neighbors were published after her death as Comic Tragedies.[21] She dramatized one of her early stories, "The Rival Prima Donnas," and wrote a farce, "Nat Bachelor's Pleasure Trip" that actually saw a single performance at the Howard Athenaeum in i860. In addition, Louisa Alcott's addiction to the footlights was reflected in her amateur acting in Walpole, New Hamps.h.i.+re, in Concord, and in Boston, and though her major role was that of the d.i.c.kensian Mrs. Jarlev of the waxworks, she elocuted her way through a variety of popular parlor comedies.

She was, in short, stagestruck. In 1855, on her twenty-third birthday, she wrote to her father from Boston: "I go to the theatre once or twice a week."[22] Three years later she mentioned in her journal: "Saw Charlotte Cushman, and had a stagestruck fit. . . . Worked off mv stage fever in writing a story, and felt better." And when that renowned American actress descended upon Concord, Louisa was lost in admiration.[23]

[20.] For the Fuseli suggestion I am grateful to Charles Colbert of Newton, Ma.s.sachusetts. See also Caroline Keay, Henry Fuseli (New York: St. Martins Press, 1974), p. 29, No. 24: Lady Macbeth sleepwalking. Alcott's interest in art persisted. See, for example, Louisa May Alcott, Diana & Persis, ed. Sarah Elbert (New York: Arno Press, 1978). In that "art novel," Persis, modeled upon May Alcott, is the young woman painter, while the character of Diana is based upon the sculptor Harriet Hosmer.

[21.] Comic Tragedies Written by fo" and "Aleg' and Acted by the "Little Women" (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893).

[22.] Louisa Mav Alcott to Amos Bronson Alcott, 28 November [1855], The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, eds. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987).

[23.] Cheney, pp. 99 and 113. As late as 1886, in her last domestic novel, Jo's Boys, Alcott created in the actress Miss Cameron "a near-translation" of Charlotte Cushman. See Joseph Leach, Bright Particular Star: The Life & Times of Charlotte Cushman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Universitv Press, 1970), p. 283.

Charlotte Cushman was of course a famous Lady Macbeth, and Louisa Alcott was becoming a connoisseur of Macbeth performers. Of Edwin Forrest she commented: "Tho Forrest does not act Shakespere well the beauty of the play s.h.i.+nes thro the badly represented parts, & imagining what I should like to see, I can make up a better Macbeth . . . than Forrest with his gaspings & shoutings can give me. ' [24] Alcott confined her own greenroom roles to those in comedies and farces. In her sensational stories she also indulged in melodrama and tragedy, and even attempted to "make up a better Macbeth."

Macbeth pervades much of Alcott's "A Pair of Eyes." That story opens in the theater where the artist Max Erdmann and the woman who is to mesmerize him are both watching a performance of that tragedy. The painting of Lady Macbeth that Erdmann finally completes, haying used Agatha Eure as his model, crashes from the w all during the second and last installment - a symbolic omen of the tragedy that is to follow.

In place of Macbeth, The Tempest provided Alcott with suggestions for her "Ariel. A Legend of the Lighthouse,"[25] the only one of these five tales in which setting is more important than plot, character, or theme. Indeed, as in The Tempest itself, an enchanted island surrounded by "deep water, heavy surf and a spice of danger" dominates all three. Out of the background emerges the character of Alcott's Ariel, to whom the author prophetically gave the surname March. And out of the background arise many of the plot developments: Ariel's life on the island; her love of the hero Philip Southesk, himself "as changeable as the ocean" he loves so well; the revelation of their true ident.i.ties; their thwarted romance; and finally their happy reunion.

[24.] Louisa May Alcott to Amos Bronson Alcott, 28 November [1855J, The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott.

[25.] "Ariel. A Legend of the Lighthouse," Frank Leslie's Chimucy Corner 14 and 15 July 1865), 81-83, 99-101.

If the author based her background upon scenes near Gloucester, Ma.s.sachusetts, where she camped out on Norman's Woe,[26] she found much else in Shakespeare's Tempest. Throughout this "Legend of the Lighthouse" there are overt and covert allusions to Shakespeare's play. In much of the conversation and characterization, the source is obvious. Philip, for example, comments to Ariel: "It only needs a Miranda to make a modern version of the Tempest," and she replies: "Perhaps I am to lead you to her as the real Ariel led Ferdinand to Miranda. ..." When Philip asks Ariel what she knows of Shakespeare, she answers: "I know and love Shakespeare better than any of my other books, and can sing every song he wrote." Indeed, she frequently sings "Oh, come unto the yellow sands," an appropriate lyric for one who is "a spirit singing to itself between sea and sky." Philip's gift to his beloved Ariel is "a beautiful volume of Shakespeare, daintily bound, richly ill.u.s.trated," and as he sketches, she reads. Gazing at "a fine ill.u.s.tration of the Tempest," she remarks: "Here we all are! Prospero is not unlike my father, but Ferdinand is much plainer than you. Here's Ariel swinging in a vine, as I've often done, and Caliban watching her. ..." Alcott's narrative adaptation is complete to its Caliban, the lighthouse keeper's humpbacked companion, whose ma.s.sive head is set upon a stunted body and who loves Ariel and wreaks much evil.

On the nineteenth-century American stage, theatergoers could w atch a winged Ariel fly in and out of the scenes of The Tempest on "visible ropes."[27] In Frank Leslies Chimney Corner, readers of sensation stories could enjoy a ryiodern version of that play ingeniously contrived bv the future author of Little Women.

[26.] See Louisa May Alcott, unpublished journals (by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University), August 1864, and Cheney, p. 159, for the fortnight in Gloucester. For scenes similar to those described in "Ariel. A Legend of the Lighthouse," see Charles Boardman Hawes, Gloucester by Land and Sea: The Story of a New England Seacoast Town (Boston: Little, Brown, 1923); Edward Rowe Snow, Famous New England Lighthouses (Boston: Yankee Publis.h.i.+ng Company, 1945); John S. Webber, Jr., In and Around Cape Ann (Gloucester: Cape Ann Advertiser Office, 1885), p. 36 md pa.s.sim.

[27.] Charles H. Shattuck, Shakespeare on the American Stage from the Hallams to Edwin Booth (Was.h.i.+ngton: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976), p. 114.

The great British actor David Garrick succeeded in reducing Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew to a three-act farce called Katharine and Petruchio, which was performed from time to time at the Boston Theatre.[28] Since the author of "The Rival Prima Donnas" had a pa.s.s to the Boston, she might well have enjoyed Garrick's adaptation of Shakespeare upon several occasions and been moved to write her own modern version. This she did in "d arning a Tartar," the "wild Russian story" she contributed to Frank Leslie's Ill.u.s.trated Newspaper. Her Russian melodrama is a well-paced, neatly plotted story of the power struggle between the defiant, fearless, freedom- loving Sybil Varna and the Slavic autocrat Prince Alexis Demidoff, whose Tartar blood has made him a tyrant. Step by step, in bout after bout, her Petruchio succ.u.mbs to her Katharine, feminism rises victorious, and where William Shakespeare tamed a shrew, Miss Alcott tames a Tartar.

It is, however, in the story Louisa Alcott contributed to the first issue of Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner that her devotion to the theater and her preoccupation with Shakespeare are crystallized. "A Double Tragedy" is precisely what its subt.i.tle indicates: "An Actor's Story."[29] Phis, the shortest of the narratives in A Double Life, is quintessential^ a story of the stage. It opens with a performance by the tw o protagonists - loyers in life as well as on the stage - in "a Spanish play" whose cast includes a lover disguised as a monk, a Grand Inquisitor, and a stern old duke and whose plot involves a state secret, a duel, and long immurement in a dungeon. What Spanish play had Alcott in mind? Her Spanish play seems to have derived more from her own early dramatic effort performed in the Concord barn and ent.i.tled "The Captive of Castile" than from any extant professional drama. During the nightmares that accompanied her illness after serving at the Union Hotel Hospital, Alcott had had visions of a "stout, handsome Spaniard" who pursued her, "appearing out of closets, in at windows, or threatening me dreadfully all night long."[30] Perhaps the shade of that Spaniard was upon her.

[28.] Ibid., p. xi. See also, for the performances of the time and Alcott s addiction to the theater, Cheney, p. 65; Madeleine B. Stern, "Louisa Alcott, Trouper," New England Quarterly 16:2 (June 1943): 188; Stern, Louisa May Alcott, p. 78; Eugene Tompkins, The History of the Boston Theatre 1834-1901 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908).

[29.] "A Double Tragedy. An Actors Story," Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner 3 June 1865), 1-3.

[30.] Louisa May Alcott, unpublished journals (by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University), [January] 1863, and Cheney, pp. 146-147.

Whatever sources may have contributed to the Spanish play that opens "A Double Tragedy," there is no doubt about the play that shaped its architecture. The sudden reappearance of her husband, St. John, so maddens the actress Clotilde Varian, who is in love with the actor Paul Lamar, that she murders her spouse. When Paul becomes aware of her guilt, he finds her abhorrent: "What devil devised and helped you execute a crime like this?" Following the murder, the two enact the only tragedy possible under the circ.u.mstances: Romeo and Juliet. On the night of the performance, Clotilde performs Juliet to the life and kills herself on stage. Paul Lamar never acts again.

When Louisa Alcott was given a free pa.s.s to the Boston Theatre, she was also conducted by the manager all over the building on Boston's Was.h.i.+ngton Street. She was shown how a dancing floor could be fitted over the orchestra chairs and the house converted into a ballroom, and she was introduced to the mysteries of theatrical apparatus and effects. In "A Double Tragedy" a platform has been hastily built for the launching of an aerial car in some grand spectacle; there is also a roped gallery from which there is a fine view of the stage. This area becomes the scene of Clotilde's murder of her husband. She simply cuts the rope that would have protected him from falling. And so, having studied the secrets behind the scenes of the Boston Theatre, Alcott shaped them to her own dramatic purposes.

Clotilde Varian's acting credo has much in common with Louisa May Alcott's credo as a writer of sensational fiction. Actors, Clotilde believed, must have neither hearts nor nerves while on stage. As an actress "she seldom played a part twice alike, and left much to the inspiration of the moment." She held that an actor must learn to live a double life. Louisa Alcott also, often relying upon the inspiration of the moment, seldom wrote a sensational story twice alike. In this particular story she created her own "hapless Italian lovers" who "never found better representatives" than in Clotilde and Paul that night. Juliet's grave clothes became Clotilde's. The "mimic tragedy . . . slowly darkened to its close."

The world of art and the world of the theater were entwined in Alcott's double life. So too was a more dangerous art. The third of Louisa Alcott's sensational themes was named after an Austrian physician and was known to the nineteenth century as mesmerism.

Although Alcott's involvement with art and with the stage are easily traceable to their sources in her life, her interest in mesmerism seems to have developed as a shared interest of her time rather than from personal experience. It is true that, toward the end of her life, when mesmerism had taken a "religious turn, in spiritualism and in Christian Science,"[31] Alcott did submit to a treatment called mind cure to rid herself of various ills. She found the treatment interesting and described it for the Woman's Journal: "No effect was felt except sleepiness for the first few times; then mesmeric sensations occasionally came, suns.h.i.+ne in the head, a sense of walking on the air, and slight trances, when it was impossible to stir for a few moments."[32] During the 1880s, when she was trying this mind cure, was Louisa Alcott remembering the 1860s, when she had used mesmerism as a pivot in a sensational story?

[31.] Taylor Stoehr, "Hawthorne and Mesmerism," Huntington Library Quarterly 33:1 (November 1969): 37.

[32.] "Miss Alcott on Mind-Cure," Woman's Journal 16:16 (18 April 1885): 121.

During the eighteenth century, "the great enchanter" Franz Anton Mesmer had developed a theory of hypnotism based upon the existence of some magnetic force or fluid that permeated the universe and insinuated itself into the nervous system of man. This force he called animal magnetism. The theory, introduced to Boston, had created a furor, and the pseudoscience originated by Mesmer attracted a stream of followers in this country - mesmerists and clairvoyants, etherologists and psvehometrists, along with a fascinated if sometimes skeptical public. Among the last were Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, while rejecting the hocus-pocus, was much taken up with such matters as the evil eye; and Edgar Allan Poe, whose "Mesmeric Revelation" consisted of a dialogue between magnetizer and magnetized and ended with the death of the sleepwalker. As for Louisa Alcott's revered neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, the G.o.d of her early idolatry, he reacted to the pseudoscience with characteristic equanimity, writing: "Mesmerism, which broke into the inmost shrines, attempted the explanation of miracle and prophecy, as well as of creation. ... a certain success attended it. . . . It was human, it was genial, it affirmed unity and connection between remote points."[33] Alcott was well aware of all these points of view. Moreover, she had access to the library of books eventually published on such subjects as electrical psychology, magnetic revelation, and mesmeric influence. She was drawn to the theme, as Hawthorne and Poe had been drawn. She perceived, as Hawthorne especially perceived, the violation of the human soul that might result from the penetrating intrusions of the mesmerist. And whether she believed in it or was skeptical, she knew that the subject of mesmerism would make a colorful thread to weave into a sensation tale.

The author of "A Pair of Eyes" writes as an expert on the hypnotic function of the mesmerist's eye, the effects of hypnotic influence upon the subject, and the use of mesmerism as an exercise in power. The eyes of Agatha Eure are "two dark wells . . . tranquil yet . . . fathomless." Her first exercise in mesmerism is perpetrated upon her unknowing victim, the painter Max Erdmann, who reacts almost clinically: It seemed as if my picture had left its frame. . . . My hand moved slower and slower. . . . my eyelids began to be weighed down by a delicious drowsiness. . . . Everything grew misty. ... a sensation of wonderful airiness came over me, and I felt as if I could float away like a thistledown. Presently every sense seemed to fall asleep ... I drifted away into a sea of blissful repose. ... I seemed to be looking down at myself, as if soul and body had parted company and I was gifted with a double life. . . . then my sleep deepened into utter oblivion. . . .

[33.] Stoehr, "Hawthorne and Mesmerism," 35, quoting from Emerson's "Historic Notes on Life and Letters in New England," and 54-55, discussing Hawthorne and the unpardonable sin. See also Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks . . . edited by Randall Stewart (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1933), PP- Ixxiv-lxxvi; Madeleine B. Stern, Heads & Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), pp. 70-85, discussing Poe's "Mesmeric Revelation."

Erdmann is expertly roused from the mesmeric state. "A pungent odor seemed to recall me to the same half wakeful state. ... an unseen hand stirred my hair with the grateful drip of water, and once there came a touch like the pressure of lips upon my forehead. ... I clearly saw a bracelet on the arm [of Agatha] and read the Arabic characters engraved upon the golden coins that formed it; I . . . felt the cool sweep of a hand pa.s.sing to and fro across my forehead." Alcott seems to have studied seriously the mesmeric process, the efficacy of mesmeric pa.s.ses, and even the use of a bracelet as a magnetic aid.

Later in "A Pair of Eyes," in the course of their tempestuous marriage, Agatha exercises her mesmeric powers upon Max with the sole purpose of subduing his will to hers. Aware of the telepathic influence being exerted upon him, Erdmann consults a physician. "Dr. L---" is temporarily absent, and while Max awaits his arrival, his attention is drawn to a book on magnetism, which opens "a new world" to him. In all likelihood, the book that elucidates his victimization is Theodore Leger's Animal Magnetism; or PsycodunaMy,[34] a volume that includes a general history of the subject, a chapter on Mesmer, and an account of the progress of the pseudoscience in the United States. "These operations," Leger expounded, "are as simple as possible; . . . No apparatus is necessary. ... It is only necessary that you find a person of impressible temperament, which is indicated generally by the largeness of the pupils of the eves." Theodore Leger happened also to have been physician to the great American feminist Margaret Puller, and his office was the place of a.s.signation for her and her lover James Nathan. Had Louisa Alcott, who admired Margaret Fuller all her life, been aware of this?[35]

[34.] Theodore Leger, Animal Magnetism; or Psycodunamy (New York: Appleton, 1846), p. 386 and pa.s.sion.

[35.] Madeleine B. Stern, The Life of Margaret Fuller (^ew York: Dutton, 1942), PP- 347-349, 351- In any event, Alcott was fully aware of the method of mesmerism and the nature of the mesmerist. In Agatha Eure she painted the pract.i.tioner par excellence: "sitting . . . erect and motionless as an inanimate figure of intense thought; her eyes were fixed, face colorless, with an expression of iron determination, as if every en- ergv of mind and body were wrought up to the achievement of a single purpose." And so, the heroine whose pair of eyes gives the story its t.i.tle, uses those eyes to conquer and control a will. If this is a variation upon Hawthorne's "unpardonable sin" - the exploitation of a human soul - it is a variation that Alcott made peculiarly her own. All her magnetic revelations are loaded with s.e.xual overtones, and her victim is no helpless female, but the male.

Like Agatha Eure, the evil genius of "The Eate of the Forrests" has "mysterious eyes [that] both attracted and repelled, with a subtle magnetism." As in "A Pair of Eyes," the focal theme is a diablerie shaped to literary ends. "The Fate of the Forrests," however, hinges not upon mesmerism or any other pseudoscience but upon the far more remote motif of Hindu Thuggee.

Of all the Alcott thrillers in A Double Life, "The Fate of the Forrests"[35] has the most complicated plot line and the most exotic theme. The characters are introduced at the moment when they wish to pry into the future, and their wish is granted - with devastating results - by the seeming "magician" Felix Stahl. His whispered prophecies presage tragic consequences for all. As for the heroine, Ursula Forrest, who loves and is loved by her cousin Evan, Stahl's prophetic whisper is a single word that turns her into a "marble Medusa" and changes her life forever. Instead of marrying her beloved Evan, she unaccountably marries Stahl!

[36.] "The Fate of the Forrests," Frank Leslie's Ill.u.s.trated Newspaper (11, 18, and 25 February 1865), 325-326, 341-343, 362-363.

And so the stage is set, the mystery presented: Who is this Stahl and what has he whispered? Ursula and Evan are "dimly conscious of some unseen yet controlling hand that ruled their intercourse and shaped events." The reader is aware that Ursula has been metamorphosed into Stahl's "very pa.s.sive bride." When Stahl exclaims, "But now, when 1 have made you wholly mine ... I find a cold, still creature in my arms," Ursula retorts that she had vow ed obedience, not love.

Why has she done so? Although the reader senses that Ursula is attempting to save Evan from some dire, unnamed fate, the answer to the enigma is not vouchsafed until the last installment. By then a poison plot has further complicated the tale, for Stahl has prophesied that "before the month is out the city will be startled by a murder, and the culprit will elude justice by death." Stahl's prophecies are invariably fulfilled. He has engineered his own death, making sure that Ursula will be charged with it. Before he dies he manages to s.n.a.t.c.h "her to him with an embrace almost savage in its pa.s.sionate fervor," while later he mutters to himself, "I won mv rose . . . but my blight is on her." It is indeed. Stahl dies; Ursula is imprisoned for the crime of murder; eventually - after her hair whitens - she too dies.

It is, as Alcott puts it, "the romance within a romance, which had made a tragedy of three lives." The romance within a romance is a theme directly out of the heart of India. Leslie readers, Alcott knew, were interested in the mysteries of Indian mores and the fascinations of their ceremonies. That she too was drawn by the lure of the East is indicated by scattered references in her tales. In "Ariel," the hero Southesk had been born on a long vovage to India; in "A Pair of Eyes," Max Erdmann, the susceptible victim of mesmerism, describes himself as having "Indian blood in my veins, and superst.i.tion lurked there still."

In June 1861, Louisa Alcott mentioned in her journal that "Emerson recommended Hodson's India, and I got it, and liked it."3 While W.S.R. Hodson's Twelve Years of a Soldiers Life in India [38] informed Alcott of the Delhi campaign of 1857 and 1858, there was little or nothing in it about the horror known as Hindu Thuggee.[37] The details of that barbarous and "abnormal excrescence upon Hinduism" may have been appropriated by Alcott from another popular book, The Confessions of a Thug, by Meadows Taylor, which created a furor when first published as a British three-decker and doubtless later t.i.tillated the lurid fancies of the Concord spinner of tales.[38] Amir Ali, Taylor's protagonist, was a professional murderer who strangled seven hundred human beings with pride and pleasure. Surely he was not only one of the most successful devotees of Thuggism but one capable of elucidating its secrets and its horrors to an author in search of shocking themes.

[37.] Cheney, p. 128.

[38.] Major W.S.R. Hodson, Twelve Years of a Soldier s Lfe in India (Boston: Ficknor and Fields, 1860).

And Hindu Thuggism was a shocking theme. The Thugs of India, first mentioned in the fourteenth century and all but stamped out by the British in the nineteenth, formed a secret "confederacy of professional a.s.sa.s.sins" who, after performing certain religious rites in wors.h.i.+p of the Hindu G.o.ddess of destruction, strangled their victims and regarded their plunder as a reward for the observance of a religious duty. Their use of the noose gave them the name Phansigars, or "noose operators." The fraternity employed secret signs by which they recognized each other. The G.o.ddess of destruction whom they wors.h.i.+ped - variously known as Kali, Bhowanee, or Bhawani - at one time demanded human sacrifice as an essential of her ritual. Her will was revealed to her wors.h.i.+pers by "a complicated series of omens." As Meadows Taylor explained, omens and incantations formed an important part of Thug ritual. Louisa Alcott, seeking themes for her thrillers, pounced upon the paraphernalia of Thuggism to explain the mystery of Felix Stahl. Stahl, it develops, was Indian on his mother's side, belonged to the Thuggee league, bore on his left arm the insignia of Bhawani, and had inherited, along with his devotion to the G.o.ddess of destruction, his family's vow of vengeance against the Forrests. The word he had whispered to Ursula, who was aware of the curse on her family, was Bhawani's name. By marrying her, Stahl wreaks vengeance not only upon her, but upon her beloved cousin Evan.

[39.] Meadows Taylor, The Confessions of a Thug, ed. F. Yeats-Brown (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1938). See also, for Thugs, Thuggism, and Kali, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. XIV, pp. 412-413; vol. XV, p. 641; vol. XXVI, p. 896.

Perhaps the most interesting Thuggist regulation in Louisa Alcott's view was that regarding women. According to the rites of the confederacy, a woman could not be killed. Hence Stahl cannot and will not murder Ursula directly. The fate he inflicts upon her becomes a fate worse than death. Thus Stahl's black art and power are explained as the Indian G.o.ddess of destruction is propitiated in a brew concocted by the future author of the Little Women series.

In "The Fate of the Forrests" Evan and Stahl ostensibly contend, "like spirits of good and evil," for the beautiful Ursula. In rcalitv, the struggle takes place where it almost inevitably does in Alcott sensation stories, between the man and the woman, between Stahl, representing Eastern vengeance and brutality, and Ursula, who wins only through dying. In succ.u.mbing to Stahl but never returning his pa.s.sion, Ursula is "both mistress and slave."

Louisa Alcott made much of the theme of slave and master in her thrillers, and the power struggle between the s.e.xes runs like a scarlet thread consistently through most of these stories. In varying degrees the woman is victorious, until, in the final narrative of A Double Life, "Faming a Tartar," she reigns supreme.

Interested as she was in the arts of painting and the theater and in the blacker arts of mesmerism and Thuggee, Alcott was dominated by the theme of the conflict between men and women. Her fascination with the relations between master and slave is explained to some extent by episodes of her early life, but bv and large her interest in the subject was pragmatic, professional, designed to satisfy subscribers to Leslie periodicals. In her hands involvement with s.e.xual conflict became an enormously productive literary theme.