Alcott, Louisa May - SSC 14 (2 page)

 
          
So
too did her reading. Dickens she devoured, reading aloud with her sister Anna
the dialogue of Sairey Gamp and Betsey Prig, thrilling to the tale of Reuben
Haredale’s murder, reinaugurating the Pickwick Club in
Concord
. Books from Emersons study could be
borrowed: Dante and Shakespeare, Carlyle and Goethe. “R.W.E. gave me ‘Wilhelm
Meister,’” she noted, “and from that day Goethe has been my chief idol.” (Her
chief idol, it needs no reminding, had delved into matters alchemical and
antiquarian, and his Faust had made a world- famous pact with the devil.) The
Heir of Redclyffe was a favorite of Louisa’s and so too was
Hawthorne
’s Scarlet Letter. Indeed, she was so
enthralled by novels that in one lofty moment she “made a resolution to read
fewer novels, and those only of the best.”

 
          
There
can be no doubt at all that the fiction addict Louisa Alcott dipped from time
to time into the gore of the Gothic novel. In
America
that type of romance was so
enthusiastically received that as early as 1797 both “dairymaid and hired hand”
amused themselves “into an agreeable terror with the haunted houses and hobgoblins
of Mrs. Radcliffe.” By the time she had become an omnivorous reader a host of
Gothic novels was available to her in English or in English translation. In
their pages Louisa could envision settings, mouth language, and
cogitate
themes. She could wander from ruined abbey to
frowning castle, from haunted gallery and feudal hall to pathless forest and
chilly catacomb. She could savor romantic words—repasts, casements, chambers.
She could revel in unholy themes—deals with the devil and the raising of the
dead, secret sects and supernatural agencies. Horace Walpole’s marvelous
machinery, Mrs. Ann Rad- cliffe’s ghosts, Monk Lewis’s horrors, William
Beckford’s Oriental terror, Ludwig Tieck’s vampires were all available to her.
So too, of course, were the strange stories of Washington Irving, the haunting
stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the subtle tales of Poe the master, whose
horrors were the unknown horrors of the mind.

 
          
Probably
Louisa Alcott had been moved to write as soon as she had learned to read. The
compulsion was hers early to combine threads of her own experience with the
threads of the books she had read and interweave them into a fabric of her own
creating. Her first published work was a poem, entitled “Sunlight,” that
appeared in the September, 1851, issue of Petersons Magazine. Interestingly, it
was pseudonymous, for it was signed “Flora Fairfield.” The poem was followed in
May, 1852, by Louisa’s first published prose narrative, “The Rival Painters: A
Tale of Rome,” for which the author received five dollars along with the
delight of seeing her initials in print.

 
          
Despite
a devastating rebuke from the publisher James T. Fields, who advised her,
“Stick to your teaching, Miss
Alcott.
You can’t
write,” Louisa persisted. In 1854 “Flora Fairfield” adorned the Saturday
Evening Gazette with “The Rival Prima Donnas,” a tale of vengeance in which one
singer crushed her competitor to death by means of an iron ring placed upon her
head. In the garret with her papers around her and a pile of apples nearby, the
twenty-two-year-old spinner of tales evolved plots about strong-minded women
and poor lost creatures until she became the mainstay of the Gazette.

 
          
At
the same time, in 1855, her full name appeared as the author of her first
published book, Flower Fables, “legends of faery land” she had devised for
Emerson’s daughter Ellen. The book netted her thirty- two dollars. In the sky
parlor of a
Boston
boardinghouse Louisa continued to write
when she was not teaching or sewing. “Love and Self-Love,” the story of an
attempted suicide woven from her own temptation at the Mill Dam, was accepted
by James Russell Lowell, editor of The Atlantic Monthly. “M. L.,” a story of
slavery and abolition, was rejected. The author went on consuming piles of
paper. She had caught the writing fever and boasted to Alf Whitman, “My ‘works
of art’ are in such demand that I shall be one great blot soon.” She worked on
two novels: Moods, a medley of death, sleepwalking, and shipwreck; and Success
(later changed to Work), an autobiographical romance in which she would one day
insert a chapter on insanity, suicide, and thwarted love. After her brief
service as a Civil War nurse, Louisa converted her experience into a realistic
narrative, Hospital Sketches, first serialized in The Commonwealth and
subsequently published in book form.

 
          
Seated
at her desk, an old green-and-red party wrap draped around her as a “glory
cloak,” Louisa pondered in groves of manuscripts. In 1855 her earnings included
fifty dollars from teaching, fifty dollars from sewing, and twenty dollars from
stories. Yet she not only preferred pen and ink to birch and book—or needle—she
was committed. Her pen was never and would never be idle. She lived in her inkstand.
Some years later, when she supplied The New York Ledger with an article on
“Happy Women,” she would include a sketch of herself as the scribbling
spinster.

 
          
The
scribbling spinster had already had a variety of writing experience. From
flower fables to realistic hospital sketches, from tales of virtue rewarded to
tales of violence, she had tried her ink-stained hand. Now, in her early
thirties, she would attempt still another experiment. The letter to Alf Whitman
revealed the plan: “I intend to illuminate the Ledger with a blood &
thunder tale as they are easy to compoze’ & are better paid than moral . .
. works.” For Louisa May Alcott they were indeed easy to compose. She could
stir in her witch's caldron a brew concocted from her own experience, her
observations and needs, as well as from the books she had read, for, like
Washington Irving, she had “read somewhat, heard and seen more, and dreamt more
than all.” Louisa's blood-and-thunder tales would be not only “necessity
stories” produced for money—from fifty to seventy-five dollars each— but a
psychological catharsis. What is more, although their author never publicly
acknowledged them, these experiments would stand the test of time. The future
author of Little Women added much of her own to the genre. Indeed, had she
persisted in the writing of thrillers, the name of Louisa May Alcott may well
have conjured up the rites of a Walpurgis Night instead of the wholesome
domesticities of a loving family.

 
          
In
1862, in the midst of the Civil War, Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper, a
popular New York weekly devoted to alluring pictures, gossip, and murder
trials, offered a one-hundred-dollar prize for a story. To pay the family debts
and at the same time to give vent to the pent-up emotions of her thirty years,
Louisa Alcott wrote the first of her blood-and-thunder tales. Though it would
be published anonymously, “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” bore the stamp of
its author, who immediately developed her own technique and outlined a theme to
which she would often return. While her plots were violent enough and her
backdrops remote enough to merit classification in the Gothic genre, Louisa was
principally concerned with character. Of all the characters she adumbrated in
these narratives the one who came most completely to life and who obviously was
as intriguing to her author as to readers was the passionate, richly sexual
femme fatale who had a mysterious past, an electrifying present, and a
revengeful future. In such a heroine—so different from the submissive heroine
of the Gothic formula—Louisa May Alcott could distill her passion for dramatics
and her feminist anger at a world of James Richardsons. At the same time she
could win a sorely needed hundred dollars.

 
          
In
“Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” as in all the Alcott thrillers, the reader
is immediately introduced to problems of character rather than of plot. The
suspense lies less in what the heroine will do than in what the heroine is,
although both considerations become entwined as the character develops and the
plot advances. In a fascinating opening, the anonymous author places onstage
her Pauline, a proud and passionate woman who has lost all—fortune and, as a
result of one man’s perfidy, love. She is left with her fury and her desire for
revenge, emotions which become the motivating forces in an ironic plot.

 
          
Against
the background of an exotic paradise, a green wilderness where the tamarind
vies with the almond tree, the spotlight falls upon Pauline Valary, pacing “to
and fro, like a wild creature in its cage,” a “handsome woman, with bent head,
locked hands, and restless steps.” She is a woman scorned by her lover, Gilbert
Redmond, who has abandoned her for a moneyed bride. In swift course she arouses
the devotion of the sensitive, young, southern romantic Manuel, who, attracted
by her implicit sexuality, becomes not only her husband but her accomplice in
the intended destruction of Gilbert Redmond. She does not plan Gilbert’s murder
but some more subtle revenge. “There are fates more terrible than death,
weapons more keen than poniards, more noiseless than pistols. . . .
Leave Gilbert to remorse—and me.”
And so, on page 1 of her
thriller, the already skillful author has sketched in her characters,
spotlighted her heroine, set her scene, and suggested a suspenseful plot.

 
          
The
suspense mounts in the search for Gilbert and the dramatic encounter with him
and his bride. The character is embroidered as Pauline’s “woman’s tongue”
avenges her and “with feminine skill” she “mutely conveys the rebuke she would
not trust herself to utter, by stripping the glove from the hand he had
touched, and dropping it disdainfully.” The meeting of Gilbert and Pauline is
the meeting of man and woman, a meeting in which Pauline silently accepts
Gilbert’s challenge to the “tournament so often held between man and woman —a
tournament where the keen tongue is the lance, pride the shield, passion the
fiery steed, and the hardest heart the winner of the prize, which seldom fails
to prove a barren honor, ending in remorse.”
And so faint
alarms and excursions subtly suggest without overtly revealing the denouement.

 
          
Pauline’s
inexorable anger intensifies until she is possessed by a devil—not one with a
cloven hoof but a subtle psychological force for evil. Her little stage performance
and “drama of deceit”—all Louisa’s heroines are actresses on the stage or
off—her machinations to bankrupt Gilbert “in love, honor, liberty, and hope”
fail utterly in the end.

 
          
The
winner of Frank Leslie’s one-hundred-dollar prize adopted the pseudonym of A.
M. Barnard for a tale she submitted to another flamboyant weekly, The Flag of
Our Union. Despite her preoccupation with passionate and angry heroines, Louisa
was already too skillful a writer to repeat herself without variation. “The
Abbot’s Ghost: or, Maurice Treherne’s Temptation” is set in no exotic Cuban
paradise but a haunted English abbey replete with screaming peacocks, thick-
walled gallery and arched stone roof, armored figures and an abbot’s ghost. A
Dickensian flavor attaches to these Gothic appurtenances as, sitting round the
hall fire, the dramatis personae tell tales of ghosts and coffins, skeletons
and haunted houses. The star of
that
dramatis personae
is less the hero of the title than the magnificent Edith Snowden, a strong-willed
woman burdened by a heavy cross, a mysterious past, and jealousies that
conflict with “contending emotions of . . . remorse and despair.” “The Abbot’s
Ghost” is filled with psychological insights that illuminate the subtle
relationships of the characters. The plot, revolving principally about the
sudden cure of the crippled Maurice Treherne and ending with a triple wedding
in the abbey, is basically a love story narrated against a strongly Gothic
background. It comes to life through the brilliant depiction of a woman of
passion and power whose furies are banked by her innate nobility.

 
          
Unlike
the anonymous “Pauline’s Passion” and the pseudonymous “Abbot’s Ghost,” The
Mysterious Key has a male hero, a charming young Italianate Englishman, and
unlike either of those narratives, The Mysterious Key was published over the
name of Louisa May Alcott. The possibility suggests itself that Louisa insisted
upon secrecy less for her blood-and-thunder stories in general than for her
passionate and angry heroines in particular.

 
          
The
hero of The Mysterious Key combines a touch of that Polish boy who, with Alf
Whitman, was to become the Laurie of Little Women, and a strong hint of the
pale and ardent Italian patriot Maz- zini.
Pauls
appearance at the Trevlyn home in Warwickshire—an estate adequately equipped
with haunted room and state chamber- touches off an elaborate plot. Well paced,
it depends for its unfoldment upon a prophetic rhyme and a mysterious
black-bearded visitor, a sealed letter and an ancient family volume, pretended
sleepwalking, a touch of bigamy and a blind ward, Helen. The silver key that
opens the Trevlyn tomb and discloses a mildewed paper proving Helen’s identity
is less mysterious and less intriguing than the hero Paul who, as Paolo, had
been—like Mazzini—a hero in the Italian Revolution. All loose ends—and there
are many—are neatly tied as the silver key slips into the door of a grisly tomb
unlocking “a tragedy of life and death.”