Alcott, Louisa May - SSC 20 (5 page)

[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 goddess 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
succumbing to Stahl but never returning his passion, 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 sexes 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 sexual conflict became an enormously productive literary
theme.

 
          
Attempts
have been made from time to time to analyze the often contradictory
relationship between Louisa Alcott and her father Bronson. As one scholar
commented recently, “Louisa May Alcott seized upon melodrama as a source of
emotional excitement and catharsis, which she indulged in as part of her
rebellion against her father’s utopian domestic ideal. The family stage thus
became an important arena for the well-known conflict between father and
daughter.”
^[40]
An outcome of the love-hate relationship that
doubtless existed between Louisa and Bronson, this discord was due in large
measure to differences in temperament between the rebellious, independent,
hardworking daughter and the idealistic, philosophic dreamer who was her
father. Louisa’s rebellion was surely intensified when she witnessed the
effects of Bronson’s inability to earn a living upon her mother and her
sisters. This background, tempestuous though always tinged with love, was in
itself a power struggle of sorts and in all likelihood helped germinate the
battles she would imagine for her characters.

 
          
The
seven weeks spent by the nineteen-year-old Louisa Alcott as a domestic servant
in
Dedham
,
Massachusetts
, must have brought to a crescendo the conflict she had experienced at
home. In
Dedham
the conflict of wills was between a young
and inexperienced girl and her taskmaster-pursuer James Richardson, whose
demands went beyond the drudgeries of domestic service. Stored in her writer’s
mind, this experience would later provide kindling for the inflammatory theme
of the power struggle
.
^[
41]

 
          
In
addition to these personal experiences, the climate of the 1850s gave Alcott
cause for the anger she would infuse into her theme. Any observant woman of the
time was aware of the inequality of the sexes in the economic world, in
government, in law, in marriage, and in the home. Taxed but not represented,
the woman of mid-nineteenth-century
America
lived in an antifeminist world in which the
war between the sexes could be carried on far more successfully in fiction than
in life.

[40.] Karen Halttunen, "The Domestic
Drama of Louisa May Alcott," Feminist Studies 10:2 (Summer 1984): 233.

[41.] See Louisa May Alcott, "How I
Went Out to Service," The Independent 26 (
4
June 1874
); Behind a Mask, pp. ix-x.

 
          
Most
of the narratives in
A Double Life
are basically exercises in that
struggle. Because she was so gifted a writer, Louisa Alcott portrayed that
fight with intriguing diversity, creating many variations on the dominant
theme. In “A Pair of Eyes” the conflict between man and woman is reduced to a
simplistic level: It becomes a matter of responding to or resisting telepathic
commands. Supremely significant is the fact that it is the woman w ho
mesmerizes, the man who is mesmerized. Agatha confesses to Max that she used
her powers until she had “subjugated” his “arrogant spirit,” to make herself
master. “Henceforth you are the slave of the ring, and w hen I command vou must
obey. . . . You have brought this fate upon yourself, accept it, submit to it,
for I have bought you with my wealth, I hold vou with mv mystic art, and hotly
and soul, Max Erdmann, you are mine!” For all the man’s resistance, in the end
the w
oman
conquers. Here, as in most of these tales,
the reiteration of certain words alerts the reader to the
authors
intention:
power, shivery, waster, slave, subjugate
,
submit, subject,
compter, control.
The words signal the recurrent theme.

 
          
Even
in “The Fate of the Forrests,” in which Stahl exercises his power with the aid
of Hindu Thuggee, the villain-hero realizes that, though he brings Ursula to
submission, he can never bring her to love. In effect he has lost his slave and
found a master — a subtle variation on the power struggle motif.

 
          
The
conflict in “A Double Tragedy” exonerates, for the reader at least, Clotilde of
the murder of her husband. The husband,
St. John
, is an arrogant lord of creation who
regards his wife with the “pride which a master bestow s upon a handsome
slave.” I
Ie
is certain she will “submit with a good
grace” and return to him. “
1 am
convinced,” he smugly remarks, “it would be
best for this adorable woman to submit without defiance or delay — and I do
think she w ill.” Of course she does not. Instead, armed with her
writers
anger, Louisa Alcott turns Clotilde into a murderess
who annihilates the male contender.

 
          
It
is in the last of the shockers in
A Double Life
that the struggle is
most explicit and most dramatic
.
^[
42]
From the start of “ Faming a Tartar” — indeed from its very title — the authors
purpose is made clear. The Tartar is the “swarthy, black-eyed, scarlet-lipped”
Prince Alexis, a man of “fearful temper, childish caprices. . . .
impetuous
. . . moods.” His Tartar blood has made him a
tyrant; he is mad for “
wolves, ...
ice and . . .
barbarous delights.” He has the “savage strength and spirit of one in whose
veins
flowed
the blood of men reared in tents, and
born to lead wild lives in a wild land.” What more delicious foil could be
invented for Mademoiselle Sybil Varna, the slender, pale-faced English teacher
in a
Pensionnat pour Demoiselles
who was “bent on” having her own way?

[42
.
]
“Taming a Tartar,”
Frank Leslie's Illustrated
A
evcspaper
(30 November, and 7, 14, and 21 December 1867), i66-i<57,
186-187, 202-203, 219. See Louisa Max Alcott,
A Modern Mephislophetes and
Taming a Tartar
, ed. Madeleine B. Stern (New York: Praeger, 1987).

 
          
The
contest between the two constitutes the entire plot of the tale. The question
is not who will yield to whom, the answer to which is implicit in the title,
but how long the struggle will take and what steps the taming process will
encompass. Each round in the battle of wills becomes more intense: The first
bout concerns the trifling question of the return to
St. Petersburg
; the second, the prince’s cruelty to his
hound. As she succeeds in these minor conflicts, Sybil gains a renewed sense of
her power. “Once conquer his
will, . . .
and I had
gained a power possessed by no other person. I liked the trial.”

 
          
The
third and penultimate round ends in a draw, a kind of mutual taming, highly
sexual in nature. Sybil refuses to accompany the prince to his estate in
Volnoi, and as a result Alexis abducts her, accompanying the physical act with
a very purple passage: “
Submit,
and no harm will
befall you. Accept the society of one who adores you, and permit yourself to be
conquered by one who never yields — except to you.” At Volnoi the struggle
ends, but not before the serfs have set fire to the estate and wounded the prince.
Sybil’s wish to see her “haughty lover thoroughly subdued before I put my
happiness into his keeping” is realized at last. The masterful Russian humbles
himself, obeys her commands, and wins her as wife. Moreover, at her demand he
frees his serfs. Victory is hers, and with the final dialogue the curtain
falls:

 
          
“I
might boast that I also had tamed a fiery spirit, but I am humble, and eontent
myself with the knowledge that the proudest woman ever born has promised to
love, honor, and —”

 
          
“Not
obey you.”

           
And so, guided by the
New England
spinster Louisa May Alcott, the woman Svbil
Varna tamed a tyrannical Iartar. In the power struggle betw een the sexes,
surely the ultimate has been achieved.

 
          
In
this quintet of tales, Louisa Alcott achieved much else as well. From her
arsenal of skills she drew forth literary techniques that made an artistic
craft of the sensational narrative. One thinks of the wonderful opening
sentences of “A Pair of Eyes,” combining the writer’s focus upon art and the
theater with the suspenseful allusion to the sought-for pair of eves. The
mesmerism theme is introduced subtly but immediately, and the threads of art,
the stage, and mesmerism are woven seamlessly together.

 
          
In
the structure of her most complicated story, “The Fate of the Forrests,” Alcott
demonstrated her skillful response to the demands of the serial. I lere, the
omens of helix Stahl pose the mystery; the omens are fulfilled and the poison
plot introduced; the denouement provides the explanation in the exotic I lindu
theme.

 
          
In
“A Double Tragedy,” the plot moves inexorably to its tragic end, each episode
mounting in tension: the performance of the Spanish play; the appearance of
Clotildes husband, St. John; the incident of the bouquet; the costume party;
the crime of murder; Paul’s reaction to it; Clotilde’s suicide on stage in the
role of Juliet.

 
          
Similarly,
“Taming a Tartar” is paced to meet the requirements of the serial, its episodes
steadily increasing in interest till the culmination and the victory of the
heroine.

 
          
Max
Erdmann, artist of the sleepw alking Lady Macbeth; Felix Stahl, “beardless,
thin lipped, sharply featured,” with a face “colorless as ivory” and “eves of
the intensest black”; the Tartar prince Alexis — all are colorful figures.
Especially vivid are Alcott’s heroines: Ursula Forrest, who “looks like one
born to live a romance” and w hose “unconscious queenliness” betrays “traces of
some hidden care, some haunting memory
⁷
, or . . . that vague yet
melancholy prescience w hich often marks those fore-doomed to tragic lives”;
Agatha Eure, “strong-willed, imperious . . . used to command all about her”;
Sybil Varna of the lustrous gray eyes and firm mouth, proud nose and chestnut
hair, tamer of a Tartar. These women, joining the gallery of Alcott heroines,
are all memorable creations.