Alcott, Louisa May - SSC 20

by A Double Life (v1. 1)

  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 amusement to the young and old, in the family and by the fireside — that altar around which cluster 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 passions — as well as the contemporary interest in what might now be termed the occult. Always present, too, are examples of the struggle between the sexes, reflecting the rise of feminism.

  Alcott’s preoccupation with the art theme is thoroughly understandable. Her sister May was an eager art student, who illustrated 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 Passage, 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 Illustrated 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 Illustrated 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-authored 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 Hampshire, in Concord, and in Boston, and though her major role was that of the Dickensian 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, Massachusetts. 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 shines 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, hayi
ng 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 identities; 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, Massachusetts, 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 illustrated,” and as he sketches, she reads. Gazing at “a fine illustration 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 massive 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 Publishing Company, 1945); John S. Webber, Jr., In and Around Cape Ann (Gloucester: Cape Ann Advertiser Office, 1885), p. 36 md passim.

  [27.] Charles H. Shattuck, Shakespeare on the American Stage from the Hallams to Edwin Booth (Washington: 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 pass 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 Illustrated 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 succumbs 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 subtitle 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 entitled “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 circumstances: 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 pass to the Boston Theatre, she was also conducted by the manager all over the building on Boston’s Washington 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 th
e 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, sunshine 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 god 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.