Alcott, Louisa May - SSC 15
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Authors: Plots (and) Counterplots (v1.1)
Plots and
Counterplots
Louisa May Alcott
MADELEINE STERN
[Jo
March] took to writing sensation stories, for in those dark
ages,
even all-perfect
America
read rubbish. She told no one, but concocted a “thrilling tale,” and
boldly carried it herself to . . . [the] editor of the Weekly Volcano. . . .
...
Jo rashly took a plunge into the frothy sea of sensational literature.
When
Louisa Alcott adopted the name of Jo March for her own role in Little Women,
she was not writing ‘‘behind a mask.” The creation is as vital as the creator
and many of the episodes in the life of this flesh-and-blood character are
autobiographical. The author herself once listed the “facts in the stories that
are true, though often changed as to time and place,” and that list included
“Jo’s literary . . . experiences.
The
exact nature of Louisa’s clandestine “literary experiences”—the discovery of
her pseudonym, the identification of her Gothic effusions— was all revealed in
Behind a Mask. There four of her thrillers were reprinted, suspenseful stories
that for over a century had lain unrecognized and unread in the yellowing pages
of once gaudy journals. Now the remaining sensational narratives written by Jo
March’s prototype have been assembled in a companion volume. Again readers may
revel in more stories by an L. M. Alcott masked in anonymity or in pseudo-
nymity. From the garret where the author wrote in a vortex flowed the tales
emblazoned in flashy weeklies circulated to campfire and hearthstone in the
1860’s. Now they can be devoured again—these suspenseful cliff-hangers which
are also extraordinary revelations of a writer who turns out to be not simply
“The Children’s Friend” but a delver in darkness familiar with the passions of
the mind.
As
a professional who could suit the demands of diverse tastes, Louisa Alcott
disdained a precise duplication of her themes and characters. Her repetitions
are repetitions with variations. Her heroines— those
femmes
fatales who could manipulate whole families—are in this second volume femmes
fatales with a difference. Motivated still by jealousy or thwarted love,
ambition or innate cruelty, they now take on the texture of marble beneath
whose cold white surface the fires of passion flame or are banked. Louisa
Alcott’s marble women have their variants too: sometimes they have encased
themselves in marble the better to execute their purposes; sometimes an attempt
is made by a demonic character to transform them into marble. Whatever the nature
of their seeming frigidity, they are all extraordinary actresses, mistresses of
the arts of disguise who use their props—their bracelets or ebony caskets,
their miniatures and keys or bloodstained slippers—with histrionic skill. In
one of the narratives of Plots and Counterplots, Alcott’s most evil heroine has
been painted, the dancer Virginie Varens of “V. V.,” a creature seductive,
viperish, manipulating, who with a lovely bit of irony wins even as she loses
in the end.
Here
too will be found themes that go beyond the tamer shockers of Behind a Mask:
the child-bride theme, which had a strange lure for the creator of Little
Women, stemming perhaps from her early disastrous experience as a domestic in
the service of the elderly James Richardson of Dedham; the theme of murder,
which appears here in gory splendor; the theme of insanity, which is traced
through many variations from a hereditary curse to an attempt at manipulated
insanity, a black plot to madden a benighted heroine. The whole psychology of manipulation
is presented with singular power in these tales, the drive of one dark mind to
shape another, the Pygmalion theme in a somber setting. Finally, in addition to
the lure of evil and violence, mental aberrations and mind control, Plots and
Counterplots will offer to devotees of “The Children’s Friend” another sinister
theme—drug addiction and experimentation. The creator of
jo
March was skilled not only in the wholesome delights of apples and ginger
cookies but in the more macabre delights of opium and hashish.
Like
the stories presented in Behind a Mask, these narratives with their purple
passages and their scarlet motifs had their sources not only in the gaudy
Gothics which their author devoured but also in the life she had led, the
observations she had made,
the
fantasies she had
dreamed. Louisa Alcott was to some extent the Jo March who “like most young
scribblers . . . went abroad for her characters and scenery; and banditti,
counts, gypsies, nuns, and duchesses appeared upon her stage. . . .
“As
thrills could not be produced except by harrowing up the souls of the readers,
history and romance, land and sea, science and art, police records and lunatic
asylums, had to be ransacked for the purpose. . . . Eager to find material for
stories, and bent on making them original in plot, if not masterly in
execution, she searched newspapers for accidents, incidents, and crimes; she
excited the suspicions of public librarians by asking for works on poisons; she
studied faces in the street, and characters, good, bad, and indifferent, all
about her; she delved in the dust of ancient times for facts or fictions . . .
and introduced herself to folly, sin, and misery.”
She
delved also into her own “ancient times,” dredging up especially the
ingredients of those “Comic Tragedies” she had penned as a girl with her sister
Anna and produced on the stage of the
Hillside
barn in
Concord
. Love scenes and direful lines, dramatic
confrontations and disguises, desertions and suicides, magic herbs, love
potions and death phials that had been the staples of “The Unloved Wife” or
“The Captive of Castile” could be introduced again with alterations. If they
had once chilled the blood of an audience of illustrious neighbors, now, having
undergone a subtle sea change, they could chill the blood of subscribers to
flamboyant weeklies.
Other
episodes in Louisa Alcott’s past could be served up to readers of sensational
stories. In 1858, after her sister Lizzie’s death, she had seen a light mist
rise from the body. Seven years later a misty apparition would arise from a
fictional Alcott grave. Before the Civil War, Louisa had heard tales of
Jonathan Walker, whose hand had been branded with the letters S.S. for “Slave
Stealer.” For the prototype of Jo March’s
Blarney
stone Banner or Weekly Volcano the initials
V. V. would be tattooed upon an imaginary wrist. A short period during the
summer of 1860, when Louisa had cared for “a young friend during a temporary
fit of insanity,” would be put to use for lurid excursions into nightmarish derangements.
Louisa
Alcott’s service as a Civil War nurse in the
Union
Hotel
Hospital
,
Georgetown
, was followed by an illness that provided
her with one of the most interesting sources for her tales of violence and
revenge. After some six weeks of nursing she succumbed to typhoid pneumonia, a
severe attack of which she wrote, “I was never ill before this time, and never
well afterward.” The bout was accompanied by sinister dreams from which the
patient would awaken unrefreshed. Since those dreams, that fevered delirium,
would be interwoven into the fabric of her blood-and-thunders, they merit an
attention less medical than literary.
The
most vivid and enduring was the conviction that I had married a stout, handsome
Spaniard, dressed in black velvet, with very soft hands, and a voice that was
continually saying, 'Tie still, my dear!” This was Mother, I suspect; but with
all the comfort I often found in her presence, there was blended an awful fear
of the Spanish spouse who was always coming after me, appearing out of closets,
in at windows, or threatening me dreadfully all night long. . . .
A
mob at
Baltimore
breaking down the door to get me, being
hung for a witch, burned, stoned, and otherwise maltreated, were some of my
fancies.
Also being tempted to join Dr. W. and two of the
nurses in worshipping the Devil.
Also tending millions
of rich men who never died or got well.
After
three weeks of delirium “the old fancies still lingered, seeming so real I
believed in them, and deluded Mother and May with the most absurd stories, so
soberly told that they thought them true.” As her father reported in a letter
to Anna in January, 1863, Louisa “asked me to sit near her bedside, and tell
her the adventures of our fearful journey home [from
Georgetown
] . . . and enjoyed the story, laughing over
the plot and catastrophe, as if it were a tale of her imagining.”
The
tales of her imagining would still pay the family bills. The economic necessity
that had prompted the stories in Behind a Mask prompted those in Plots and
Counterplots. At times the only breadwinner of the family, Louisa Alcott set
about liberating that family from debt with her thrillers, and in so doing she
achieved a psychological catharsis that liberated her own mind from its
phantasmagorias. Her father had observed in “the elements of your temperament”
both the “Spaniard” and the “Saxon.” The “Spanish” elements were surely in the
ascendancy when she reeled off her “‘thrilling’ tales, and mess up my work in a
queer but interesting way.” She was at this time a compulsive writer, dashing
off her narratives “like a thinking machine in full operation.” Stories
simmered in her brain demanding to be written. “My pen,” she despaired, “will
not keep in order, and ink has a tendency to splash when used copiously and
with rapidity.” Once she wrote, “
Liberty
is a better husband than love to many of
us,” and often she “longed for a crust in a garret with freedom and a pen.”
It
was to the office of the Weekly Volcano that Jo March boldly ventured with a
thrilling tale and “bravely climbed two pairs of dark and dirty stairs to find
herself
in a disorderly room, a cloud of cigar smoke, and
the presence of three gentlemen, sitting with their heels rather higher than
their hats.” If “Louisa Alcott” is read for “Jo March,” then The Flag of Our
Union may be read for the Weekly Volcano, and for the three gentlemen in a
cloud of cigar smoke, the three colorful Boston publishers, Messrs. Elliott,
Thornes and Talbot, whose “disorderly room” was part of the Journal Building at
118 Washington Street.
Louisa
Alcotts
first contribution to The Flag of Our Union
was also the story that flaunted her most unregenerate heroine. “V. V.: or,
Plots and Counterplots” “By a Well Known Author” appeared in February, 1865, to
titillate readers and divert them from news of the war that would end two
months later. A shocker it was, with its heady ingredients—poison in an opal,
footprints left by a murderess, drugged coffee, a feigned pistol duel,
theatrical props against sketchy theatrical backgrounds of a fancied Spain or
India, Paris or Scottish estate. But it is less for its plots and counterplots
moving relentlessly on to the “eclat” of a “grand denouement” that “V. V.”
becomes a fascinating narrative. It is, as in most of the Alcott thrillers, the
nature of the heroine that captures the intense interest of the reader.
Virginie
Varens is no Jo March. All Spanish, she bears no traces of her authors “Saxon”
elements. “A sylph she seemed” in the greenroom of a
Paris
theater, a seventeen-year-old dancer
“costumed in fleecy white and gold . . . flushed and panting, but radiant with
the triumphs of the hour.” Her cousin and dancing partner, that sinewy,
animated flame of fire, Victor, has set his mark upon her—two dark letters
“tattooed on the white flesh” of her wrist, the monogram V. V., which she
conceals by means of a bracelet fastened with a golden padlock. Virginie is
already
a
fdle if not a femme fatale with many
suitors, including a viscount who offers her an establishment and infamy, and the
Scot Allan Douglas who offers her an honorable name and a home. “Mercenary,
vain, and hollow-hearted” as well as conniving and ambitious, Virginie accepts
the latter. Thereupon the “fiery and fierce” Victor, enraged with jealousy,
“reckless of life or limb,” takes “the short road to his revenge,” and “with
the bound of a wounded tiger” stabs the bridegroom. As for the heroine, one
“night of love, and sin, and death” has transformed her into wife, widow, and,
as it turns out, mother too.
So
the curtain rises upon a melodrama of deceit and death. Because she is
motivated primarily by social ambition, Virginie Varens appears more innately
evil than her competitors—those powerful and passionate