Alcott, Louisa May - SSC 15 (3 page)

 
          
And
so for A. M. Barnard laudanum or opium was not merely surcease from pain but a
useful narrative device. She applied it skillfully in “A Marble Woman,” in
which Cecil’s addiction softens and transforms Yorke into a human being who can
react to love. The inevitable Alcott masquerade party; a mad chase in a storm
at sea against a backdrop of buffeting gusts, torrential rain, and thick mists;
the identification of the mysterious model and the hint of incestuous love this
entails—all lead to a satisfactory conclusion. By curtainfall the marble has
been reconverted into very human clay and, as her publisher assured her, “my
friends think the ‘Marble Woman’ is just splendid; & I think no author of
novels need be ashamed to own it for a bantling.”

 
          
The
conclusion of “A Marble Woman” by A. M. Barnard appeared in The Flag of Our
Union on
June 10, 1865
.
On July 19, Louisa M.

 
          
Alcott,
traveling companion, sailed aboard the
China
bound for
Liverpool
and her first journey abroad. Her travels
were productive for they yielded a partial prototype for Laurie in Little Women
as well as romantic backgrounds for Gothic tales—castles and towers, gardens
and lighthouses on moon-shaped bays. They produced also an urgent compulsion to
write, for her mother had borrowed money to keep the traveler in
London
after she had left her charge. According to
her father, Mr. Weld had complacently remarked, “Miss Alcott can easily pay all
her travelling expenses by contributing to some newspapers.” Shortly after her
return she “fell to work on some stories, for things were, as I expected,
behindhand when the money-maker was away. Found plenty to do, as orders from E.
. . .
and
several other offers waited for me.”

 
          
One
of the stories she produced at this time for “E.” (James R. Elliott) was a
short but dramatic narrative in which the heroine is a self-made marble woman.
She is also, it develops, a woman of noble character, and so Louisa M. Alcott
allowed her name to appear as the author of The Skeleton in the Closet when
Elliott, Thornes & Talbot issued it in November, 1867. It is, like most of
the Alcott thrillers, a page-turner. It is also of more than ordinary interest
for its variation on the marble-woman theme and for its description of a mind
unhinged.

 
          
Mme.
Mathilde Arnheim, “the loveliest widow in all
France
,” graces a chateau which, although she
“desires no Adam,” she has converted into an
Eden
. With its “airy balconies” and “inviting
apartments,” its “rare pictures” and “graceful statues,” its “light draperies”
swaying before “open casements” and “leafy shadows” flickering on a marble
floor, Madames chateau was surely based upon some villa the scribbling
traveling companion had seen on her recent journey. As for Madame herself, she
is slender and white-robed, wearing a black lace scarf in the Spanish style, an
Italian greyhound tripping daintily beside her. She seems “a marble image,
beautiful and cold, though there are rare flashes of warmth
that
win, a softness that enchants, which make
her doubly dangerous.” Her
eyes are lustrous, dark, “filled with the soft gloom of a patient grief.” She
calls herself a widow. Like V. V. she wears a steel bracelet clasped by a
golden lock, the key of which hangs by a golden chain. But unlike V. V., Mme.
Arnheim is an involuntary femme fatale who lives in seclusion guarding her
secret—the skeleton in her closet.

 
          
Despite
the isolation of this “loveliest spot in
France
,” Madame attracts a lover. Gustave
Novaire’s jealousy is aroused when he glimpses an apparent rival whose arm
encircles “her graceful neck,” whose hand plays “idly with a tress of sunny
hair.” Gustave spies his beloved “pacing to and fro with clasped hands and
streaming eyes, as if full of some passionate despair.” He sees her “strike her
fettered arm” upon the balcony and knows that the bracelet binds her to a dire
fate. The mystery is at length revealed—“the secret anguish of my life, the
haunting specter of my home, the stern fate which makes all love a bitter
mockery, and leaves me desolate.” At sixteen—again the child-bride
theme—Mathilde was married to the victim of a “fearful malady,” “a hereditary
curse”—a “wreck of manhood” afflicted with a weakened brain. Having learned of
her plan to commit suicide to escape this “marriage mockery,” Reinhold Arnheim
suffers further mental derangement until he becomes an imbecile mouthing
senseless words, smiling a vacant smile.

 
          
Now
Mathilde is “bound by a tie which death alone can sever; till then I wear this
fetter, placed here by a husband’s hand nine years ago; it is a symbol of my
life, a mute monitor of duty. ... I have thrown away the key, and its place is
here till this arm lies powerless, or is stretched free and fetterless.”

 
          
After
the passage of three years and the machinations of two artful villains,
Mathilde’s loathsome tie is broken and the steel bracelet is replaced by a
slender chain of gold. The heroine has been faithful unto death, and so the
authors sally into the nightmare of mental aberration could be acknowledged.

 
          
Several
years before, Louisa Alcott had ventured more boldly into a similar region of
the mind. Six months after her prize story, “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,”
had appeared in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Prize Story No. 17—the
anonymous “A Whisper in the Dark”—was emblazoned in the columns of that gaudy
weekly. The narrative goes far beyond the effort at mind control that provides
the basis for the plot of “A Marble Woman.” Here the reader is regaled with the
lowest form of psychological manipulation—an attempt, for mercenary purposes,
to drive the heiress heroine insane so that her inheritance will be denied her.
Interwoven in this black fabric are several scarlet threads: suicidal thoughts
and chemical experiments, sleepwalking and the hint of sexual attraction
between a forty-five-year-old adopted uncle-guardian and the heroine, Sybil,
who is not quite eighteen. With an unusual last will and testament, a large
measure of maternal love, and a house of horrors for background, “A Whisper in
the Dark” becomes not only an engrossing gruesome Gothic but an interesting
foray into the disorders of the mind.

 
          
The
teen-age orphan Sybil is thrust almost immediately into the clutches of her
so-called uncle, who “regarded me mutely for an instant, then, holding me fast,
deliberately returned my salute on lips, cheeks, and forehead, with such warmth
that I turned scarlet and struggled to free myself, while he laughed that
mirthless laugh of his till my shame turned to anger, and I imperiously
commanded him to let me go.

 
          
“ ‘Not
yet, young lady. You came here for your own pleasure,
but shall stay for mine, till I tame you as I see you must be tamed. . . .
Chut! What a little fury it is!’

 
          
“I
was just then; for exasperated at his coolness ... I had suddenly stooped and
bitten the . . . hand that held both my own. I had better have submitted; for .
. . it had an influence on my afterlife. . . .”

 
          
Although
Sybil is betrothed to her adopted uncle’s son, Guy, she is at first not averse
to trying her “power over them both.” Before the plot advances she sits on
“Uncle’s” knee and smokes “a cigarette of his own offering . . . then I slept
on his arm an hour, and he was fatherly kind.”

 
          
“Uncle’s”
fatherly kindness is soon exposed for the dastardly mercenary sham it is. When
Sybil refuses the role of child-bride and rejects her “uncle”—“I had rather die
than marry you!”—her fate is sealed.

 
          
Now,
with the aid of the “stealthy, sallow-faced Spaniard,” Dr. Karnac, “Uncle”
resorts to mind control. If he can unhinge Sybil’s mind, he—not she—will
receive the inheritance. And so the horrors accumulate. Spirited away in a
drugged sleep to a nightmarish domain “twenty miles from the Moors,” she is
placed in a dreary room, its door locked, its window grated. “An ominous
foreboding thrilled cold through nerves and blood, as, for the first time, I
felt the paralyzing touch of fear.” A great hound guards the room above where a
mysterious occupant paces, a ghostly hand emerges,
a
whisper sounds through a keyhole. Sybil walks in her sleep through the haunted
house. Since “madness seemed [her] inevitable fate,” she resolves to commit
suicide. Instead, she elucidates the mystery of the room above, learning that
if she is “not already mad, [she] will be . . . [she was] sent here to be made
so; for the air is poison, the solitude is fatal, and Karnac remorseless in his
mania for prying into the mysteries of human minds.”

 
          
Despite
the terrors of this dark plot, “A Whisper in the Dark” has moral overtones,
thanks to which Louisa Alcott eventually found it possible to acknowledge its
authorship. Twenty-five years after its initial appearance she agreed to
reprint “A Whisper in the Dark” with a new edition of her Modern
Mephistopheles.

 
          
Only
by means of initials did Louisa acknowledge authorship of the final story in
Plots and Counterplots. “Perilous Play” by “L. M. A.” appeared not in Frank
Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper but in another of Leslie’s expanding chain of
periodicals. Issued in February, 1869, shortly after she had completed the
second part of her perennial best seller Little Women, it was the last of Jo
March’s necessity stories.

 
          
In
January, 1865, Louisa had written in her journal: “L. asked me to be a regular
contributor to his new paper, and I agreed if he’d pay beforehand; he said he
would, and bespoke two tales at once, $50 each . . . Alcott brains seem in
demand, whereat I sing ‘Hallyluyer’ and fill up my inkstand.”

 
          
Frank
Leslie’s “new paper” was actually his present mistress’s and future wife’s new
paper. Frank Leslies Chimney Corner had been started, planned, and edited by
that femme fatale of real life Miriam Squier, who assembled its corps of
writers and defined its purpose. It was conceived as a family paper that would
appeal to every member of the American home, an illustrated fireside friend in
which the mother would find a domestic story, the daughter a romance of love,
the son a dramatic escapade, the
youngsters
adventures
and fairy tales. Miriam Squier’s flowery prospectus rivaled some of Louisa
Alcott’s purple passages: “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.” The astute editor selected for her “welcome
messenger” articles less holy than titillating—sketches of Chinese gamblers or
insane monarchs, the original Bluebeard or the werewolf of Dole—along with such
stories of engaging violence as “The Queen of the Stranglers” and “The Phantom
Hand.” “We give,” she boasted, “a story a day . . . some to touch by their
tragic power, some to thrill with love’s vicissitudes, some to hold in suspense
with dramatic interest.”

 
          
“Perilous
Play” by L. M. A. could be assigned to this last category when it was run in
1869 in that “Great Family Paper of America.” The last, the shortest of the
Alcott thrillers, it is also in a way the most dramatic shocker of all, for it
is devoted in its entirety to an experiment with hashish.

 
          
As
usual the now extremely skillful author sketches her dramatis personae with
broad brushstrokes, presenting the familiar Alcott heroine, daughter of a
Spanish mother and an English father (the “Spanish” and “Saxon” elements are
here combined).
Rose St
. Just is “pale, and yet brilliant” with magnificent “Southern eyes,”
“clear olive cheeks,” “lips like a pomegranate flower.” She is attired in an
“airy burnoose” and she wears a bracelet of Arabian coins. She reads the legend
of “The Lotus Eaters.”

 
          
To while away a long afternoon for
Rose St
.
Just and others of the party, Dr. Meredith
produces his “little box of tortoiseshell and gold” containing “that Indian
stuff which brings one fantastic visions” and is called hashish.
The clever and ingenious twist that L. M. A. gives to this
experiment results in a story of delicate charm that is also a page- turner.
But it is the experiment itself that transcends the interest of the plot, for
in “Perilous Play” the twentieth-century reader familiar with marijuana can be
introduced to the nineteenth-century attitude toward hashish.