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Authors: Behind a Mask (v1.1)
Behind a Mask
Unknown
Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott
Contents
BEHIND A MASK
OR
A WOMAN'S POWER
PAULINE'S PASSION and PUNISHMENT
THE MYSTERIOUS KEY and WHAT IT OPENED
MADELEINE STERN
I
intend to illuminate the Ledger with a blood & thunder tale as they are
easy to “compoze” & are better paid than moral & elaborate works of
Shakespeare so don’t be shocked if I send you a paper containing a picture of
Indians, pirates, wolves, bears & distressed damsels in a grand tableau
over a title like this “The Maniac Bride” or The Bath of Blood A Thrilling Tale
of Passion.
The
quotation is not by a writer associated with the gore of Gothic romance but by
the future author of a domestic novel known to
all the
world as Little Women. On
June 22, 1862
, Louisa May Alcott wrote those lines to a
young man named Alf Whitman, whose charms she would one day incorporate into
the fictional character of Laurie.1
The
statement itself evinces her powers, for within the briefest compass it touches
upon her facility in composition, her ostensible motive, and the type of
periodical or audience at which she aimed. The fact that Louisa May Alcott—“The
Childrens Friend”—let down her literary hair and wrote blood-and-thunder
thrillers in secret is in itself a disconcerting if titillating shock to
readers in search of consistency. Like Dr. Johnsons dog that stood upon its hind
legs, it is per se remarkable. Equally remarkable is the story of their
discovery, an intriguing byway in literary detection. Most remarkable of all
perhaps is the fact that those gory, gruesome novelettes—written anonymously or
pseudonymously, for the most part—were and still are extremely good: well paced,
suspenseful, skillfully executed, and peopled with characters of flesh and
blood.
Now,
for the first time, after more than a century, they are reprinted—a belated
though well-deserved tribute to a multifaceted genius who hailed from
Concord
,
Massachusetts
. They merit not only the avid attention of the general reader, whose
appetite will grow with what it feeds on, but closer study by the astonished
yet delighted critic, who may wonder precisely why and when, how and for whom
these colorful forays into an exotic world were written. The analysis will
disclose not only the nature of the creation but the nature of the creator, for
Louisa May Alcott brought to this genre of escapist literature both an economic
and a psychological need.
There
is no doubt the economic need was there. The four “little women” whose name was
not March but Alcott—Anna, Louisa, Abby, and
Elizabeth
—grew up not only in the climate of love but
in the colder climate of poverty. Their father, Amos Bronson Alcott, the
Concord
seer, who was sometimes regarded as a
seer-sucker, had many gifts but none for making money. As Louisa put it in a
letter to a publisher: “I too am sure that ‘he who giveth to the poor lendeth
to the Lord’ & on that principle devote time & earnings to the care of
my father & mother, for one possesses no gift for money making & the
other is now too old to work any longer for those who are happy & able to
work for her.”
The
cost of coal, the price of shoes, discussions of ways and means, all the
essentials of living formed an obbligato to Louisa’s early years, a background
as basic to her life as romps with the neighboring Emerson children, berrying
excursions with Henry David Thoreau, glimpses of a mysterious Hawthorne
hovering in the Old Manse, and echoes of her fathers lofty discourses on
universal love and Pythagorean diet. Returned from a lecture tour in the West,
Bronson Alcott was asked, “Well, did people pay you?” He opened his pocketbook,
flourished a single dollar bill, and replied, “Only that! My overcoat was
stolen, and I had to buy a shawl. Many promises were not kept, and travelling
is costly; but I have opened the way, and another year shall do better.” He was
the recipient of gifts from his wife’s distinguished relatives, the Mays or
Sewalls, or from his friend and neighbor the illustrious Ralph Waldo Emerson,
who would place a bill under a book or behind a candlestick “when he thinks
Father wants a little money, and no one will help him earn.”
To solve the mundane question of
ways and means, to pay the family debts and end the necessity for a charitable
Alcott Sinking Fund, Louisa May Alcott was prepared to do any kind of work that
offered, menial or mental. “Though an Alcott”—and Louisa underlined not the
condition but the name—she would prove she could support herself. “I will make
a battering-ram of my head
,,,
she wrote in her
journal, “and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world.”
She
tried what was available, and what was not she tried to make available:
teaching, working as a seamstress or as second girl, doing the wash at two
dollars a week. At midcentury the family poverty had never been more extreme.
At this juncture Louisa went out to service and garnered from her experience no
money but a villain for her tales and a consuming inner fury to explode.
The
full story of what might be entitled “The Humiliation at
Dedham
” has never been told, although Louisa
herself years later wrote a bowdlerized account of it in “How I Went Out to Service.”
Since it was grist for the mill of a writer of thrillers, it merits recounting.
At
the difficult midcentury the Alcotts lived for a
time in
Boston
, for it was better to be earning a living
in a city than to be starving in a country paradise. Mrs. Alcott, the Marmee of
the as yet unwritten Little Women, worked as a city missionary and opened an
intelligence office. When an ancient gentleman from
Dedham
applied for a companion for his sister,
Louisa decided to take the position herself. The gentleman—now for the first
time identified as the Honorable James Richardson, Dedham lawyer, president of
a local fire-insurance company, author of several orations, and devotee of the
Muses—seemed to her tall, ministerial, refined. Waving black-gloved hands about,
he assured her that his home was graced by books and pictures, flowers, a
piano, the best of society. She would be one of the
family
,
required to help only in the lighter work.
Fortified
by those assurances, Louisa in 1851, age nineteen, went out to service. The
Richardson
home was not precisely as it had been
represented. The light housework included not only bed making but the kindling
of fires and the destruction of cobwebs. What was
more,
Louisa was expected to play audience to Hon. James Richardson, who invited her
into his study for oral readings or metaphysical discussions. The aged
Richardson
's attentions soon became maudlin. He plied
her with poems while she washed the dishes and he left reproachful little notes
under her door. Stranded on an island of water in a sea of soapsuds, Louisa
finally delivered an ultimatum: she had come to serve as companion to Hon.
James Richardson’s sister, not to him. As a result of her display of
independence, all the household work was assigned to her: digging paths through
the snow, fetching water from the well, splitting the kindling, and sifting the
ashes. The final degradation was the command to polish the master’s muddy boots
with the blacking hose, at which the young domestic balked. After seven weeks
of drudgery she announced her intention of leaving.
Richardson
shut himself up in sulky retirement while
his sister tucked a sixpenny pocketbook into Louisa’s chilblained hands. The
pocketbook contained four dollars, which the outraged Alcotts returned to
Dedham
. Although Louisa subsequently made light of
this experience in “How I Went Out to Service,” there can be no doubt that from
her humiliation an anger was born that would express itself both obliquely and
directly when she sat down to write her blood-and-thunder tales.
Another
devastating experience a few years later could also be caught in a net of
words,
provided the author remained anonymous. Frustrated in
her attempts to find work—teaching Alice Lovering, sewing for Mrs. Reed or Mrs.
Sargent—Louisa found that her courage had all but failed. As she looked at the
waters of the Mill Dam she was tempted to find the solution of her problems in
their oblivion. Though her immediate problem was resolved, surely that
“Temptation at the Mill Dam,” however fleeting, became, along with the
“Humiliation at
Dedham
,” part of the psychological equipment of a young woman who would
shortly take her pen as her bridegroom.
There
was much else in Louisa’s life in
Concord
or
Boston
that formed part of that equipment. There
were characters not merely in books but in life-like
Hawthorne
, whose dark figure had glided through the
entry of a somber Manse, a fitting shadow to inhabit a house of shadows. There
were fugitive slaves who passed through the village, a stop on the Underground
Railway. There were the ghost stories with which Louisa thrilled the boys of
Frank Sanborn’s school as apples and ginger cakes rounded out an Alcott Monday
Evening. Surely the report of Professor Webster’s hanging for the murder of
George Parkman at Harvard provided her with a store of bloodcurdling detail.
Louisa’s short but indelible service as a nurse in the Civil War brought her a
harvest of characters along with a shattering illness in which delirium
alternated with unconsciousness, aspects of disease most adaptable to the
blood-and-thunder variety of fiction. As companion to a sickly young woman,
Louisa went abroad in 1865.
Europe
yielded her dramatis personae ranging from a Russian baron to an English
colonel, from a mysterious lady resembling Marie Antoinette to a charming
Polish boy. There too she saw Mazzini, pallid, diaphanous, wearing deep
mourning for his country, the perfect hero for a dramatic destiny in a
sensational story. For a Louisa Alcott who never stopped taking notes,
Europe
provided also a panorama of
backgrounds—exotic, colorful, romantic.
As her father wrote
to her: “Your visit to Chillon and description of . . . the Prison, is as good
for the romancer as for the poet, and this with the legend the best matereal
[sic] for a story by the former.”
Bronson
Alcott called his scribbling daughter “an arsenal of powers.” In that arsenal
was stored still another personal source for stories. All her life the
redoubtable Louisa May Alcott had gone barnstorming and all her life she had
dreamed of the ten dramatic passions. The “Louy Alcott troupe,” of which Louisa
May, age ten, was author- director, gave way to family tableaux and dramatic
performances in the
Hillside
barn. At fifteen Louisa dipped her pen into
gaudy ink as, with her sister Anna, she wrote the scripts of a succession of
melodramas whose titles and subtitles foreshadow those of the thrillers that
were to come: “Norna; or, The Witch’s Curse”; “The Captive of Castile; or, The
Moorish Maidens Vow.” The props and appurtenances, the backgrounds and
characters of these early plays staged for the
Concord
neighbors are familiar to readers of
blood-and-thunder tales: ghosts and stolen scrolls, duels and magic potions,
dungeon cells and gloomy woods, murder and suicide.
Throughout
her life Louisa carried the theater with her wherever she went. She took the
roles of director, author, and actress in drawingroom charades or plays in the
Boston
kitchen. With lightning changes of costume
she ranged from a prince in silver armor to a murderer in chains, until she
confided to her journal that she would be a Siddons if she could. From her
later work in the Amateur Dramatic Company of Walpole and the Concord Dramatic
Upion, Louisa gained
a certain
professionalism in her
attitude toward the theater. In 1860 her farce, Nat Bachelors Pleasure Trip,
was actually staged at the Howard Athenaeum,
Boston
, and the playwright received a bouquet as
she viewed the performance from a private parlor box. Louisa received more than
a bouquet from her experience in theatricals and her romance with greasepaint.
She developed a skill in lively dialogue, in suspenseful plotting, and in
broad-stroke character delineation, skills she would one day apply to her
blood-and-thunder tales. “I fancy ‘lurid’ things,” she wrote in her 1850 journal,
“if true and strong also”—a fancy she would gratify a decade later. Like many
of the episodes of her life, Louisa’s addiction to the theater provided both a
source and a training ground for what would follow.
