Alcott, Louisa May - SSC 15 (2 page)

 
          
Alcott
heroines urged on by the more primitive force of jealousy. The remainder of the
narrative is set in the Scottish estate of Lady Lennox, where V. V. determines
to win Allan Douglass cousin, a noble Scot also named
Douglas
who looks like Allans twin. For this
mercenary purpose Virginie assumes several theatrical disguises and perpetrates
sins
both venial
and venal, ranging from peccadillo to
crime. Posing as Mrs. Vane— she has been Colonel Vane’s mistress in
India
, not his wife—she captivates every Scot but
her target, Cousin Douglas, who astutely detects in her “gliding gait” and
“brilliant eyes” the hint of “a little green viper.”

 
          
The
“viper” is accompanied by a deaf-and-dumb servant named Jitomar, supposedly one
of Colonel Vane’s Indian retainers, actually, of course, the treacherous Victor
in Eastern disguise. With his help Virginie lays her plot and spins her
counterplots. Her pawn is the lovely Diana Stuart, betrothed to
Douglas
, who must be eliminated. This V. V.
proceeds to accomplish, feigning, lying, conniving, manipulating. To
Douglas
this female Iago confides that Diana may be
the victim of a hereditary curse; to Diana she “proves” that
Douglas
is already married.

 
          
These
viperish machinations and the plots they generate are implemented by a
succession of fascinating props that recall performances in the
Hillside
barn: an ancient iron seal ring; a satin
slipper with a dull red stain; a bit of black lace. But the most potent dea ex
machina is, of course, the heroine herself. She is an exciting femme fatale.
She has some feminist inclinations although they stem primarily from a basic
misanthropy. To Diana she observes, “A man’s honor is not tarnished in his eyes
by treachery to a woman, and be believes that a woman’s peace will not be
marred by the knowledge that in God’s sight she is not his wife, although she
may be in the eyes of the world.” Virginie has “the nerves of a man, the quick
wit of a woman, and presence of mind enough for . . . all.” She has also the
malignancy of a Satan and the conniving skills of a Machiavelli. She has both
the power and the will to inveigle her rival, Diana, to a loathsome death.

 
          
Since
crime must in some way, however subtle, be followed by punishment, the
counterplots spin on. A surprisingly modern, pre-Sherlock- ian detective, M.
Dupres, is introduced for the purpose—a man who “adore[s] mystery; to fathom a
secret, trace a lie, discover a disguise, is my delight . . . this brain of
mine is fertile in inventions, and by morning will have been inspired with a
design which will enchant you by its daring, its acuteness, its romance.”

 
          
Against
such an agent Virginie, adopting a variety of disguises, continues to weave her
deceitful web until, in the “eclat” of the “grand denouement,” that web is
broken and the spinner brought to judgment. “A hunted creature driven to bay,”
she is arrogant, audacious, and conniving to the end. In a final confrontation
Douglas
condemns her: “Your treachery, your craft,
your sin deserve nothing but the heavy retribution you have brought upon
yourself.” Her disguises—her “artifices of costume, cosmetics, and consummate
acting”—have all been penetrated. Her plots and counterplots have been
unraveled. “Virginie, this night your long punishment begins”—a punishment
intolerable to contemplate, a punishment from which “escape is impossible,” but
from which, in her ultimate triumph, Virginie Varens, the most Mephistophelian
of Louisa Alcott’s heroines, does in her way escape.

 
          
This
was doubtless one of the tales the author had in mind when, in January, 1865,
she recorded in her journal: “Fell back on rubbishy tales, for they pay best,
and I can’t afford to starve on praise, when sensation stories are written in
half the time and keep the family cosey.” As for Jo March, “She . . . began to
feel herself a power in the house, for by the magic of a pen, her ‘rubbish’
turned into comforts for them all. The Dukes Daughter paid the butcher’s bill,
A Phantom Hand put down a new carpet, and the Curse of the
Coventry
's proved the blessing of the
Marches
in the way of groceries and gowns.”

 
          
If
“V. V.: or, Plots and Counterplots” is “rubbish,” then it is superb rubbish.
Though the heart of the heroine may be molded of marble, she is a creature of
flesh and blood who, in the very act of appalling, enchants. The plots and
counterplots, though derivative, are inventive enough to lure the reader on. As
star of this page-turner, Virginie Varens merits a lead position in the Alcott
gallery of
femmes
fatales.

 
          
The
first of the Alcott contributions to The Flag of Our Union was by no means the
last. The delighted editor James R. Elliott assured his new author that he
“should be pleased to have you write me some stories for the Flag, of about 25
to 40 pages of such Ms. as ‘V. V.’ ” Using the pseudonym of A. M. Barnard, she
obliged; and three months after “V. V.’s” bow, “A Marble Woman: or, The
Mysterious Model” appeared in the pages of Elliott’s weekly.

 
          
Richmond
had been taken in April, and Louisa had
gone to
Boston
“and enjoyed the grand jollification. Saw
Booth again in Hamlet.” Less than a week after Appomattox came news of
Lincoln’s assassination. Despite, or perhaps because of, the crisis and grief
of the LInion, the story papers churned out their narratives for avid readers
in search of escape. On May 20, The Flag of Our Union carried the first
installment of “A Marble Woman: or, The Mysterious Model.
A
Novel of Absorbing Interest.
By A. M. Barnard, Author of ‘V. V.: or,
Plots and Counterplots/"

 
          
Into
this remarkable tale the author injected a delectable combination of themes,
including the Pygmalion-Galatea motif, the concept of the child-bride, a hint
at incest, and a brief but intriguing bout with opium addiction. Add to these
the enigma of the “mysterious model,” a masquerade, a chase at sea, and a
satisfactory
denouement,
and the result is a story as
varied in its episodes as it is absorbing in its totality.

 
          
Of
all the themes used by A. M. Barnard one of the most interesting is her
variation on the Pygmalion and Galatea motif—her depiction of the woman who is
molded into marble by a sculptor whose clay is flesh and blood. The “marble
woman” first appears on stage as a twelve- year-old orphan, Cecilia Bazil
Stein, whose dying mother has selected as her guardian a former lover, the
genius sculptor Bazil Yorke. Against a Gothic background replete with ancient
furniture, dark window hangings, gloomy pictures, a great dog on a “tawny tiger
skin,” and a spiral staircase leading to Baziks tower studio, the child and her
artist guardian interact. Bazil Yorke bears “traces of deep suffering, latent
passion, and a strange wistfulness, as if the lonely eyes were forever seeking
something they had lost.” To crush his rising affection for the child of the
woman he once loved and lost, the sculptor attempts to stifle her warmth and
remold her into marble. “If I had power to kill the savage beast, skill to
subdue the fierce dog, surely I can mold the child as I will, and make the
daughter pay the mothers debt.” Bazils ruthless purpose is complicated by the
third actor in this melodrama, who appears at first as a face at a window—“a strange,
uncanny face, half concealed by a black beard that made the pallor of the upper
part more striking—the face of the hidden watcher or mysterious model, whose
identity is suspensefully withheld until an appropriate time.

 
          
In
the tower studio Yorke models from a handful of clay. The long large room is
“filled with busts, statues, uncut blocks, tools, dust, and disorder.” Young
Cecil—for so Yorke calls her—learns the art of modeling, and there is no doubt
that A. M. Barnard borrowed for the sequences in the tower studio the knowledge
of art that Louisa Alcott had acquired from observing her artist sister May.
Indeed, Dr. William Rimmer, May's anatomical drawing teacher, was one day to be
incorporated into the character of Professor Bhaer in Little Women.

 
          
Meanwhile,
five years pass and a different kind of modeling is attempted by the sculptor
in flesh and blood. Cecil, dressed in white from neck to ankle, has no
companions but marble men and women. She is cautioned to live without love. “Be
what I would have you,” Yorke commands, to which she replies, “A marble woman
like your Psyche, with no heart to love you, only grace and beauty to please
your eye and bring you honor. . .

 
          
“Yes,”
says Yorke, “I would have you beautiful and passionless as Psyche. ... I am
done with love.”

 
          
The
experiment all but succeeds. As Yorke’s wife in name only, Cecil becomes
“Yorke’s statue,” “his best work.” Yorke has married “one of his marble
goddesses. . . . He fell in love with her beauty, and is as proud of it as if
he had carved the fine curves of her figure and cut the clear outline of her
face.” But the snow image is not marble yet. Out of her unsatisfied human
desires arises one of the most interesting episodes in the Alcott
blood-and-thunders, an episode concerned with drug addiction. The theme
engrossed A. M. Barnard, who would return to it, with fascinating variations,
later on.

 
          
As
narrated in “A Marble Woman,” Yorke gives the sleepless Cecil a bitter, dark
liquid that will bring her “deep and dreamless sleep.” She recalls that her
mother had taken laudanum for pain and that she herself has “often tasted it.”
After the unconsummated marriage with her sculptor Cecil develops a growing
taciturnity, takes short unexplained flights, and ventures upon mysterious
errands. She appears “dreamy, yet intense, blissfully calm, yet full of a
mysterious brightness that made her face strangely beautiful.” An unnatural
inner excitement is followed by “an unconquerable drowsiness” that overpowers
her. A “restless sleep” deepens into a “deathlike immobility; the feverish
flush was gone, and violet shadows gave her closed eyes a sunken look; through
her pale lips slow breaths came and went.” A physician recognizes immediately
that Cecil has taken an overdose of laudanum and that she has survived the
overdose because she is addicted.

 
          
“Your
wife eats opium, I suspect.”

 
          
The
suspicion is verified. For a year Cecil has had the habit, which “grew upon me
unconsciously, and became so fascinating I could not resist it.” She eats her
opium in the form of little comfits that leave traces of “grayish crumbs” and
an “acrid odor.” Her need for this “dangerous comforter” is clearly traced to
the secluded life forced upon her as the teen-age virgin bride of a
thirty-eight-year-old recluse. She has found it too “hard to tame myself to the
quiet, lonely life you wish me to lead.”

 
          
The
opium episode is pivotal to the plot of “A Marble Woman” and its denouement.
But its interest is not literary alone. As the concoction of the future author
of Little Women it raises the eyebrows. The fact that Louisa May Alcott
concerned herself with drug addiction is a shocker which, today especially,
requires some analysis and investigation.

 
          
Bazil
Yorke’s library—and doubtless Louisa Alcott’s—contained a copy of De Quincey’s
Confessions of an Opium-Eater. But the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, played
a less bookish part in many nineteenth-century American lives. Indeed, some of
the great New England fortunes accrued from the shipping industry in which
opium trade with China
was
often involved. A. M.
Barnard’s publisher, William Henry Thornes of Elliott, Thornes & Talbot,
had sailed aboard an opium smuggler that plied between
China
and
California
. Little more than a month after “A Marble
Woman” completed its run in his paper, Louisa Alcott would go abroad as
companion to a young woman whose father, William Fletcher Weld, owned a fleet
of ships that flew the Black Horse flag to
Hong Kong
and
Manila
. Obviously the opium trade was familiar to
her.

 
          
Laudanum—tincture
of opium—was part of the pharmacopoeia of every nineteenth-century physician
except those who eschewed medicine of every kind. It was freely prescribed for
coughs and digestive disorders, arthritis and rheumatism, and despite the
Alcott preference for homeopathic medicine, there is a strong possibility that
at some stage of Louisa’s typhoid pneumonia some derivative of the opium poppy
had been administered to her. During her brief but disastrous period as a nurse
in the Civil War, she had certainly observed the use of morphine as a narcotic
for wounded soldiers and was perforce aware of the morphine addiction that
sometimes followed and was known as “soldier’s disease.” With the influx of
Chinese laborers on expanding American railways, tales of Oriental opium dens
in the West provided grist for the mill of sensation writers in the East.