Alcott, Louisa May - SSC 15
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Plots and Counterplots
Louisa May Alcott
Contents
Introduction
BY MADELEINE STERN
V. V. Or PLOTS AND COUNTERPLOTS
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
A Marble Woman
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
The Skeleton in the Closet
A Whisper in the Dark
Perilous Play
Introduction
BY 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
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/"