Alcott, Louisa May - SSC 15

by Plots (and) Counterplots (v1. 1)

  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.

  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 exp
enses 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.