The author of “A Pair of Eyes” writes as an expert on the hypnotic function of the mesmerist’s eye, the effects of hypnotic influence upon the subject, and the use of mesmerism as an exercise in power. The eyes of Agatha Eure are “two dark wells . . . tranquil yet . . . fathomless.” Her first exercise in mesmerism is perpetrated upon her unknowing victim, the painter Max Erdmann, who reacts almost clinically:
It seemed as if my picture had left its frame. . . . My hand moved slower and slower. . . . my eyelids began to be weighed down by a delicious drowsiness. . . . Everything grew misty. ... a sensation of wonderful airiness came over me, and I felt as if I could float away like a thistledown. Presently every sense seemed to fall asleep ... I drifted away into a sea of blissful repose. ... I seemed to be looking down at myself, as if soul and body had parted company and I was gifted with a double life. . . . then my sleep deepened into utter oblivion. . . .
[33.] Stoehr, "Hawthorne and Mesmerism," 35, quoting from Emerson's "Historic Notes on Life and Letters in New England," and 54-55, discussing Hawthorne and the unpardonable sin. See also Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks . . . edited by Randall Stewart (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1933), PP- Ixxiv-lxxvi; Madeleine B. Stern, Heads & Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), pp. 70-85, discussing Poe's "Mesmeric Revelation."
Erdmann is expertly roused from the mesmeric state. “A pungent odor seemed to recall me to the same half wakeful state. ... an unseen hand stirred my hair with the grateful drip of water, and once there came a touch like the pressure of lips upon my forehead. ... I clearly saw a bracelet on the arm [of Agatha] and read the Arabic characters engraved upon the golden coins that formed it; I . . . felt the cool sweep of a hand passing to and fro across my forehead.” Alcott seems to have studied seriously the mesmeric process, the efficacy of mesmeric passes, and even the use of a bracelet as a magnetic aid.
Later in “A Pair of Eyes,” in the course of their tempestuous marriage, Agatha exercises her mesmeric powers upon Max with the sole purpose of subduing his will to hers. Aware of the telepathic influence being exerted upon him, Erdmann consults a physician. “Dr. L---” is temporarily absent, and while Max awaits his arrival, his attention is drawn to a book on magnetism, which opens “a new world” to him. In all likelihood, the book that elucidates his victimization is Theodore Leger’s Animal Magnetism; or PsycodunaMy,[34] a volume that includes a general history of the subject, a chapter on Mesmer, and an account of the progress of the pseudoscience in the United States. “These operations,” Leger expounded, “are as simple as possible; . . . No apparatus is necessary. ... It is only necessary that you find a person of impressible temperament, which is indicated generally by the largeness of the pupils of the eves.” Theodore Leger happened also to have been physician to the great American feminist Margaret Puller, and his office was the place of assignation for her and her lover James Nathan. Had Louisa Alcott, who admired Margaret Fuller all her life, been aware of this?[35]
[34.] Theodore Leger, Animal Magnetism; or Psycodunamy (New York: Appleton, 1846), p. 386 and passion.
[35.] Madeleine B. Stern, The Life of Margaret Fuller (^ew York: Dutton, 1942), PP- 347-349, 351-
In any event, Alcott was fully aware of the method of mesmerism and the nature of the mesmerist. In Agatha Eure she painted the practitioner par excellence: “sitting . . . erect and motionless as an inanimate figure of intense thought; her eyes were fixed, face colorless, with an expression of iron determination, as if every en- ergv of mind and body were wrought up to the achievement of a single purpose.” And so, the heroine whose pair of eyes gives the story its title, uses those eyes to conquer and control a will. If this is a variation upon Hawthorne’s “unpardonable sin” — the exploitation of a human soul — it is a variation that Alcott made peculiarly her own. All her magnetic revelations are loaded with sexual overtones, and her victim is no helpless female, but the male.
Like Agatha Eure, the evil genius of “The Eate of the Forrests” has “mysterious eyes [that] both attracted and repelled, with a subtle magnetism.” As in “A Pair of Eyes,” the focal theme is a diablerie shaped to literary ends. “The Fate of the Forrests,” however, hinges not upon mesmerism or any other pseudoscience but upon the far more remote motif of Hindu Thuggee.
Of all the Alcott thrillers in A Double Life, “The Fate of the Forrests”[35] has the most complicated plot line and the most exotic theme. The characters are introduced at the moment when they wish to pry into the future, and their wish is granted — with devastating results — by the seeming “magician” Felix Stahl. His whispered prophecies presage tragic consequences for all. As for the heroine, Ursula Forrest, who loves and is loved by her cousin Evan, Stahl’s prophetic whisper is a single word that turns her into a “marble Medusa” and changes her life forever. Instead of marrying her beloved Evan, she unaccountably marries Stahl!
[36.] "The Fate of the Forrests," Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (11, 18, and 25 February 1865), 325-326, 341-343, 362-363.
And so the stage is set, the mystery presented: Who is this Stahl and what has he whispered? Ursula and Evan are “dimly conscious of some unseen yet controlling hand that ruled their intercourse and shaped events.” The reader is aware that Ursula has been metamorphosed into Stahl’s “very passive bride.” When Stahl exclaims, “But now, when 1 have made you wholly mine ... I find a cold, still creature in my arms,” Ursula retorts that she had vow ed obedience, not love.
Why has she done so? Although the reader senses that Ursula is attempting to save Evan from some dire, unnamed fate, the answer to the enigma is not vouchsafed until the last installment. By then a poison plot has further complicated the tale, for Stahl has prophesied that “before the month is out the city will be startled by a murder, and the culprit will elude justice by death.” Stahl’s prophecies are invariably fulfilled. He has engineered his own death, making sure that Ursula will be charged with it. Before he dies he manages to snatch “her to him with an embrace almost savage in its passionate fervor,” while later he mutters to himself, “I won mv rose . . . but my blight is on her.” It is indeed. Stahl dies; Ursula is imprisoned for the crime of murder; eventually — after her hair whitens — she too dies.
It is, as Alcott puts it, “the romance within a romance, which had made a tragedy of three lives.” The romance within a romance is a theme directly out of the heart of India. Leslie readers, Alcott knew, were interested in the mysteries of Indian mores and the fascinations of their ceremonies. That she too was drawn by the lure of the East is indicated by scattered references in her tales. In “Ariel,” the hero Southesk had been born on a long vovage to India; in “A Pair of Eyes,” Max Erdmann, the susceptible victim of mesmerism, describes himself as having “Indian blood in my veins, and superstition lurked there still.”
In June 1861, Louisa Alcott mentioned in her journal that “Emerson recommended Hodson’s India, and I got it, and liked it.”3 While W.S.R. Hodson’s Twelve Years of a Soldiers Life in India [38] informed Alcott of the Delhi campaign of 1857 and 1858, there was little or nothing in it about the horror known as Hindu Thuggee.[37] The details of that barbarous and “abnormal excrescence upon Hinduism” may have been appropriated by Alcott from another popular book, The Confessions of a Thug, by Meadows Taylor, which created a furor when first published as a British three-decker and doubtless later titillated the lurid fancies of the Concord spinner of tales.[38] Amir Ali, Taylor’s protagonist, was a professional murderer who strangled seven hundred human beings with pride and pleasure. Surely he was not only one of the most successful devotees of Thuggism but one capable of elucidating its secrets and its horrors to an author in search of shocking themes.
[37.] Cheney, p. 128.
[38.] Major W.S.R. Hodson, Twelve Years of a Soldier s Lfe in India (Boston: Ficknor and Fields, 1860).
And Hindu Thuggism was a shocking theme. The Thugs of India, first mentioned in the fourteenth centur
y and all but stamped out by the British in the nineteenth, formed a secret “confederacy of professional assassins” who, after performing certain religious rites in worship of the Hindu goddess of destruction, strangled their victims and regarded their plunder as a reward for the observance of a religious duty. Their use of the noose gave them the name Phansigars, or “noose operators.” The fraternity employed secret signs by which they recognized each other. The goddess of destruction whom they worshiped — variously known as Kali, Bhowanee, or Bhawani — at one time demanded human sacrifice as an essential of her ritual. Her will was revealed to her worshipers by “a complicated series of omens.” As Meadows Taylor explained, omens and incantations formed an important part of Thug ritual. Louisa Alcott, seeking themes for her thrillers, pounced upon the paraphernalia of Thuggism to explain the mystery of Felix Stahl. Stahl, it develops, was Indian on his mother’s side, belonged to the Thuggee league, bore on his left arm the insignia of Bhawani, and had inherited, along with his devotion to the goddess of destruction, his family’s vow of vengeance against the Forrests. The word he had whispered to Ursula, who was aware of the curse on her family, was Bhawani’s name. By marrying her, Stahl wreaks vengeance not only upon her, but upon her beloved cousin Evan.
[39.] Meadows Taylor, The Confessions of a Thug, ed. F. Yeats-Brown (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1938). See also, for Thugs, Thuggism, and Kali, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. XIV, pp. 412-413; vol. XV, p. 641; vol. XXVI, p. 896.
Perhaps the most interesting Thuggist regulation in Louisa Alcott’s view was that regarding women. According to the rites of the confederacy, a woman could not be killed. Hence Stahl cannot and will not murder Ursula directly. The fate he inflicts upon her becomes a fate worse than death. Thus Stahl’s black art and power are explained as the Indian goddess of destruction is propitiated in a brew concocted by the future author of the Little Women series.
In “The Fate of the Forrests” Evan and Stahl ostensibly contend, “like spirits of good and evil,” for the beautiful Ursula. In rcalitv, the struggle takes place where it almost inevitably does in Alcott sensation stories, between the man and the woman, between Stahl, representing Eastern vengeance and brutality, and Ursula, who wins only through dying. In succumbing to Stahl but never returning his passion, Ursula is “both mistress and slave.”
Louisa Alcott made much of the theme of slave and master in her thrillers, and the power struggle between the sexes runs like a scarlet thread consistently through most of these stories. In varying degrees the woman is victorious, until, in the final narrative of A Double Life, “Faming a Tartar,” she reigns supreme.
Interested as she was in the arts of painting and the theater and in the blacker arts of mesmerism and Thuggee, Alcott was dominated by the theme of the conflict between men and women. Her fascination with the relations between master and slave is explained to some extent by episodes of her early life, but bv and large her interest in the subject was pragmatic, professional, designed to satisfy subscribers to Leslie periodicals. In her hands involvement with sexual conflict became an enormously productive literary theme.
Attempts have been made from time to time to analyze the often contradictory relationship between Louisa Alcott and her father Bronson. As one scholar commented recently, “Louisa May Alcott seized upon melodrama as a source of emotional excitement and catharsis, which she indulged in as part of her rebellion against her father’s utopian domestic ideal. The family stage thus became an important arena for the well-known conflict between father and daughter.”[40] An outcome of the love-hate relationship that doubtless existed between Louisa and Bronson, this discord was due in large measure to differences in temperament between the rebellious, independent, hardworking daughter and the idealistic, philosophic dreamer who was her father. Louisa’s rebellion was surely intensified when she witnessed the effects of Bronson’s inability to earn a living upon her mother and her sisters. This background, tempestuous though always tinged with love, was in itself a power struggle of sorts and in all likelihood helped germinate the battles she would imagine for her characters.
The seven weeks spent by the nineteen-year-old Louisa Alcott as a domestic servant in Dedham, Massachusetts, must have brought to a crescendo the conflict she had experienced at home. In Dedham the conflict of wills was between a young and inexperienced girl and her taskmaster-pursuer James Richardson, whose demands went beyond the drudgeries of domestic service. Stored in her writer’s mind, this experience would later provide kindling for the inflammatory theme of the power struggle.[41]
In addition to these personal experiences, the climate of the 1850s gave Alcott cause for the anger she would infuse into her theme. Any observant woman of the time was aware of the inequality of the sexes in the economic world, in government, in law, in marriage, and in the home. Taxed but not represented, the woman of mid-nineteenth-century America lived in an antifeminist world in which the war between the sexes could be carried on far more successfully in fiction than in life.
[40.] Karen Halttunen, "The Domestic Drama of Louisa May Alcott," Feminist Studies 10:2 (Summer 1984): 233.
[41.] See Louisa May Alcott, "How I Went Out to Service," The Independent 26 (4 June 1874); Behind a Mask, pp. ix-x.
Most of the narratives in A Double Life are basically exercises in that struggle. Because she was so gifted a writer, Louisa Alcott portrayed that fight with intriguing diversity, creating many variations on the dominant theme. In “A Pair of Eyes” the conflict between man and woman is reduced to a simplistic level: It becomes a matter of responding to or resisting telepathic commands. Supremely significant is the fact that it is the woman w ho mesmerizes, the man who is mesmerized. Agatha confesses to Max that she used her powers until she had “subjugated” his “arrogant spirit,” to make herself master. “Henceforth you are the slave of the ring, and w hen I command vou must obey. . . . You have brought this fate upon yourself, accept it, submit to it, for I have bought you with my wealth, I hold vou with mv mystic art, and hotly and soul, Max Erdmann, you are mine!” For all the man’s resistance, in the end the w oman conquers. Here, as in most of these tales, the reiteration of certain words alerts the reader to the authors intention: power, shivery, waster, slave, subjugate, submit, subject, compter, control. The words signal the recurrent theme.
Even in “The Fate of the Forrests,” in which Stahl exercises his power with the aid of Hindu Thuggee, the villain-hero realizes that, though he brings Ursula to submission, he can never bring her to love. In effect he has lost his slave and found a master — a subtle variation on the power struggle motif.
The conflict in “A Double Tragedy” exonerates, for the reader at least, Clotilde of the murder of her husband. The husband, St. John, is an arrogant lord of creation who regards his wife with the “pride which a master bestow s upon a handsome slave.” I Ie is certain she will “submit with a good grace” and return to him. “1 am convinced,” he smugly remarks, “it would be best for this adorable woman to submit without defiance or delay — and I do think she w ill.” Of course she does not. Instead, armed with her writers anger, Louisa Alcott turns Clotilde into a murderess who annihilates the male contender.
It is in the last of the shockers in A Double Life that the struggle is most explicit and most dramatic.[42] From the start of “ Faming a Tartar” — indeed from its very title — the authors purpose is made clear. The Tartar is the “swarthy, black-eyed, scarlet-lipped” Prince Alexis, a man of “fearful temper, childish caprices. . . . impetuous . . . moods.” His Tartar blood has made him a tyrant; he is mad for “wolves, ... ice and . . . barbarous delights.” He has the “savage strength and spirit of one in whose veins flowed the blood of men reared in tents, and born to lead wild lives in a wild land.” What more delicious foil could be invented for Mademoiselle Sybil Varna, the slender, pale-faced English teacher in a Pensionnat pour Demoiselles who was “bent on” having her own way?
[42.] “Taming a Tartar,” Frank Leslie's Illustrated A e
vcspaper (30 November, and 7, 14, and 21 December 1867), i66-i<57, 186-187, 202-203, 219. See Louisa Max Alcott, A Modern Mephislophetes and Taming a Tartar, ed. Madeleine B. Stern (New York: Praeger, 1987).
The contest between the two constitutes the entire plot of the tale. The question is not who will yield to whom, the answer to which is implicit in the title, but how long the struggle will take and what steps the taming process will encompass. Each round in the battle of wills becomes more intense: The first bout concerns the trifling question of the return to St. Petersburg; the second, the prince’s cruelty to his hound. As she succeeds in these minor conflicts, Sybil gains a renewed sense of her power. “Once conquer his will, . . . and I had gained a power possessed by no other person. I liked the trial.”
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