Alcott, Louisa May - SSC 20 (3 page)

[20.] For the Fuseli suggestion I am
grateful to Charles Colbert of
Newton
,
Massachusetts
. See also Caroline Keay,
Henry Fuseli (New York: St. Martins Press, 1974), p. 29, No. 24: Lady Macbeth
sleepwalking. Alcott's interest in art persisted. See, for example, Louisa May
Alcott, Diana & Persis, ed. Sarah Elbert (New York: Arno Press, 1978). In
that "art novel," Persis, modeled upon May Alcott, is the young woman
painter, while the character of Diana is based upon the sculptor Harriet
Hosmer.

[21.] Comic Tragedies Written by
fo
" and "Aleg' and Acted by the "Little
Women" (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893).

[22.] Louisa Mav Alcott to Amos Bronson
Alcott, 28 November [1855],
The
Selected Letters of
Louisa May Alcott, eds. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy (Boston: Little, Brown,
1987).

[23.] Cheney, pp. 99 and 113. As late as
1886, in her last domestic novel, Jo’s Boys, Alcott created in the actress Miss
Cameron "a near-translation" of Charlotte Cushman. See Joseph Leach,
Bright Particular Star: The Life & Times of Charlotte Cushman (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale Universitv Press, 1970), p. 283.

 
          
Charlotte
Cushman was of course a famous Lady Macbeth, and Louisa Alcott was becoming a
connoisseur of Macbeth performers. Of Edwin Forrest she commented: “Tho Forrest
does not act Shakespere well the beauty of the play shines thro the badly represented
parts, & imagining what I should like to see, I can make up a better
Macbeth . . . than Forrest with his gaspings & shoutings can give me. '
^[24]
Alcott confined her own greenroom roles to those in comedies and farces. In her
sensational stories she also indulged in melodrama and tragedy, and even
attempted to “make up a better Macbeth.”

 
          
Macbeth
pervades much of Alcott’s “A Pair of Eyes.” That story opens in the theater
where the artist Max Erdmann and the woman who is to mesmerize him are both
watching a performance of that tragedy. The painting of Lady Macbeth that
Erdmann finally completes, haying used Agatha Eure as his model, crashes from
the w all during the second and last installment — a symbolic omen of the
tragedy that is to follow.

 
          
In
place of
Macbeth
,
The Tempest
provided Alcott with suggestions
for her “Ariel. A Legend of the Lighthouse,
”
^[
25]
the only one of these five tales in which setting is more important than plot,
character, or theme. Indeed, as in
The Tempest
itself, an enchanted
island surrounded by “deep water, heavy surf and a spice of danger” dominates
all three. Out of the background emerges the character of Alcott’s Ariel, to
whom the author prophetically gave the surname March. And out of the background
arise many of the plot developments: Ariel’s life on the island; her love of
the hero Philip Southesk, himself “as changeable as the ocean” he loves so
well; the revelation of their true identities; their thwarted romance; and
finally their happy reunion.

[24.] Louisa May Alcott to Amos Bronson
Alcott, 28 November [1855J, The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott.

[25.] "Ariel. A Legend of the
Lighthouse," Frank Leslie's Chimucy Corner 14 and
15 July 1865
), 81-83, 99-101.

 
          
If
the author based her background upon scenes near
Gloucester
,
Massachusetts
, where she camped out on
Norman
’s Woe
,
^[
26]
she found much else in Shakespeare’s
Tempest.
Throughout this “Legend of
the Lighthouse” there are overt and covert allusions to Shakespeare’s play. In
much of the conversation and characterization, the source is obvious. Philip,
for example, comments to Ariel: “It only needs a Miranda to make a modern
version of the Tempest,” and she replies: “Perhaps I am to lead you to her as
the real Ariel led Ferdinand to Miranda. ...” When Philip asks Ariel what she
knows of Shakespeare, she answers: “I know and love Shakespeare better than any
of my other
books,
and can sing every song he wrote.”
Indeed, she frequently sings “Oh, come unto the yellow sands,” an appropriate
lyric for one who is “a spirit singing to itself between sea and sky.” Philip’s
gift to his beloved Ariel is “a beautiful volume of Shakespeare, daintily
bound, richly illustrated,” and as he sketches, she reads. Gazing at “a fine
illustration of the Tempest,” she remarks: “Here we all are! Prospero is not
unlike my father, but Ferdinand is much plainer than you. Here’s Ariel swinging
in a vine, as I’ve often done, and Caliban watching her. ...” Alcott’s
narrative adaptation is complete to its Caliban, the lighthouse keeper’s
humpbacked companion, whose massive head is set upon a stunted body and who
loves Ariel and wreaks much evil.

 
          
On
the nineteenth-century American stage, theatergoers could w atch a winged Ariel
fly in and out of the scenes of
The Tempest
on “visible ropes.”
^[27]
In
Frank Leslies Chimney Corner
, readers of sensation stories could
enjoy a ryiodern
version of that play
ingeniously
contrived bv the future author of
Little Women.

[26.] See Louisa May Alcott, unpublished
journals (by permission of the Houghton Library,
Harvard
University
), August 1864, and Cheney,
p. 159, for the fortnight in
Gloucester
. For scenes similar to
those described in "Ariel. A Legend of the Lighthouse," see Charles
Boardman Hawes, Gloucester by Land and Sea: The Story of a New England Seacoast
Town (Boston: Little, Brown, 1923); Edward Rowe Snow, Famous New England
Lighthouses (Boston: Yankee Publishing Company, 1945); John S. Webber, Jr., In
and Around Cape Ann (Gloucester: Cape Ann Advertiser Office, 1885), p. 36 md
passim.

[27.] Charles H. Shattuck, Shakespeare on
the American Stage from the Hallams to Edwin Booth (Washington: Folger
Shakespeare Library, 1976), p. 114.

 
          
The
great British actor David Garrick succeeded in reducing Shakespeare’s
Taming
of the Shrew
to a three-act farce called
Katharine and Petruchio,
which was performed from time to time at the Boston Theatre
.
^[
28]
Since the author of “The Rival Prima Donnas” had a pass to the Boston, she
might well have enjoyed Garrick’s adaptation of Shakespeare upon several
occasions and been moved to write her own modern version. This she did in “d
arning a Tartar,” the “wild Russian story” she contributed to
Frank Leslie's
Illustrated Newspaper.
Her Russian melodrama is a well-paced, neatly
plotted story of the power struggle between the defiant, fearless, freedom-
loving Sybil Varna and the Slavic autocrat Prince Alexis Demidoff, whose Tartar
blood has made him a tyrant. Step by step, in bout after bout, her Petruchio
succumbs to her Katharine, feminism rises victorious, and where William
Shakespeare tamed a shrew, Miss Alcott tames a Tartar.

 
          
It
is, however, in the story Louisa Alcott contributed to the first issue of
Frank
Leslie's Chimney Corner
that her devotion to the theater and her
preoccupation with Shakespeare are crystallized. “A Double Tragedy” is
precisely what its subtitle indicates: “An Actor’s Story.”
^[29]
Phis,
the shortest of the narratives in
A Double Life
, is quintessential^ a
story of the stage. It opens with a performance by the tw o protagonists —
loyers in life as well as on the stage — in “a Spanish play” whose cast
includes a lover disguised as a monk, a Grand Inquisitor, and a stern old duke
and whose plot involves a state secret, a duel, and long immurement in a
dungeon. What Spanish play had Alcott in mind? Her Spanish play seems to have
derived more from her own early dramatic effort performed in the
Concord
barn and entitled “The Captive of Castile”
than from any extant professional drama. During the nightmares that accompanied
her illness after serving at the
Union
Hotel
Hospital
, Alcott had had visions of a “stout,
handsome Spaniard” who pursued her, “appearing out of closets, in at windows,
or threatening me dreadfully all night long.”
^[30]
Perhaps the shade
of that Spaniard was upon her.

[28.] Ibid., p. xi. See also, for the
performances of the time and Alcott s addiction to the theater, Cheney, p. 65;
Madeleine B. Stern, "Louisa Alcott, Trouper," New England Quarterly
16:2 (June 1943): 188; Stern, Louisa May Alcott, p. 78; Eugene Tompkins, The
History of the Boston Theatre 1834-1901 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908).

[29.] "A Double Tragedy. An Actors
Story," Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner
3 June 1865
), 1-3.

[30.] Louisa May Alcott, unpublished
journals (by permission of the Houghton Library,
Harvard
University
), [January] 1863, and
Cheney, pp. 146-147.

 
          
Whatever
sources may have contributed to the Spanish play that opens “A Double Tragedy,”
there is no doubt about the play that shaped its architecture. The sudden
reappearance of her husband,
St. John
, so maddens the actress Clotilde Varian,
who is in love with the actor Paul Lamar, that she murders her spouse. When
Paul becomes aware of her guilt, he finds her abhorrent: “What devil devised
and helped you execute a crime like this?” Following the murder, the two enact
the only tragedy possible under the circumstances:
Romeo and Juliet.
On
the night of the performance, Clotilde performs Juliet to the life and kills
herself on stage. Paul Lamar never acts again.

 
          
When
Louisa Alcott was given a free pass to the Boston Theatre, she was also
conducted by the manager all over the building on
Boston
’s
Washington Street
. She was shown how a dancing floor could be
fitted over the orchestra chairs and the house converted into a ballroom, and
she was introduced to the mysteries of theatrical apparatus and effects. In “A
Double Tragedy” a platform has been hastily built for the launching of an
aerial car in some grand spectacle; there is also a roped gallery from which
there is a fine view of the stage. This area becomes the scene of Clotilde’s
murder of her husband. She simply cuts the rope that would have protected him
from falling. And so, having studied the secrets behind the scenes of the
Boston Theatre, Alcott shaped them to her own dramatic purposes.

 
          
Clotilde
Varian’s acting credo has much in common with Louisa May Alcott’s credo as a
writer of sensational fiction. Actors, Clotilde believed, must have neither
hearts nor nerves while on stage. As an actress “she seldom played a part twice
alike, and left much to the inspiration of the moment.” She held that an actor
must learn to live a double life. Louisa Alcott also, often relying upon the
inspiration of the moment, seldom wrote a sensational story twice alike. In
this particular story she created her own “hapless Italian lovers” who “never
found better representatives” than in Clotilde and Paul that night. Juliet’s
grave clothes became Clotilde’s. The “mimic tragedy . . . slowly darkened to
its close.”

 
          
The
world of art and the world of the theater were entwined in Alcott’s double
life. So too was a more dangerous art. The third of Louisa Alcott’s sensational
themes was named after an Austrian physician and was known to the nineteenth
century as mesmerism.

 
          
Although
Alcott’s
involvement with art and with the stage are
easily traceable to their sources in her life, her interest in mesmerism seems
to have developed as a shared interest of her time rather than from personal
experience. It is true that, toward the end of her life, when mesmerism had
taken a “religious turn, in spiritualism and in Christian Science,
”
^[
31]
Alcott did submit to a treatment
called mind cure to rid herself of various ills. She found the treatment
interesting and described it for the
Woman's Journal:
“No effect was
felt except sleepiness for the first few times; then mesmeric sensations
occasionally came, sunshine in the head, a sense of walking on the air, and slight
trances, when it was impossible to stir for a few moments.”
^[32]
During the 1880s, when she was trying this mind cure, was Louisa Alcott
remembering the 1860s, when she had used mesmerism as a pivot in a sensational
story?