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[31.] Taylor Stoehr, "
Hawthorne
and Mesmerism,"
Huntington
Library Quarterly 33:1
(November 1969): 37.

[32.]
"Miss Alcott on Mind-Cure," Woman's Journal
16:16
(
18 April 1885
): 121.

 

 
          
During
the eighteenth century, “the great enchanter” Franz Anton Mesmer had developed
a theory of hypnotism based upon the existence of some magnetic force or fluid
that permeated the universe and insinuated itself into the nervous system of
man. This force he called animal magnetism. The theory, introduced to
Boston
, had created a furor, and the pseudoscience
originated by Mesmer attracted a stream of followers in this country —
mesmerists and clairvoyants, etherologists and psvehometrists, along with a fascinated
if sometimes skeptical public. Among the last were Nathaniel Hawthorne, who,
while rejecting the hocus-pocus, was much taken up with such matters as the
evil eye; and Edgar Allan Poe,
whose
“Mesmeric
Revelation” consisted of a dialogue between magnetizer and magnetized and ended
with the death of the sleepwalker. As for Louisa Alcott’s revered neighbor
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the god of her early idolatry, he reacted to the
pseudoscience with characteristic equanimity, writing: “Mesmerism, which broke
into the inmost shrines, attempted the explanation of miracle and prophecy, as
well as of creation. ...
a
certain success attended
it. . . . It was human, it was genial,
it
affirmed
unity and connection between remote points.”
[33]
Alcott was well
aware of all these points of view. Moreover, she had access to the library of
books eventually published on such subjects as electrical psychology, magnetic
revelation, and mesmeric influence. She was drawn to the theme, as Hawthorne
and Poe had been drawn. She perceived, as
Hawthorne
especially perceived, the violation of the
human soul that might result from the penetrating intrusions of the mesmerist.
And whether she believed in it or was skeptical, she knew that the subject of
mesmerism would make a colorful thread to weave into a sensation tale.

 
          
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 century 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.

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