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Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott,

Madeleine B. Stern (Editor)

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Jul 08, 2023 Werner rated it it was amazing

Shelves: classics, short-stories, general-fiction

Louisa May Alcott is best known for her Little Women trilogy, Realist novels of staid, mostly conventional and loving family life in New England in the years during and after the Civil War. In the same era, Realism was rising to claim the throne of literary respectability in American letters, supplanting the style of the previously dominant Romantic school. Rising writers who wanted to earn accolades from the critical clerisy of that day had to adopt the Realist goal (that is, to faithfully depi Louisa May Alcott is best known for her Little Women trilogy, Realist novels of staid, mostly conventional and loving family life in New England in the years during and after the Civil War. In the same era, Realism was rising to claim the throne of literary respectability in American letters, supplanting the style of the previously dominant Romantic school. Rising writers who wanted to earn accolades from the critical clerisy of that day had to adopt the Realist goal (that is, to faithfully depict the contours of everyday modern life as it's ordinarily lived) and style. Alcott was quite successful in doing so, and she does it with a depth and skill that suggests that it was not just an affected pretense she engaged in only for critical brownie points. Telling the realistic story of the March family, and especially of Jo, her fictional alter ego, was a genuine, true aspect of her literary vision, and very close to her heart. But it wasn't the only true and genuine aspect of her vision.... :-)

Readers of Little Women know that Jo, as a budding writer, wrote (gasp!) some rather lurid and melodramatic thrillers in the now ever-so-disparaged Romantic mode. In the book, she repents of her literary sin, and vows to do better. Serious literary detective work in the 20th century revealed that one of many aspects in which Jo resembled Louisa was in their literary endeavors; the latter had written quite a number of tales in the same mold as those her fictional heroine penned, mostly anonymously or under pen names. (While Jo's 1868 avowal of repentance may have been genuine for the character, her author was still secretly writing in the same vein as late as 1870.) The depth and skill of craftsmanship and psychological insight she brought to these tales is no less than that which she brought to her Realist novels. This part of her corpus was also no thrown-together hackwork done just for the money (though it did bring in some money, at a time when the Alcott household needed it). Rather, the exploration of human moral and psychological possibilities (for both good and evil), family dysfunction and gender inter-dynamics, often through unusual and extreme situations, and in ways that frankly seek to elicit an emotional reaction from the reader, was also a true and genuine expression of her vision and creativity, part of her nature as much as was the quieter, more “realistic” chronicler of the everyday world.

In all, she wrote a corpus of 29 stories in the “sensational,” or Romantic mode. The complete 780-page collection, Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers was finally published in 1995 under the editorship of independent scholar Madeleine Stern, who was largely responsible for unearthing most of these unjustly forgotten works. Originally published 20 years earlier, and also edited by Stern, the collection reviewed here (which I first read in 1989, so my just completed read was my second) includes just four of those stories, and basically serves as an appetizer for the main course. (Which I'll definitely add to my to-read shelf ASAP!). Written between 1863-1867 (the dates are given in the roughly four pages of documentary end-notes to the Introduction), the four selections here are the title story, “Behind a Mask, or, A Woman's Power” (1866), the longest story here at 105 pages; “Pauline's Passion and Punishment,” (1863), the only one of the tales here that has illustrations, apparently done for the original magazine printing, and the shortest one at around 48 pages; “The Mysterious Key and What It Opened” (1867), which the author actually allowed to be published under her real name; and “The Abbot's Ghost, or, Maurice Treherne's Temptation.”

A friend of Alcott's, L. C. Pickett, who years later recounted (in his 1916 book Across My Path: Memories of People I Have Known) a revealing conversation he'd had with her, recalled her as saying, ”I think my natural ambition is for the lurid style. I indulge in gorgeous fancies and wish that I dared inscribe them upon my pages and set them before the public.... How should I dare to interfere with the proper grayness of old Concord? The dear old town has never known a startling hue since the redcoats were there. Far be it from me to inject an inharmonious color into the neutral tint.... To have had Mr. Emerson for an intellectual god all one's life is to be invested with a chain armor of propriety.... I shall always be a wretched victim to the respectable traditions of Concord.” (In an earlier letter to her friend Alf Whitman, she also contrasted the sort of “blood and thunder” tales she was proposing to write with “moral” works.) She's undoubtedly not the only author, then and now, who's felt hemmed in artistically by the constraint of not wanting to lay bare all of the scenarios he/she could imagine, and take creative pride in constructing, before the possibly scandalized and censorious gaze of family and friends!

These comments can easily be misunderstood, though, to create a false impression and expectation of what these stories are. They're definitely not the work of a writer who, in Dame Edith Pargeter's phrase, “take[s] pleasure in evil,” nor do they seek to make evil attractive to the reader. All four of the stories have a solid moral compass; but it operates in the context of dark situations, where characters may be facing temptations, and dealing with feelings, such as unbridled desire for vengeance or determination to marry for money, that wouldn't be openly discussed in typical Concord parlors. Here we have female characters who may display a great deal of self-direction and agency (qualities 19th-century males didn't necessarily admire in women!), and not always for good ends or by good methods. Not everybody in these tales is always operating in an ethical fashion, and violence and scandal may be real possibilities. Of course, “Realist” dogma notwithstanding, that doesn't necessarily make them “unrealistic;” all of these elements are part of the real world –they're just parts that the Realist movement of that day deliberately chose not to include much in its portrayal of reality. The light of moral reality shines the most vividly against a dark background; Alcott masterfully gives us both. So a “blood and thunder” tale actually may be quite a solidly moral tale as well, and these are; they just aren't the kind of “moral” story where everybody sets a saccharine-sweet moral example, and they promote their message not so much by a tepid intellectual appeal as by the engagement of powerful emotions such as anger, horror, sorrow, fear, pity and compassion, hope, joy, and vicarious romantic attraction. And like life, they may give us tragedy or happy endings (or elements of both).

All of the stories utilize omniscient third person narration. “Pauline's Passion and Punishment” begins in Cuba and then moves to the U.S.; the other three stories are set in England, in the milieu of the landed gentry. Many typical Romantic, and even Gothic, elements are present in the various stories; but the stories all also have a richly-depicted tapestry of realistic social interactions, in many places, these works have the flavor of a novel of manners in the mold of Austen or Henry James. The titular abbot's ghost in the final story is “real” (for purposes of the story), but doesn't play a big role; otherwise, these are stories of the real world, albeit a real world that can be home to mysterious keys, concealed identities, secrets sinister and otherwise, and hidden agendas. Alcott excels in the creation of highly believable, three-dimensional characters, who are mostly morally gray characters, adding to the considerable interest of the tales, and to their moral complexity. We don't have any totally morally black-hatted characters (even among the “villains,” and who the latter are might be debatable at times), and few totally white-hatted ones. (19th-century attitudes of classism, ableism, ethnic stereotypes, and the realities of gender roles are sometimes reflected, but there's no illicit sex or bad language in any of the selections.) Every one of the four stories packs a very powerful emotional wallop, and this is appealing to me, as a reader who, overall, tends to prefer the Romantic over the Realist school.

Stern's Introduction is a bit over 21 pages long, and --based on the parts of it that I read-- is accessible (no scholarly jargon here!), illuminating, and chock-full of information about Alcott's life, including much that I didn't previously know. (She also wrote a well-received 1971 biography of Alcott, and had access to her subject's papers and correspondence.) However, even after reading this book, I read only part of the Introduction, since it not only has spoilers for the stories here, but for other Alcott stories as well! (The much shorter Afterword, on the other hand, is just an assessment of the spike in critical and pop-cultural awareness of Alcott caused by this collection's first publication.) ...more

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May 31, 2011 Alandra marked it as to-read

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