Alcott, Louisa May - SSC 20 Read Online Free Page A

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?
     
    [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. .