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.