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.

 

[39.] Meadows Taylor, The Confessions of a Thug, ed. F. Yeats-Brown (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1938). See also, for Thugs, Thuggism, and Kali, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. XIV, pp. 412-413; vol. XV, p. 641; vol. XXVI, p. 896.

 

            Perhaps the most interesting Thuggist regulation in Louisa Alcott’s view was that regarding women. According to the rites of the confederacy, a woman could not be killed. Hence Stahl cannot and will not murder Ursula directly. The fate he inflicts upon her becomes a fate worse than death. Thus Stahl’s black art and power are explained as the Indian goddess of destruction is propitiated in a brew concocted by the future author of the Little Women series.

            In “The Fate of the Forrests” Evan and Stahl ostensibly contend, “like spirits of good and evil,” for the beautiful Ursula. In rcalitv, the struggle takes place where it almost inevitably does in Alcott sensation stories, between the man and the woman, between Stahl, representing Eastern vengeance and brutality, and Ursula, who wins only through dying. In succumbing to Stahl but never returning his passion, Ursula is “both mistress and slave.”

            Louisa Alcott made much of the theme of slave and master in her thrillers, and the power struggle between the sexes runs like a scarlet thread consistently through most of these stories. In varying degrees the woman is victorious, until, in the final narrative of A Double Life, “Faming a Tartar,” she reigns supreme.

            Interested as she was in the arts of painting and the theater and in the blacker arts of mesmerism and Thuggee, Alcott was dominated by the theme of the conflict between men and women. Her fascination with the relations between master and slave is explained to some extent by episodes of her early life, but bv and large her interest in the subject was pragmatic, professional, designed to satisfy subscribers to Leslie periodicals. In her hands involvement with sexual conflict became an enormously productive literary theme.

            Attempts have been made from time to time to analyze the often contradictory relationship between Louisa Alcott and her father Bronson. As one scholar commented recently, “Louisa May Alcott seized upon melodrama as a source of emotional excitement and catharsis, which she indulged in as part of her rebellion against her father’s utopian domestic ideal. The family stage thus became an important arena for the well-known conflict between father and daughter.”[40] An outcome of the love-hate relationship that doubtless existed between Louisa and Bronson, this discord was due in large measure to differences in temperament between the rebellious, independent, hardworking daughter and the idealistic, philosophic dreamer who was her father. Louisa’s rebellion was surely intensified when she witnessed the effects of Bronson’s inability to earn a living upon her mother and her sisters. This background, tempestuous though always tinged with love, was in itself a power struggle of sorts and in all likelihood helped germinate the battles she would imagine for her characters.

            The seven weeks spent by the nineteen-year-old Louisa Alcott as a domestic servant in Dedham, Massachusetts, must have brought to a crescendo the conflict she had experienced at home. In Dedham the conflict of wills was between a young and inexperienced girl and her taskmaster-pursuer James Richardson, whose demands went beyond the drudgeries of domestic service. Stored in her writer’s mind, this experience would later provide kindling for the inflammatory theme of the power struggle.[41]

            In addition to these personal experiences, the climate of the 1850s gave Alcott cause for the anger she would infuse into her theme.