Any observant woman of the time was aware of the inequality of the sexes in the economic world, in government, in law, in marriage, and in the home. Taxed but not represented, the woman of mid-nineteenth-century America lived in an antifeminist world in which the war between the sexes could be carried on far more successfully in fiction than in life.

 

[40.] Karen Halttunen, "The Domestic Drama of Louisa May Alcott," Feminist Studies 10:2 (Summer 1984): 233.

[41.] See Louisa May Alcott, "How I Went Out to Service," The Independent 26 (4 June 1874); Behind a Mask, pp. ix-x.

 

            Most of the narratives in A Double Life are basically exercises in that struggle. Because she was so gifted a writer, Louisa Alcott portrayed that fight with intriguing diversity, creating many variations on the dominant theme. In “A Pair of Eyes” the conflict between man and woman is reduced to a simplistic level: It becomes a matter of responding to or resisting telepathic commands. Supremely significant is the fact that it is the woman w ho mesmerizes, the man who is mesmerized. Agatha confesses to Max that she used her powers until she had “subjugated” his “arrogant spirit,” to make herself master. “Henceforth you are the slave of the ring, and w hen I command vou must obey. . . . You have brought this fate upon yourself, accept it, submit to it, for I have bought you with my wealth, I hold vou with mv mystic art, and hotly and soul, Max Erdmann, you are mine!” For all the man’s resistance, in the end the w oman conquers. Here, as in most of these tales, the reiteration of certain words alerts the reader to the authors intention: power, shivery, waster, slave, subjugate, submit, subject, compter, control. The words signal the recurrent theme.

            Even in “The Fate of the Forrests,” in which Stahl exercises his power with the aid of Hindu Thuggee, the villain-hero realizes that, though he brings Ursula to submission, he can never bring her to love. In effect he has lost his slave and found a master — a subtle variation on the power struggle motif.

            The conflict in “A Double Tragedy” exonerates, for the reader at least, Clotilde of the murder of her husband. The husband, St. John, is an arrogant lord of creation who regards his wife with the “pride which a master bestow s upon a handsome slave.” I Ie is certain she will “submit with a good grace” and return to him. “1 am convinced,” he smugly remarks, “it would be best for this adorable woman to submit without defiance or delay — and I do think she w ill.” Of course she does not. Instead, armed with her writers anger, Louisa Alcott turns Clotilde into a murderess who annihilates the male contender.

            It is in the last of the shockers in A Double Life that the struggle is most explicit and most dramatic.[42] From the start of “ Faming a Tartar” — indeed from its very title — the authors purpose is made clear. The Tartar is the “swarthy, black-eyed, scarlet-lipped” Prince Alexis, a man of “fearful temper, childish caprices. . . . impetuous . . . moods.” His Tartar blood has made him a tyrant; he is mad for “wolves, ... ice and . . . barbarous delights.” He has the “savage strength and spirit of one in whose veins flowed the blood of men reared in tents, and born to lead wild lives in a wild land.” What more delicious foil could be invented for Mademoiselle Sybil Varna, the slender, pale-faced English teacher in a Pensionnat pour Demoiselles who was “bent on” having her own way?

 

[42.] “Taming a Tartar,” Frank Leslie's Illustrated A evcspaper (30 November, and 7, 14, and 21 December 1867), i66-i<57, 186-187, 202-203, 219. See Louisa Max Alcott, A Modern Mephislophetes and Taming a Tartar, ed.