John, so maddens the actress Clotilde Varian, who is in love with the actor Paul Lamar, that she murders her spouse. When Paul becomes aware of her guilt, he finds her abhorrent: “What devil devised and helped you execute a crime like this?” Following the murder, the two enact the only tragedy possible under the circumstances: Romeo and Juliet. On the night of the performance, Clotilde performs Juliet to the life and kills herself on stage. Paul Lamar never acts again.

            When Louisa Alcott was given a free pass to the Boston Theatre, she was also conducted by the manager all over the building on Boston’s Washington Street. She was shown how a dancing floor could be fitted over the 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. . . .