In Alcott's version, the heroine, Gladys, possesses a purity that's endangered by the machinations of a jaded aristocrat, Jasper Helwyze.

Helwyze liked to see her [Gladys] among the flowers; for there was something peculiarly innocent and fresh about her then, as if the woman forgot her griefs, and was a girl again. It struck him anew, as she stood there in the sunshine, leaning down to tend the soft leaves and cherish the delicate buds with a caressing hand.
"Like seeks like: you are a sort of cyclamen yourself . . . the likeness is quite striking. . . . This is especially like you," continued Helwyze, touching one of the freshest. "Out of these strong sombre leaves rises a wraith-like blossom, with white, softly folded petals, a rosy color on its modest face, and a most sweet perfume for those whose sense is fine enough to perceive it. Most of all, perhaps, it resembles you in this--it hides its heart, and, if one tries to look too closely, there is danger of snapping the slender stem."

Here, as in her other stories, Alcott employs flower imagery to symbolize the beauty and fragility of the human soul, and insect imagery as a similitude for the delicate though enduring quality of women's work--indeed, Alcott often referred to herself as "spinning tales like a spider."

There's a secret at the heart of A Modern Mephistopheles that I suspect will be difficult for today's readers to guess (at least it was for me). In any case, the tale can be read a number of ways, including allegorically. To me, Jasper Helwyze represents the kind of malevolent cynicism that ultimately destroys innocence, even that of children.

In another long story, "V. V.; or Plots and Counterplots," Alcott examines the evil nature of women--particularly women who use their beauty and intelligence to serve their own selfish ends. Alcott's descriptive powers help prepare the way for the melodramatic elements of the story, thereby making them more palatable, and sometimes even arresting:

Everything about her was peculiar and piquant. Her dress was of that vivid, silvery green, which is so ruinous to any but the purest complexion, so ravishing when worn by one whose fresh bloom defies all hues. The skirt swept long behind her, and the Pompadour waist, with its flowing sleeves, displayed a neck and arms of dazzling fairness, half concealed by a film of costly lace. No jewels but an antique opal ring, attached by a slender chain to a singular bracelet, or wide band of enchased gold. A single deep-hued flower glowed on her bosom, and in that wonderful hair of hers, a chaplet of delicate ferns seemed to gather back the cloud of curls, and encircle coil upon coil of glossy hair, that looked as if it burdened her small head.

This is, of course, a more florid writing style than any that prevails today, although it's certainly consistent with Alcott's exotic settings and characters. As scholars have noted, there was a theatrical side to her nature--she flirted with the idea of becoming an actress--that seemed to require an occasional respite from the mundane. Perhaps this is the reason so many of her characters wear masks, and why she was so profoundly aware of the tensions between the exterior self and interior self, tensions that figure prominently in her gothic prose. Perhaps it's also the reason so many of her tales have a rich European or English setting. Considering the fact that she was brought up in a household of strong democratic beliefs and practices, these same aristocratic leanings must have posed some uncertainties. After all, her father, Bronson Alcott, was a close friend of Emerson (Emerson referred to him as "a tedious archangel"), who in the 1830s had called for an indigenous American literature, and also of Thoreau, who in Walden had the will and vision to make Emerson's call a reality.

Yet what did "indigenous literature" mean to a female writer of this period except in strictly domestic terms, and what did a woman's skills have to do with taming a wilderness or describing a backwoods culture that was predominantly male? Even Hawthorne recognized the problem. "No author, without a trial," he earlier observed, "can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight." For Alcott, the artistic dilemma must have been doubly perplexing. Where were the customs, artifices, airs, and psychological nuances that would occupy Edith Wharton decades later? Her chief recourse--unless she wished to go on writing endless extensions of Little Women--was to seek creative impetus elsewhere, and this is what she did. (This impetus, by the way, had its commercial aspect: like today's celebrity worship, the burgeoning middle class wished to read about their "betters.")

Her demons, too, were almost always highborn, or at the very least, cosmopolitan--it was as if she sent her New World morality abroad to combat Old World pathologies. If so, morality invariably won, though not without considerable sacrifice--a struggle that, incidentally, figured in the trajectory of Alcott's own career. She never married, and although she enjoyed a certain amount of success, she also suffered numerous rejections, and some of her stories remained unpublished during her lifetime.

So what does this literary "spinning spider" have to teach us today? What can we learn from her stories? Though her tenacity of purpose and willingness to experiment both are traits to admire, she is, above all, a superb storyteller. She was one of the first "popular" female writers to recast traditional classics, such as Faust and Pilgrim's Progress, in order to examine women's roles; in this sense, it's little wonder that feminists have claimed her as their own.