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AlcottWeb: Reference Shelf: News: Memphis Commercial Appeal |
| AlcottWeb: Home | Alcott potboiler has interesting subtext Peggy Burch The Commercial Appeal 10/08/95 The Commercial Appeal Memphis, TN Page G4 Copyright, 1998, The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tennessee. Used with permission. No republication of this article in any media (print, electronic or otherwise) is authorized without the express, written permission of the copyright holder. http://www.gomemphis.com A Long Fatal Love Chase is the kind of novel Louisa May Alcott chastised herself for writing in Little Women. In the latter book, the most famous of her domestic novels, Alcott's fictional counterpart, Jo March, begins to write "thrilling tales" to satisfy the tastes of her publishers. Jo remarks that since "thrills could not be produced except by harrowing up the souls of the readers, history and romance, land and sea, science and art, police records and lunatic asylums had to be ransacked for the purpose." Alcott's resources for learning about the dark side of life were fairly limited to the honorable poverty her family endured in mid-19th Century Concord, Mass., where her father, Bronson Alcott, was a fixture in an intellectual community that included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. In Little Women, recognizing that her simple upbringing had ill-prepared her to churn out the sensational stuff she wanted to peddle to magazines, Jo/Louisa studied newspapers and went to the library to learn about "folly, sin and misery." At first blush, A Long Fatal Love Chase seems to be the product of such studies, a somewhat naive concoction of all the prescribed ingredients of the Gothic romance. It begins on a dark and stormy night, on an English island where a beautiful 18-year-old orphan named Rosamond is kept by her irascible grandfather. A mysterious man with a scar on his forehead, a former pupil of the old man, arrives suddenly. The stranger looks curiously familiar; the girl blurts out that he resembles the portrait of Mephistopheles which hangs in the hall. The storm rages. Rosamond observes that she loves tempests. The stranger reveals that his name is Tempest. From this moment, Rosamond's life is, of course, tempestuous. The book delivers the goods the title promises. There is a long chase, proceeding from Italy to France to Germany and back to England; from villa paradise to remote convent to noisy lunatic asylum. A number of fatalities occur. The admirable heroine is hunted by a villain whose character is not complicated by conscience, which sets him free for some fabulous swaggering. Explaining why he is reduced to bribing a priest, Tempest complains that "in these days one cannot sack a convent as in the chivalrous old times." The story, full of dark secrets, hidden pasts and fantastic coincidences, partakes of the excesses and pleasures of romances in the Gothic tradition. Alcott, driven by her family's financial need as well as her literary ambition, became an adept at the form, and previous collections of her works in this genre include A Double Life: Newly Discovered Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott and Plots and Counterplots: More Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott, both edited by Madeleine Stern. This latest manuscript was purchased at auction by Kent Bicknell, headmaster of a New Hampshire country day school, who edited the text. It is, as Random House asserts in sensational capital letters, "The Never Before Published Novel," because it was considered too shocking when Alcott submitted it for publication in 1866. Behind the Gothic facade lies an interesting perspective on the plight of young women in Alcott's time. Love Chase is a sort of captivity novel, the prototype of which is Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, in which an upper-middle-class English girl is imprisoned at her family's estate by her father, then "rescued" by a depraved aristocrat who constrains her in a whorehouse, drugs her and rapes her. Alcott's Rosamond also is, for practical purposes, a prisoner, kept by a rapacious grandfather who hopes to get her inheritance. When she is disenchanted with this villain, she must resort to disguises and flight. As a young adult, Alcott had tried many ways to make a living, many of which she describes in an autobiographical novel called Work, and she was conscious of the restrictions imposed on the most independent and adventurous of her sex. Before Alcott's heroine in Love Chase is bartered away by her relative, she considers the possibilities of making her own way. She could "Turn governess and drudge (her) youth away as most indigent gentlewomen do." Or become an actress or a seamstress. Or she could take the well-worn path of least resistance: marriage. The fact that she chooses the last option is her undoing.
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