Alcott, Louisa May - SSC 14 Read Free Page A

were violent enough and her
backdrops remote enough to merit classification in the Gothic genre, Louisa was
principally concerned with character. Of all the characters she adumbrated in
these narratives the one who came most completely to life and who obviously was
as intriguing to her author as to readers was the passionate, richly sexual
femme fatale who had a mysterious past, an electrifying present, and a
revengeful future. In such a heroine—so different from the submissive heroine
of the Gothic formula—Louisa May Alcott could distill her passion for dramatics
and her feminist anger at a world of James Richardsons. At the same time she
could win a sorely needed hundred dollars.
                 In
“Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” as in all the Alcott thrillers, the reader
is immediately introduced to problems of character rather than of plot. The
suspense lies less in what the heroine will do than in what the heroine is,
although both considerations become entwined as the character develops and the
plot advances. In a fascinating opening, the anonymous author places onstage
her Pauline, a proud and passionate woman who has lost all—fortune and, as a
result of one man’s perfidy, love. She is left with her fury and her desire for
revenge, emotions which become the motivating forces in an ironic plot.
                 Against
the background of an exotic paradise, a green wilderness where the tamarind
vies with the almond tree, the spotlight falls upon Pauline Valary, pacing “to
and fro, like a wild creature in its cage,” a “handsome woman, with bent head,
locked hands, and restless steps.” She is a woman scorned by her lover, Gilbert
Redmond, who has abandoned her for a moneyed bride. In swift course she arouses
the devotion of the sensitive, young, southern romantic Manuel, who, attracted
by her implicit sexuality, becomes not only her husband but her accomplice in
the intended destruction of Gilbert Redmond. She does not plan Gilbert’s murder
but some more subtle revenge. “There are fates more terrible than death,
weapons more keen than poniards, more noiseless than pistols. . . . Leave Gilbert to remorse—and me.” And so, on page 1 of her
thriller, the already skillful author has sketched in her characters,
spotlighted her heroine, set her scene, and suggested a suspenseful plot.
                 The
suspense mounts in the search for Gilbert and the dramatic encounter with him
and his bride. The character is embroidered as Pauline’s “woman’s tongue”
avenges her and “with feminine skill” she “mutely conveys the rebuke she would
not trust herself to utter, by stripping the glove from the hand he had
touched, and dropping it disdainfully.” The meeting of Gilbert and Pauline is
the meeting of man and woman, a meeting in which Pauline silently accepts
Gilbert’s challenge to the “tournament so often held between man and woman —a
tournament where the keen tongue is the lance, pride the shield, passion the
fiery steed, and the hardest heart the winner of the prize, which seldom fails
to prove a barren honor, ending in remorse.” And so faint
alarms and excursions subtly suggest without overtly revealing the denouement.
                 Pauline’s
inexorable anger intensifies until she is possessed by a devil—not one with a
cloven hoof but a subtle psychological force for evil. Her little stage performance
and “drama of deceit”—all Louisa’s heroines are actresses on the stage or
off—her machinations to bankrupt Gilbert “in love, honor, liberty, and hope”
fail utterly in the end.
                 The
winner of Frank Leslie’s one-hundred-dollar prize adopted the pseudonym of A.
M. Barnard for a tale she submitted to another flamboyant weekly, The Flag of
Our Union. Despite her preoccupation with passionate and angry heroines, Louisa
was already too skillful a writer to repeat herself without variation. “The
Abbot’s