PART I

SHORT FICTION

Louisa May Alcott is best known for her juvenile novels, but she was a prolific writer of short fiction for both children and adults. Not only did she write for different audiences, but she also wrote in at least two different genres for each audience. Her short fiction for children, which she wrote throughout her career, includes the fairy tales and fantasy stories of Flower Fables (1854), her first book publication, and Morning-Glories, and Other Stories (1868), published the same year as Little Women.Thereafter, she continued to publish fantasy stories in such periodicals as St. Nicholas and Harper’s Young People and to include new as well as previously published children’s fantasy in the six volumes of Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag and the three volumes of Lulu’s Library. Alcott’s genius in writing for children, however, lies in her realistic depictions of family life. Such stories dominate the Scrap-Bag and Lulu series as well as A Garland for Girls (1888).Whereas Daniel Shealy has collected all of Alcott’s fantasy stories in Fairy Tales and Fantasy Stories (University of Tennessee Press, 1992), Alcott’s realistic tales for children are not yet readily available. Claire Boose did publish a number of them in her 1982 volume Works of Louisa May Alcott (Avenel), and Joy A. Marsella has published a critical study of the Scrap-Bag volumes.

Today, the best known of Alcott’s short works are ones for which she was not recognized in her lifetime—her sensation stories or thrillers for adults.Thanks to the indefatigable sleuthing of Madeleine B. Stern, no fewer than thirty-three of these anonymously and pseudonymously published stories are now in print. These works, which range from the very short tale to the elaborately plotted novella, appeared in such publications as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,The Flag of Our Union, Frank Leslie’s Lady’s Magazine, and the Ten Cent Novellettes series. Almost all of these stories were first published in the 1860s and written before the success of Little Women in 1868-69. For more than a hundred years, they languished unread in moldering periodicals, and their reappearance in the 1970s, coinciding as it did with the revival of the women’s movement, regained for Alcott an adult reading audience and made her a subject of interest to feminist scholars. But as these scholars have since demonstrated, Alcott, at the time she was cranking out sensation stories with clockwork regularity, was also aspiring to a more exalted position in the literary marketplace. During the 1860s, her short fiction appeared in that arbiter of taste The Atlantic Monthly, as well as in The Commonwealth, which published her first big success, Hospital Sketches (1863). Like Alcott’s realistic stories for children, her realistic stories for adults deserve to be better known. Elaine Showalter’s collection Alternative Alcott and Sarah Elbert’s Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery have made some of these short works available, and the stories and sketches dealing with race and the Civil War have begun to receive serious critical attention.

The eight stories reprinted here represent the different genres in which Alcott worked, as well as different stages of her career. “My Contraband,” first published under the title of “The Brothers” in The Atlantic Monthly (November 1863), is one of several works based on Alcott’s experience as a Civil War nurse and reveals her abolitionist sympathies (see “M. L.,”“An Hour,” and Work). Like her more autobiographical Hospital Sketches, “My Contraband” is told in the first person by a nurse who becomes attached to one of her patients, but whereas nurse Tribulation Periwinkle of Hospital Sketches comforts “a brave Virginia blacksmith” through his last hours, Faith Dane prevents a contraband quadroon from wreaking vengeance upon his white half-brother. Faith, in her ability to intercede and exercise moral suasion, anticipates her role in Alcott’s full-length novel Moods. “A Whisper in the Dark,” published the same year as “My Contraband,” but in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, is to the feminist reader an equally powerful political statement. Just as Robert, the slave, has no right to his wife, so Sybil, as a woman, has no right to determine whom and when she will marry. Robert is estranged by race from father and brother, Sybil is deprived of a mother’s love by what men interpret as madness. Robert is enslaved, Sybil incarcerated, and both are deprived not only of freedom but also of the knowledge that would free them.The one statement, however, is straightforward, though not without its ironies and ambiguities; the other is oblique, muted, a veritable “whisper in the dark.”

“Thrice Tempted,” which appeared anonymously in Frank Leslie’s Chimney Corner (July 1867), and “Psyche’s Art,” published by Loring in 1868, the same year as Little Women, part 1, also represent two different adult genres and suggest the fine, sometimes even nonexistent line between children’s and adult literature. “Thrice Tempted” is unusual among Alcott’s sensation stories in that the heroine, Ruth, is no femme fatale like her rival, Laura, but a lonely, diffident, not conventionally attractive, generous, and principled girl; in short, she resembles the heroine of many domestic novels, whether for children or adults. Nonetheless, she commits a crime perhaps more heinous than that of any other Alcott character. “Psyche’s Art,” on the other hand, bears a family resemblance to Little Women. Psyche could be one of the March sisters—an amalgam of Meg, Jo, and Amy, and her sister May could be Beth. But in this story, Alcott dares to do what she did not in the longer work: she permits readers to choose between two alternative endings, to decide whether Psyche marries or devotes herself to art.

Two short sensation stories, “La Jeune; or, Actress and Woman” ( Frank Leslie’s Chimney Corner, 1868) and “My Mysterious Mademoiselle” ( Frank Leslie’s Lady’s Magazine, 1869), exemplify Alcott’s fascination with the theater and its amorphous potentiality. Both stories employ an unreliable male narrator, unreliable in that he betrays even more about himself than he wishes to reveal. In “La Jeune,” the narrator prides himself on not being taken in by the actress heroine, but he finds to his chagrin that her impersonation is entirely other than he suspects. In “My Mysterious Mademoiselle,” the narrator plays a cat and mouse game with the sharer of his railway carriage. Like Sybil’s uncle in “A Whisper in the Dark,” he tries to take advantage of his confinement with a spirited young girl, but she frustrates his efforts and, in doing so, suggests, like Laurie and Jo, the fluidity of gender roles.

Finally, two children’s stories represent the genres of domestic realism and fantasy, but they, like several of the adult stories, suggest a dual audience. “Cupid and Chow-chow,” first published in Hearth and Home (May 1872), became the title story for the third volume of Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag (1874).This story is especially interesting for its treatment of the suffrage movement. How does one reconcile the seemingly satiric treatment of Chow-chow and her mother, an avid suffragist, with Alcott’s own support of suffrage and other women’s rights? “Queen Aster,” significantly, was first published in The Woman’s Journal (February 1887), an organ of the women’s rights movement to which Alcott had previously contributed. There it was entitled “A Flower Fable,” an allusion not only to Alcott’s earlier Flower Fables but also to the tale’s allegorical nature. Although reprinted as a children’s story in Lulu’s Library, “Queen Aster” clearly can be read as a feminist fable, offering a utopian vision of social harmony and justice under matriarchal rule.