Chasing Amy: Mephistopheles, the Laurence Boy, and Louisa May Alcott's Punishment of Female Ambition

Abstract

Chasing Amy:Mephistopheles, the Laurence Boy, and Louisa May Alcott's Punishment of Female Ambition Holly Blackford (bio) I'd gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom. Rosamond, A Long Fatal Love Chase I don't think it's fair for some girls to have lots of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all. Amy, Little Women Louisa May Alcott's 1877 A Modern Mephistopheles begins with the tableau of the tortured artist named Felix burning his failed manuscript, "offering the first-born of heart and brain as sacrifice to a hard fate."1 This theme, the irreconcilability of nurturing life and art, recurs in Alcott's fiction. In Alcott's earlier Künstlerroman for girls, Little Women (1868-69), Jo's writing is similarly figured as an infant whose legs Jo must amputate "in order that it might fit into a new cradle," the cradle being an editor's demands.2 It is precisely for this Faustian sin—the unyielding desire for publication and fame—that Felix sells his soul to Jasper, the modern Mephistopheles who serves as first mentor then ghostwriter to Felix in A Modern Mephistopheles. Felix's punishment is the loss of wife and child. Likewise, in her 1868 "Psyche's Art" Alcott depicts a female artist's triumph when she smashes her statue and assumes her proper station in life, caring for her family.3 In Alcott's 1865 The Marble Woman an artist adopts a child and turns her into a cold, heartless piece of art; the resolution of the story is her passionate rejection of the marble role sculpted for her.4 She embraces love for her Pygmalion creator, thereby transforming him from sculptor to loving, life-affirming husband. Alcott repeatedly features plots in which warm-blooded womanhood expels the demon of artistic creation and passion, whether the demon is within the woman or embodied by a Mephistopheles figure chasing her about. [End Page 1] In Little Women, the story of Jo's struggle to become a principled writer, we find two similarly powerful moments in which Jo's manuscripts are dramatically sacrificed to fire. It is her youngest sister Amy who burns Jo's firstborn manuscript. She burns it after Jo and Laurie go to a play and refuse to take Amy with them. On the one hand, Amy burns Jo's fairy tales and thus possibly does her a favor, destroying Jo's entry into a feminine genre; on the other hand, the fiery furor unleashed in Jo is represented as a demonic inner monster named Apollyon, named after the allegorical demon of John Bunyan's 1678 The Pilgrim's Progress. Alcott used Bunyan's influential Protestant story of a Christian's pilgrimage to the Celestial City to structure the girls' struggles in Little Women. Jo's inner monster takes tempestuous form and shape against Amy, preventing Jo from rescuing Amy while she and Laurie are ice-skating and Amy, following behind, falls through thin ice. Jo's inner fire, against which she must constantly struggle, resurfaces when she secretly writes sensational stories for the "Weekly Volcano," which she guiltily feels "printed in large type, on her forehead," as if an inner eruption (LW, 355). Jo eventually burns these stories in shame. Echoing Jo's earlier mutilation of her literary child for an editor, this moment is viewed by Angela Estes and Kathleen Margaret Lant as "the horror" of Jo's self-mutilation in Little Women. They claim that Alcott murders her Jo, transforming her—upon Beth's death—into a selfless zombie in an "impersonation of the dead."5 Just as Beth calms Jo's fire, Amy draws out the passions within Jo that seek volcanic outlet in blood-and-thunder tales. In Little Women Amy expresses the viewpoint that Jo should write whatever will sell, at whatever cost to self-integrity (270). Just as Amy lives to please socialites, Alcott's early tales fueled a hungry marketplace, paid the pressing bills the Alcotts always had, and expressed Alcott's love of drama. In self-reflexive form Little Women is the story of itself—of its own making. Suggestive of a popular marketplace that thrives...