"Datin' Satan: A Journey to Hell With Louisa May Alcott" by Sean Gill
Gothic castles, satanic rites, hard drugs, S&M, white-knuckle suspense, and fountains of blood are rarely associated with Louisa May Alcott, though it was in this macabre realm where she launched her career as an author. Devotees of Alcott's Little Women (1868) may remember a brief and celebratory scene where Jo March—teenaged writer and acknowledged Alcott alter ego—reads a short story aloud to her sisters. Entitled "The Rival Painters," it's a rousing tale of lust and murder of which we learn little beyond, "most of the characters died in the end." Only when Jo has finished reading does she reveal, to her sisters' delight, that she is the author, writing under her own name, and published in a proper newspaper.
In reality, a twenty-one-year-old Alcott sold her debut story in 1854 to the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette under the byline "Flora Fairfield." It was called "The Rival Prima Donnas" and was a bit of morbid slapstick featuring a steamy love triangle between an unsavory painter and two opera divas. In its explosive, proto-Grand Guignol finale, the prima donna Beatrice flings a crown of roses onto her rival's head during curtain call. The twist: Beatrice has concealed an iron ring within the garland, which, with blood-squirting flourish, crushes her fellow diva's skull before her adoring fans. This story earned the cash-strapped Alcott ten dollars (about $290 today, adjusted for inflation), and it was the first of many paydays to come.
Alcott would further hone her craft, writing and publishing dozens of such "blood and thunder" tales in the Gazette and elsewhere, sometimes as "Flora Fairfield," sometimes as "A.M. Barnard," sometimes under her own name, and occasionally masked in complete anonymity. Soon, she was commanding fifty to seventy dollars per story (between $800-$1,300 today) and could barely keep up with the demand. Many of these manuscripts were only uncovered or properly attributed thanks to the tireless efforts of 20th Century scholars and antiquarian book collectors such as Madeleine B. Stern and Kent Bicknell.
These stories—which are far lesser known than the Little Women series, if they are known at all—paint a dark and lively panorama of Gothic romance, homicide, arson, confidence women, avenging angels, fortune hunters, premature burials, sleepwalkers, ghostly visitors, and drug enthusiasts. (She ends her story "Perilous Play" with a spectacular line, worthy of Hunter S. Thompson: "Heaven bless hashish, if its dreams end like this!")
Upon learning that Louisa May Alcott spent more than a decade moonlighting as a sordid, heady mix of Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Brontë, I dove eagerly into this secret canon. To my surprise, I found neither the shame of a literary author slumming, nor the through-the-motions prose of one writing merely to pay the bills. Alcott may have corresponded with a friend that these were "easy to 'compoze' [sic] & are better paid than moral & elaborate works of Shakespeare," but the breathless joy of her creation is undeniable. It's clear that she takes special satisfaction in devising absurd and grotesque scenarios, in flipping the scripts of the era and applying subtle—or sometimes overt—feminist messaging, or in introducing eccentric characters with motivations far more complex than you'd encounter in the typical penny dreadful. For me, a quote from her story "Pauline's Passion and Punishment" perfectly epitomizes her entire creative project: "She said low to herself, 'This is an old, old story, but it shall have a new ending.'"
This leads me to A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866), the crown jewel of Alcott's lurid esoterica, a novel of rare and delicious madness, a European travelogue-told-as-fever dream, and a story of such melodramatic intensity, satanic villainy, and feminine agency that it remained unpublished until the mid-1990s—the era of R.L. Stine, The Craft, and Antichrist Superstar.
Classified as "too long" and "too sensational" by her usual publishers, Alcott attempted rewrites to blunt the manuscript's sharper and more garish edges, but these, too, were rejected. Afterward, she focused her energies on Little Women (characterized by Alcott as "moral pap for the young" written at the urging of her father and her publisher), and that novel's considerable success ensured a parade of Little sequels while A Long Fatal Love Chase continued to collect dust, sight unseen, for over a century.
A year before writing A Long Fatal Love Chase, Alcott toured Europe for the first time—an eye-opening journey which, for such a watchful observer and constant note-taker, made a considerable impression. Due to her limited means, she was only able to travel as a paid companion to Anna Weld, the sickly heiress of Boston elites. In Switzerland, after meeting Ladislas “Laddie” Wisniewski—a Polish revolutionary more than a decade her junior and the inspiration for “Laurie” in Little Women (and possibly even Father Ignatius)—Alcott became charmed with the young man, perhaps even smitten (“pleasant walks & talks with him in the château garden,” according to her journal). However, when she came to believe that his affections were meant for her wealthy employer, Alcott quit the job outright and continued the trip, unshackled, using the funds she had already earned.
In Paris, she reunited with Laddie for what she would coyly describe as “a very charming fortnight.” Of their parting, Alcott wrote, “I drew down his tall head and kissed him tenderly, feeling that in this world there were no more meetings for us. Then I ran away and buried myself in an empty railway carriage, hugging the little cologne bottle he had given me.” While she would sometimes characterize this connection as a motherly one, it has the feel of a galvanizing affaire de cœur, one which I believe contextualizes the strange emancipations of Love Chase.
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Alcott—who once wrote in a letter to her father, "I will make a battering-ram of my head, and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world"—begins her Fatal Love Chase with the line, "I'd gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom." It is spoken by the eighteen-year-old Rosamond, living on a lonely English isle under the thumb of a depressive, selfish grandfather. Upon the utterance of these words, a storm gathers, thunder peals, lightning strikes, and who should appear but "Philip Tempest," a fiery-eyed, thirtysomething socialite/alchemist with an intriguing forehead scar and a suave mustache who wanders Europe on a pleasure yacht called Circe and is definitely not Satan.
Throughout the course of A Long Fatal Love Chase, there are often portraits of Satan's infamous agent Mephistopheles—noted for his central role in the Faust legend—hanging randomly on the walls. This is solely so that characters may make remarks about Philip Tempest like, "Why, you're the very image of Meph—" before anxiously cutting themselves off. Tempest refers to himself as "the Evil One" and is always mumbling cryptic Satan nonsense to himself like, "My coming was a worse omen than either storm or thunderbolt, if the child did but know it," or "Speak of Satan and he appears," or "Whenever I enter a house… I invariably bring a tempest with me." He is, if you have not yet noticed, quite the Bad Boy.
But Rosamond's life is dull, and, frankly, she's in the market for a Bad Boy. Upon meeting Mr. Tempest, she blurts out things like "I love tempests" and "I like danger," partly because she's an overcompensating teenager, and mostly because she's never met a potential suitor before, age-appropriate or otherwise. Nonetheless, she lays out her life's philosophy to Tempest:
I don't intend to die till I've enjoyed my life. Everyone has a right to happiness and sooner or later I will have it. Youth, health and freedom were meant to be enjoyed and I want to try every pleasure before I am too old to enjoy them… In the books I read, the sinners are always more interesting than the saints… A short life and a gay one for me and I'm willing to pay for my pleasure if it is necessary.
I'm certain that Alcott intended for the moral scolds to absorb this as a prelude to Rosamond receiving her "just desserts" (after all, the title gives us advance notice that this love chase will indeed turn fatal). But what follows is a journey of discovery, maturity, and self-actualization, even if it's often cloaked in didactic wrappings, like glamorous Hays Code gangster pictures forced to avow again and again—sometimes with a wink and a nod—that "crime doesn't pay."
Though it's essential to her story that Rosamond becomes romantically entwined with the diabolical Tempest, Alcott is sure to establish nuance and agency from the outset. As he continues his flirtation, Rosamond is struck with foreboding, "as if some womanly instinct warned her that his compliments were dangerous." She is further turned off when he lectures her about what he sees as her only career options: governess, seamstress, actress, or trophy wife. When she expresses personal ambition, he administers a textbook dose of negging: "Wait a little longer, you impatient bird, and do not try to fly too soon."
Still, she is fascinated by him, in a sort of "Heathcliff-meets-Beelzebub-on-a-pleasure-cruise" way, but she's robbed of any say in the matter after her grandfather loses a high-stakes card game to Tempest. The wager: the ability to become Rosamond's "master." Because she is at this point, according to Alcott, "innocent and ignorant," she enters into a hasty marriage with Tempest and is whisked away to enjoy the pleasures of continental Europe. This is a development which one might associate with the regrettably enduring subgenre of Stockholm syndrome romance, but Alcott does allow her heroine to establish boundaries (after Tempest casually muses on the idea of breaking her will, Rosamond responds, "You might kill me but not bend me if I had once decided to oppose you").
A Long Fatal Love Chase contains several modes: it's consistently sensational and melodramatic, often darkly comic, and occasionally disturbing. To wit: Tempest travels Europe with a strange entourage: Baptiste, his sadistic French-Algerian manservant, and Lito, his fourteen-year-old "protégé," a golden-haired Greek boy, about whom Tempest observes, "He's a pretty plaything isn't he? I found him in Greece and took a fancy into my idle head that I could make a fine man of him." It is heavily implied that Lito is either a genuine faun from Greek myth or perhaps the legendary Ganymede, whose abduction by Zeus provided the blueprint for pederasty in the ancient world. Tempest's creepy relationship with the boy reaches its nadir when Baptiste murders him, off-stage, on Tempest's orders, because the boy dared to indulge in private correspondence. Lito is soon replaced by a new boy, and Rosamond "never took any interest in the sleek brown Italian lad."
But wait!—while Alcott allows us to believe that Tempest is a prolific pederast and child killer for more than half the novel, it is later revealed that Lito not only survived his brush with death, but that he is actually Tempest's son. (Stabbing noises and midnight burial are reinterpreted, wildly, as Tempest ordering Baptiste to kill and dispose of Lito's beloved dog.) This reads to me as Alcott, having pushed the envelope as far as she could, attempting to soften the novel in revision. (Even she, who cut her teeth on opera diva brain-splatter, has to walk back the trauma now and again.)
The absurdity continues: as Rosamond crisscrosses Europe with her husband, she finally comes to the decision to break her Faustian bargain. Of course, she waits until after the aforementioned drama with Lito, Tempest purposefully infecting a friend with a fatal case of cholera, the discovery that Tempest is a bigamist (he's already married to Lito's mother), and constant and obnoxious husbandly rejoinders like "What now, my little bookworm?" Alcott might say that when people tell you who they are—whether that's Satan, Mephistopheles, or the kind of man who calls women "impatient birds" or "cruel, crafty girls"—you should believe them. And thus, Rosamond decides to leave him, despite her feeling that "she had never been blind to the fact that Tempest was no saint, but like many another woman she hoped to save him through her love." Tempest does not take this rejection well, and indeed it triggers the fatal love chase of the title.
The descriptions of Europe throughout, particularly Nizza (Nice, when it belonged to the Kingdom of Sardinia), Paris, Versailles, and Wiesbaden (a favorite haunt of Goethe) are exceptionally vivid, and here and there the novel takes on the flavor of a travelogue, though each chapter still ends on an adrenaline-pumping cliffhanger.
Rosamond fakes her death and spends years hiding out across western Europe, in shabby Parisian apartments, secluded convents, and alpine villages aided by code words, kind gestures, and sympathetic women. While she may have waffled over her feelings for Tempest in the first act, once she makes up her mind, she commits to her escape with unbending determination—she will have her independence, or die trying.
At every turn, Tempest materializes, seemingly out of nowhere, attempting to thwart her. Sometimes he appears so abruptly and supernaturally that the result is comic, such as in a gloriously melodramatic moment when Rosamond flings open a door, closes her eyes, and throws herself into the arms of a supportive girlfriend, who—my goodness—is actually a mustache-twirling Tempest. Elsewhere, at the convent, she develops feelings for a hot priest and, while expressing her inner romantic turmoil in the confessional booth, pulls back the curtain to reveal… "the dark face of Philip Tempest!"
However, for all of its black humor, at a certain point, the novel transforms into an instruction manual for escaping a domestic abuser, with Rosamond identifying and dismantling Tempest's every tactic to the reader. He uses effusive praise and "love bombing," employs threats and physical intimidation, gaslights her friends into believing her mad, engages in emotional blackmail (pretending to appear weak and sickly), and finally, just outright admits his plan to enslave and murder her. ("I have the power," Tempest says. "I doubt it and I defy it," counters Rosamond.) Alcott reminds us again and again that these methods might have worked were it not for Rosamond’s hard-earned worldliness ("The years that had passed since they first met had strengthened the woman's nature by suffering, experience, and that long struggle against temptation").
Eventually, Tempest is "cancelled" (when word of his stalker behavior spreads, he is "shunned in London"), and he begins his final, barbaric assault on Rosamond. The book ends with Tempest running over Rosamond's boat with his yacht during a river chase, killing her. In a bit of "Hugh-Hefner-creepily-burying-himself-beside-Marilyn-Monroe" panache, he tries to claim even her corpse ("Mine first—mine last—mine even in the grave!"), then stabs himself in an impotent fury. A fire escapes his chest, and the vessel of Tempest dies. Presumably the Satan/Mephisto/Randall Flagg-like force which animated him lives on in some other form, but Alcott doesn't care and doesn't think we should, either.
Had Love Chase been published in 1866, as Alcott intended, I imagine her more puritanical readers would have seen the finale as an argument for young women to never seek pleasure, experience, or self-actualization. I think Rosamond's fate—referred to in the title, so as priggish consumers would keep turning the pages?—is a clever bit of window-dressing to conceal Alcott’s true feelings from these very readers.
In spite of her constant trauma, Rosamond has a pretty good run, all things considered. She sees continental Europe for free, emancipates herself, indulges in the most intense priestly flirtation this side of Fleabag (a highlight: resisting a moonlit kiss, Father Ignatius falls to his knees, pleading "Let me keep your white soul fit for heaven!"), attends great opera and classic theater, has an emotional fling with a silver fox Comte (with whom she enjoys a purely platonic friendship, full of grand château ballrooms, black lace dresses, hand-kissing, and none of the danger, sleaze, abuse, or coercion which define her relationship with Tempest), and then meets back up with Father Ignatius for more romance after learning he was formerly a Che Guevara-style student revolutionary(!). Alcott seems to say that Rosamond had two choices as a woman of low means in the 19th century: an unfair/persecuted life of boredom, or an unfair/persecuted life of culture and excitement. For her, the choice is clear.
Sean Gill is a writer and filmmaker who won Pleiades’ 2019 Gail B. Crump Prize, The Cincinnati Review's 2018 Robert and Adele Schiff Award, the 2017 River Styx Micro-Fiction Contest, and the 2016 Sonora Review Fiction Prize. He has studied with Werner Herzog and Juan-Luis Buñuel, documented public defenders for National Geographic, and other recent work may be found in The Iowa Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Michigan Quarterly Review.
