“Behind a Mask or A Woman’s Power” by Louisa May Alcott (post 2) writing as A. M. Barnard: Woman, background like Alcott’s, portrayed as psychopath.

The protagonist of this novella is a poor, 19-year-old governess who uses her skills as an actress to trick her rich, elderly employer into marrying her.

Louisa May Alcott, herself, had a background in theater and was once a poor, 19-year-old lady’s companion, who had to flee her position, because her employer, the lady’s elderly brother, made inappropriate advances.

So I would have expected the governess in this story to have been portrayed sympathetically, with her marriage a triumph, if not for feminism, then at least class struggle and social mobility. But the narrative portrays the governess as a triumphant, scheming psychopath.

Another interesting thing about the governess is that she passes herself off as being nineteen, but she is actually thirty. The reader is told that she is thirty and shown her removing her disguise in private. The latter scene made me think of Dr. Jekyll’s turning into Mr. Hyde. Indeed, at another point in the story, she is referred to as a Scottish witch (Robert Louis Stevenson was Scottish).

But the governess’s transformation reverses Stevenson’s scenario. In A. M. Barnard’s story, the bad personality is the real one. Barnard’s story is like Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde told from Hyde’s point of view (except that Barnard’s story was written twenty years before Stevenson’s).

Maybe Louisa May Alcott was “Dr. Jekyll” and A. M. Barnard was “Mr. Hyde” in a novelist’s normal version of multiple personality.

1. A. M. Barnard (pseudonym of Louisa May Alcott). “Behind a Mask or A Woman’s Power” (1866), in Louisa May Alcott. Behind a Mask: the Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Edited and with an Introduction and Afterword by Madeleine Stern. New York, William Morrow and Company, 1975/1995.