A Modern Mephistopheles

Louisa May Alcott's A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), an American version of the Faust legend, seems surprisingly close to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray--and not just because of the shared source material.  A quick trip through the MLA bibliography indicates that Isobel Murray thinks it may have been one of Wilde's sources, so I won't develop the point further here.   (But it might make for an interesting assignment.) 

Despite the similarities, Wilde's take on Goethe's Faust is far more sophisticated; for starters, he doesn't keep informing the reader that he's, well, writing a take on Faust.  Not only does Alcott's narrator link the action to Goethe's drama, but also the characters themselves explicitly locate themselves in it.   Alcott's most revisionist twist on her original involves the Gretchen figure, Gladys, who here is legitimately married to the Faust stand-in, the would-be poet Felix Canaris, but is nevertheless pursued by the Mephistophelean atheist, Jasper Helwyze.  Gladys, the heroine, embodies all true feminine virtues; indeed, the novel repeatedly associates her with both the Virgin Mary and Dante's Beatrice.  By the end of the novel, she has converted the irreligious Felix; "saved" Helwyze's browbeaten companion, Olivia; and thwarted the desires of Helwyze himself.   (The only thing she truly fails to accomplish, however, is a reconciliation between Felix and Helwyze.)  Her death provides the final impetus for Felix to leave Helwyze: "Disheartened I may be: never desperate again, for I have some one to love and hope and work for.  She is waiting for me somewhere: I must make myself worthy to follow and find her" (255).  Unlike Faust, who exits his drama carried to Heaven by the angels, assisted by the "intercession" of "transfigured love," Felix exits to the world of serious labor; his desire to "make myself worthy" is at odds with the theology behind Faust's escape from Hell.  As the rhetoric of Felix's resolution suggests, Alcott insists that without faith in an afterlife, human endeavor becomes meaningless.  It is not for nothing that the novel's last words fall to the despairing Helwyze: "Life before was Purgatory, now it is Hell; because I loved her, and I have no hope to follow and find her again" (258).  Helwyze, we know, believes in neither Heaven nor Hell, a character flaw that "explains" his amorality; even though, just a couple of paragraphs previously, Alcott held out some hope for his eventual conversion, she leaves him unable to postulate anything beyond the present tense. 

Given that Alcott works redemption into her plot in a way that Wilde most certainly doesn't, it's interesting that she chose to make her Mephisto an atheist.  After all, atheism is one sin that can't be laid at the door of Goethe's Mephisto!  Unlike Mephisto, who strikes up a bet with God over Faust's fate, Helwyze plays his game to no purpose; he works evil without believing in an "end."  In a sense, I suppose, this makes him a humanized version of Satan, in much the same way that Victor Frankenstein is a (fatally) humanized version of God: Helwyze does evil to fill the void produced by his permanently invalided body, but has no sense of real, future repercussions beyond those immediately pertaining to himself.  Significantly, the mysteriously crippled Helwyze (a "terrible fall," we're told, which may have left him impotent) abuses his own creative gifts; he does not, that is, "reproduce" himself properly, either in the literal or figurative senses.  Hence, in the novel's fatal secret, we discover that Felix's poetry has all been written by Helwyze--who refuses to claim it.  But he uses "Felix's" second poem, a romance, in an attempt to woo Gladys.  Borrowing Felix's original idea, Helwyze rewrites it according to his own desires: "He had read it, and, taking the same plot, made it what you know, writing as only such a man could write, when a strong motive stimulated him to do his best" (233).  For Helwyze, poetry is neither an art to be pursued for its own sake, nor (as in Felix's case) a route to literary lionhood; it is, instead, a means of bending the will of others to his own desire.  Helwyze's poetry becomes an extension of his larger manipulative project, and thus stands--and falls--against Gladys' pure Christian virtues.  Felix starts down the road to salvation by crossing out his own printed name and substituting Helwyze's, thereby finding himself in the act of rejecting his fraudulent public persona.  As Helwyze finally realizes, the collapse of his schemes is, in some measure, a creative failure: "Goethe could make his Satan as he liked, but Fate was stronger than I, and so comes ignominous failure" (257).  Helwyze is both the Satan of Goethe's plot, "left lamenting" at the end, and a failed Goethe himself, unable to truly reinvent himself in Satan's image.