Monster Throwdown: Deconstructing Vampires, Werewolves, and Louisa May Alcott

– One Professor of English and Louisa May Alcott biographer.
– One author of a book called Little Vampire Women.
– One author of a book called Little Women and Werewolves.

So . . . okay.  That’s pretty darn interesting.

The gist of the talk was that it was to be a discussion, moderated by the professor, between the two women.  The professor in question was one John Matteson, author of Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and her Father (W.W. Norton), which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.  As for the women themselves, the author of Little Vampire Women is Lynn Messina, maybe best known for the Fashionistas series, who came on wearing these remarkable knee-high boots that I spent most of the talk wanting very much.  On the other side of the equation, Porter Grand, author of Little Women and Werewolves, a former reference librarian who came on wearing black lace tights of eye-dazzling patterns.

Little Women is beloved, a fact that no one would be able to deny (it came in at #25 on the Top 100 Children’s Novels Poll).  And in writing a mash-up, you have pre-opinions about your book even before it hits bookstore shelves.  Therefore it is important to remember that before she wrote LW, Louisa wrote some pretty darn melodramatic fare for money.  This led to a fun game, the brainchild of Mr. Matteson:

Alcott or Fauxcott?

In the game Alcott or Fauxcott you read melodramatic passages and then ask the audience to vote on which of the two was actually written by Miss Louisa.  The audience did pretty well, at least when Mr. Matteson would include the word "stake" or "wolf", but there were a couple (one in first person) that I certainly missed.

Messina, for her part, pointed out that Alcott’s text just naturally lends itself to vampirism.  Remember, if you will, that in one moment of true pique Jo calls Aunt March a "vampire" in the original story.  How much harder would it be to extend that to making all the Marches vampires?  Vegetarian ones, of course (or at least as vegetarian as a vampire could be).  The original text also contains points where Laurie is referred to as "a mortal boy" and Jo says several times that she will not marry "any human".  Matteson mentioned that it was interesting to look at the "vegetarian" aspects of all this, and then proffered an anecdote about the time Alcott ate with Emerson.  Emerson began cutting a large hunk of some kind of meat, and the conversation turned to cannibalism in other cultures.  Alcott expressed surprise that people would find it so abhorrent saying that if you were going to be eating meat, after all, "why not the best?"

At one point the talk brought up the use of the word "vampire" both before and during the Civil War.  According to Mr. Matteson, the word used to show up in Antebellum writings, as a term used by the anti-slavers for slavery.  Think about it.  Vampires are, like slaveholders, often upper class.  "You don’t have a lot of working class vampires."  Even more to the point, it was often thought that slavery wasn’t just harmful to the slaves, but destroyed the slaveholders’ humanity as well.

The style of writing, where you take an original (public domain) text and give it a supernatural element is called a "mash-up".  To place some of these mash-ups into context, Mr. Matteson read us a list of real mash-ups.  Many I had heard of.  Some I had not.  And at least one of them caused the audience to gasp in horror at the sheer awfulness of the idea (Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim).  The panelists were asked if they thought this style of writing would go away, and Ms. Porter said that you wouldn’t be able to take it away from her.  Matteson could help but quip that it would take some prying "from our cold dead hands", eh?

The audience members were particularly charming at this discussion.  No New York panel discussion that takes questions from its audience is ever complete without the old-timey New Yorker who starts to ramble, then makes brilliant salient points when you have begun to despair of where they are going.  This talk had at least one of those, as well as people who were able to throw out little observations like, "I see that Alcott’s Marches are still the Marches, just with a different diet."

In the end, the argument was made that rather than take away from the original books, mash-ups of this sort reinforce their canonical status.  Time and again Grand and Messina would say how they couldn’t really change the essential structure of the story.  You might want to marry Jo to Laurie, but the text wouldn’t let you.  Not to say they didn’t make a lot of changes.  Mr. March gets a much bigger role in Little Women and Werewolves and Messina always found it annoying that Beth doesn’t die of anything in particular.  And it’s "particularly galling when it’s Clare Danes."  In her book, Beth dies for a reason.  Still and all, both authors kept their stories in the Alcott mold.

And so I end today with a prediction.

Prediction: In ten to fifteen years, there will be a new trend in literature.  It will be popular but regarded with the same jaundiced eye that many mash-ups now face.  In ten years time, we will see slash fiction become not only acceptable, but published.  Slash fiction (defined here) is very popular in on fan fiction websites, but has yet to spark a publishing trend of its own.  In the future, books well within the public domain will start to be rewritten, much as these mash-ups are today, but with different romantic liaisons.  Laurie will finally get Jo, for better or for worse.  Elizabeth Bennet will become closer to her friend Charlotte (to put it delicately).  Other things will happen as well.  The market will be surprised to learn that there is an appetite for such literature (an appetite that does not quite exist yet, but will thanks to the slow rise in popularity of slash fiction online throughout the years).  And we’ll have many of the same conversations then that we’re having now.  So sayeth I, Saturday May 8th, 2010.