Fred Vaughn

Fred Vaughn is an English twin associated with Laurie’s foreign friendships and with Amy Curtis March’s decisive change in her understanding of marriage. He first appears as a socially well-connected young man whose wealth and courtship make him attractive to Amy as a possible escape from poverty, but his eventual rejection becomes evidence that her emotional desires have outgrown her earlier calculations. Fred is therefore less important as a romantic hero than as the practical alternative against which Amy measures the difference between security and love.

Identity and Introduction

Fred is one of four Vaughn siblings known to the March sisters through Laurie. Josephine March tells Margaret March that the family includes Kate, the older sister; Fred and Frank, twins about Josephine March’s age; and Grace, the youngest child, nine or ten years old. Laurie had known the family abroad and liked the boys, while Josephine March suspected from his manner that he did not especially admire Kate. This introduction places Fred within a prosperous, mobile social circle that the March family can approach through friendship rather than through established family intimacy.

Amy first encounters Fred again in London, where he and Frank come to visit the travelers after learning from Laurie where they were staying. She is initially so surprised that she would not have recognized them without their cards. The brothers are described as tall and bearded; Fred is handsome in an English style, while Frank is considered the more attractive of the two because he only limps slightly and no longer uses crutches. The Vaughns invite the party to their house, and, when that visit cannot immediately take place, accompany them to the theater. Fred talks with Amy about past, present, and future amusements as if they had known one another all their lives, while also remembering Camp Laurence and its earlier pleasures.

Conduct During the European Journey

Fred’s courtship develops through repeated proximity rather than through an immediate declaration. During the journey he is kind and cheerful, and the group becomes fond of him. A moonlit serenade at Coblentz gives their association a more romantic charge: students from Bonn sing beneath the travelers’ windows after Fred has made their acquaintance on the boat, and Amy sees Fred among them. When flowers are thrown down from the window, Fred keeps one of the crumpled blossoms in his vest pocket and later looks sentimental over it. Amy laughs when she tells him that Flo, not she, threw the flower, and Fred throws it away, briefly returning to his sensible manner. The episode makes his interest legible to Amy while preserving the teasing, unstable tone of a flirtation not yet named.

Other incidents reinforce Fred’s image as energetic but requiring supervision. At Baden-Baden he loses money, and Amy scolds him, agreeing with Kate’s earlier hope that he will marry soon because he needs someone to look after him when Frank is absent. Fred’s jealousy is also visible in small, repeated choices: he does not usually accompany Flo, instead taking Amy’s side of the carriage, table, or promenade; he becomes sentimental when they are alone; and he frowns when another man speaks to her. At dinner, when an Austrian officer stares at Amy and describes her to a baron as a beautiful blonde girl, Fred reacts fiercely, cutting his meat so violently that it nearly leaves his plate. His feelings are thus conveyed through conduct before they are stated, and Amy reads the pattern as proof that he intends to propose.

Amy’s Marriage Calculation

At first Amy explicitly imagines accepting Fred without being passionately in love with him. She likes him, finds that they get along comfortably, and judges him handsome, young, sufficiently clever, and extremely rich—richer even than the Laurences. Her reasoning is not presented as a simple desire for luxury. Amy hates poverty and does not intend to endure it longer than necessary; she believes that one of the sisters must marry well, since Margaret March has not done so, Josephine March will not, and Elizabeth March cannot yet. Marriage to Fred appears to her as a way of making everything right for the family as well as securing her own future.

The material attractions are concrete. Amy has seen the Vaughns’ city house in a fashionable street, their plate and family jewels, their old servants, and pictures of their country estate with its park, large house, grounds, and horses. She prefers this established comfort to a title without substance and values the household’s apparent genuineness. She also believes that Fred’s family would not object to her and that its members are kind, well-bred, generous people who like her. Yet she draws a moral boundary: she would not marry a man she hated or despised. Fred is not her ideal hero, but she thinks she could grow fond enough of him if he loved her deeply and allowed her considerable freedom.

This calculation shows Amy speaking for herself rather than merely being chosen by a wealthy man. She evaluates affection, inheritance, family acceptance, comfort, and personal independence together, and she recognizes the accusation that others might call her mercenary. Her language makes marriage resemble a practical arrangement whose advantages can be weighed, but the narrative subjects that logic to a test that wealth cannot settle. Fred may offer position and protection; he cannot automatically create the inward attachment Amy later discovers she needs.

Rejection and Narrative Function

Fred eventually returns and asks the question Amy had once decided to answer with an uncomplicated acceptance. The circumstances have changed. She now tells him no, kindly but firmly, because when the moment arrives she realizes that money and position are insufficient for the new longing filling her heart with hopes and fears. Her refusal is not caused by a sudden revelation that Fred is cruel or unworthy. He remains a good fellow, and the force of the reversal lies precisely in the fact that his virtues and fortune are real but no longer enough.

Amy is troubled by her earlier declaration that she would marry for money. She fears that Laurie will regard her as heartless and worldly, and she wishes she could take the statement back because it now sounds unwomanly to her. Her ambition also changes in emphasis: she no longer cares as much about becoming a queen of society as about becoming a lovable woman. Fred’s rejection therefore marks an inward correction rather than a social defeat. Amy does not merely lose a rich suitor; she abandons a version of herself that believed comfort could substitute for love.

Fred’s role in the plot is consequently that of a credible alternative and a revealing contrast. His courtship brings Amy’s economic anxieties into contact with her emotional life, while the scenes of serenade, jealousy, travel, and anticipated proposal make his attachment persuasive enough to create a genuine choice. Once Amy refuses him, the narrative shows that her development cannot be measured only by improved manners or access to society. It is measured by her willingness to reject an advantageous future when it conflicts with the deeper desire she has begun to recognize.