Jo said sadly, "We haven't got Father, and shall not have him
for a long time." She didn't say "perhaps never," but each
silently added it, thinking of Father far away, where the fighting was.
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868-9) was remarkable on
its publication for centring on the domestic cares and the trials and
tribulations of a group of female characters—sisters Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy and
their mother, Marmee. Becoming a ‘little woman’ meant facing hardships, taming
your feelings and embracing self-sacrifice. The result is a beloved classic
that is still read regularly by young girls and has been seen as one of the
first representations of ‘all American’ femininity.
Geraldine Brooks takes this well-loved work and examines the opposite side of the coin. If Alcott tells us this is what it means to be a woman at home, what does it mean to be a man at war, and, specifically, what did it mean to be a man on the side of the North in the Civil War?
 |
| Geraldine Brooks (1955- ) |
In March (Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize), she takes the character
of the girls’ absent father and constructs a parallel narrative to Little Women, forcing readers to
confront the brutal realities of conflict, reassess the March household (in
particular the parents’ marriage) and question the absolutism on many
narratives concerning the North and its abolition of slavery.
One of my main criticisms of
Valerie Martin’s 2003 Property, which
I reviewed in this same series on my blog, was its idealised view of
Northerners when it came to questions of race. Brooks doesn’t fall into the
same trap. Mr March himself is
liberal (you might think unbelievably so until you realise he was based on
extensive research into Louisa May Alcott’s father Bronson, a vegan educator
and reformer). But he is an idealist at sea in a pragmatic world, where
Northerners are more than happy to take over plantations to make their
fortunes, mistreating former slaves, whose lives are just as hard and more
endangered now that they are no longer slaves, but ‘contraband’.
And, while in Property we are never given access to
black characters’ views directly, Brooks gives us Grace, a former slave with
whom March has had a sexual relationship. It is she who has the final say on March’s
on-going involvement in the war:
“We have had a enough of white people ordering our existence!
There are men of my own race more versed in how to fetch and carry than you
will ever be. And there are Negro preachers aplenty who know the true language
of our souls. A free people must learn to manage its own destiny.”
Grace is of course in a better
position than many former slaves. She is well spoken and educated, due to being
the illegitimate daughter of a plantation owner. But March’s life is actually saved
by another black female character—Zannah. Zannah is mute (her tongue was cut
out while a group of men raped her) and was totally illiterate until March’s
arrival to teach on the plantation.
Her inability to communicate
provides a stark contrast to Mr March. Unlike Zannah, he has the tools of
language at his disposal, but he is still unable to tell the truth in his
letters—instead sending Marmee and the girls a highly edited, and at times
falsified, account of his time away from them.
This leaves Brooks with a plot
problem. To be true to her source text, March must fall ill, prompting Marmee’s
journey to Washington, and she can’t sustain this section in his first person.
So, at the 200-page mark, we have a sudden shift of POV and continue the story
from Marmee’s perspective.
The change is a little abrupt,
and not just in tone. Marmee’s narrative doesn’t seem to be so much about
developing her own character as hammering home that March’s perspective is
unreliable—that a marriage can be made up of misunderstandings and resentment
on both sides. The result? The he
said/she said at times feels a little overdone.
Brooks’s prose too at times tips
over into the long-winded and dense, when the period could, I think, still be
indicated with a lighter touch. Take for instance the following:
‘As I mentally composed these letters, it was inevitable that my
mind would turn to the days when it was myself to whom such epistles had been
directed. From there, my thoughts travelled in easy stages to the unravelling
of my fortune, and to the exigencies of a current situation so threadbare that
even my daughters are forced to toil for wages.’
But these quibbles over
construction and execution are minor when compared with the overall genius of
what Brooks has done, the scholarship of her research and the compelling nature
of the story she has crafted from what was, in Alcott’s novel, an elision.
March doesn’t
comfort like the familiar pages of Little
Women. At times, it appals and horrifies. But the novels could be read as
equally didactic. For Alcott, being a good woman in the nineteenth century was
a story of self-improvement and self-sacrifice. For Brooks, being a good man in
the nineteenth century seems to involve recognising injustice, but also
recognising your own powerlessness to fight it everywhere and that pursuing
your ideals could mean you’re doing an injustice to the little women waiting
patiently at home.
Which novel should
the Secret Victorianist read next as part of the Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook or
by tweeting @SVictorianist!
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