THE UNDERSTORY OF LITTLE WOMEN

March. By Geraldine Brooks. New York: Viking, 2005. Pp. 288. $24.95 hardcover.

 
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) is one of the iconic books of American literature. Despite its depiction of successful womanhood as a series of self-conquests, it never seems to go out of style. A bestseller in its own era, by 1920 it was second only to the Bible in sales in the U.S.; it has been made into major motion pictures three times, and in 2005 a musical version of the novel opened on Broadway. It is difficult to write an American novel about sisters, or about mothers and daughters, without at least alluding to Little Women (most recently, in 2003, Katherine Weber rewrote it as a tale of contemporary New Yorkers called The Little Women).

Despite its sentimentally alluring idealizations of family life, two powerful sources of conflict ripple beneath the surface of Alcott’s novel, contributing to the impression that this story of innocent girlhood is hemmed in by darker territory, and accounting, perhaps, for some of its continuing allure. The first of these conflicts is Marmee’s persistent anger, mentioned briefly as an aspect of her character which her husband helps her to keep in check by an occasional finger to his lips. The battle with her temper is a central feature of Jo’s story, but Alcott merely hints at its origins in her mother’s frustrations with her husband and her domestic role. The other suppressed conflict is the presence of the Civil War, into which the March family’s patriarch has already disappeared at the novel’s opening, and from which he returns just as Book One draws to a close. What we know of Mr. March’s experience of the war we learn indirectly from his letters, which punctuate at rare intervals the central drama of the March daughters’ pursuit of their “castles in the air” and their battles with their “bosom enemies.” But what of Mr. March’s battles, both internal and external, and what of his ambitions and passions? And what of the marriage between this controlling husband and his volatile wife (Alcott focuses on the parents’ relations with their daughters, not with one another)?

Beginning with these questions, Geraldine Brooks weaves the understory of Little Women. March, recipient of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize, tells the story of the March family’s father, gone to war as an unorthodox Union chaplain, whose own “castles in the air” are all but toppled by the messiness of historical events and the revelations of his own flawed character in the face of danger, temptation, and ethical ambiguity. If in Little Women, Alcott rewrote her real family’s conflicted history as a fantasy of domestic stability and virtuous poverty, in March, Brooks restores the psychological and historical complexity which Alcott largely mutes, reconnecting the private world of Alcott’s women to the cataclysmic historical events which made and unmade the lives of mid-nineteenth century American men. Modeling her protagonist on Alcott’s real father, the transcendentalist philosopher, abolitionist, and educational reformer Bronson Alcott, Brooks constructs a powerful tale of damaged ideals and divided commitments. Just as Gillian Armstrong, in her film of Little Women, updated the character of Marmee by attributing to her many of the abolitionist and feminist sentiments belonging to Alcott’s real mother (Abba May Alcott), in March, Brooks relies heavily on the journals of Bronson Alcott and the work of his biographers, as well as on Louisa’s accounts of her hospital work during the Civil War, to create characters closer to the historical Alcotts in their complexity. Brooks also brings into the story a number of the Alcotts’ friends and neighbors, such as Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Higginson, Ralph and Lidian Emerson, and John Brown, and draws from Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl for her portrait of the black “contraband” with whom March forms a passionate bond. These figures do more than help to establish the historical authenticity of the novel, however. They contribute to its drama of ideas, in which intellectual and political passions play as large a role as do the private forces of desire, loyalty, compassion, and pride.

Like Bronson Alcott, Brooks’s March is a man compelled by ideas, convinced that the fallenness of the world can be redeemed through educational innovation, simplified living, and a vegetarian diet. He is naïve, impractical, and, in the beginning, confident of his truths. Unlike his historical model, however, Brooks’s idealistic protagonist finds himself thrown alarmingly into the midst of worldly action, in which even lofty ends seem to necessitate bloody means. “What manner of man would I be,” March asks, “who has had so much to say in the contest of words, if now I shirked this contest of blood?” He discovers, in fact, that he is not at all the “manner of man” he had imagined himself to be. In the war’s cauldron of strong passions and terrible fears, the life of the mind is not impervious to the promptings of self-interest, cowardice, and lust.

In passages of rumination and reminiscence, we learn of March’s impoverished rural childhood, his self-education, and his early life as a peddler in the South, during which he finds himself attracted to the learning and leisure of a Southern planter and to the charm of one of his female slaves, an educated woman named Grace. When he is caught teaching a young slave to read, the planter’s brutal response, visited upon Grace in full view of the child, reveals to him the savagery underlying Southern refinement and the disastrous consequences of his own innocence. The experience converts March to abolitionism, propels him into marriage with a woman of fierce antislavery passions (Margaret or Marmee), and drives him eventually into financial support of the insurrectionist John Brown, a collaboration which costs March the fortune he has amassed through investing his peddling profits.

In each of these episodes, March is drawn into the orbit of a figure more powerful, passionate, or self-aware than he himself, someone whose strength of character both compels him and puts him to shame. In Grace, March finds a dignity, refinement, and courage which he can only dream of possessing; his sentimental desires to rescue her are soundly rebuffed. In Marmee, he comes up against a woman whose political commitments lead her to ignore social conventions, and whose sexual vitality threatens to overwhelm his own somewhat tepid affections. Though he is irresistibly attracted to her, as her husband he finds himself frightened by her angry outbursts and obliged to try to tame her. At the same time, his recognition that he is not quite equal to her leads to his own wild acts of imprudence: committing his fortunes to John Brown’s activities (because his wife so clearly admires Brown), and promising, in a moment of impassioned public rhetoric, to accompany his town’s young recruits on their march to war. March’s actions often appear craven and compensatory; he is driven by guilt and inadequacy more than by principle, while the figures around him appear both more clear-headed and more genuinely passionate. Though the story is largely told from March’s point of view, his stiffness and timidity render him less sympathetic than the novel’s other characters, and the guilt which dogs him seems largely earned. It is Brooks’s heroic women (anything but “little”) who dominate the tale, practically stealing it from the “little man” who narrates it.

Structured around March’s letters home, the novel emphasizes the problem of representing immediate experience in language, and the difficulty of telling the truth when one’s own role in events has been less than perfectly admirable. In the course of the war, March experiences horrors and beauties—and commits acts of misjudgment and cowardice—which must remain hidden from those he loves. In his first letter home, he describes the “colors swirled across the heavens” on an evening after battle, like the “marbled endpapers in the Spenser that I used to read to you.” He does not write, however, of the “the blood that perfused the silted eddies of the boot-stirred river” and “also formed a design that is not unlike those fine endpapers.” In promising to write every day to his wife and daughters, his intention was to set down “even those things which could not be easily spoken,” yet he finds that his letters are “shrouded in words meant to mislead.” When March is injured in an attack by Confederate guerillas on the plantation where he has been assigned to help educate newly freed slaves, he is transported to a Washington hospital where his former love, Grace, now works as a Union nurse—and where the arrival of his wife uncovers the full extent of his many deceptions. At this point in the novel, the story’s narration is taken over by Marmee. Events already described are recounted a second time from her perspective and given a wholly different significance. We discover the truth of Emerson’s remark that married people are like two globes coming into contact at only a single point—vast arcs of experience, both inner and outer, remain unshared between husband and wife. In her final chapters, Brooks’s Civil War begins to resemble Little Women’s, serving as the backdrop for more private battles, with the dissolution of national union symbolizing the failure of marital union. At its heart, March is the story of a marriage, and all that escapes that relation.

As the novel moves back and forth between scenes of mayhem and quiet meditation, between vivid surroundings and epistolary accounts, between the present of the war and March’s past life, it measures the distance between intention and action and the costly consequences of deception. It also raises questions about the category of historical fiction to which the novel itself belongs. Where does the novelist draw the lines between historical fact, participants’ accounts, prior fictions, and what she imagines as possible? To what extent is she obliged to tell the truth about real events or real people (such as Bronson Alcott), and what obligations does she owe to her own imagination? Brooks, whose previous novel, Year of Wonders, centers on an English village during the plague of 1666, has said that what attracts her to historical fiction are the gaps in the record which allow for fictional expansion. Self-interest, self-delusion, and the desire to protect others from painful knowledge distort the tellings and writings of various characters in March, suggesting that even eye witnesses to history can lay no exclusive claims to its truths.

March is Brooks’s reinvention of the war, of Alcott’s family, of the abolitionists and feminists and transcendentalists who made mid-century New England such an intriguing locus of social change, and of the African-Americans who first tested the waters of freedom during the war. While her meticulous historical research yields a finely nuanced nineteenth-century prose style and a rich texture of material and social detail that draws us to reconsider some little-known aspects of Civil War history (such as the leasing of southern plantations by northern entrepreneurs during the war), Brooks has freely altered dates and facts to serve her story. Likewise, though she has borrowed heavily from Bronson Alcott’s writings and life, she has made her narrator less fuzzily verbose than the actual philosopher, as well as less insulated from the world. And though she hangs her tale upon the scaffolding of Little Women, Brooks undercuts its sentimentality with difficult truths about the mixed nature of people’s motives and the inevitability of moral failure. Returning home, March sees himself entering a “simulacrum of domestic joy,” in which he will strive “to live in the quick world, but the ghosts of the dead would be ever at hand.” In the course of the novel, he has come to know himself in ways that may either cripple him or ennoble him—we cannot be sure which. March is a powerful and unsettling tale, infused with a terrible sadness about human relations and ideals. It searches among many voices for adequate ways of telling the soul’s secrets and the world’s hard facts.