It's funny to me that my immediate reaction to finishing March is the same as it was for another Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Hours: in both cases, an author has used a literary classic as the source material for a new work, and after reading in the afterword of the additional books that Geraldine Brooks says she borrowed from liberally, it all seems so easy and obvious (but again, as with The Hours, I'm undecided whether "obvious" equals "lightweight", and again, am curious about the Pulitzer jury and their processes). With March, Brooks starts with the basic narrative from Little Women: the father of the four sisters has joined the Union Army as a chaplain during the Civil War, and from his perspective, we learn of his service there and, through his memories, questions from the original storyline are answered (how he met their mother, how his fortune had been made and lost, what his occupation was before the war, etc.) Since the sisters were based on Louisa May Alcott's own, Brooks used the journals and collected letters of Alcott's famous abolitionist father as the inspiration for Mr. March and surrounds him with characters lifted from contemporaneous works of fiction and memoir; placing him in the middle of well-documented Civil War battles; and having him pass through the various settings of other books she mentions as research. Since his basic story is laid out in Little Women -- March goes to war, takes deathly ill and Marmee visits him in Washington, Marmee must return home to attend on sick Beth, March is home for Christmas -- and everything else that happens to him is based on actual, documented events, I can't get over the lingering feeling that this is such an obvious creation (but again, as with The Hours, I need to hedge and note that if it's so obvious, it would be done all the time, so there must be something more at work here).
What Brooks does well here is to update Little Women from an adult perspective -- in the original, the parents are one-dimensional paragons of virtue, forever encouraging their daughters to Christian ideals of hard work and self-sacrifice. In March, we see that they struggle with fatal flaws of their own: March is prideful, thinking that his dubious battlefield ministry is more important than taking care of his wife and children, and Marmee is lustful, jealous, spiteful and hot-tempered. There's a scene in Little Women where Marmee cautions Jo to try harder to control her temper, explaining that she, too, used to lose control until March helped her to overcome it. This came as such a shock to Jo, but it shouldn't have -- March is forever shushing or removing his wife, even restraining her with a hand over her mouth when she can't control her stinging tongue. I had a hard time reconciling the Marmee I knew with the one who went to Washington:
All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and felt a pressure in my breast, like floodwaters rising behind a flimsy dike. Before I knew I did it, the soup bowl was rising in my hand as if elevated by some supernatural force. Then, its yellow-gray contents were running down the nurse’s pudgy face.If that seemed out of character, I was more than a little put off by the following, the thoughts of the same woman who would ask her daughters to go without breakfast on Christmas so as to feed the truly destitute:
But where he might retire to his study and be wafted off on some contemplation of the Oversoul, it was I who felt harassed at every hour by our indebtedness and demeaned by begging credit here and there; I who had to go hungry so that he and the girls might eat. Oh, he gardened to put food on our table, and chopped wood for others when the larder was truly bare. And what praise he won for it: “Orpheus at the plow,” Mr. Emerson hailed him. (No one thought to attach such a poetic label to me, though I might wear myself to a raveling with the hundred little shifts necessary to sustain us all.)But while I might not have truly believed that Marmee would go that far, she is at least humanised. (And that would seem to have been one of Brooks' goals here. When her mother first encouraged her to read Little Women as a girl, Brooks' mother warned: “Nobody in real life is such a goody-goody as that Marmee.”) One last complaint about her character: it's charming in Little Women that her children call her "Marmee" and I felt robbed of that when it's explained in March that "Marmee" is a childhood nickname that everyone uses for her. In the same vein, I was charmed when March referred to his daughters as his "little women" once in a letter home in the original book, but grew impatient that he always referred to them that way in this book.
Even though I learned that many of the situations March was put into were lifted straight from historical accounts, they were interesting nonetheless -- and especially the liberated plantation where the former slaves were now to be paid for working the fields as an investment for a Northerner. This was a fascinating story of how the ideals of the abolitionists were hard to put into practise -- and especially with the incompetence of the Union Army behind them -- and Brooks did an admirable job of showing both sides of a lot of thorny issues (the racism of some Union soldiers who did not believe the Civil War was about abolition, the slaves who might remain loyal to their former masters, mercenary carpet-baggers disguised as white knights). That March remained a naïve idealist throughout his war experience might be a little patronising, but his prideful belief in the value of his own contribution (despite repeated proof to the opposite) is at least true to the effort to humanise his character, too. It did annoy me that March knew so many famous people in the book (he socialised with Emerson and Thoreau, met Nathaniel Hawthorne, and supported John Brown) but this was apparently true of Alcott's father. I also thought it went too far when his vegetarianism (a strange trait, I thought, to give to a 19th century man) led to March giving up silk and wool (because the materials properly belonged to the animals that created them) and later foreswearing milk and cheese (as robbed from calves). In the afterword, Brooks explains that these were also beliefs of Alcott's father (who tried to create a Utopian commune that wouldn't even steal manure from animals to fertilise the fields) but, although that explains the strange details, where truth is stranger than fiction, perhaps these truths shouldn't be borrowed for fiction.
The best of March comes at the end: the touching scene in the original book -- wherein March returns, a weak but treasured presence, in time for a Christmas reunion with his family -- is seen anew through the adults' eyes. Marmee regards him as her "inconstant, ruined dreamer", and March himself thinks, So this was how it was to be, now: I would do my best to live in the quick world, but the ghosts of the dead would be ever at hand. His PTSD (and forsaken dreams) add a rich inner life to the scenes that follow in the original book and Marmee is left with her own demons to wrestle: all while the two of them endeavor to remain models of perfection for their daughters.
In the end, I don't know if my course of rereading Little Women before tackling March was a good idea or not: every time Brooks has a character doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing, I recognised Alcott's hand in the story. It felt implausibly prescient for Marmee to say the following in her first conversation with March:
Perhaps one day I will be entrusted with daughters of my own, and if so, I swear I will not see their minds molded into society's simpering ideal of womanhood. Oh, how I would like to raise writers and artists who would make the world acknowledge what women can do!To later learn that much of what the absent March experienced was lifted straight from historical events had the same effect -- to what extent did this book write itself? And is that true of all good historical fiction? And should it matter? March is an easy book to read, interesting enough and well written, but I didn't love it; and I can't reconcile the Pulitzer.
