Geraldine
Brooks
MARCH
Fourth Estate, $29.95pb, 352pp, 0 7322
7841 4
SPACIOUS
AND SOLIDLY constructed, the classic nineteenth-century
novel invites revisiting. Later writers
reconfigure its well-known spaces, change
the lighting, summon marginal figures
to the centre. Most memorable, perhaps,
is Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea
(1966), in which the first Mrs Rochester,
the madwoman in the Thornfield attic,
is allowed a voice and a history. She
tells a story very different from the
version her husband gives to Jane Eyre.
The more familiar the text, the greater
the lure of revisioning. Tom Stoppard’s
brilliant take on Hamlet, in Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern Are
Dead (1966), turns tragedy into
absurdist comedy.
In her new novel, March, Geraldine
Brooks takes Louisa May Alcott’s
Little Women as her starting point.
Refashioned, it retains very little of
the sedate, warm-hearted domestic story
that has been a children’s classic
since first publication in 1868. Like
Brooks, I read Little Women as
a ten-year-old. I must have reread it
many times, so clearly and accurately
does memory now retrieve its words and
situations. The four girls, Meg, Jo, Beth
and Amy, are still vividly present. Meg,
whose failing is vanity, behaves badly
at a party and is punished when she sprains
her ankle. Rebellious Jo sells her hair
(‘her one beauty’) to help in
a family crisis. Saintly Beth catches
scarlet fever from the poor family she
visits with baskets of food. Wilful Amy,
forbidden to go out skating, disobeys
and falls through the ice. The moral system
is always clear, and the happy ending
guaranteed.
I doubt if any readers of Alcott’s
novel thought much about the missing father.
Away at the Civil War for almost the whole
length of the novel, March is restored
to his family just in time to add a Christmas
blessing to the final tableau. Except
for the fact that his absence means financial
hardship for his wife and daughters, he
is an irrelevancy in the plot; as a character,
he scarcely exists. Yet it is Mr March
who prompts Geraldine Brooks’s reworking
of the family story. What did March see,
Brooks asks, when he travelled south with
the Union forces? What was the impact
of war on the middle-aged husband and
father from New England, whose conscience
prompts him to volunteer his services
as chaplain? Louisa May Alcott’s
novel is silent on the issues of the war.
The four daughters think that their father
acts nobly in volunteering, but the questions
of secession and slavery are not explored.
Filling the large gap in Little Women,
Brooks has written a powerful novel about
war and slavery. In her version, March
is almost destroyed, physically and mentally,
by witnessing the slaughter, by seeing
the corrupting power of the slave system,
and by having to confront a sexual transgression
in his own past. His attempts to save
lives, or even to give comfort to dying
or mutilated men, are mostly futile.
Free to invent her own March, Geraldine
Brooks has drawn on the history of Bronson
Alcott, father of the author. A friend
and associate of Emerson and Thoreau,
Alcott was a social thinker and teacher
whose attempts to put his ideals into
practice failed utterly. Discussing her
sources in an afterword, Brooks deals
briskly with Alcott the reformer:
A
vegetarian, he founded a commune, Fruitlands,
so extreme in its Utopianism that members
neither wore wool nor used animal manures,
as both were considered property of
the beasts from which they came. One
reason the venture failed in its first
winter was that when canker worms got
into the apple crop, the non-violent
Fruitlanders refused to take measures
to kill them.
Brooks
makes March a more sympathetic character
than the Bronson Alcott of history, whose
diaries reveal a sanctimonious domestic
tyrant. Although his abolitionist views
were strongly held, Alcott was never tested
as March is tested. Twenty years older
than his fictional counterpart, Alcott
did not go to war. It was his daughter
Louisa who saw the cost of battle during
a brief stint as a volunteer nurse in
Washington.
Brooks invents March as a flawed idealist
whose decision to volunteer has a strong
element of selfishness. When he tries
to atone for past mistakes by staying
on in the South beyond any hope of being
useful, his wife exposes his self-dramatising
tendencies. As a study of a marriage under
tension, March is subtle and eloquent.
On fathers and daughters — surely
a promising way to reread Little Women
— it is less satisfying.
Told in the first person, mainly by March,
but with four chapters from his wife’s
viewpoint, the narrative voice is strongest
in describing the landscapes of war, the
battles and atrocities. Turning towards
home, March’s sentiment-ality takes
over. When ‘our little Mouse Beth’
is heard to ‘squeak’, today’s
readers might well shudder.
March could stand in its own right
as a Civil War novel, like Cold Mountain
(1998). As in A Year of Wonders (2001),
her story of an English village divided
and doomed by plague in 1666, Brooks looks
unflinchingly at horrors. March
is built on some impressive research,
including material on the precarious fate
of the ‘contraband’ slaves —
those caught between North and South after
Lincoln’s edict had pronounced them
free. I am not sure, however, that the
appearance of Emerson and Thoreau in walk-on
parts is worth the trouble. Bronson Alcott’s
story would need a fuller account of the
Transcendentalists, as well as a more
astrin-gent tone than that of March.
Given that the novel departs radically
from its origins in Little Women,
it is also worth asking how much is gained
by evoking the gentle domestic world of
Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Perhaps the real
point is to show that in times of war
there are no safe havens.
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