No
safe havens
Brenda Niall
Geraldine
Brooks
March
Fourth Estate, $29.95 pb, 352 pp, 0732278414
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 sentimentality 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.
Brenda
Niall is currently our Critic
of the Month
