Source of book: I own this
I had high hopes for this book. My youngest kid read Horse, another book by the author, and liked it. And, the book won a freaking Pulitzer.
Unfortunately, this book was disappointing. The key problem was its use of lazy anachronism which rendered its female characters fundamentally unbelievable.
I have run across this phenomenon before, of course. Plenty of genre fiction authors like to put 21st Century feminists in the past. For example, The Lie Tree is a murder mystery set in the past, with a protagonist who talks using modern feminist terms. But it is also YA and not exactly serious literature, so I just enjoyed the mystery.
Serious literary fiction - particularly historical fiction - should be held to a higher standard. Which this book does not meet.
The premise of the book is interesting, and it has its moments.
The book is a riff on Little Women, which I read with a couple of friends in preparation for reading this book together. “March” is Mr. March, the father in that story, who goes off to be a chaplain in the Civil War, gets ill and nearly dies, and is brought home to convalesce.
March is all about March, and also about the story that was never told about what went down. It is, I would say, intended as a bit of a corrective against the dynamic in Little Women, with Marmee being the impossible angel who never has a bad thought, and dad being the beloved and noble figure.
Because Little Women has autobiographical elements, it is easy (and probably accurate) to see Mr. March as being the same person as Bronson Alcott, Lou’s father.
And he was, well, a character.
Part of the Transcendentalist movement, he was the True Believer, the ideologue, the guy who lacked basic practicality and common sense.
Reading through his life story, it is clear that he had great intentions, and incompetent and misguided execution of those intentions. He also seems to have been allergic to taking advice from smarter people, including his long-suffering wife.
This all comes through well in March, and is in my opinion the strongest part of the book.
The book tells of March/Bronson’s early days selling notions in the South, where he (with his typical lack of common sense) fell in love with plantation culture, while failing to notice that it was propped up by the brutal enslavement system.
It also tells briefly of the Alcott’s time as a stop on the Underground Railroad. It isn’t difficult to see that part of the challenge of that was for Marmee to keep Bronson from blowing their cover and getting his ass into hot water.
And that was the one thing that the Alcotts actually succeeded at.
Mention could be made of his ill-advised attempt to disrupt a trial. Or his many failed attempts at teaching, where he let his ideology get in the way of doing a competent job.
And, my favorite, which was, sadly, NOT in the book: that time he tried to do a vegetarian commune except he was so extreme that he refused to use manure to fertilize the crops, because that was stealing from the cattle.
(Note: I have cats. I can assure you that they have no interest in what you do with their shit…as long as you keep that litter box nice and clean for them.)
Oh, and one more: the real-life Bronson may not have actually served in the Civil War, but he did get gravely ill…and shared his germs with Thoreau, who likely died of that infection.
Plot spoilers ahead.
So, in March, Bronson Alcott’s letters and diaries and writings are drawn from, sometimes word for word, particularly his letters home while out volunteering. The incidents in the book that were not from Bronson’s life were based on other real-life events. Battles, personal incidents, and more.
But there are a number of incidents which are filled in from the author’s imagination.
The key one is the existence of an enslaved woman named Grace, who serves as part of the love triangle along with Bronson and Marmee. And the first part of the book is pretty darn horny.
Which is, in my opinion, a bit of unnecessary artistic license. In the book, the couple has passionate sex by Walden Pond, resulting in a hasty marriage and the conception of Meg. In real life, the first Alcott daughter was born a perfectly respectable 10 months after the marriage. It was the marriage which was “scandalous,” as the couple - ages 29 and 30, by the way - got engaged without her family’s permission. But it can’t have been too scandalous - her brother (who introduced them) performed the ceremony.
We also learn that during his trip south, March/Bronson met Grace and had an affair of some sort with her. (He is a thoroughly unreliable narrator, so we can’t believe what he says.)
Later, by coincidence, they meet again during the Civil War. Maybe they rekindle their affair? It isn’t clear. And then again, she becomes his nurse during his illness.
At this point, we get the story, not from March/Bronson’s point of view, but from Marmee’s.
And this is where the book totally lost me. (Although to be fair, there were huge problems already when it came to Grace, so…)
Marmee finds out about the affair, confronts Grace, etc.
The whole episode is so anachronistic that I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief any further.
Because the Bronson portion of the book was at least based on his writings, he came off as fairly believable. His voice seemed to belong to his era.
But neither Grace nor Marmee would have acted like that, or talked like that, or really existed in those forms at all.
Let’s start with one thing at a time.
So, initially, Grace is plausible. An enslaved woman who is really the daughter of the master, and raised with a higher level of education. Okay, that did sometimes happen.
Along comes March, who becomes buddies with the master, while clearly having the hots for Grace. Fine, plausible.
But from there, things go sideways. The idea that somehow Grace would bare her heart to this white guy who not only was buddies with her enslaver but who continually put his foot in his mouth is ludicrous. Grace is no fool - and neither were other enslaved people. Which is why, in books written by the enslaved who freed themselves - see Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - they made it clear that you never told a white man more than you had to.
Ironically, Brooks gets this right in the episode of the young woman on the Underground Railroad. We never learn her name, she never tells her story.
And this is to people who are literally helping her to freedom. Not to some random white guy crushing on the master’s library. And certainly not to someone who easily could (and eventually does) get her beaten within an inch of her life.
Of course March would be that stupid. But Grace would not.
So then we get into that stupid scene where Marmee hears March call Grace a term of endearment.
Neither Marmee nor Grace behaves how any reasonable person would have in that era. Or any person at all.
I start with the fact that social expectations were different regarding male sexuality.
Most men lost their virginity to either a sex worker or a servant/slave. This is not merely well established fact, but it was socially expected. Male virginity and marriage was not expected, and was widely looked on as showing a lack of masculinity. And women thought this way too. (Seriously, I’ve read the books by female authors!)
In a more recent book I read, The Ministry of Time, there is a great reference to 19th Century sexuality. A main character, brought back to the present from that time, is tested for STIs, and comes back negative. The modern doctors correctly conclude that he is likely a virgin.
This isn’t to say that there weren’t men who were virgins at marriage, but that social expectations were to the contrary.
The likelihood that Marmee cared about March’s sexual history before marriage is extremely low. And given March’s delirium at the time he uses his term of endearment to Grace, there is no reason she would automatically assume she was a current (or even past) lover.
But even more ludicrous is that she pretty much stalks Grace, shows up at her employer’s house, and confronts her. Why on earth would she do that? What is the point?
If she thought Grace was a threat, she could simply, like any white woman of the era, made a complaint and ruined Grace’s life. Or at least had her reassigned. Why would you make a scene, make yourself look bad, and possibly put Grace’s life at risk?
And, on the other side, why the hell would Grace once again bare her soul to this furious white woman?
All she would have had to do - and would have done in real life - would have been to deny any connection. March presumably mistook her for someone he used to know. He was clearly delirious. And all black people look alike, right? (Sarcasm font, but you know what I mean in this context.) Just deny and play dumb - a little code switch would have been so easy for an intelligent black woman with lots of experience.
And then, Marmee would look even more crazy and foolish than she already did. Which is why I strongly doubt she would have bothered with a confrontation. Even if she were as foolish and impulsive as March/Bronson, she surely would have known this wouldn’t end well unless she got a confession. Which rarely happens in real life. And would certainly not have happened in this case.
Marmee is essentially a 21st Century semi-feminist woman, one that both is justifiably frustrated with the double standard and holding modern views of expectations of male behavior. (Modern religiously biased expectations, one might say.)
Okay, so I have vented properly about this. (My wife, for what it is worth, shares my frustration with lazy anachronism in writing.)
In thinking about why Brooks struggled with this, I have a few theories.
First, she is an Australian white woman writing about the American Civil War. Now, I am not one of those who thinks writers should only write what they know. But I also have reservations about writers inserting themselves in unfamiliar contexts and cultures, at least without a great deal of care.
For example, I suspect that a white American writer would be equally clumsy writing about indigenous Australians during the age of conquest. There are things a guy like me would miss - the nuances, and the cultural baggage that still remains from the era.
Another theory is that Brooks seems good at imagining herself in this book. Marmee reacts to March and Grace the way Geraldine Brooks would respond. Grace reacts to March and Marmee the way Geraldine Brooks would respond.
March feels real, because he is based on Bronson Alcott and uses his words and ideas. Marmee would feel more real if she sounded like, to use a couple of examples, Mary Wollstonecraft or Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
I want to contrast this with a few books written by other authors that felt far more resonant. First is James by Percival Everett, which our book club read a couple years ago. The other is Tar Baby by Toni Morrison, which I am reading right now.
In both cases, the white characters seem thoroughly realistic. Both male and female characters feel realistic.
And the reason why is that they act, talk, react, and behave consistent with their time, place, and station in life. As a white guy, I feel like I have met people like the characters, whether in real life, or in books of the era. (Everett’s white characters are better than Mark Twain’s black characters - it’s quite striking.)
One final quibble, which would have been minor if the other issues hadn’t been there: the book isn’t subtle, but rather preachy. I won’t get into it, but there were times I felt the book dragged for that reason. It was set up to show the ills of the enslavement system, and the unconscious prejudice of New England, which is fine, but it felt to me a lot like Brooks was trying to educate people who had no idea that the North was racist too. Or even that rape was endemic to the antebellum South.
That said, there were some things that I thought were well done in this book.
I thought that a lot of the section from March’s point of view did a great job of letting his own sense of self-importance and white-saviorism show through in his own words. He is clearly unaware of what he sounds like, and that makes him a good - and believable - character.
The more that a scene is drawn from historical records, the more believable it feels. This includes the battles and the incidents in Alcott’s trip through the South as a young man.
While a bit preachy, I did appreciate that the book captured the general resistance toward the education of black people, and the mistreatment of “contraband” - the freed peoples that the Union army failed so badly.
There were also plenty of pithy comments on religion which seem fully true today as back in the day.
The anti-war ideas of Marmee are the most era-appropriate of her views.
And, at the core of the book, I think that it does capture a lot of the complexity of Bronson Alcott: his noble aspirations, his lack of sense, his talent at doing and saying the wrong thing, his inability to spot con artists, his unwillingness to listen to advice and take counsel. Again, the part of the book from his point of view is better written.
I’ll share a few of the quotes that were interesting to me. This one, from Alcott’s writings, is good.
“I find it suits me, this job of chaplain. I am, indeed, a ‘chapel man,’ who carries within himself all that’s needed for worship. At last, it is possible to have a part in faith without carved pulpit or Gothic arch, without lace altar cloth and without robes, save my suit of unornamented black.”
Or this one:
One of these, who was clearly dying, said he was a Catholic and asked if I was a priest. Knowing full well that there was no priest to bring to him, I looked around to see if we were overheard, and then I whispered to him that I was. I let him make his confession, and gave him absolution as I had seen the Fathers do it. I have wondered, since then, if I did wrong. I cannot think that even the exacting God of Rome would find so.
And this one:
If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.
There is a nice call out to the Quakers, who are well documented as having been the backbone of the Underground Railroad and the Abolitionist movement generally.
In Concord, because of our work in the Underground Railroad, we had come to know many who fit the latter description. Mostly they were Quakers, whose abolitionism and pacifism sprang from the selfsame core belief: there is that of God in every person, and therefore you may not enslave any man, and neither may you kill him, even to liberate the enslaved.
And one here from Marmee’s point of view:
I am not alone in this. I only let him do to me what men have ever done to women: march off to empty glory and hollow acclaim and leave us behind to pick up the pieces. The broken cities, the burned barns, the innocent injured beasts, the ruined bodies of the boys we bore and the men we lay with.
I am reminded of the profound and powerful poem, “The End and the Beginning” by Wislawa Szymborska, also about the process of rebuilding after war.
By the way, the above passage is one that I felt was likely that Marmee could have thought in that era.
I’ll end with a bit that really nails the problem with March/Bronson: his savior complex and sense of self-importance. Marmee may sound a bit modern here, but I believe the sentiment is realistic.
“Brave enough! How brave do you need to be to satisfy yourself? I said pride, and pride it is, when you speak so. For it is not enough for you to be accounted commonly courageous. Oh no: you must be a Titan. You must carry all the wounded off the field. You must not only try to save a man, you must succeed at it, and when you can’t, you heap ashes on your head as if all the blame were yours - none to spare for the generals who blundered you into that battle, or the stretcher bearers, who also fled for their lives; or for Stone’s own panic, or for the fact that he never troubled to learn to swim, not even a modicum of blame for the man who shot him…You did not kill Silas Stone, or Zannah’s child. The war killed both of them. You must accept that.”
This is really the story of March’s life: go in trying to be the hero, ignore what the smarter people advise, do something stupid, and fail. Or, in some of the cases above, just try and fail - the incident on the battlefield was not March’s fault, and he had no time to think.
In this sense, we can all draw a bit of a lesson. We can’t do everything. We won’t succeed at everything. But we should try, and we should listen to others, and we should be humble enough to realize that our powers are limited, and that all we can do is what we can. We are not responsible for outcomes, just for our actions.
I really wish I had been able to like this book. It was a promising premise, it had its moments, but it was ultimately doomed by anachronism and difficulty in creating believable female characters.
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