I re-examine Alcott's world with Geraldine Brooks

March ****
By Geraldine Brooks

"March" is the parallel story of Mr. March, the mostly-absent father from "Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott.

Total disclosure: I confess that "Little Women" was, for me, an acquired taste. I despised the book as a child, rejecting it as preachy and prissy when I was 12. When I was 35 and actually made it through the book, I realized that a large part of what I had rejected in adolescence was my own Unitarian upbringing, where all actions had moral consequences that had to be endlessly inspected, parsed, and talked over. At 35, I was able to overlook a lot of what had irritated Adolescent Me and see a realistic and engaging story about a family of women trying to be humane and decent in hard times.

ANYway, having overcome my aversion to the prissy side of Alcott's "Little Women," I was better able to overlook Mr. March's even prissier narrative--one that Brooks developed from reading the writings of Alcott's father, a philosopher and educator who founded a failed utopian community.

From the first **SPOILERS FOLLOW** it's clear March's fierce idealism has two sides. He's always trying to be moral and decent, but he rarely thinks of the consequences his actions will have on Marmee and the girls. One recalls the old adage about the road to hell being paved with good intentions. And March is clearly on that road when he enlists in the Union Army in his 40s and leaves the fam at home without means of support.

As an army chaplain, March makes cheerful noises about his sacrifices--as well as the sacrifices he demands of others.

Of his beggary, he writes:

I had come in stages to a different belief about how one should be in this life. I now felt convinced that the greater part of a man's duty consists in abstaining from much that he is in the habit of consuming. If I prolong my dark hours by the consumption of costly oil, then I waste both the life of the beast slaughtered for the purpose, and the clarity of mind which comes from timely sleep. If I indulge in coffee then I pay to pollute myself, when instead I could have had a cleansing draught of water at no charge at all. None in our household ate meat, but now we learned to do without milk and cheese also, for why should the calf be deprived of its mother's milk? Further, we found that by limiting our consumption to two meals a day, we were able to set aside a basket of provisions from which the girls were able to exact a pleasure far greater than sating an animal appetite. Once a week, they carried the fruits of their sacrifice as a gift to a destitute brood of German immigrants.

This kind of logical idealism is, of course, shattered by the chaos and ambiguities of war and his meeting up with his own imperfections. We already know what the outcome of the girls' connection to the German family will be.

Briefly, Marmee takes over the "March" narrative, at the point in "Little Women" where she is called to Blank Hospital in Washington, D.C., to care for her sick husband. In a display of temper hinted at in "Little Women," she grows weary of the invalid's breast-beating over his failure to do more, and thereby sums up the conflict in March's soul:

Marmee: You are not God. You do not determine the outcome. The outcome is not the point.

March: Then what, pray, is the point?

Marmee: The point is the effort. That you, believing what you believed--what you sincerely believed including the commandment "thou shalt not kill"--acted upon it. To believe, to act, and to have events confound you--I grant you, that is heard to bear. But to believe, and not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your soul held was wrong--how can you not see? THAT is what would have been reprehensible.

March: Leave me now. I need to sleep.

Summarily dismissed by March, Marmee leaves to care for the ailing Beth, but not before challenging March to get better and, more difficult, to accept that he cannot save the world, win the war or solve racial tension. But that, broken as he is, he can save their family. We all know the choice he makes, and that choice helps him overcome and (to use a favorite Unitarian word) transcend his notions about strength, weakness and success.

Added bonus are Brooks' human renditions of Thoreau and Emerson, who were the equivalents of Sts. Peter and Paul of our Unitarian Church when I was growing up.