Little Women Month: March

The final installment of Little Women Month takes us into the heart of Geraldine Page’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, “March”, which takes us into events in the life of Mr. March while he serves as an army chaplain in the Civil War.

“March” is unique in that it’s a parallel novel that takes place, for the most part, during the early chapters of Little Women.  Following Mr. March across southern battlefields, giving us glimpses of his yearning for his wife while he’s drawn into an affair when he falls victim to a fever and is taken off the field, and we are taken into the past with his reminiscences. 

There’s a lot to admire in March; the prose, the sense of place and time – both work beautifully.  March is a sympathetic if pacifistic character, devoted to the good earth, the education of the innocent and the cultivation of a vegan diet in equitable amounts.    Brooks based March off of Alcott’s father, Bronson Alcott, a wise if not entirely competently executed move, for Mr. March does not behave in the spendthrift and impulsive way Alcott did.   He is so passive for a reason: his reckless behavior as a youth once resulted in the whipping of a slave woman in the house he’d stayed with – the very woman is now a nurse, an educated freedwoman, who tends to him when he falls ill.  

It is here where the story grows shaky, and the character’s moral imperatives grow foggy.  It’s hard to imagine the moral steward of Jo being an adulterer; it’s hard to imagine that Marmee, though fiery, might actually abuse her passive husband in their early marriage.    When he goes back to his family, the response is not ‘finally’ but ‘why?’.