Using her
tremendous imagination and extensive historical research about the
Civil War, Geraldine Brooks wrote the novel March about the
absent father of the family in Little
Women. It won the 2006 Pulitzer Price for fiction.
Brooks based the character of March on the actual father of Little Women
author Louisa May Alcott, who was a Concord abolitionist and friend of
Emerson and Thoreau. Unlike the idealized male parent in Little Women,
Brooks's March is a flawed man. He impulsively enlists in the Union
Army as a chaplain even though at 39 he's well past the age of most
soldiers. He alienates many of his service comrades with his
naive idealism, he is cowardly and incompetent when lives are on the
line, and he surrenders to his attraction to a slave. March flagellates
himself for his failings but keeps most of them secret in the loving
letters he writes to his wife, Marmee, and daughters Meg, Jo, Beth, and
Amy.
In an interesting afterward, Brooks describes how she had once been
bored by her husband's fascination with the Civil War until she
"finally saw the light." In March she may teach readers some new things about that war. Two examples: John Brown played fast and loose with
abolitionists' donations to finance his antislavery activities. Northerners leased
former Southern plantations that they paid freed slaves (known as
contraband) to farm.
Much less sentimental than Little
Women, March brings home the realities of war. It is a
changed March who returns to the "little women" who will nurse his
broken spirit.
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