March: A grimmer vision of Little Women (#8)

When I was home in late May, I was excited to get a couple of books of out of the library that I can't get here, ending up with Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict (Laurie Viera Rigler) and Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, in addition to Geraldine Brooks' Pulitzer Prize-winning March. I'd had March on my to-read list for a couple of years, but I never got around to it. And when I was home, it was once again at the bottom of the pile; I started both of the other two, but as it turned out, I couldn't get into either -- Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict was un-fun fluff and the tone of Bel Canto, which seemed akin to reading a Woody Allen movie, put me off. So, after many years of good intentions, I finally started March.

March takes its title from the last name of the main character, the much-missed father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, imagining what his experience was like as a chaplain during the Civil War, the cause of his absence in Alcott's book. The novel starts out after a devastating battle, and basically, because of a chance encounter with a woman named Grace, a former slave, that he had met as a young man, he starts to remember his past. The book alternates between his reawakened memories and his present circumstances in the Union army, and March struggles to stay true to his family and his own highly held values while existing/surviving in his wartime reality.

March is an incredibly well-written book but I can't say that I loved it, mostly because I didn't like Mr. March all that much. Generally the main character in a novel -- the hero, if you will -- will learn something about themselves and the world, growing and changing in the process, but I don't think he did, not really. March is incredibly selfish from the start and enjoys playing the martyr, while not seeing the hardships he puts upon others, especially his family. I think this is what bothered me most about him, and the novel in general -- in Little Women, his wife Marmee and their daughters Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth miss him so much and have to make so many sacrifices in his absence, and it turns out, in this telling, that he's a selfish bastard who didn't really deserve it. He never honors the individuality of his wife or makes an effort to truly connect to or understand her. He’s so willing to help others, but never really his family; he always sacrifices them to the bigger cause, while they sacrifice themselves for him. And this never changes.

He also doesn't get himself up from hardship. Since he feels that he's shamed himself (by not winning an unwinnable situation), he refuses to go home, saying his work is not done, that others died or were taken back as slaves because he was not "brave enough." But really, he's choosing the easier path, one where he doesn't have to tell the truth to those he loves, as well as giving into his fondness for playing the martyr. In the end, he's literally forced to go back to his family. Grace has to reject him for him to go home, and John Brooke has to physically bring him back, gripping his arm as they make their way to the house. He doesn’t choose it and he doesn’t change.

But most importantly, he never has to atone for his initial stifling and later betrayal of Marmee. This is why he doesn't want to go home -- if he stays away, he doesn't have to tell her about his entire past or reveal the untruths written in his letters. But in the end, he doesn't really have to say anything. Marmee figures it out for herself and basically just decides to understand after she realizes it’s hard to write the truth when she’s writing to the girls, and she wants to keep the family together. She learns something, but he doesn't.

I am really not sure why Geraldine Brooks chose to write Mr. March this way. He's fairly passive and ineffectual, making him a weak character as things happen to him, when he should really be the one instigating the events of the novel. My only guess is that she's trying to reflect the harsh realities of war -- he's broken by what he's seen and done, and that can't be fixed. I suppose in this novel, the main character did change, but instead of growing, he shrank, ultimately making March the protagonist, but not a hero.