Reading post: Little Women and a bunch of other stuff...

Another reading post: ignore if it's not your thing. Even if it is your thing, it's a bit of a mess.

My sixth book for the Classics Challenge is Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, first published in 1868 (Part 1) and 1869 (Part 2, sometimes printed separately as Good Wives). For background, context, and perspective, I also read part or all of a lot of other books, including Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott (1863), Little Men by Louisa May Alcott (1871), Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1892 version), The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War by Daniel Aaron (1973), March by Geraldine Brooks (2005), and Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and his Brothers in the Civil War by Robert Roper (2008). Since I chose Little Women to fit into category #12, "Classic Adaptation," I also planned to watch the most recent film version, but haven't managed to do that yet. I may come back and edit this post after I do (as if it's not long enough already).

So, why all these other books? Why couldn't I just read Little Women and be done with it? I'll try to explain.

My original plan for the Classics Challenge this year was to read books about the Civil War and its aftermath. I quickly realized that I wasn't interested in battles. I wanted to know about the war from the perspective of African-Americans, even though I know that historians don't view slavery as the real cause of the war. The war resulted in big changes to Black people's lives, though not entirely positive ones (end of slavery but then comes Reconstruction, Jim Crow, etc.). I thought trying to understand race in America would be useful during this election year. I don't think I'm psychic, but yes, it's turning out to have been a good decision.

But I realized when I started choosing books to read that there aren't a lot of older classic novels about the war, especially not from the perspective of African-Americans -- until Toni Morrison wrote Beloved (1987). There's The Red Badge of Courage (1895), and Gone with the Wind (1936) for the southern/racist view, but I'd read them both and didn't want to revisit them. I assumed that the great fiction writers (Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, etc.) of the time would have written about the war, but they didn't. A scholarly book I got from the CU library, The Unwritten War (Aaron, 1973), is basically chapter after chapter about why major Civil War era writers didn't write about the war. Sections of the book are titled "A Philosophical View of the Whole Affair," "The Malingerers," etc.

[Boston Unitarian minister] John Weiss did not expect an American masterpiece to emerge from the War itself (it was time, he said, to stop sighing for Iliads), but almost immediately after Appomattox Northern commentators began to complain about the failure of American writers to do justice to the recent strife and to offer extenuating reasons why... (p. xv)

One exception -- sort of -- is Walt Whitman, who, though mostly past his prime by the 1860s, did write poems about the war, specifically about soldiers who suffered and died from injury or illness. He also wrote a great poem about Lincoln's death, "When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd" (1865). So I started reading Leaves of Grass, which contains pretty much all the poems Whitman ever wrote. He revised it throughout his life, adding in his latest poems each time instead of starting a new volume. I thought I couldn't include it as one of my "Classics" because it's poetry, not a novel, but I just wanted to read it (I'm still working on it). And as soon as I started reading it, I thought, I need some context. I need to know more about this guy than Wikipedia can give me.

So, at the Boulder Public Library, back when you could still browse the shelves, I found this very interesting and readable biography, Now the Drum of War (Roper, 2008). In addition to explaining many things I needed to know about Whitman, it also explains why neither he nor anyone else wanted to write about the war:

...Apparently a grand subject, full of heroism and historical significance, the war was hard to grasp for contemporary Americans, and even harder to render in a way that appealed to a commercial audience. The experience of the common soldiers, if honestly told, was too raw for polite literature, and a national narrative of brother slaughtering brother only sounds like a good idea for a book -- in the reading and writing of it, a quality of unredeemed horror would make itself felt. (p. 174)

Roper also discusses the problem of white people writing about African-Americans at that time:

An epic novel or poem of the war would have to reckon with slavery and its effects, and more to the point, with the reality of black people, who as convincing and articulate characters are almost entirely missing from the literature that did get written. Nor was the story of Reconstruction something that Americans were eager to tell each other, or knew how to speak of. The rapid retreat from postwar reform by the Federal authorities, and the return almost to the status quo ante for Southern blacks, threw an odd light on the recent vast bloodletting -- if not for this, then, good God, for what? (p. 175)

One of Walt Whitman's brothers was a Union soldier, but Whitman himself served as a sort of nurse/comforter in military hospitals in Washington during the war, which fit in well with his general love of young men. He wrote about how much he enjoyed kissing the wounded soldiers, for instance. It was an important time in his life.

At the age of 30, Louisa May Alcott was also, briefly, a nurse in a military hospital, as described in her Hospital Sketches (1863), which I read online (it's very much in the public domain). This is an interesting little book, sounding much more real than her children's books, though still exhibiting her tendency to turn everything into a perfect little story with a moral. It's based on her letters home during her time as a nurse, which were turned into articles for an abolitionist magazine, and then into this book. She calls herself Tribulation Periwinkle and mentions that she has a little brother Tom, which Louisa May Alcott didn't have. But otherwise the stories are apparently almost identical to her letters home. Her descriptions of the wounded men's terrible injuries made me think of the quote from Roper above: "The experience of the common soldiers, if honestly told, was too raw for polite literature..."

There are tiny mentions of Black people here and there throughout the book, mostly fairly neutral for the time though some made me wince. But her abolitionist sensibilities are also visible, as when she comments on who she thinks has stolen her apples:

...and the apples... took to themselves wings and flew away; whither no man could tell, though certain black imps might have thrown light upon the matter, had not the plaintiff in the case been loth to add another to the many trials of long-suffering Africa.

In the last full chapter she goes into more depth about her experiences from a racial point of view. She says she was warned before heading to Washington "not to be too rampant on the subject of slavery," but gradually she finds that she cannot be silent in the face of all the prejudice around her. One day, while fixing food for her patients, she picks up "a funny little black baby, who was toddling about the nurses' kitchen," which upsets another nurse, from Virginia:

"Gracious, Miss P.! how can you? I've been here six months. and never so much as touched the little toad with a poker."
"More shame for you, ma'am," responded Miss P.; and, with the natural perversity of a Yankee, followed up the blow by kissing "the toad," with ardor. His face was providentially as clean and shiny as if his mamma had just polished it up with a corner of her apron and a drop from the tea-kettle spout, like old Aunt Chloe.* This rash act, and the anti-slavery lecture that followed, while one hand stirred gruel for sick America, and the other hugged baby Africa,** did not produce the cheering result which I fondly expected; for my comrade henceforth regarded me as a dangerous fanatic...

*A character in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

**Note that even for Alcott, white people are "America," and Black people are "Africa," and she has this sense that the U.S. is a white country, despite the fact that white people stole it from its original people and Black people were there with white people almost from the very beginning.

 

The last line of the book, in the Postscript, is this:

The next hospital I enter will, I hope, be one for the colored regiments, as they seem to be proving their right to the admiration and kind offices of their white relations, who owe them so large a debt, a little part of which I shall be so proud to pay.

Spoken like the abolitionist she was, though in fact she did not enter any more hospitals. She contracted typhoid fever, recovered but was "never well afterward," and returned to Concord, Massachusetts, and her family.

This brings us to Little Women (1868/9), supposedly the subject of this very long post, which I first read when I was probably 11 or 12. Briefly, it is the story of four sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy (based on Louisa and her three sisters Anna, Lizzie, and May), who with their mother Marmee are keeping the home fires burning while their father, an army chaplain, is off "where the fighting is," during the early part of the Civil War (note that Louisa's real father, Bronson Alcott, was not a chaplain and did not serve in the war). At the beginning of the book they range in age from 16 (Meg) to 12 (Amy), and they proceed to have various mild adventures which teach them important life lessons, such as "control your temper" and "don't envy what others have." Part 1 of the book takes place over the course of a year (possibly 1861, but it would make much more sense if it were 1862), and Part 2 begins three years later and goes on for several more years, ending with three of the sisters married with children.

I have to admit that I have never much liked this book and I have never understood why so many people love it so much. Louisa May Alcott wrote several other books for young people and I liked many of those better (Little Men (1871), Eight Cousins (1875), Jack and Jill (1880), etc.). I chose Little Women for the Classics Challenge because I knew it was set during the Civil War, and I wanted to reread it through that lens. But rereading it was even less pleasant than I expected. I like the characters of Jo Marsh and her sisters, but I find Marmee's moralizing excruciating. In later books, Alcott figured out how to make the moralizing more palatable, even welcome.

In addition to my irritation with Marmee, I remembered as I read that I always disliked the March sisters' endless mooning over money. Every young woman they know seems to be wealthy (and brainless), and they all, even Jo, constantly wish they could have some of that money so they could have nicer clothes, trips to Europe, and so on. I remember thinking that the Marches seemed awfully shallow. But it makes more sense when you know that the Alcotts were truly poverty-stricken and sometimes starving. Louisa May Alcott makes their lives seem less terrible in her novel, but retains their longing for money. And the awful young women they associate with? Well, Alcott told her publisher that she couldn't write a book about girls because she didn't like them and didn't know many (except her sisters). If the young women of her acquaintance were like this, I can understand her feelings. Or maybe she just didn't like girls. (But in that case why did she tell an interviewer, "I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man"?)

Given my current interests, I read Little Women looking for how Alcott portrays Black people. There are very few, but partway through I started wondering whether Hannah, the March family's faithful and underpaid servant, might be Black. Most of the time she speaks pretty much the way the family does, with just a few humorous mispronunciations, but at one point she contributes to a letter that the whole family is writing to Marmee. And this is how she writes:

Dear Mis March--
     I jes drop a line to say we git on fust rate. The girls is clever and fly around right smart. Miss Meg is going to make a proper good housekeeper; she hes the liking for it, and gits the hang of things surprisin quick. Jo doos beat all for goin ahead, but she don't stop to calklate fust, and you never know where she's like to bring up...

That first line sure looks like a clumsy attempt at stereotyped Black speech: "git on fust rate," for heaven's sake. (As if anyone would write that way! She can spell "housekeeper" but not "just" or "get" or "first"?) I haven't been able to find much on the internet about Hannah, other than a journal article about Louisa May Alcott's views on domestic service as illustrated in her writing (Maibor, 2006) which did not attempt to guess Hannah's background. Another short article about how to teach Chapter 4 of Little Women refers to "Irish servant Hannah." Maybe Hannah was supposed to be Irish, but if so, Louisa did not know how to write an Irish accent.

Almost the only other mention of a Black person comes in the very last chapter, as part of the description of the boys who attend Jo's school:

...and a merry little quadroon, who could not be taken in elsewhere, but who was welcome to the "Bhaer-garten," though some people predicted that his admission would ruin the school...

I'm not sure I knew what a quadroon was when I read this as a child. Certainly this sentence contains a wealth of information about prejudice against African-Americans in the North. Although at this point in the story, the Civil War and slavery were both over, Alcott sneaks in this hint that nothing was over. I suppose her publisher might not have allowed her to be more open about her views in a story for children.

I'm now in the middle of rereading Little Men, looking for that "quadroon," but so far he hasn't turned up. There's just Asia, the "black cook." Little Men is fun, though, as I had recalled. Actually, it's incredibly sentimental, but for whatever reason, the sentimentality is easier for me to swallow than it is in Little Women.

March had been sitting in my to-be-read pile for a few years, after I found it in a Little Free Library. My book group read People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks some years back, and I liked it well enough -- that's probably why I snagged March. Once I had it home, I picked it up a few times and set it down again, but this spring seemed a good time to read it, finally.

March is a modern attempt to tell the story of what Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy's father was doing off in the Civil War while they stayed home and learned life lessons. March describes Mr. March's experiences in the war, with flashbacks to his earlier life, and shows how an idealistic dreamer learns the truth about life. Or sort of. In the beginning of the book, March is portrayed as essentially an idiot. He's thrown out of his regiment for being insufferable. And yet, his life is later saved by a former slave who describes him as a "gud kin man." Is he both, or did he become a better person as the book went along? I am not sure. I just didn't get a good sense of him. Brooks' writing is gorgeous and compelling, but did she really understand her character?

As I see it, the problem with March is that the title character is based on a fictional character (Mr. March) who was partly but not entirely based on a real person (Bronson Alcott). It might have worked if Brooks had just expanded on the fictional character of Mr. March, but instead she researched the life of Bronson Alcott and brought some of the understanding she gained to March. But there are so many differences between Louisa May Alcott's character of Mr. March and her father. Most crucially, Bronson Alcott was never an army chaplain in the Civil War. But since Louisa sends her father off to war in Little Women, Geraldine Brooks sends him there, too. And since Louisa sends him to an Army hospital like the one she nursed in, Brooks sends him there, too. So we have a mix of Louisa's fiction, Louisa's real life, Bronson Alcott's real life, and Brooks' imagination. A mix that doesn't quite work for me. It's almost an argument against doing research -- Brooks' novel might have been better if she hadn't known anything about Bronson Alcott.

So that's it for my reading of Little Women and a whole lot of other books that seemed to me to be related. I think I really may come back and add to this after I see the latest movie, but for now this is enough. My next two "Challenge" choices are by African-Americans, which I am very ready to read.