Title: March
Rating: 5 Stars
Continuing my journey through the Pulitzer Fiction Prize winners, I tackled March. This was one of the novels that I held off for a while. I’d last read Little Women some twenty-five or thirty years ago. It was OK but not exactly my cup of team. I’m not exactly the demographic that that novel was shooting for. The fact that March is in the same universe as Little Women wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement to me.
Little Women is the story of four young sisters coping while their father is off serving as a chaplain for Union troops during the Civil War. The novel March is the story of their father. It’s centered around his time serving the Union, but it jumps back in time reviewing key moments in his life.
Mr March (I might have missed it, but I never learned his first name), as a young man, started out as an itinerant peddler. In his travels, he alights upon a plantation in Virginia. There, he meets a cultured slave owner and an educated, sophisticated enslaved person named Grace. The owner, Mr Clement, excited to meet an intellectual young man, encourages him to stay for a while. Stunned at Clement’s vast library, March agrees. While there, March, upon Grace’s request, surreptitiously begins to teach a young Black girl to read. When Clement discovers this, in a rage he orders Grace to be viciously whipped. Shocked that such a seemingly sophisticated man can behave so barbarously hardens March’s abolitionist beliefs.
Later March meets, falls in love, and marries Marmee. In due course, she gives birth to four daughters, the now famous Little Women. In Marmee, March has more than met his match in her hatred of slavery. Her adulation of the fierce John Brown leads March to later finance some of Brown’s investment opportunities. These investments, essentially fraudulent, collapse and March loses his fortune, forcing him and his family to live in much reduced circumstances.
Later, when some local troops are getting ready to head out to fight to save the Union, March is called upon to make a speech. As he’s giving his inspirational words, he looks over at his wife. His wife’s eyes seem to be full of fervor. At that moment, with that inspiration, he spontaneously decides, at the age of thirty-eight, to join the Union cause himself, serving as a chaplain.
While serving, he witnesses fierce battles. As chaplain, there isn’t much that he can do. In one battle as he and other soldiers are desperately trying to retreat from battle by swimming across a river, he kicks a drowning soldier away from him that was going to drown them both. The guilt of this act eats at him.
He also understands that his troops don’t find his extreme abolitionist beliefs to be particularly soothing. They are more interested in more traditional religions than his transcendent beliefs, so he feels that he’s failing in the role of chaplain.
He volunteers to serve as an educator for recently freed Blacks. He moves to a plantation that has just recently been abandoned by its Southern owner. A Northerner named Ethan Canning is desperately trying to work the previously enslaved on the plantation to harvest much needed cotton for the Union cause. While there, March witnesses the Black people still being worked and treated as if they were still enslaved. He begins to question his purpose. However, he does make progress teaching the former enslaved to read and write. He sees their desperate hunger for learning as proof of a common humanity.
Unfortunately, this takes place in the early years of the Civil War (1862) where the outcome is very much in doubt. The Union soldiers essentially abandon the protection that they were providing the plantation and secessionists come back, torture Canning, destroy the crops, and re-enslave the plantation workers. March is helpless to stop the violence.
He catches a bad fever and barely survives the trip back North. Marmee comes to DC to nurse him back to health. March is a broken man. All of his ideals have fallen apart in the face of reality. He feels worthless and that the only thing that he can do now is to dedicate his life in the service of all of those that he’s failed. It is up to Marmee and Grace (who has amazingly reappeared in his life) to convince him that his life is with his family and it is there that he can do the most good.
The stories of battle and of plantation life are graphic and horrific. You see a man with the best of intentions struggle with coming to terms with the mismatch between his ideals and the reality in which he lives.
The relationship between Marmee and March is also handled well. Even though they are happy and in love, there is trouble between the two. Most of the novel is told in the first person from March’s perspective. There is one small section that is the perspective of Marmee. There’s a Rashomon like quality to how the two of them view identical shared events. While March believes that his wife inspired him to give his fortune away to Brown, Marmee is actually shocked that he did so without consulting her. Similarly, even though March believed that his wife willed him to volunteer to join the Union army, in actuality she hated the idea of a middle-aged man with four daughters abandoning them.
It was a gripping story. I know that it’s a bit trite to say that war is hell and that slavery is a brutal evil, but this novel placed you in the middle of all of this unspeakable horror. The fact that you are seeing this through the eyes of a peace loving, vegetarian minister makes it that much more shocking. You see his ideals get shredded in front of him.
dorkenstein 