March—Larsa Ramsini

aegis 2007

Brooks, Geraldine. March. New York: Penguin Group, 2005. 304 pp.

Larsa Ramsini

In her most recently published novel, March, Geraldine Brooks tells the story of the absent father, Mr. March, from Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women. It is the story of a passionate, idealistic minister during the Civil War confronted with cold reality, religious hypocrisy, challenges to his strongest beliefs, as well as his cowardice and the seemingly unbearable guilt that results. March believes he is fighting for a great cause and will be able to do much good for his country and fellow man; but the road is bumpy right from the start. It is during this time that he realizes why “simple men have always had their gods dwell in the high places. For as soon as a man lets his eye drop from the heavens to the horizon, he risks setting it on some scene of desolation” (4). The war brings him to an understanding of the sharp contrast between his views of an ideal world, and the reality in which he and the rest of mankind are trapped. He recognizes the times when ones needs to be realistic in one’s dealings with the world, especially when it is an issue of life or death. In speaking to the youth ready to go off to battle, March refers to the scriptures in saying that they must know why they are going to war, and what they are fighting against. But he feels the “essential emptiness” of his words as he recognizes that “action, now, was all that mattered” (182). The war has come, according to March, because one group of people has a great ideal that it wants to see realized; and in order to win, they cannot give up on this ideal. Despite everything he has seen and gone through, March still yearns for a better future and believes it is possible through courage and determination. But March knows how important the end goal is, and truly believes that the ideal is possible, even if the reality of achieving it is monstrous. So paradoxically, in order to work toward the idealistic goal of equality, one needs to be realistic in action. In the words of his wife, March is one of the “few dreamers” who believe that one can “build a nation upon ideas such as liberty and equality” (216). The theme of the hypocrisy of religion in this novel runs along the same lines as the idealistic versus realistic view of the world, because ideally, Christianity is meant to be one thing, but when people maintain views that appear utterly opposing to Christian doctrine, this religion turns into something completely different. This novel frequently regresses back to March’s past so the reader can further understand his feelings and experiences during the war. When March intervenes in a Bible study that is going on inside a church, and asks why the money they are about to use to send the scriptures to Africa cannot be better spent by freeing the human beings being sold into slavery right outside its doors, he is rebuked with cold hostility and asked to leave. Afterward, March wonders “how the scene might have gone if the pastor had led his people of faith out from that little church to stand in that square with their Bibles raised in protest;” that is, if their Bibles were used for purposes for which they were intended, instead of being blind to reality (44). If religion is intended to help people in this

world, then people who claiming to be religious cannot ignore everything around them; they have to recognize what is really important. According to March, religion isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do if it is not helping as many people as it can. When religious institutions overlook people in this world, they are too focused on the ideal that they don’t see how they can use reality to move closer towards that ideal goal, because they are absolutely certain that what they are doing is right. One of the most valuable pieces of knowledge March gains during the war is the realization that he really does not have very much at all. He has been a man of strong moral convictions, but through the war he realizes that everything is not black and white. Before going to war, March invests, and subsequently loses, all of his savings to a man named John Brown’s endeavors for the Underground Railroad. After “Brown proclaimed that he had no doubt it would be right, in opposing slavery, not only to accept a violent death, but also to kill,” March cringes (120). He claims to have believed back then that “if there is one class of person [he has] never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt” (120). If he truly believes this before the war, then after the war he knows how much doubt really is inevitable for a human being living in this world. To address one of his realizations, in one of his letters home to Marmee and his daughters, he writes of how surprised he is at how intelligent the black children are, even though they have never learned to read or write; beforehand, he always judged “a man’s mind” by “how lettered” he was (135). This is certainly a small trifling of knowledge that March gains, but it is the seemingly insignificant instances like these, as well as the obvious doubts that result from seeing bloodshed all around, that drive March to doubt almost everything he thought he had right. As he sits alone, away from his family, he thinks to himself:

“And now, a year has passed since I undertook to go to war, and I wake every day, sweating, in the solitude of the seed store at Oak Landing, to a condition of uncertainty. More than months, more than miles, now stand between me and that passionate orator perched on his tree-stump pulpit. One day, I hope to go back. To my wife, to my girls, but also to the man of moral certainty that I was that day; that innocent man, who knew with such clear confidence exactly what it was that he was meant to do” (184).

It is easier to be ignorant of reality and the terrible atrocities committed in this world than it is to own up to them and form beliefs that take reality into consideration. If March is to be an effective preacher to his community, it is imperative that he be able to tell his parishioners how to deal with the seemingly hopeless reality of the world while at the same time maintaining their foundational convictions. What March doesn’t know when he makes that comment about John Brown is that he is commenting on just the type of person he is at that time. March may have had a few doubts about his beliefs, but nothing as grand or profound as the doubts that arise out of his most recent experiences. By going through this war, he will now be able to help people develop even more by showing doubt to be almost, if not as most, admirable as conviction itself. It is through doubt and experience that March will continue to learn and build his faith even further. What will now be difficult for him will be to live up to the new standards he sets for himself.

aegis 2007

aegis 2007

While at war, March gives a brief commentary on, in his view, the surprisingly close proximity of courage and cowardice on the entire spectrum of behavior:

“Are there any two words in all of the English language more closely twinned than courage and cowardice? I do not think there is a man alive who will not yearn to possess the former and dread to be accused of the latter. One is held to be the apogee of man’s character, the other its nadir. And yet, to me, the two sit side by side on the circle of life, removed from each other by the merest degree of arc. Who is the brave man—he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination. The brave man, the real hero, quakes with terror, sweats, feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of this moves forward to do the act he dreads. And yet I do not think it heroic to march into fields of fire, whipped on one’s way only by fear of being called craven. Sometimes, true courage requires inaction; that one sit at home while war rages, if by doing so one satisfies the quiet voice of honorable conscience” (168).

March doesn’t feel as if he lives up to this conception of courage after leaving a man to drown in a river and ignoring the Confederate who threatens to kill an old slave if March does not come out from hiding. As he speaks with his wife Marmee about this in the hospital, he cannot cease dwelling over his cowardice, and his stubbornness tells him he needs to stay in the war and make up for the pain he had caused. But it is not only March who lacks the courage necessary to complete the tasks he endeavors to finish. Courage is shown in a different light with Marmee, who cannot manage to tell her husband to stay home in the very beginning, that what he is doing at his age is ridiculous. But the difference between them is that she is able to forgive herself and see the positive in the situation, whereas without this faith from his wife, March would have gone back to the war as a man set on making amends for his failures. When Marmee finally gets through to him and he realizes his duty to his family, he returns home, thinking that “truly, walking up that path was an act of courage greater than any asked of [him] at war” (271). According to March, it takes much more strength to face and own up to another about the mistakes one has made than it does to do the right thing in the first place. What March needs to learn, and what he certainly hasn’t learned even at the end of the war, is how to forgive himself and to accept his best efforts as outcome enough. March goes into the war thinking that he is going to help multitudes of people, but is overwhelmed with guilt at having behaved so cowardly. March’s problem is that since he is a man of God, he thinks he needs to be infallible. When he does make mistakes, he is unable to forgive himself because his standards for courage are realistically unattainable. Marmee hits the issue right on when she tells him:

“‘it is not enough for you to be accounted commonly courageous. Oh no: you must be a Titan. You must carry all the wounded off the field. You must not only try to save a man, you must succeed at it, and when you can’t, you heap ashes on your head as if all the blame were yours—none to spare for the generals who blundered you into that battle, or the stretcher bearers, who also fled for their lives; or for Stone’s own panic, or for the fact that he never troubled to learn to swim, not even a modicum of blame for the man who shot him…You did not kill Silas Stone, or Zannah’s

March loathes himself for valuing his principles of not killing anyone over lives of the innocent. In his mind, the outcome is the only thing that matters. But even through all of his wife’s coaxing, she still cannot convince him that he is still the same honorable man he was before entering the war. As he spends time with his family following his departure from the war, he is constantly reminded of the hurt he has caused and decides that, “this was how it was to be, now: [he] would do [his] best to live in the quick world, but the ghosts of the dead would ever be at hand” (273). Brooks uses the word “decides” at the very end of the novel to emphasize the point that how we view things in this world is up to us. We can choose to dwell in our past and never forgive ourselves for our transgressions, or we can learn from them and move on. As is evident, none of the themes mentioned here seem to shed any new light on the hardships and trials of war that we haven’t already seen and heard before. The novel is extremely well written with a good use of vivid imagery and frequent flashbacks to make the reader really feel involved, and Brooks does a fine job of depicting what one man goes through as representative of the problems most soldiers probably face. But if the reader is looking for a new glimpse of light in an old story, this probably isn’t a good place to look. I would recommend the novel to a younger, more inexperienced reader that is just being introduced to these ideas, but not to the critical reader looking to be challenged.

aegis 2007