Alina BigJohny
Professor Ings
Seminar Paper
1 March 2011
Layers of Truth in March and Little Women
“I promised her that I would write something every day… I never promised I would write the truth” (Brooks 4).
Writers have the privilege of choosing the truth presented in their texts: fiction, nonfiction, or a mixture of both such as in historical fiction. Louisa May Alcott wrote a novel,
Little Women, where the realities of her personal life such as her tomboy personality and yearning for individuality intermingle as snippets in her literary work. Although, a very engaged reader can overlook Alcott’s personal truths in her novel, knowing her biography only adds to the depth and complexity of the novel by creating a more informed reader who can question character motives and decisions. Historical truths also present themselves in Little Women such as the story taking place during the United States Civil War. Yet, its lack of depictions of the war makes the war have more of a purpose to foil the inner turmoil of members of the March family than to show the realities of the country at that time. The Civil War is not a character in
Alcott’s drama, but instead, an outwardly existing phenomenon, which the March girls do not grasp the importance of. The Civil War creates a physical, external war to serve as a backdrop against the March girls’ internal wars of learning responsible behavior and proper niceties.
However, an adaptation of Little Women, March, a historical fiction novel by Geraldine Brooks, uses the Civil War to expose actual contextual truths of the war as she weaves literary fiction into a new story of the father, Mr. March. In Brooks’ adaptation, the Civil War becomes the

BigJohny 2 center of the novel as men, Mr. March in particular, endure physical hardships and grotesque violence, all in the name of their country. By layering these two texts, differences between truth emerge. Alcott and Brooks both intertwine Alcott’s life and worldly truths with an invented story to depict the differences in emotions and personalities presented in the surface level text of a novel versus the underlying subtext of a novel. While Alcott appeased the world by excluding a negative side of Mr. March from her novel, Brooks later chose to show a different side of Mr. March in her novel March, the very probable side of a man who has just come back from the Civil War. By analyzing these two texts, along with the pieces of Alcott’s real life that are incorporated into them, a new Mr. March arises in order to add an additional layer to the humble Mr. March in Little Women- a layer more fitting for a man who has endured the trials and lost loves of a life during the Civil War.
When immersed into a novel, readers have the tendency to enter so thoroughly into the work that they often accept the reality of the book, as if it is their own. This is part of the unwritten contract between reader and writer. Readers clutch a novel in their minds and respect what the author has to say. Whether the novel is based completely on fiction or partial fact, readers aptly accept what they read; novels become an easy outlet as an escape from reality. This fact led Alcott to believe that she could give the world a novel that intertwined her life with her imagination. In her “Journals”, Alcott says, “Mr. N wants a girls’ story, and I begin
“Little Women”… I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it” (413). In order to appease her publisher, she had to write a “girls’ story”, which with Alcott had no experience. Her only choice was to use her own life, which included young girls with wild

BigJohny 3 imaginations and pleasant images and turn it into a fictional novel. Where the truth ends and fiction begins is unknown to the uninformed reader. The entire fictional reality can present itself as just that, fiction. However, it is important to discover the truths of a novel, because those truths transform into deeper meaning behind characters, such as Jo March in Little
Women.
The most rebellious March daughter, Jo, lives for her writing and her independence.
These two characteristics easily mimic Louisa May Alcott’s outlook on life. In her
Correspondence on Little Women to Mrs. H. Koorders-Boeke on August 7, 1875, Alcott says,
“Many things in my story truly happened… I am “Jo” in the principal characteristics, not the good ones” (425). Essentially, Jo inhabited qualities of Alcott except for one key fact: Alcott did not marry nor have children, nor did she want to take on those roles of wife and/or mother.
Throughout the first half of the novel, Jo revels in gaining her independence and aspiring to be a writer. While the rest of her sisters plan out their dreams, mostly involving good husbands and angelic children, Jo says, “I shall write books, and get rich and famous; that should suit me”
(118). Jo never hints at domestication becoming a part of her life until the second half of the novel when Alcott springs the revelation of Mrs.Bhaer into the story. Jo marries, as do the rest of daughters, minus the belated Beth, and settles for a domesticated life, but the informed reader is left unsettled as this image does not quite fit the Jo presented in the first half of the novel, nor does it fit the truths of Alcott that some readers followed throughout the storyline.
To where does the fiery, independent Jo March disappear? By discovering the truths of Alcott’s life readers can uncover an entire subtext to Alcott’s novel.

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Alcott gave in to her publishers when she decided to write a “girls’ story”, but she also gave in to publishers and young readers when she wedded Jo March. Alcott’s own life proves that she does not associate herself or her characters with the common societal placement of women as wives and mothers. Angela M. Estes and Kathleen Margaret Lant contemplate
Alcott’s untrue depiction of herself in Jo Bhaer in the article “Dismembering the Text: The
Horror of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.” They say, “Alcott… craves freedom and the power of self-assertion for both herself and her characters” (567). However, Alcott surmised to the pressure of society to marry Jo, but thriller-writer as she was, Alcott could not simply let her independent Jo accept defeat and plunge into societal demands. Estes and Lant say, “To reveal the complex, dangerous truths of female experience, the self-assertive drives toward womanly independence, Alcott (resorting to one of the ploys she uses frequently in the thrillers-disguise) must incorporate a subtext” (567). Through research into Alcott’s history and desires, Estes and
Lant find Alcott’s ulterior motives lurking beneath Little Women. Strong, independent Jo March and submissive, motherly Mrs. Bhaer cannot coexist, and because of this, Alcott quietly destroys Jo March. The true Jo, the Jo who stems from Alcott, ceases to exist, and only through knowing the true thoughts of Alcott, does this disclosure appear. The difference between truth and fiction often go unnoticed, but finding the truths creates layers of character and plot within a novel and can lead to more intriguing texts.
For Alcott, Little Women was real; the novel was a curated version of her reality. She grasped readers’ attention by laying out her simple and charming life in an ideal manner for all to croon over. Writer of Louisa May Alcott: A Biography, Madeline B. Stern, shows a glimpse into Alcott’s personal life as compared with her novel. Even though Little Women was a new

BigJohny 5 type of writing for Alcott, the story was not. Stern writes, “Louisa Alcott had known this cast of characters. The sisters were there, waiting to be reanimated. Anna would turn into Meg, beautified of course, for there must be one beauty in the book… Louisa took up her pen, but the Marches wrote her story” (435). To the uninformed, this novel is a genuine and charming story that encapsulates the lives of four young girls as they grow into mature women; to Alcott, this novel is a mirrored yet fictionalized version of her life as she catapulted from a restless, wild girl into writer turned wife by demand of fans and publishers. The uninformed are those who choose to accept the reader/writer contract and believe the truths set down before them in a novel. The informed are those who strive for the hidden text that sometimes lies beneath an author’s surface narrative. There is not a right or wrong way to approach a novel; however, layers of information in a novel, especially when complemented by an adaptation, bring about different interpretations dependent upon of the knowledge of the reader.
Layers of meaning and how to decipher them become more complex when authors choose to create an adaptation of an existing text. Adaptations exist to create a new level of meaning to an original text, new levels of fictionalized truth. Geraldine Brooks does this with her novel March. She portrays an original world compared to the naive world that the female
March characters live within in Little Women. Therefore, to read both novels is to conflate two images of the March family and the Civil War. The multiple sides of a story that arise when authors make adaptations create a new image of who characters really are and what they really think. Albert William Levi’s article “Literary Truth” establishes a wide context for the nonimportance that authors place on truth in literary contexts. He says, “Literary truth is therefore perhaps not meant even by its most loyal defenders as a compendium of true propositions but

BigJohny 6 rather as ‘truth in some sense’” (1). Novelists do not have to spend their time worrying over the precision of correct details, because the stories come from their own experiences and/or imaginations. The truths presented weave themselves into new ideas until no one really knows what the truth is but instead accepts the novel for the entertainment and intellectual purposes that it is meant to serve.
Looking at Alcott’s Little Women and Brooks’ March produces one example of how a story can be looked at from a completely different angle just by the insight of the author. The little women of the March family are content beings, plagued by day-to-day hardships and the fact that their father has gone off to war. This war, barely mentioned throughout Little Women, wreaks hardship on the family only by taking away their father. When the war is mentioned, its significance is downplayed such as when Jo March says, “‘I’ll try and be what he loves to call me, ‘a little woman,’ and not be rough and wild, but do my duty here instead of waiting to be somewhere else,’… thinking that keeping her temper at home was a much harder task than facing a rebel or two down south” (Alcott 17). This statement shows the naivety of the young
March girls about the current events happening around them. They simply do not understand the depth and monstrosity of the war, but they cannot be blamed for their ignorance. The depiction of the war that is exposed to the March girls lacks truth and becomes a cute war to them, one where their father must go to help a good cause, not a war that encompasses brutal death.
Wars are just that, wars, because they are conflicts of battle, violence, and death. There has never been a happy war or delightful war. However, Alcott places her characters in a cozy little world, where the Civil War happens only behind closed doors and even behind the doors,

BigJohny 7 the proceedings are simple, not horrific. Mr. March can be looked at as whom to blame for this false imagery of the war that his girls see. His letters home are tender and heartfelt words of a father missing his family. At the beginning of Alcott’s novel, the first depiction of the war is from Mr. March’s letter, summarized by Marmee when she says, “Yes, a nice long letter. He is well, and thinks he shall get through the cold season better than we feared. He sends all sorts of loving wishes for Christmas and an especial message to your girls” (16). Even in the “nice long letter” that Mr. March found the time to write, he fails to portray the hardships endured, the dangers faced, or the homesickness conquered (16). These details are simply not the image that Alcott portrayed in her young moral tale, because she was told to write an idealistic story, so she chose one of four young girls who learn several moral lessons and live life in the best way possible; the war only plays a background character.
Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy grow up within a family full of morality and virtue. They have both mother and father there to guide their paths and redirect them as needed. When Mr.
March chooses to leave his precious family in order to fulfill his ministerial duties to his people, his family is neither bitter nor uprooted. They have faith in their father to do his good deeds and come back safely. So besides taking Mr. March away, what other point does the Civil War serve in Little Women? Many scholars will answer, not a significant one but a metaphorical one.
Judith Fetterley, a scholar who published articles in the journal Feminist Studies, wrote ““Little
Women”: Alcott’s Civil War” focusing on the role of the Civil War in Alcott’s novel. Fetterley states, “The Civil War is an obvious metaphor for internal conflict” (370). The girls make promises to themselves and their mother to work on being more moral. The internal progress that the young girls are trying to make composes the conflict that the girls must face, as

BigJohny 8 outlined by Fetterley: “The rebels that the girls must fight are clearly identified… discontent, selfishness, quarrelsomeness, bad temper, thinking too much of worldly things… The success of their campaign depends on their acquiring one central weapon: self-control” (372). Fetterley’s statements help demonstrate that the girls’ internal conflict takes precedence over any actual war that, as far as the March females are concerned, may or may not be afflicting their country at the same time. The war pulls Little Women and March together by creating a united conflict, yet it distinctly separates them at the same time by creating opposing viewpoints of the catastrophe.
Yes, these young girls face personal hardships, especially Jo March, the daughter most unlike the others, but their optimistic outlooks on life are contagious to each other anytime one girl feels low. Jo can be described as a tomboy, a wild girl in need of an adventure. Unlike her sisters, Jo has a temper, which she attempts to learn how to control throughout the course of the novel. In the scene where Amy burns Jo’s book of stories, Jo loses all control and her “hot temper mastered her, and she shook Amy till her teeth chattered in her head; crying, in passion of grief and anger” (64). Later, Jo is reprimanded for her temper by her model of virtue mother,
Marmee. This scene shows the internal conflicts that plague the little women. They spend the first half of the novel trying to overcome the snarky tempers that adolescents often have. While the nation is at war fighting for the freedom of all, the March girls are at home fighting for strong enough temperaments to become adults. The internal struggles that the girls face as a result of Alcott’s reality placed into the novel are then compared to the external realities of the war on the homefront. The Civil War only afflicts the girls as much as not having their father can

BigJohny 9 afflict a family; the girls are more concerned with the progress of their personal beings. Mr.
March simply leaves to join this war and not much more is said.
Once father comes home, all is quaint and back to how it always had been. The girls are content since their family is back together and their conflicts have been resolved, as they are now ready to endeavor onto more adult aspirations such as marriage. Alcott displays the quaintness and normality of the situation when she tells us, “To outsiders, the five energetic women seemed to rule the house... but the quiet man sitting among his books was still head of the family, the household conscious, anchor and comforter” (190). Mr. March is portrayed as the quiet yet steady man that every woman needs in her life. The girls fail to ask about the condition of their father, as a result of the war. Therefore, the possible consequences and effects on Mr. March after serving during a time of war are never known in Alcott’s story. Alcott submitted to the demands of writing a moral tale for young readers; her novel omitted the horrific personal outcomes that often follow a disastrous event, and instead, presented a humble man, happy to be back home with his family.
But is this steady and peaceful man the true man who came back from the war?
Geraldine Brooks does not agree with this image of post-war Mr. March, and she reveals the
truth of the conditions of the Civil War and the hardships men faced during it. Brooks depicts a new side of the war and with that comes a new Mr. March. Brooks’ novel takes the role of showing realities of the war, which Alcott could not depict in her “girls’ story.” By reading these two stories, the idea that more than one truth, along sub-textual truths, or in Levi’s words, a
“truth in some sense” is sometimes what exists within novels.

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War encapsulates the minds of those involved with it. War is a not an airy term used to describe some event that happens; it is a struggle, a wear-upon-the-soul series of events that a person cannot return from the same as before they entered. Brooks epitomizes what war can do to a person through the adaptation of Mr. March in her historical fiction novel, March.
Brooks does not adhere to Alcott’s optimistic children’s novel, but instead dives into the depths of reality and sorrow during the United States Civil War. Brooks leaves no time easing into the burdens of this war. She plagues even the first pages with the reality of death: “Downriver, men of the burial party wade chest deep to retrieve bodies snagged on fallen branches” (4). The images evoked through Brooks’ writing create an adult resonance as compared to Alcott’s Little
Women. Happiness is seldom and grief and sorrow strike almost every soldier encountered in the novel, especially Mr. March. Brooks ensures that she displays contrasts between her novel and Alcott’s, even in the first few pages.
Brooks’ novel is considered historical fiction because it is meant to portray the actual war and real occurrences during that period. By reading March, people can learn about the horrific details of slaves’ lives and constant threat to soldiers’ lives as a result of the war. The nation was in a state of uproar- the battlefield was not a happy place. While Little Women shows the inner turmoil of working through morals and personal limitations within four young girls, March shows the absolute physical, emotional, and psychological turmoil facing people of the United States during the Civil War. Mr. March a gentle, loving man in Alcott’s novel, thrusts himself into such cruel situations by embarking to help with the war that he finds himself an unknown person. He says, “My heart was a black pit of hatred. For the unseen, honey-voiced commander, for the thin, cruel youth, for the hard-faced men. But most of all, for myself” (189).

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The father and husband who hates himself is not the Mr. March portrayed in Alcott’s fiction written for young readers. In the dialogue between these novels, Mr. March’s character becomes destabilized; he is no longer the strong nor the steady, but a version in-between the two adaptations.
March immediately delves into one of Mr. March’s letters home. The charming words of a father speaking to his family places Mr. March into the dignified and happy place of Alcott’s world, but this soon ends. Mr. March makes it plain to see that this is not the reality of the war.
The idea of historical truth versus fiction quickly arises in this novel when Mr. March says, “I promised her that I would write something every day… I never promised I would write the truth” (4). It is easy to comprehend why a father/husband would not want to recall the horrific details of the war to his family. However, Mr. March creates more blunders for himself than just euphemizing his war experiences in letters. His feelings and thoughts about many of his beliefs are challenged in this new kind of novel that Brooks presents. By challenging his morals, such as Mr. March’s unknown love for another woman, a black slave woman, his character becomes desensitized. Mr. March’s lies to his family show another insight into the hidden truths that exist in novels. Without reading Brooks’ adaptation, Alcott’s charming tale makes it hard to find real faults within the characters. However, Brooks’ novel brings in the idea of altering personalities and real subjections to temptations of the world, which go unspoken of in
Little Women.
Real war, not Alcott’s “nice” war, has the capacity to change each person who has to endure it. Therefore, Mr. March cannot be the same within these two stories. Through her novel, Brooks introduces the truth of the war. Mr. March crystallizes the horrific details when

BigJohny 12 he describes the “hospitals” set up for wounded soldiers: “Inside… men huddled, wounded and wet. Some lay flat upon the floor, some half-propped against the walls… Some were entirely nude. Of these, a few shared Turkey rugs pulled up to cover them. Others, without such comfort, shivered so hard that it seemed likely they would shake the house off its foundations”
(46). These scenes cannot be witnessed and have the same person walk away from them as when they entered. The realities of slavery also place a new historical truth into the novel, which Alcott conveniently omits from Little Women, because the cruel lives that slave-owners subject their slaves to would not fit into the quaint world of the March women.
Slavery provides the background and part of the foreground story of March. Brooks take this element, not mentioned in Alcott’s novel, and runs with it. It is a piece of truth not only from United States history, but also from Alcott’s actual life. Elizabeth Young, writer of the article “A Wound of One’s Own: Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War Fiction,” discusses the literal and metaphorical effects that the Civil War had on Alcott. Young says, “Raised in a fervently abolitionist family that regularly met with antislavery leaders and played host to John Brown’s family, Alcott associated the war with the end of slavery and longed to ‘go South and help the blacks’” (449). While Alcott chooses not to include the truths of slavery during her life, Brooks intertwines more details of truth from Alcott’s life in order to connect the two novels. Alcott’s personal life weaves itself into both of these novels and because of this, the two find another common ground to lie upon. Alcott’s background of thriller tales and anything opposite of her moral tale, which publishers subjected her to writing, places March within her ordinary realm of thinking. While Brooks conveys a new image of war through her historical fiction, she also complements the underlying story of Little Women, the story that Alcott could not tell. Two

images of Mr. March are presented through these differing texts, yet the images are
BigJohny 13 complimentary. Yes, this loving father exists- on the surface, while the mentally and emotionally torn man, ruined by the war and forced to appease the women in his family even though he longs for another woman also exists underneath.
By reading Alcott’s novel and Brooks’ adaptation, two drastically different husbands appear-- the absent one who is assumed wholly good and loving versus the man who deems life worthless and loves a slave woman. Throughout March, Mr. March’s other love rises to the surface along with his adulterous thoughts and actions. The reality of his thoughts hit home at the end of the novel when he finally returns to his family. As opposed to the happy depiction in
Alcott’s tale, Brooks displays a new Mr. March as he drones through the excitement of his family, as seen when he thinks, “Had someone, walking in the white street, looked in at our window, he would have seen in the family tableau a simulacrum of domestic joy… and all the time I spoke, my heart ached for the dignified bearing of that other nurse” (272). Brooks’ depiction of his state of mind is jarring compared to the joyful and picture perfect family displayed in Little Women. At the end of the novel, Brooks’ adaptation completely renders light to a different Mr. March, as seen in his final thought: “All eyes were on [Beth] then, before anyone had thought to ask their father how a year at war had changed him” (273). This statement immediately places the family back to the scene in Alcott’s novel. Was Mr. March actually unhappy with life when he returned home? It is completely plausible, as it is true that no one ever asked Mr. March his feelings or thoughts in either novel. The image strikes home and makes Brooks’ Mr. March become more realistic and believable, forcing a reconsideration of Alcott’s portrait of the perfect March family.

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Layers of truth and fiction are embedded one on top of another throughout these two novels. Truths of Alcott’s life and fictional truths all come together to create two works that are wholly different yet both compelling in their own ways. The Civil War is a symbol of what conflict can do to a family- bring it together or tear it apart. It functions as an external reality of the hardships people endured during this time, resulting in Mr. March’s weakened state of mind; it also functions as internal turmoil that others were facing at the same time that the actual war was happening. It is up to the reader to take this idea of war and place it in the context that they deem most fitting for the March family. Knowing the horrific details of the war that Mr. March witnessed, it is hard to believe that he came home the loving, gentle man depicted in Alcott’s novel. Therefore, instead we have to face the torn, sorrow-filled man left to endure his cute, little family. While Alcott personally may have chosen to write a story more along the lines of Brooks’ adaptation, she was subjected to the demands of publishers and readers. Therefore, March becomes a tale that sheds light upon the truths of the Civil War that
Alcott was not allowed to include in her moral tale. Together the novels complement one another by creating layers of fictional truth to show the surface life versus the hidden life of the
March family.

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Works Cited
Alcott, Louisa May, Thomas Niles, and Bronson Alcott. “Correspondence on Little Women.” In
Little Women: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Gregory Eiselein and Anne K. Phillips. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2004: 417-28.
Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Gregory Eiselein and Anne K.
Phillips. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2004.
Brooks, Geraldine. March. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
Estes, Angela M., and Kathleen Margaret Lant. “Dismembering the Text: The Horror of Louisa May
Alcott’s Little Women.” In Little Women: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Gregory Eiselein and
Anne K. Phillips. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2004: 564-83.
Fetterley, Judith. “Little Women: Alcott’s Civil War.” Feminist Studies 5.2 (Summer 1979):
369-83. 5 Nov. 2010 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177602>.
Levi, William Albert. “Literary Truth.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 24.3
(Spring 1966): 373-82. 5 Nov. 2010. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/427972>.
Stern, Madeleine B. “Louisa May Alcott: A Biography.” In Little Women: A Norton Critical
Edition. Ed. Gregory Eiselein and Anne K. Phillips. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc,
2004: 434-46.
Young, Elizabeth. “A Wound of One’s Own: Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War Fiction.” American
Quarterly 48.3 (Sept. 1996): 439-74. 21 Oct. 2010
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/30041689>.