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Civil War Nurse Narratives, 1863â"1870
By Daneen Wardrop University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2015 the University of Iowa Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-368-8
CHAPTER 1
Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches
A Readership
Certainly, nothing was set down in malice ... (73)
Alcott was taken aback by the success of Hospital Sketches. A group of notes tossed off in a couple of months after she returned from hospital service, the book was hardly the work she would have envisioned for significant acceptance by a readership. The editors of The Commonwealth, a Boston newspaper, had suggested she arrange and submit the letters she wrote during her Civil War nursing service, and she recorded in her April 1863 journal that they "thought them witty & pathetic, I didn't, but I wanted money so I made three 'Hospital Sketches'" (Journals 118). The Commonwealth editors found her letters remarkable, but Alcott's curt phrase, "I didn't," spoke volumes for her own opinion. Nonetheless, she promptly adapted and revised the correspondence she had written home a few months earlier while serving at the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington, DC (she said she wrote three of these "Hospital Sketches," above, but she eventually penned four altogether). The four writings were published by The Commonwealth as "Hospital Sketches I," through "Hospital Sketches IV," appearing from May through June of 1863. Soon after the columns appeared, in August of the same year, James Redpath published Alcott's book, in which she heavily revised those four columns. She also added two new chapters, the first two of the book: "Obtaining Supplies" and "A Forward Movement." The newspaper pieces and the book both received immediate attention, but Alcott was confounded by it, as she wrote on November 6, 1863, to a friend of the family, Mary Elizabeth Waterman: "'Hospital Sketches' still continues a great joke to me, & a sort of perpetual surprise-party, for to this day I cannot see why people like a few extracts from topsey turvey letters written on inverted tin kettles, in my pantry, while waiting for gruel to warm or poultices to cool, for boys to wake and be tormented, on stairs, in window seats & other sequestered spots favorable to literary inspiration" (Letters 95).
Louisa May Alcott, daughter of Transcendentalist teacher and writer Amos Bronson Alcott, didn't publish her famous novel Little Women until 1868, a half-decade after Hospital Sketches, which was based on her service at the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington, DC, where she nursed the incoming wounded from the disastrous Battle of Fredericksburg during December 1862. Hospital Sketches launched Alcott's career, and the composition of it showed her a way to cultivate a narrative brio and a means to establish a close bond with an audience. Alcott herself acknowledged that the book "never made much money, but showed me 'my style'" (Journals 124); in other words, though it didn't make her wealthy, it did light an aesthetic that guided her subsequent literary productions. The development of Alcott's style forms a primary concern in this chapter, wherein her attention to her readers can be tracked by way of her revisions, which focus on a conversational bonding. Having struggled as a writer before the release of her newspaper pieces, Alcott suddenly found the literary world taking notice, with her work reaching an audience broad enough to garner some acclaim. She learned quickly from this reception and revised The Commonwealth pieces, basing the publication of her book on a rhetoric tailored to the reader.
Alcott chronicled the reception of The Commonwealth contributions in her journal the same month the serial ended, noting that she was both surprised and encouraged by "the commendation bestowed" upon these pieces, "which were noticed, talked & inquired about much to my surprise & delight" (119). Upon publication of the book in August, though, she recorded uncertainty, confiding that the sketches "keep on making friends for me, though I dont [sic] get used to the thing at all & think it must be all a mistake" (120). It is touching to see Alcott dumbfounded by recognition; she told Redpath on August 28, the month of the book's publication, "such a burst of new plans & projects rather made my head spin" (88). By September, Redpath was planning another edition of the book, and in October Alcott found herself still disbelieving: "If ever there was an astonished young woman it is myself, for things have gone on so swimmingly of late I dont know who I am. A year ago I had no publisher & went begging with my wares, now three have asked me for something" (121). The success astonished her to the point that she felt her identity shifting, as when she wrote, above, "I dont know who I am." She was confounded probably less because of a lack of artistic self-confidence than because of a bewilderment that it was this particular book — a realistic blend of fact and fiction, instead of a story of sensation — that provided a career breakthrough. In a kind of journal summary for the year of 1863, she wrote almost poignantly, "Hospital Sketches come out & I find I've done a good thing without knowing it" (122).
Alcott received positive responses from both the smaller circle of her townspeople and the larger circle of national readers and critics. She expressed delight at the warm reception from residents of her home village of Concord: "I have the satisfaction of seeing my towns folk buying, reading, laughing & crying over it wherever I go" (Letters 88). From a slightly larger circle she also took pleasure in the observations of an army surgeon who visited Concord to inform her that he found her characterization of army mules to be particularly true-to-life; she wrote with humor that the surgeon "considered my mules striking likenesses" (88). As regards the larger, national circle, Hospital Sketches became known to the extent that in at least one case, a nurse read aloud to soldiers from Alcott's book, which they enjoyed. Critically, Hospital Sketches garnered several good reviews, among them one in 1863 calling her work "not only remarkable but memorable," lauding the presence of cultivated women nurses in war hospitals, so that "we have prepared the way for a new variety of literature which will still further open our sympathies for the sick and wounded soldiers" (Clark 12). Notably, the reviewer used class stereotypes to mark the presence of female nurses as respectable, but in addition saw the possibility of the female nurse writing "a new variety of literature," a prescient claim in the light of the books written by nurses that appeared after Alcott's book.
It must be said at the outset that Alcott's narrative is not, strictly speaking, a narrative. She was circumspect about nonfiction and covered her wariness with Dickensian aplomb. She developed her text to involve a quirky, likeable, and at times slightly exasperating narrator whose convictions were tested by rapid-fire incidents. Hospital Sketches was "thinly fictionalized," according to Elizabeth Young (73), and Alcott fictionalized it for a reason, fearing that the unadorned memoir would reveal and overexpose the narrator — that is, herself. Elbert notes that Alcott was "troubled" by the publication of Hospital Sketches, feeling vulnerable as a narrator who had "previously hidden behind pseudonyms" (164). In light of her desire to endear herself to her audience, she may have been anxious to screen some of her more potentially objectionable opinions. Hence, she created a narrator who tried to ingratiate herself to readers, hoping to beguile them into accepting the uncommon world she inhabited at the Union Hotel Hospital where women nurses, controversial at the time, labored.
This chapter examines how Alcott carefully established reader rapport, from the epigraph on the book's front cover to "A Postscript" at the end. In the cover epigraph she voiced her concern with pleasing the audience so that "'no offence could be took,'" and in "A Postscript" on the last page she expressed her desire to attend to the "cheerfulnesses" of the nurse's existence. However, as we shall see, Alcott counterweighed the "cheerfulnesses" with the inevitable "dismals" that occasionally surfaced despite her conscious efforts. Finally, Alcott, a staunch abolitionist, recorded some nonetheless unsettling interactions with black hospital workers, and the attempt to ameliorate the political aims of abolition with the new need for social equality in everyday life also became part of her mediation with the reader. Hospital Sketches exhibits fault lines that trace where Alcott used her letters and journals as raw drafts from which she composed a finished newspaper account, then afterwards a yet more polished book.
The Cheerfulnesses
The final chapter of Hospital Sketches, "A Postscript," reads a little like a contemporary media Q & A, with questions posed to the writer, and it clues us to the sensitive, even volatile, issues Alcott attempted to skirt in trying not to offend the reader. Some of the questions in "A Postscript" were asked outright by readers of The Commonwealth columns, and some questions can be extrapolated by looking at the "answers" she gave: Are there church services for the soldiers? Can friends and family come to nurse their loved ones in the wards? What domestic comforts does the military hospital offer? Do nurses have a choice as to whether to witness amputations? In brief, Alcott's readers wanted to know how the war hospital accommodated Christian faith, family, friends, domesticity, and women who might want to be nurses. Though she had answered many of the questions directly in the fourth of her four installments of "Hospital Sketches," she was unable to answer one.
This one, which she seemed very keen to address in the book, was posed by a reader who apparently had accused her of writing in a tone too lively for the columns' subject matter. The reader apparently asked whether Alcott's voice was appropriate for the material, finding her use of humor off-putting in the face of the enormity of Civil War casualties. Always concerned about reader reaction, Alcott must have felt particular consternation in singling out this one objection so prominently, but nonetheless stood firm. Interestingly, she defended her levity by drawing on the informal commendation of her companion laborers at the workplace, reporting that "since the appearance of these hasty Sketches, I have heard from several of my comrades at the Hospital; and their approval assures me that I have not let sympathy and fancy run away with me" (73). Alcott substantiated her fictionalized work, paradoxically, by deferring to her actual "comrades at the Hospital," people who shared the hospital experience and knew firsthand the graphic details of medical work.
She protected her style in Hospital Sketches, a deliberate mix of truth and invention — a type of writing she had developed expressly for the book. In this same paragraph about levity, she furthered her defense:
Certainly, nothing was set down in malice, and to the serious-minded party who objected to a tone of levity in some portions of the Sketches, I can only say that it is a part of my religion to look well after the cheerfulnesses of life, and let the dismals shift for themselves. (73)
Managing the reader's concern, Alcott pronounced that she pursued an ongoing project of finding optimism in the business of living, keeping abjection and melancholy outside her purview. The strategy of attending to the cheerfulnesses in Hospital Sketches made for the prominence of a sanguine tone, in keeping with her claim that such was part of her "religion." She fostered the cheerfulnesses with heartening and witty prose. Though she responded only to this one reader who had taken issue with her tone, she was most likely anxious about disapproval, especially because the two new chapters she added to the four newspaper installments to comprise the book were even more chipper. She weighed in on the project of cultivating a writing style characterized by an off-the-cuff optimism and relentless alacrity: "As no two persons see the same thing with the same eyes, my view of hospital life must be taken through my glass and held for what it is worth" (73). Not surprisingly, in the early pages of the book she identified the "glass" of her main character, Tribulation Periwinkle, as rosy, when she described the Periwinkle family as wearing "rose-colored spectacles" (4). The irrepressible Alcott cheer was to become a signature force for her as an author.
In these beginning chapters, "Obtaining Supplies" and "A Forward Movement," Alcott initiated the nurse-narrative strategy of describing the nurse's travel, a tactic that performed the service of cushioning the perceptions of detractors who might initially have surmised that nurse working conditions were morally compromising. The scene of travel was often preceded by a statement of the nurse's motivation for serving in the hospital, as in the very first sentence of Hospital Sketches, when Tribulation unabashedly proclaimed to her family, "'I want something to do'" (3). She addressed the sentence "to no one in general," so as to include her whole family — and by extension her whole readership — in the process of mulling over the problem: a woman wants something to do, wants to occupy herself with a meaningful project. The family responded in kind, her father suggesting that she write a book, her mother that she teach, her sister that she take a husband, and another sister that she act on the stage. In proposing teaching and taking a husband as choices, her family proffered options that would have been in accordance with customary expectations for nineteenth-century women, with the option of writing a book also acceptable. The family suggested civilian choices, despite the fact that the country's conflict had begun to turn into the most devastating war in United States history — until Tribulation's brother offered the alternative she needed: "Go nurse the soldiers." To this she replied concisely, "I will!" (3). The suggestion, framed by the voice of her brother, gave Tribulation the license to move into this new arena where women performed work for a military cause, and her jaunty response may have been designed to cue readers to respond in kind.
Alcott scuttled possible public censure of women nurses by enticing the reader with an exuberant statement of the motivation of her protagonist, Tribulation Periwinkle, her brother's suggestion, and the ensuing enthusiasm of her family. Upon making her flash decision, the family became involved in imagining the specifics of her new vocation, working variations on each other's ideas. As the Periwinkles were "a hopeful race," their imaginings served to "set the whole family in a blaze of enthusiasm" (4), as they constructed an invented institution:
A model hospital was erected, and each member had accepted an honorable post therein. The paternal P. was chaplain, the maternal P. was matron, and all the youthful P.s filled the pod of futurity with achievements whose brilliancy eclipsed the glories of the present and the past. Arriving at this satisfactory conclusion, the meeting adjourned, and the fact that Miss Tribulation was available as an army nurse went abroad on the wings of the wind. (4)
The family built a domestic idyll of the war hospital, including father, mother, "and all the youthful P.s," transposing familial closeness onto the site of the war workplace in an image custom-made for an audience that cherished home relationships.
This segment clearly shows Alcott reaching out to her readership by involving the family in the national project of service to the Union. In some ways the Periwinkle family anticipated the similar imaginative energy of the more famous March family of Alcott's 1868 Little Women, both groups distanced from the extreme eccentricity of the actual Alcotts while keeping the heartwarming quirks. Alcott drew a verbal picture of the Periwinkle family crest, including roosters that wore "rose-colored spectacles, and are lineal descendants of the inventor of aerial architecture" (3–4). Having made her decision, Tribulation exhibited an alacrity that in turn stoked the reader's enthusiasm.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Civil War Nurse Narratives, 1863â"1870 by Daneen Wardrop. Copyright © 2015 the University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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