Even in today's highly charged political climate, it's hard to imagine one half of the country declaring its independence from the other. Of course, many 19th-century Americans would have said the same thing. In his newest novel, The March, E. L. Doctorow tackles the great moral and military conflict of the Civil War.
Specifically, Doctorow sets his characters' stories against the backdrop of one of the largest and most successful military campaigns in American history. Unprecedented at the time of its undertaking, General William Tecumseh Sherman's so-called March to the Sea began after the destruction of Atlanta by Union forces. President Abraham Lincoln was determined to end the war as quickly as possible, and he gave Sherman more than a modicum of autonomy in his control of Army forces. Doctorow uses the immensity of Sherman's mission as a point of comparison. The wide swath of destruction spread from Atlanta, through Georgia to Savannah, then turned north, passing through South Carolina and into North Carolina.
Such a large theater of warfare -- not to mention the attendant destruction, confusion, illness and death -- inevitably split families, broke relationships and caused society in general to break down. Doctorow does not underplay the horrors of Sherman's brand of total war. Plantations were indeed burned, infrastructure destroyed, innocent people killed, the helpless left to fend for themselves. But Doctorow also convinces us that, even in the most hopeless of circumstances, people adapt and change, sometimes for mere survival, other times for their own personal sanity.
While the novel includes many real-life personalities (Sherman, Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant), most of it is filled with the accounts of fictional characters. Elizabeth, the daughter of a respected judge, sheds her gentrified lifestyle and becomes a nurse on the March's front lines, under the wing of a staid German doctor named Wrede Sartorius. As her relationship with Sartorius matures, Elizabeth's new position forces her to confront death and suffering unflinchingly. The gangrenous wounds, messy amputations and nameless faces she witnesses daily are a far cry from the afternoon tea and English literature she once new.
Pearl, once an embittered slave girl on a Georgia plantation (whose father was also her master), becomes another compassionate helper among the medical tents. After a childhood spent on anger and resentment, in her nascent adolescence she begins to believe in a future, one in which she is free and independent. While for the first time in her life, Pearl has the power to define, perhaps more important is Pearl's power to decide. Her encounter with newfound options plays out in her relationship with Stephen Walsh, a New York soldier of Irish descent, who, though five years Pearl's senior, nevertheless almost instantly falls for her. Their bond forces Pearl to reflect on her loyalties. She could go home with Walsh and conform to the standards of his "Yankee" society, where, with her light skin, she could easily blend in. On the other hand, Pearl feels a certain amount of devotion to her home, even though it had been a place of enslavement and a site of unforgivable misdoings. Indeed, when she encounters her former mistress in a state of shock and on the verge of mental collapse (her husband and two sons were thought dead or -- equally bad -- on the front lines), Pearl cares for her as if their past were irrelevant.
And then, for a bit of comic relief from all the carnage and suffering, enter the characters of Arly and Will, two ne'er-do-wells who trick and maneuver their way from the Confederate side to the Union and back to "secesh" again as circumstances require, believing their scamming to be in God's divine plan. The duo's antics, though told tongue in cheek, highlight the central conflict that Pearl, Elizabeth and even Dr. Sartorius experience. In essence, it is a struggle between ideology and practicality. Each character can choose either to remain loyal to a destroyed land and a failed belief system or move on and adapt to a new world. It is, of course, a difficult choice to make and leads -- at least for Elizabeth -- to a feeling of personal suffocation and, consequently, physical escape from the past. For Dr. Sartorius the circumstances are different and noticeably less problematic. Obstinately and perhaps a bit ingenuously, he chooses work over a relationship with Elizabeth. Pearl, in the end, also chooses practicality, but, because she has a loving partner in Walsh, it seems easier for her than for Elizabeth.
Thus, while each character chooses according to his or her own conscience and has a unique rationale for doing so, Doctorow wants us to ultimately see them in the same light. Bringing together seemingly disparate stories and individuals in a convincing manner is, perhaps, his greatest feat.
The novel ends when Sherman's march -- and the war itself -- ends. There is a feeling of optimism that only the cessation of conflict can bring. It is perhaps a naive hopefulness, one we know will not come completely to fruition, but it is nevertheless poignant and necessary for any sort of livable future.
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