Alcott's Hospital Sketches is, in the Bedford edition edited by Alice Fahs, a 6-chaptered memoir of Alcott's two months spent nursing for the Union Army in Georgetown, outside DC, during the Civil War. I add the disclaimer because Fahs mentions in her introduction that the sixth "chapter" is actually a letter tacked on after the publication of the original five-chaptered Hospital Sketches. And it shows. I didn't shudder or cringe at anything Alcott wrote in those first five chapters even though one of them, "A Night," describes the slow, sentimental death of her beloved John. But in that final letter, the entire tone of the book changes from tragicomedy, dark and gritty, to the grotesque, all but describing the sounds arms make when they're being sawed off by a rougher-than-necessary Dr. P.
Chapter one, "Obtaining Supplies," covers how it is that Alcott made up her mind to (all but) join the Army as a nurse. It establishes a tone of playful cheeriness that pervades the novel? memoir? journal? -- especially in light of difficulties, such as all the gender-related obstacles she faces when trying to get a rail pass from Concord, MA, to Washington, DC, as well as all the other permissions a woman of her time needs to travel alone.
Chapter two, "A Forward Movement," recounts her trip to DC and then onto the hospital, which she dubs The Hurley-Burley House, with stops in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore along the way. Her first view of Washington, DC, "a spacious place, its visible magnitude quite took my breath away, and of course I quoted Randolph's expression, 'a city of magnificent distances,' as I suppose every one does when they see it," so squared with my own experience that, had I not been already endeared to LMA, she would have had me right there. We also see quite a bit more development of her alter ego, Tribulation Periwinkle, in this chapter, whom I believe LMA uses to call attention to the sentimental irony of her usually gendered or classed situations -- as well as to contribute to the sense that LMA is more aware of what's going on than a simple retelling would allow.
Chapter three, "A Day," takes us through a day-in-the-life of a quirky, intellectual, sarcastic Army "Nurse" -- and we begin to see just how loose a term that actually is, as the methods used in these hospitals seem so illogical and foreign to a germaphobe like me or any contemporary reader.
Chapter four, the most sentimental and, appropriately, dark chapter, is "A Night," in which she recalls the night that John dies. This chapter is fascinating for a number of reasons. It's the first time in the book that she actually addresses PTSD (though not called that at the time) outright in the fevers and reactions that soldiers reli(e)ving the war produces. It relies on the very dichotomy between woman and mother than the nineteenth century is so good at keeping separated in LMA's transformation from maternal caretaker to man-sensitive woman then back to maternal--even grandmotherly--caretaker. And it ends with two men kissing each other goodbye, "tenderly as women." Chock-full of intimacy, but Fahs contends that, when compared to other first-hand accounts of John's death, we find that LMA actually over-sentimentalizes the scene by adding the final goodbyes series and by playing up the homoeroticism of the final farewell between John and Ned.
Chapter five, "Off Duty," explains that LMA was relieved of her duty after contracting an illness that killed another woman working in her ward then details her return to her family home, but not before one last action scene wherein LMA rushes from room to room of the hospital in order to save a dying soldier's life (actually, it's a sardonic parody of the hospital's poor organization and implementation of care, a recurring theme in the narrative). It's remarkable, still, for its inclusion of LMA's brief encounter with a black family and the responses given by those around her to LMA's genuine concern for and acceptance of them. The chapter also details some of LMA's duties after she was no longer in contact with the bodies as well as what she enjoyed paying attention to now that her mind wasn't constantly occupied with wounds and dying.
The postscripted chapter, as I hinted at earlier, goes back through her time in a hurry but adds to it some gruesome details she left out in the first, original five chapters. I get the impression that she's been asked so much about those details that she felt compelled to, from the perspective of her alter ego Tribulation Periwinkle, tell the dirty underside of being a nurse... while also taking a backhanded stab at the way things were done at the Hurley-Burley House.
This was my first LMA reading, so I'm going to say only that I was surprised by the comedic tone she took up early on and maintained throughout. I'm also intrigued by the adoption of the alter ego, as though she required someone else to shift the responsibility to when things got gruesome or disgusting or plain ridiculous. Suggests to me a kind of splitting that she might have observed others doing, maybe her (then) larger-than-life father (whom she would come to overshadow in fame and fortune, as she details in the final letter). That's me psychoanalyzing LMA through her book, but if it's a memoir, I'm welcome to. Even if it's fiction, I can if I want. :)
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