Help needed, and I love nursing, and must let out my pent-up energy in some new way.
Decided to go to Washington as a nurse if I could find a place. Here, as elsewhere, the character and her author merge as Alcott describes her own motives for joining the Union nurses, the slavery issue is nearly invisible:ġ862. Instead, Tribulation Periwinkle longs to participate in the war because she «want something to do» (3). The Sketches actually begin without a word of anti-slavery feeling. Throughout her journals, and occasionally in her Sketches, Alcott demonstrates that she shares the blood of her mother’s family, the anti-slavery, «fighting» Mays.ģAnd yet these abolitionist gestures are not the first signs of political agitation to appear in Hospital Sketches indeed, one doesn’t discover Nurse Periwinkle’s abolitionist sentiments until late in her story. 4 This comment probably refers to the heroism of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s all-black regiment, displayed in the battle of Fort Wagner in August, 1863, the same month that Hospital Sketches was published. This dangerous fanatic ends her Sketches with a glance toward political action aimed more directly at African-Americans: «The next hospital I enter will, I hope, be one for the colored regiments, as they seem to be proving their right to the admiration and kind offices of their white relations, who owe them so large a debt, a little part of which I shall be so proud to pay» (73). did not produce the cheering result which I fondly expected for my comrade henceforth regarded me as a dangerous fanatic.» 3. «This rash act, and the anti-slavery lecture that followed. War times suit me, as I am a fighting May.» 2 Indeed she was, and her abolitionist sentiments emerge strongly in a comic scene toward the end of Hospital Sketches, when Nurse Tribulation Periwinkle, Alcott’s autobiographical persona, shocks a fellow Union nurse by kissing a black baby. In January 1868, as she reflected on the war at an Antislavery Festival at Mercantile Hall, Alcott wrote in her journal, «Glad I have lived in the time of this great movement, and known its heroes so well. Nevertheless, her condemnation doesn’t follow the predictable roads of abolition, even though her antislavery position is well known to people at all familiar with her life and writings. 4 «Thought much about going to Port Royal to teach contrabands,» Alcott wrote in her journal (Octobe (.)ĢThat Hospital Sketches, published at the height of the Civil War, is openly critical of American society and government might not seem surprising, given Alcott’s active role among the Concord intelligentsia, never known for blind obedience to any organized body.
0 kommentar(er)
