History in the Margins

Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy–and Anne Boyd Rioux

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It’s the 150th anniversary of the publication of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and the legions of Alcott fans have plenty of ways to celebrate.  PBS released an adaptation in May and at lease one new feature film adaptation is in the works.(1) A graphic novel that re-envisions the March sisters as a blended family leaving in modern New York City will be released in hardcopy in February. (The hard core have been able to watch it on-line in serial form beginning in March.) As the anniversary grew closer, articles about Alcott, Little Women, and related topics have appeared in all the major publications that consider things pop-cultural, literary, and historical.

Anne Boyd Rioux’s Meg, Jo, Beth , Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters is an important contribution to the conversation, and one that will last long after the current flutter of interest subsides. (2) Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy is not a biography of Alcott, though Rioux certainly tells Alcott’s story. It is instead a biography of Little Women itself. Rioux considers the changing audience for Little Women(3). She examines its many adaptations into other art forms. She describes the book’s cultural influence–including an amazing array of women who claim it as an influence. And, perhaps most importantly, she takes on the question of Little Women’s relevance today.

Discussing Mark Adamo’s opera based on Little Women, Rioux says “The story Adamo tells does exactly what an adaptation should do: it opens up the original text and makes you feel like you understand it even more deeply.” The same could be said of Rioux’s study. Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy is an engaging and enlightening piece of scholarship that led me straight to my copy of Little Women, eager to read it one more time.

(1) Maybe two. I’m seeing two different directors and two different time lines. The one with Meryl Streep as Aunt March looks interesting enough that I may break my long-standing ban on watching adaptations of Little Women.
(2) Rioux also edited a new annotated edition of Little Women for Penguin Classics. It’s a thing of beauty:  a good choice if you’ve read your childhood copy to flinders, or want to introduce someone to the book.
(3) Boys read it, too, when it first came out. And their lives were richer for it in my opinion.

J’Accuse!

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As I’ve mentioned before here on the Margins, one of the weird facts about historical research (or maybe just about life in general) is that once a person or idea has come to your attention you find references to him/it/them everywhere. Lately the Dreyfus Affair has been popping up in my life. In email conversations with more than one writing friend and around the edges of subjects that don’t at first glance have anything to do with the infamous trial and exoneration of a man wrongly accused. When a story tracks me down with that kind of fervor, it’s time to share it with you.


On October 15, 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer in the French War Ministry, was arrested for selling military secrets to Germany. His trial, conviction, and subsequent exoneration became an international cause-celebre.

A military court found Dreyfus guilty in a trial notable for fabricated evidence and illegal procedures and sentenced him to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, off French Guiana. The French press, led by Édouard Drumont’s virulently anti-Semitic La Libre Parole, applauded the verdict. Drumont, in particular, claimed that Dreyfus’s actions illustrated the inherent disloyalty of French Jews.

Doubts about Dreyfus’s guilt grew once the irregularities of the trial became known. When Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart uncovered evidence that another officer, Major C. F. Esterhazy, was a spy and that the letter that had incriminated Dreyfus was in Esterhazy’s handwriting, the leftist press demanded a new trial. A military court acquitted Esterhazy and Picquart was arrested. Outraged, popular novelist Émile Zola published an open letter to the president of France, on January 13, 1898. Under the headline, J’Accuse, Zola denounced the army for covering up its mistaken conviction of Dreyfus. More than 200,000 copies sold on the day the letter appeared.

If Zola had hoped to catapult France into action on the Dreyfus case, he succeeded. The right-wing press exploded with diatribes against Zola, foreigners, and Jews. On the other side, more than 3,000 people signed a petition demanding a new trial for Dreyfus. Zola himself was brought to trial for criminal libel on February 7, in a case that kept the details of the Dreyfus affair in the international press for two weeks. Zola was sentenced to a year in jail and a 3,000-franc fine, but escaped to England.

In August of the same year, Major Hubert Joseph Henry, who had claimed to discover the letter that convicted Dreyfus, confessed he had forged documents in the case and suppressed others in an effort to convict a man that he believed to be a traitor. Henry then committed suicide. Faced with exposure, Esterhazy fled the country. Dreyfus’s appeal for a retrial was now assured.

Dreyfus was brought back from Devil’s Island for a new court martial in August, 1899. He was found guilty once more, but was pardoned with the right to continue his efforts to establish his innocence. In 1906, a civilian court of appeals reversed the conviction. Dreyfus was formally reinstated in the army and given the Legion of Honour. Recalled to active service in World War I, he commanded an ammunition column as a lieutenant colonel.

The French army did not declare Dreyfus innocent until 1995. Because evidently it’s hard to admit you’re wrong.

The moral of the story as far as I’m concerned? The path to justice begins when one person stands up and says “J’Accuse.”  Followed by a second, and a third, and–you get the idea.

Vivandières

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If you’ve spent any time here on the Margins in recent years, you know I’ve been thinking about women warriors. One thing I’ve learned in the process is that women have always been a part of war, whether or not they picked up a weapon or led a charge.

From the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, women were always a critical part of European armies, though not as soldiers. They cooked, did laundry and mending, nursed the wounded, and scavenged the battlefield for useful gear when the fighting was over. The British army described them as “women on the ration”—such women may have accounted for as much as ten percent of the British force in the American Revolution. The numbers varied by the type of unit: artillery units, for instance, which as we have seen needed support on the battlefield, tended to have larger numbers of women than other units. Such women were often the wives, or at least permanent female companions, of enlisted men.(1) Some armies also tolerated women “off the rations”—prostitutes, grog vendors, fences for plundered goods— as long as they did not disturb camp discipline. But that’s a different story.

Vivandières were a last-gasp variation of “women on the ration”. They first appeared in the French army shortly before the Napoleonic wars, after efforts to outlaw the presence of women in army camps. They continued as official auxiliaries of the French army until 1906.(2) A small number of women also filled this role, in a less official capacity, in the American Civil War.

Like their predecessors, they were often married to a member of the regiment and they traveled with the army. They were attached to specific regiments. Although they did not wear uniforms in the sense of officially mandated apparel, they often wore unofficial uniforms loosely based on those worn by Zouave units (3)–the defining feature being a practical pair of trousers worn under a short skirt. (A uniform that Civil War nurses may have looked at with envy.) Their official job was to sell alcohol, tobacco and other comforts to soldiers–a pragmatic recognition on the part of nineteenth century armies that their own supply systems were inadequate. Unofficially, vivandières carried water, bore colors, mended clothing (for a fee) and served as nurses on the battlefield.

And, yes, sometimes they fought alongside the men they served with.

(1) Officers’ wives often accompanied armies as well. Their role was even less clearly defined.
(2) The end of the vivandières as an official auxiliary was part of the military reforms instituted in France in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair.
(3) The Zouaves were light infantry units in the French army that primarily served in French North Africa. They had a reputation for reckless bravery and wore distinctive uniforms modeled on those of North African troops. Units in other nineteenth century armies, most notably units on both sides of the American Civil War, adopted the colorful uniforms, presumably hoping that Zoave uniforms would come with Zoave courage attached.