clearclassicsblog: The Martins and the Marches.

These two nineteenth-century families, one real, and one fictional, had a big influence on me in my first decade.

At home, two books were read over and over by all of us (four girls, one boy, who, like many only boys, had to read what his sisters read) until they literally fell apart. One was a hardback red book which told the story of the young St Therese of Lisieux in the Martin family in the 1870s and 80s. I can’t remember the title or author and haven’t been able to find it, but I know it was American because the spelling was different and that was the first time I noticed American spelling as different. The other book was a folio-sized red volume of Little Women, which incorporated Good Wives, and had lots of coloured illustrations. I remember vividly the feast Mr Lawrence sent over on Christmas night and Meg’s grey wedding costume, and when I saw the latest Little Women film by Greta Gerwig, I gasped out loud to see what was almost an identical copy of the illustration of Jo and Beth at the seaside, from the book, up there on the screen.

One family was fictional and the other was real, but in our house both books were morally on a par. We didn’t know the background; we didn’t know that Alcott held the usual prejudices of her class against Irish Catholics, which would have shocked us, and we didn’t know the Martins were anti-republican, which would have been surprising to us in that triumphalist commemorative Irish decade of the 1960s.

The Marches are New England Protestants, closely based on the Alcotts, though Louisa Alcott omitted her father’s more extreme beliefs and the misery he subjected his family to, in the story. Still, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy stand a little apart from the world in which they live – some of the signs of this are the attitude to Meg’s visit to a ball at the Gardiners’ house ( which is called ‘vanity fair’), the hand-me-downs the girls wear, and the fact that Marmee is indignant at Amy being slapped at school. (This was baffling to us in 1960s Ireland.). The book opens during the American Civil War when Mr March is ‘far away where the fighting was’ – it is never stated that he is a chaplain, but that’s the impression given. Religion is central but there is no church; the idea of the pilgrim’s progress runs through the book, and Bunyan’s book was new to us Catholics,although we did understand (oh how well we understood) the idea of life as a journey of self-improvement, self-sacrifice and service. The Marches are ‘poor’, but the Hummels, to whom they give their Christmas breakfast, are poorer. Poverty (March-style) is good and wealth (Gardiner-style but funnily enough, not Lawrence-style) is bad. All the girls go their own way. Jo gives up the handsome boy next door to go and write in a boarding-house full of eccentrics in New York, Meg could probably find a rich husband if she hung around ‘vanity fair’ long enough, but she falls in love with John Brooke, a ‘penniless’ teacher. (The idea that a teacher could be regarded as poor was another baffling aspect of the story.)Beth dies in young adulthood because Louisa Alcott’s sister Lizzie died, and Alcott wanted to honour her memory. The death of a dearly-loved family member was an integral part of everyday life for many people until at least the mid-twentieth century, which is why grown men cry at Little Women.I have no patience for literary critics who argue that Beth ‘has to’ die for some ridiculous literary reason. Beth contracts rheumatic fever from the Hummels (it is a bit creepy that the immigrant family’s key role in the story is as carriers of infection), she recovers, but her heart is weakened and she dies in her 20s. This happened to some people I know of in the twentieth century too – it was not a ‘made-up’ condition, as some critics claim.

Sadness and premature death overshadowed the real Martin family too, to a much greater extent. Their beloved mother, Zelie, died when Therese, the youngest, was only 4, and four children died in infancy or early childhood. The survivors were all girls – Marie, Pauline, Leonie, Celine, and Therese. The Martins were devout Catholics who were very much against the secularising Third Republic of France, so, like the Marches, set apart a little. Both Louis and Zelie Martin tried to enter the religious life and were rejected, so they married, intending to live as brother and sister, but abandoned this plan after a few months. Judging by their letters, they had a very loving marriage. They were, I suppose, well-doing artisans; Zelie ran a lacemaking workshop in Alencon in Normandy, in which she employed a number of women; Louis was a jeweller. They were noted for their practical generosity to their poorer neighbours. After Zelie’s death the family moved from Alencon to Lisieux, to be near Zelie’s brother Isidore Guerin, a chemist, and his family. The Martin house, Les Buissonnets, was a fairly small suburban house set in its own grounds, although the Martins always had one servant, Louise, and before her, Victoire. (The Marches, readers will remember, had the faithful Hannah).

The Martins were unusual not only because they produced a daughter who was canonized and declared one of the four female doctors of the Catholic church, but because all five daughters entered the religious life, four of them in the Carmelite convent in Lisieux, with Leonie, the odd woman out in this as in so much else, entering the Visitation at Caen. (Leonie deserves an article of her own and has her own following. Some argue that she was the real saint of the Martin family). Therese decided in her early teens to enter the enclosed Carmel convent where two of her sisters already were, and she travelled to see Pope Leo XIII to ask his permission. As a teenager I first read Therese’s actual autobiography, and maybe it was embellished by her sisters Marie and Pauline (about whom I have very mixed feelings), but her joyful honesty and simplicity shines through. Later I read a lot about Therese, including some of the books listed below, and came to suspect that her death from tubercolosis at 24 was due to medical neglect, and by no means inevitable. (Just because she used the language of religious resignation to cope with it doesn’t mean she wanted it.) Moreover, poor Louis Martin’s descent into insanity might have been partly due to one daughter after another removing herself forever from the family environs. A married daughter would have been able to visit, but Carmelites never set foot in their homes again. Therese spent the last year of her life in a state of spiritual desolation, getting no comfort at all from her prayers, harangued by her overbearing sisters (in blood) Marie and Pauline, who took down her every utterance. (Heather King suggests that nowadays they would have a camcorder.) She died in agonising pain as her internal organs consumed themselves. Neither did the fictional Beth pass away heroically, Alcott tells us, but painfully and uncomfortably:

…such heavy days, such long, long nights, such aching hearts and imploring prayers, when those who loved her best were forced to see the thin hands stretched out to them beseechingly, to hear the bitter cry, ‘Help me! Help me!’ and to feel that there was no help.

These two childhood books formed me, for better or worse. Firstly, they gave me the lifelong prejudice that female stories are much more interesting than male ones. (Well, they are, aren’t they?)Secondly, they taught me that girls can hold out for what they want – Jo and her writing, Therese and her vocation. Thirdly, they convinced me that life can be a lot more interesting and worthwhile if you stand apart a little from mainstream values. Is this true? I genuinely don’t know, but it’s how I’ve lived my life.

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Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, Good Wives (first published in the U.S.A 1868 and 1869, they have gone into thousands of editions and are still in print.)

U.S.-published book about the Martins: ‘The Young Therese’? Red cover, hardback. Was it in a series of young saints?

Cornelia Meigs, Invincible Louisa: a study of the author of Little Women (N.Y: Little, Brown 1933).

Therese Martin, The Story of a Soul: the autobiography of a saint (First published in France in 1898, it has gone into several editions and is still in print.)

Ida Gorres, The Hidden Face: a study of StTherese (1959: Ignatius Press edition 2003).

Monica Furlong, Therese of Lisieux (London: Darton, Longman and Todd 1987).

Guy Gaucher (ed.) Zelie et Louis Martin, Correspondance Familiale 1863-1885 (Paris: Cerf 2004)

Samantha Ellis, How To Be A Heroine: or what I’ve learned from reading too much (London: Chatto & Windus 2014).

Heather King, Shirt of Flame: a year with St Therese of Lisieux (Massachussets: Paraclete 2011).