ABSTRACT

Multiplicity is a distinctive aspect of Geraldine Brooks’ novel March (2005). Opening with an epigraph from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), it then diverges to take readers into the consciousness of the earlier novel’s absent father during and before the American Civil War. This narrative strategy establishes a parallel relationship between the two texts: for readers with knowledge of Alcott’s work, the events of Little Women unfold alongside the activities of the missing character until the texts converge in the final scene of the father’s return. Such readers must hold both novels in their minds simultaneously. The relationship between these texts, however, is not simple and unidirectional: revelations from Brooks’ work flow back into Little Women, adding details of the Alcott family biography, as well as gender and racial politics of the period. These frequently recontextualise elements of the earlier text and encourage readers to make further parallels between the fictionalised past and the lived present. Brooks’ use of multiplicity as a narrative strategy thus interrogates both the past and present, and raises questions about possible futures.