Emily Thompson, a Southern society woman displaced by the war and initially attracted to Sartorious, first joins his surgery and later his bed, surrendering to him her virginity. But her attraction turns to nightmare, culminating in her departure from the march. The only character in the novel with the courage to leave the mad procession, Thompson sees Sartorious as he is, "the aspect of them by which they persuade themselves they are civilized." Though sworn to "do no harm," Sartorious is provider of moral and scientific justification for murder and torture.
There's a war on now, and readers, including this one, will be more than tempted to draw parallels between Doctorow's portrait of a long gone American war and the present. But Doctorow cares too much about his craft to reduce his work to a polemic, and the "lessons" of The March are elliptical at best. Two prominent characters, the Confederate soldiers Arly Wilcox and Will Kirkland, begin the book in a Confederate jail awaiting execution for minor crimes against their own army. Over the course of the novel, they are freed to defend Milledgeville, GA from the Union, put on the Union uniform themselves, are captured by their own army, sworn back into the ranks as converts, switch back to act as Union prisoners of war, attach themselves a Union hospital, and then leave both armies behind after a debauched week in a whorehouse. Yet when Will dies, Arly puts Confederate uniform on him once more, and so too, when Arly dies in an unsuccessful attempt on Sherman's life, he casts off his photographer's disguise to die in the secession uniform. The two soldiers play as slapstick, a comment of how much license war brings to the land, but it is no accident they die in their own colors. When the march ends, the game is up.
Race, in the path of an army that frees slaves by the mile, runs similarly complex. Most slaves in Sherman's path are freed but then shed and left to fend for themselves; those who are taken care of are inevitably light-skinned, such as the young and beautiful slave girl Pearl, "with skin white as a cahnation flow'r." Emancipation, for men at war, is as much an issue of expediency as justice. A slave-owner, confronted with a Union foraging party's incursion onto his plantation, tells his slaves
They didn't ride in here because they knowed you was here waitin, nosir, they come for my vittles and my stores, for my stock and my horses and my mules…so you go with them, go on, and good riddance if you do, 'cause they doan care one way or t'other.
Justice may be served, but only as an aside an essentially narcissistic Union march, a world that thinks only of itself. Pearl, in contrast to the majority of the freed slaves, is well cared for, but at the cost of becoming a child of the march-"So how is I free? Never as a black girl, and not now as a white."
They didn't ride in here because they knowed you was here waitin, nosir, they come for my vittles and my stores, for my stock and my horses and my mules…so you go with them, go on, and good riddance if you do, 'cause they doan care one way or t'other.
Justice may be served, but only as an aside an essentially narcissistic Union march, a world that thinks only of itself. Pearl, in contrast to the majority of the freed slaves, is well cared for, but at the cost of becoming a child of the march-"So how is I free? Never as a black girl, and not now as a white."
The march is a force of momentary liberation, but the freedom and meaning it provides are wholly linked to the fact of its artificial and perverse existence. Outside the march, at its end, the land lies as it did before. Thus Sherman, at the war's end, realizes that "everything of the past four years has come down to a parade, as it will in Washington. We have been but marching to a politician's parade." A swirling mass, over-determined by honor, justice, race, and violence, settles back on the earth in the form of a parade. Sherman, and Doctorow as well, ask at the end not for answers, but only for significance, a way to confront the familiarity and solidity of everyday life.
