L. Miller Minutes

To continue my commentary on American Short Stories, I’m turning to A Night (1863), by novelist, poet, abolitionist, American suffragette, Civil War Union nurse, author of Little Women, and Pennsylvanian, Louisa May Alcott.

To avoid getting into the weeds of the noteworthiness of Louisa May Alcott’s life, for which there is a field’s worth, and I suggest everyone do at some point, I’ll jump right into the story of discussion, A Night. By the way, if you’d like to read A Night and join the discussion, there’s an online available version here from a University of Pennsylvania hosted archive of women authored stories.

Background

A Night is the third part of a compilation of six sketches (see Hospital Sketches, 1863) composed by Alcott based on her time as a Union nurse stationed in Washington during the Civil War. Written under a fictionalized narrator, Nurse Periwinkle, Hospital Sketches is purported to be slightly altered but virtually authentic to Alcott’s real experiences as a nurse.

Length

7 pages, 1 hour comfortably

Setting

A hospital in Georgetown during Civil Wartime America, night time.

Crude Plot Summary

1) Alcott opens A Night as Nurse Periwinkle by describing the scene: she’s a nurse in a hospital during wartime about to start her night duty, she describes the figures with whom she works with, and the general atmosphere of the ward.

• Her own station is next to the bed of a New Jersey boy, suffering from trauma and hallucinations, often cheering his comrades on, sometimes grabbing the narrator to drag her from the vicinity of bursting shells; whispering, shouting, and lamenting.
• She notes her ward is divided into three rooms: the duty room, for those needing rollers, plasters, and pins; the pleasure room, for those needing books, flowers, and games; and the pathetic room, for those needing lullabies, consolation, and “sometimes, a shroud.”
• She describes the watchman, Dan, as a ghost with a figure similar to that as a beer barrel mounted on cork-screws.
• She describes the attendant of the pathetic room as a goblin who would appear to her and provide a sweet dish of food and coffee.

2) The events of the narrator’s night start with a one-legged Pennsylvanian man hopping into the room she’s in, whose wound-fever had taken a turn for the worse. He was drunken, not producing a roar of pain, but instead balancing on his on the single leg like a stork discussing the war, the President, beer, and rifles. Another man, a Prussian, came into the room and put the one-legged man to rest.

3) Next, a cry is heard from a bed in the corner in the room – it belonged to a 12-year old drummer boy, Teddy. He was mourning the death of his friend Kit in a vivid dream. Kit had saved the boy by carrying him to safety despite being hurt himself. Teddy mourned that had he been thinner when Kit carried him, Kit may have survived.

4) Just as the boy wailed, the one-legged man reentered. As Nurse Periwinkle became overwhelmed, Dan and the Prussian entered to help and resolved the commotion.

5) Before Nurse Periwinkle could get settled, a bearer delivered a message that “John is going, and wants to see you.” The narrator then discussed the importance of John to her:

• He came to the “pathetic room” a day or two after his friend Ned. Ned (and other patients) continually praised John’s courage, sobriety, self-denial, and kindness, so Nurse Periwinkle was curious to meet him until he arrived.
• The narrator describes John as a stately, large, attractive Virginian blacksmith. Despite facing mortal wounds to his back, he maintains calmness.
• The narrator describes the second night she watched John when making rounds with the doctor, she asked the doctor which man in the room probably suffered the most, and the doctor pointed to John. The doctor went on to describe the pain that John felt, “every breathe he draws is like a stab.” The doctor continued, “[John] must lie on his wounded back or suffocate… there’s not the slightest hope for him.” The narrator could have sat down and cried upon hearing the doctor’s words.
• The doctor informed Nurse Periwinkle that she must inform John that “he must die.” Faced with the burden of this task, she went to John while his wounds were being dressed. There she saw him weep in despair and she could not bring herself to tell him that he will die. Instead, she let him lean on her to help him bear the pain. John was glad she did this, and Nurse Periwinkle was now a “poor substitute of a mother” to him.
• After the night of letting him lean on her, John asks Nurse Periwinkle to draft him a letter to his mother and to his siblings – he had no wife, his mother was a widow, and he was her oldest child and looked after the other children.
• In discussing his family, the John asks Nurse Periwinkle, “This was my first battle, do they [the doctors] think it’ll be my last?” The Nurse responds, “I’m afraid they do, John.” Soon, John then dictates the letter for Nurse Periwinkle to write. The letter is then sent.

6) Upon entering the room to meet John, John says, “I knew you’d come! I guess I’m moving on, ma’am.” For the next few hours, John suffered.

7) Various other patients from the room circled around John in awe and pity for him – he was beloved by all. Ned, his friend who arrived before him to the hospital, then enters and visits him bedside. They say goodbye to each other and part.

8) In a gasp, John passes.

9) While John was being made ready for the grave, he laid in state for half an hour, an uncommon act at that time for the hospital, but it was done in reverence for John. As he laid in state, the ward master handed Nurse Periwinkle a letter returned from John’s family in response to his that she drafted. The story concludes as Nurse Periwinkle places the letter in John’s hands to be buried with him in a “government lot.”

Themes

Horrors of War: suffering, trauma

Death: final moments, bereavement, dignity, reverence

Friendship: David & Jonathan

Thoughts

When finishing the previous short story commentary and starting this one, I was not expecting such an emotionally heavy, bleak-yet-somehow-hopeful story to be next. A Night begins with the narrator, Nurse Periwinkle, starting her night shift in the ward of a Civil War hospital. Alcott uses humor to humanize the people around her: she describes the fellow hospital attendants as ghosts and goblins, and she likens the snoring of all the patients to a band of wind instruments with a funny reference to a hymn Blow ye the trumpet, Blow! (as well as a reference to hardcore abolitionist John Brown).

It’s soon clear, as the narrator foreshadows:

“The night whose events I have a fancy to record, opened with a little comedy, and closed with a great tragedy; for a virtuous and useful life ultimately ended is always tragical to those who see not as God sees.”

Nurse Periwinkle’s night descends into a hands-on reality of the American Civil War: brutality, suffering, child soldiers, and trauma for the participants all culminating to the death of John, the Virginian blacksmith for whom Nurse Periwinkle (and everyone else, it seems) revered as a great man. She describes him in great detail in reverence. He embodies a content, simple, honest, heroic man admired by those around him. In my favorite exchange in the story, in his suffering Nurse Periwinkle asks John:

“Do you ever regret that you came, when you lie here suffering so much?”

In which John responds:

“Never, ma’am. I haven’t helped a great deal, but I’ve shown I was willing to give my life, and perhaps, I’ve got to; but I don’t blame anybody, and if it was to do over again, I’d do it. I’m a little sorry I wasn’t wounded in the front; it looks cowardly to be hit in the back, but I obeyed orders, and it don’t matter in the end, I know.”

Alcott not only humanizes the characters for the readers to know their suffering, but also conveys the feelings of those peers of the person suffering – the friends in the room, the hopefulness and the pity they feel is delicately laid out for the reader to latch on to. Since A Night is part of a compilation drafted by Alcott primarily from her own experiences, I get the sense John was a real person she may have known and comforted in his passing. In A Night, Nurse Periwinkle notes after John’s passing:

“He [John] never spoke again, but to the end held my hand close, so close that when he was asleep at last, I could not draw it away. Dan helped me, warning me as he did so that it was unsafe for dead and living flesh to lie so long together; but though my hand was strangely cold and stiff, and four white marks remained across its back, even when warmth and color had returned elsewhere, I could not but be glad that, through its touch, the presence of human sympathy, perhaps, had lightened that hard hour.”

Reading A Night was a cathartic experience, and it’s amazing to me that Alcott was providing readers in the 1860s with such an unsparing and poignant glimpse at a man’s final moments.

There’s an endless array of themes to look at in A Night, and to that I recommend it to readers. I think anyone would enjoy A Night, especially those interested in US History and the Civil War.

To read along and join the discussion in this series, the book I’m reading is  100 Great American Short Stories (Dover Thrift Edition), 2020. I’ll share the link of stories that are available online through library sources.

Next up: A Forward Movement (1863) also by Louisa May Alcott.

Cheers.