Hospital Sketches

In her Postscript at the end of Chapter 6, Alcott notes that “no two persons see the same thing with the same eyes” and her description of “hospital life must be taken through [her] glass” (72). This sentiment is a variation on how she begins Chapter 2. She states that she offers her own impressions of the journey not only to “amuse the reader,” but also to assure her readers that her descriptions are authentic, “not romance” (11). In this sense, the episode that makes up her second sketch prepares the reader to receive her ensuing experiences as individual to her. Though they “have been described a half dozen times before” (11), they have not been described by her. Drawing attention to her unique lens is her way of affirming the authenticity of her experience. Given her Abolitionist audience and the fragile state of the war effort at the time, establishing this authenticity could be considered crucial.

As in her previous sketch, Alcott laces her description with humorous moments even when events are frustrating, consistently highlighting The Value of Humor in Stressful Times. This is evident in the way she casts aside her bashfulness to avoid fulfilling a cliche about American women, the suggestion that a passenger was sneaking brandy when the lamps temporarily extinguished, and her observation that, as her train was being repaired, men made a nuisance of themselves among the workers and the women did the same from the windows. The episode on the boat with the “plump old lady” (13) seems intended to be funny, but its reliance on weight stereotyping and bias for the punchline is today recognized as hurtful and harmful.

While traveling from Boston, Alcott notes that she often saw Black Americans “not at all the sort [she]’d been accustomed to see at the North” but more like characters “out of a picture book, or off the stage” (17). She offers no further comment because her audience would have had the frame of reference to visualize her meaning. For modern readers who do not, Alcott’s discussion in Chapter 5 of the Black Americans she interacted with in Washington helps supply a meaning. She says that enslavement had made them “obsequious, trickish, lazy and ignorant, yet kind-hearted, merry-tempered” (57). These are the same harmful stereotypes reproduced in minstrel shows, as described by the National Museum of African American History & Culture, which presumably are what Alcott means by “picture books” and the “stage.”

It can be difficult for modern readers to understand how an ardent Abolitionist who challenged racist behavior could reproduce such harmful stereotypes. From Alcott’s perspective, attributing enslavement to the cultivation of negative qualities in the individual serves to fuel the fight to dismantle it as an institution, since the problem lies not in the character of the people themselves, but in the system that subjugates them. However, in the process, she reinforces and gives credence to the stereotypes.