Weblog 1

This was a question posed in class that was touched on, but not really answered in detail, so after taking it home and thinking about it, I decided to address in my weblog. Dr. Campbell asked about the ways that were used in talking about death in the Louisa May Alcott stories and in Whitman’s “Drum-Taps”.

Going back over the two stories, I saw quite a few places where Alcott writes about death, relating it to sleep. One of the most obvious places she does this is in “Hospital Sketches” chapter three in the very last sentence when the narrator describes leaving the patients at the end of the day “where rest, the sweetest, made our pillows soft, while Night and Nature took our places, filling that great house of pain with the healing miracles of Sleep, and his diviner brother, Death” (8). Another place in “Hospital Sketches” where Alcott uses sleep as a reference to death is when the nurse refers to a dead soldier as “the quiet sleeper” (6). In “The Brothers” this happens again, when Miss Dane is watching over Ned, the rebel soldier, in his sleep, waiting for him to either live or die. She says, “Sleep, the healer, had descended to save or take him gently away” (588).

Comparing Alcott’s and Whitman’s references to death, I feel that Whitman gives his readers a much more honest perspective of what he was seeing while dressing the wounds and encountering death than we get from the nurses in “Hospital Sketches” and “The Brothers”. In “Drum-Taps” Whitman does not shy away from telling us which men had life threatening illnesses and what those illness exactly were, when all Alcott writes about the characters in her stories that are close to death is that they are asleep.

It was brought up in class that Alcott used a writing style that was more straightforward when Whitman’s writing seems wordy and harder to understand. I just thought it was interesting that even though Alcott uses an honest tone with everything else in the stories, she sugar-coats death while dying seems to be one of the only things that Whitman doesn’t dress up with flowery language in “Drum-Taps”.