What phrases has the author used to introduce this character?
Here's how Mac is first introduced in Eight Cousins:
Mac shook his hair out of his eyes, stumbled over a stool, and asked abruptly,
“Did you bring any book with you?”
“Four boxes full. They are in the library.”
Mac vanished from the room...
Find a portrait or photograph that closely embodies how you imagine them.
I'm hoping the edition of Rose in Bloom I ordered from the library will have the same illustrations as the one I read at age eight. I really have no idea how to find a portrait that would look like my version of Mac. However, with the novel's strong Transcendentalist theme, a portrait of Henry David Thoreau (before the hideous beard days!) seems appropriate.
Actually, in my favorite chapter of Rose in Bloom, Rose tells Mac that if he “had no beard and wore [his] hair long” he'd look like Milton. Is it just me, or do Thoreau and Milton look something alike? (Both portraits below are of Milton, of course.)
How has the character changed? Through Eight Cousins and much of Rose in Bloom, Mac is the quintessential nerd. He seems hardly to notice what is going on around him, cares nothing for the society and amusements other people value, and can bury you in an avalanche of erudition. But slowly he begins to observe others, with delightful philosophical amusement, and then to interact more with others in ways that are worth-while and leave his associates better for their contact with him.
Has your opinion of them altered? Since I've reread this novel several times, I guess I can only say my crush on him has grown. ;)
Are there aspects of their character you aspire to? or hope never to be? What are their strengths and faults? Do you find them believable? I'd love to be as erudite as this, "And allophite is the new hydrous silicate of alumina and magnesia, much resembling pseudophite, which Websky found in Silesia." Though I wonder if Alcott just made that up and a real scientist would roar at it. Anyways, it's a delicious sentence.
More seriously, although Mac has faults, I don't think he has any glaring ones that particularly jar on me. They are the rather enduring faults of a nerd – inattention to social etiquette, absorption, and extreme bluntness. In Eight Cousins, as a teenage boy threatened with blindness and kept from the reading he loves, he is fractious and rebellious, but it would be unbelievable to have such a character behave differently. If anything, by the end of Rose in Bloom he has become almost too much a model man to be believable. But I'm certainly not objecting to the strengths that make me admire him. He's intelligent and intellectual, yet has a sense of humor even about himself. He's studying to become a doctor no doubt after Uncle Alec's own heart, whose emphasis is on prevention through healthful, vigorous living. Like a good Transcendentalist, he doesn't just write poetry - his life is a poem. He has, as he has purposed, become a man through "keeping good company, reading good books, loving good things, and cultivating soul and body faithfully and wisely." And did I mention he's hilarious?
Would you want to meet them? Nothing could be more droll! I only hope that I will someday meet someone half so wonderful in “real life”.
Try writing a short (four sentences +) note or letter as the character, addressed to you, another character, the author, anyone.
Dear Cousin,
You asked what else you should read of “my Thoreau”, so I am sending you his account of how he went to the woods to live deliberately. You also asked if all this reading of Keats will not rather put me in danger of catching from him a touch of the romantic as well as Romanticism. Did Archie or Steve never mention that I intend to study love with all the assiduity I have given medicine? But as all the recent contact still hasn't seem to have infected, I think Keats a good primer.
Give my love to my lady Dulcinea and tell Jaime that if he keeps you always running about on his errands that I shall never play base ball with him again.
Your Reluctant Milton
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