Brothers William James and Henry James Jr. became famous in
their lifetimes for their powers of observation as respectively, pioneering
psychologist-philosopher and fiction writer. It took over 70 years after her
death, with the publication of her diaries, for the world to know that their
younger sister, Alice James, had her own penetrating vision of the
world, albeit one experienced from the bed where she languished as an invalid
recluse.
The diary entry above conveys her pride in her two
older brothers’ literary achievement in the prior year, as well as a gallows
sense of humor bordering on stoicism in the face of the declining health that
finally claimed her life a year later.
Alice was the youngest child of Henry James Sr.,
a wealthy, one-legged philosopher whose eccentricities affected, for good and
ill, the lives of his five children—perhaps none more so than his daughter.
"In our family group, girls seem scarcely to have
had a chance," Henry Jr. wrote. Irritated and uncomfortable because their father felt that women were mere appendages of men, Alice fell ill or sometimes
pretended to be ill, with fainting spells or headaches. Some doctors diagnosed the underlying ailment as suppressed
gout, others as “wandering womb.”
But the one applied most commonly to her (a particular
favorite of male doctors of the time) was known as “neurasthenia,” a form of what
European doctors saw as “hysteria.” We know recognize what she had as a depression
so devastating that Alice became suicidal. “A hoop skirt is a death trap,” she would
observe.
Oddly enough, perhaps because Alice finally felt she
could be useful, the one period of her life when these conditions abated was
when she had to care for her father when his health started to decline. But
with his death in 1882, her condition worsened again.
Even confined to her bed, Alice missed little. The
diary entries she began writing in 1889 (dictated to her longtime companion, Katherine
Loring) were sometimes sharp, often funny, and usually unconventional.
Anglophilic Henry Jr., for instance, was astonished to
discover, when Loring presented to him a copy of the diary after Alice’s death,
that his sister “was really an Irishwoman.” It wasn’t simply because she
ardently believed in Home Rule, but that she had assessed Britain’s role in
fostering the conditions for this rising movement—and found their disclaimers
of blame all too wanting:
“The behaviour of the Unionist and Tory is simply the
bete carried to its supreme expression. It is truly a great misfortune for a
people to be so destitute of inspiration, and so completely without honour, as
to be left absolutely naked to itself. If you could read, too, the chorus going
up to heaven on all sides over the love of manliness and fairness in the
Briton's bosom! — those qualities of which they are always assuring the rest of
the world they hold the monopoly. The Englishman, however, should not be held
accountable for being mentally so abject before the Irishman; he is helpless,
for there is absolutely nothing in his organization wherewith he can conceive
of him, and his self-respect naturally has no other refuge save in loathing and
despising him. He has no wings to his mind to bear him whither his leaden feet
are inapt for carrying him; so that it is only now, at the end of seven
centuries, that he is beginning faintly to divine that in Ireland, above all
other lands, there are impalpable spiritualities which rise triumphant and
imperishable before brutalities.”
Alice James died in 1892 of breast cancer. Although her brothers sensed her keen intellect, even they must have wondered at times what to make of her. We may be only coming to terms with her now.
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