Lone talent
Anthony Storr
Alice James Jean Strouse (Cape pp. 363, £9.95) This book is not only a valuable addition to Leon Edel's great biography of Henry James, but also an original and convincing demonstration of the joint part played by society and the family in causing one form of neurosis. Alice was the youngest of the family, and the only girl. Of her four brothers, she was closest to Henry, the novelist, who treated her with the greatest understanding and compassion throughout her life. The element of bisexuality in the character of each forged a special link between them. Whereas 'Henry had withdrawn early from the competitive masculine fray,' Alice resented the fetters imposed upon women by Victorian convention and the particular evasion of the harsher aspects of reality demanded by her father. Henry James senior, a believer in 'Divine Natural Humanity,' enveloped his children in love, discouraged competition, shielded them from evil, and permitted them everything to which his tolerance and his large income allowed access, provided only that evil and unhappiness were both denied.
Children who are not allowed to express unhappiness in words do so in indirect fashion through illness. Alice James had her first 'breakdown' at the age of 19; and, until her death of cancer in her 44th year, remained an intermittent invalid. Her illness was, of course, hysteria. The multiplicity of her various symptoms, as always in this neurosis, served more than one function. By being ill, she could avoid competition both with her two brilliant elder brothers and also in the marriage market. She could gain the loving attention which she craved, and something of the status which, as a woman, she felt had been denied her. Moreover, by retreating to the security of her room, she could diminish the risk that the passionate side of her nature, both sexual and aggressive, might inadvertently break out and overwhelm her, a danger of which she lived in constant dread.
Hysteria is the neurosis of the disregarded, of those who, within society or within the family, have been made to feel of no account. Freud's earliest patients were hysterics, with symptoms closely resembling those of Alice James. Today, although single hysterical symptoms are common enough, psychiatrists rarely see the cases of `grande hysterie' who fascinated 19th-century neurologists and who made illness into a profession. This is partly due to increased psychological sophistication — in the United States today, Alice James would have instantly found herself on the couch — but it is also because women are given so many more opportunities for fulfilment than she was offered.
Her father believed that a woman's aim in life is 'simply to love and bless man,' and that 'learning and wisdom do not become her'; whilst the social conventions of Cambridge. Massachusetts forbade women access to any more rewarding occupations than 'sewing-bees' and the 'Society to Encourage Studies at Home.' No amount of love could compensate Alice for her father's patronising denigration. Moreover, youngest children, although petted, live for solong in the shadow of their older siblings, that they often find it difficult to acquire confidence in their own capabilities. Alice James, intelligent, well-read, and verbally gifted, 'used other people's voices to express her own thoughts.' It was not until three years before her death that, in a diary, she found a voice of her own. (The complete diary, edited by Leon Edel, was published in 1964). Jean Strouse, commenting on Alice's first breakdown, demonstrates that she deliberately suppressed any manifestation of the fact that she was more intelligent than either her mother or the aunt who lived with the family. Turbulent, gifted, and rebellious, Alice tried to turn herself into the Victorian ideal of womanhood, 'mindless, selfless, and effortlessly good;' and, by suppressing her intelligence as well as her instincts, closed the door to sublimation through writing or any other intellectual activity.
Such renunciation is a form of suicide. In her diary, she wrote: The fact is, I have been dead so long . . .' 'and it is small wonder that, at times, she considered ending her life, and welcomed her fatal illness as a relief from suffering. She discussed the morality of suicide with her father, who wrote to a friend: 'I told her so far as I was concerned she had my full permission to end her life whenever she pleased, only I hoped that if ever she felt like doing that sort of justice to her circumstances she would do it in a perfectly gentle way in order not to distress her friends.' By thus undermining both the dramatic and revengeful aspects of the suicidal act, her father took credit for 'preventing her suicide by granting the right to commit it,' but still failed to acknowledge the validity of her existence as a person in her own right, assuming that 'she was more than content to stay by my side, and battle in concert with me against the evil that is in the world.' One of the many valuable insights in this book is Jean Strouse's demonstration that parents can be infinitely 'loving' and yet fail to treat their children with respect or dignity.
Extracts from Alice James's letters show that she developed a sardonic humour as one consequence of her tribulations. Much of her sharp wit js directed against men, as one might expect: but her wide reading also impelled her towards an interesting comment on the contemporary scene in literature. In a letter to William, she deplores the fact that a book by Henry has only been recognised by 'a few lines of superficial criticism which you know to be written by a child, but which sets the tune for the general public, The English papers are in one way worse than ours owing to the absolutely authentic fact that there is no independent literary criticism known. It is all unblushing cliques and sets worse than Trollope made out.' Today, the picture might be said to be reversed. Although the United States boasts some of the best and most objective literary critics, it is the land of the prepublication 'puff and the big sell. One reason why the United States employs so many English critics is that there now seems little tradition of literary journalism.
It might be thought impossible to write an interesting biography of someone who never 'did' anything and who made a career out of illness. However, Jean Strouse has brought it off. This book is something of a 'tour de force,' and may be warmly recommended.
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