Mr. James's Daughter and Shakespeare's Sister: A Review-Essay on Jean Strouse's Alice James: A Biography

Mr. James's Daughter and Shakespeare's Sister: A Review-Essay on Jean Strouse's Alice James: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. Xv, 367 pp. $15.00. by Cushing Strout, Cornell University Until now Alice James has always been peripheral to the biographers of the other Jameses. Leon Edel edited her complete diary for the first time in 1964 in order to make a place for it "on the brotherly bookshelf" of the James family. His portrait of a lady interpreted her as in some part a victim of common "Victorian restrictions on women," one who "wrested from the hovering Miss Loring and the loyal Henry a ful I amount of attention and love which, in some large way, she felt had been denied to her during an earlier period of her existence." It Is appropriate to our time that she should now be the subject of a ful l-length biography developing these premises and written by a woman. Its photograph of the bed-ridden lady, attended by her faithful companion, in a typical Victorian room at the Royal Leamington Spa In 1890, conjures up at a glance the worId of femaIe invalidism, which came to the scientific attention of so many early neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts. In our own time, however, Freud himself has become a familiar target of a feminist criticism that finds him too much a part of the patriarchal, sexually polarized wor Id whose victims he stud i ed on h Is couch. Al ice James's sympathy with feminists, her position as the only daughter In a family famous for its male genius, and her radical Irish nationalism give her special credentials for appealing to a contemporary audience. The risks in exploiting its interest lie in sentimentally overestimating Alice's intellectual achievements, politicizing her suffering as the inevitable effect of the Victorian patriarchal system, and neglecting the insights of Freud into that female hysteria to which she gave her main energies. Jean Strouse, who has edited Women and Analysis: Dialogues on Psychoanalytic Views of Femininity, is we I I aware both of Freud's work and of the feminist critique of psychoanalysis. Sensitive to social history and to individual psychology, as any biographer must be, Strouse is alertly on guard against sentimentality , psychological dogmatizing, and dubious surmising. She admits that Alice's diary "does not burst with hidden genius," that she cannot be abstracted from her "peculiar Jamesian universe" or made Into a "victim-as-heroine." Even so, Strouse begins her book by a strategy that risks all of these failures of interpretation. She refers to Virginia Woolf's feminist speculation about what might have happened If Shakespeare had had an adventurous, gifted, imaginative sister as talented as he was. Woolf suggests that any greatly gifted woman in the sixteenth century would certainly have shot herself or ended up lonely and crazed. Through Alice James, Strouse proposes, "it is possible to look closely at the scenario Woolf Imagined." Alice James's sharp wit and shrewd social observations do raise her well above the level of her failed younger brothers, but her talents do not suggest that she was the equal genius of her elder brothers. Alice herself warned against dwelling on "who she might have been," and though Henry James imagined she might have become an influential Irish radical, he also added, "if, always, she had not fallen a victim to disgust—a large if." Henry's qualification is crucial. The James family was notable for Its hot-house germination of human orchids, brilliant in color and sometimes grotesque in form. Its most spectacular genius was masculine, its most spectacular neurosis, feminine. The morbid pathos behind Alice James's wit Is caught forever in her remark about the year in which Henry had published The Tragic Muse and William had brought out The Principles of Psychology: "not a bad show for one family! especially if I get myself dead, the hardest jobof all." Thedl scovery of an organic i I I ness in her body, a breast tumor, came to her as "an enormous relief" after "the monstrous mass of subjective sensations" she has been staggering under for so many years. Diana Trilling...