Alice James - Diary

Diary

James began to keep a diary in 1889. Full of witty, acerbic, insightful comments on English life and manners, it included excerpts from various publications to support her opinions. The diary was not published for many years after her death due to sharp comments on various persons whom she had mentioned by name. A poorly edited version of the diary was eventually released in 1934. Leon Edel published a fuller edition in 1964. The diary has made James something of a feminist icon: she was seen as struggling through her illnesses to find her own voice. This view of the diary's significance, however, has been criticized as a facile and inaccurate tale of victim blaming. Henry, one of Alice’s brothers, read this work with deep alarm (because of its candid indiscretions about family and friends) but also with enormous admiration. He wrote another of the James brothers, William, that he now understood what had caused their sister’s debility. The diary, he said, displayed for him Alice’s great "energy and personality of intellectual and moral being," but also, "puts before me what I was tremendously conscious of in her lifetime -- that the extraordinary intensity of her will and personality really would have made the equal, the reciprocal life of a ’well’ person—in the usual world—almost impossible to her—so that her disastrous, her tragic health was in a manner the only solution for her of the practical problems of life—as it suppressed the element of equality, reciprocity, etc."

Alice herself, however, did not see her illness as a product of conflict between her character and her "usual world" surroundings. To her it was instead the outcome of a struggle between her "will" or "moral power" and her "body." "In looking back now," she wrote toward the end of her life, "I see how it began in my childhood, altho’ I was not conscious of the necessity until ’67 or ’68 when I broke down first, acutely, and had violent turns of hysteria. As I lay prostrate after the storm with my mind luminous and active and susceptible of the clearest, strongest impressions, I saw so distinctly that it was a fight simply between my body and my will, a battle in which the former was to be triumphant to the end...."

She eventually found, she continued, that she had to let loose of her body, giving up "muscular sanity" in order to preserve her mind: "So, with the rest, you abandon the pit of your stomach, the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, and refuse to keep them sane when you find in turn one moral impression after another producing despair in the one, terror in the others, anxiety in the third and so on until life becomes one long flight from remote suggestion and complicated eluding of the multifold traps set for your undoing."

James described two opposing views of what causes many ill-defined "psychosomatic" illnesses. In one of these a "flight into illness" relieves the individual of the burden of unbearably conflicted impulses, feelings, or social demands. In the other, the afflicted individual, far from taking refuge in illness, tries desperately to become or feel healthier. James suggests that illness may in fact be willed in order to avoid different social problems. According to her, chronic fatigue, irritable bowel movements, and migraines may be some of the illnesses that are feigned to avoid society.