Алиса Джеймс: Күнделіктері мен өмір тағдыры

American writer
the publisher

Alice James (August 7, 1848 – March 6, 1892) was an American diarist, sister of novelist Henry James and philosopher and psychologist William James. Her relationship with William was unusually close, and she seems to have been badly affected by his marriage. James suffered lifelong health problems that were generally dismissed as hysteria in the style of the day. She is best known for her published diaries.

Born into a wealthy and intellectually active family, daughter of Henry James Sr. of Albany, New York, and Mary Robertson Walsh. James soon developed the psychological and physical problems that would plague her until the end of her life at age 43. The youngest of five children, she lived with her parents until their deaths in 1882. She went to a Boston school called Miss Clapp’s, where she met Frances Rollins Morse, one of her life long friends often cited in her published diary and correspondence. James taught history from 1873 to 1876 for the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, a Boston based correspondence school for women founded by Anna Eliot Ticknor. The three years she taught were "among the most illness free she had." James never married, seeking affection from her brothers and female friends instead. After her father's death in late 1882, she inherited a share in the income from the family properties in Albany, and her brother Henry made over his own share to her. This allowed her to live independently.

In the Victorian era, hysteria was an extremely common diagnosis for women. Almost any disease a woman had could fit the symptoms of hysteria because there was no set list of symptoms. In 1888, twenty years after James was "overwhelmed by violent turns of hysteria", she wrote in her diary that she was both suicidal and homicidal. She was struggling with the urge to kill her father, though this diary entry does not state the reason why she was patricidal. The diary has made James something of a feminist icon. She was seen as struggling through her illnesses to find her own voice. 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 in a letter to another of the James brothers, William, that he now understood what had caused their sister's debility. The diary, Henry 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 lifetimethat the extraordinary intensity of her will and personality really would have made the equal, the reciprocal life of a 'well' personin the usual worldalmost impossible to herso that her disastrous, her tragic health was in a manner the only solution for her of the practical problems of lifeas it suppressed the element of equality, reciprocity, etc." Alice, 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 she was 19 and 20] 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  "