Alice James by Strouse Jean

Author:Strouse, Jean.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59017-472-2
Publisher: Random House Publisher Services
Published: 2011-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

It is doubtful that Alice found much comfort in the idea that these paroxysms of mental and physical anguish had nothing to do with her but were simply part of the troubles of the race. Once again, her father insisted on her primal innocence, although she expressed in this crisis what she had told Sara Sedgwick lightly: “Original sin is my only refuge, I was born bad and I never have recovered.” By refusing to acknowledge the truth of what Alice felt — by seeing good where she saw bad — Henry Sr. seems likely to have robbed this painful breakdown of whatever personal value it might have had. Alice was fighting for self-control and for a strengthening sense of moral responsibility. In placing blame on an external “diabolic influx” at war with her pristine soul, her father’s exonerating analysis took responsibility and control out of her hands.

She clung to him during this protracted crisis but left no evidence that she shared his view of the situation. She laughed at his notion that she could fight off evil for all mankind. She had learned too well, ten years before, that evil conquered good and that she would succumb in the end even while hating the diabolical “with all her heart.”

Exhausted from her struggle, unable to believe in victory, she thought about suicide. As far as the record shows, she never tried to kill herself, but the subject always fascinated her, and in her diary she commented approvingly on those whose suicides struck her as acts of moral autonomy. She read Hamlet again and again, and in the copybook at the front of her diary inscribed from Act I, scene 5:

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