Tormented Hope by Brian Dillon

Author:Brian Dillon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141957937
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-08-05T04:00:00+00:00

Alice emerged from the Orthopedic Dispensary in May of 1867, returned home to Cambridge with her aunt Kate and began to renew her modest social life, attending dinner parties and being introduced to the new friends her family had made in her absence. Her mother wrote optimistically to William: ‘Alice seems very bright and is an immense joy to us. Her presence is a perfect sunbeam to Father.’ As her biographer Jean Strouse reports, the health of her brothers had in the meantime declined: Wilky and Bob had purchased a plantation in Florida, but Wilky had returned home with a fever and Bob, having taken up a post as a railroad clerk in Wisconsin, was suffering, wrote Mary, from constant ‘catarrhal trouble’. Henry was plagued as usual by back pain and constipation, had resorted to massage and ice therapy (which he soon abandoned as ‘pernicious’) to relieve his discomforts, and planned to visit Taylor himself to be fitted for a ‘spinal assistant’: a brace or corset designed to alleviate strain on the affected portion of the spine. He would later devise a humorous theory to account for his ‘degenerescence’: the family, he conjectured, maintained among them a delicate balance of health and disease, so that while Alice and Wilky got better, the remainder of the James allocation of ailments was visited upon him in his turn. In 1867, however, the regulating mechanism seemed to oscillate wildly; Alice’s apparent improvement was short-lived, and in June, scarcely a month after leaving New York, while visiting her friend Fanny Morse in Brookline, she succumbed to another attack. Mary, summoned to her bedside, now foresaw, so soon after her daughter’s apparent cure, the life that inevitably lay before her. ‘Alice I am sorry to say, from a little overexertion, has had one of her old attacks; and a very bad one. She will have dear child to live with the extremest care.’

The tedious round of Alice’s lifelong indisposition now began in earnest; she was never afterwards properly well. The following year she fell ill again, this time more spectacularly, with what she would call in her diary, twenty-two years later, ‘violent turns of hysteria’. According to a letter of her mother’s written at the time of her collapse, the diagnosis seems to have been generally accepted by the family; Alice’s was, she wrote, ‘a case of genuine hysteria for which no cause as yet can be discerned’. Oddly, Mary James claimed that her daughter’s mind was not involved in the episode at all – prompting us to wonder what the unnamed symptoms actually were – and that she seemed otherwise perfectly happy once the initial violence of the attack had passed. Alice’s diary entry of the 26th of October 1890, however, sketches in retrospect a more troubled scene, and is worth quoting at length:

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