“Maybe there’s more to the picture here”
I first read The Diary of Alice James when I was in my late teens. Alice was the younger sister of Henry and William (there were also two other sons in there who weren’t in the literary world) and she was very likely as brilliant as her two high-achieving brothers, but, perhaps entirely because of her sex, was never encouraged to do anything with her brains. In fact, she was routinely teased and belittled, by her father and also by William who often spoke to and about her as though she were the object of his romantic affection, accusing her of toying with his heart. If, in some abstract sense, Alice had the potential to achieve what her brothers achieved, she never did so. Institutionalized for emotional distress several times in her youth, she ended up, in adulthood, bedridden with something like a “nervous disposition”—the sort of condition with which women of her time were often diagnosed. And while in bed she kept a diary.
Before I realized the ways in which I identified with Alice James, I fell in love with her voice, brilliant and funny as hell, and not particularly nice. She could paint pictures of those she knew that were both hilarious and devastating. And then came the deeper resonances for me. I too have two older brothers, and, like Alice, I too was the younger sister who could not achieve. While they were were top of their classes, accomplished musicians, attending Ivy League schools, I graduated in the bottom of my class, could never learn to read music, and was rejected by all but one college to which I applied. I suffered from very serious, undiagnosed ADD, as well as some other less serious learning disabilities, anxiety, and depression, all of which contributed to a girlhood of frustration and sadness.
In a sense, Alice’s diary felt both like a companion in failure and like a beacon of hope. Yes, she never achieved in any of the classic, recognized ways, but it was so clear that she was smart and a gifted writer, it gave me some sense that I too might have some undetected potential. Wait a minute, maybe there’s more to the picture here. Maybe the little sister actually can be smart too! Alice was a kind of aspirational figure for me, not because I wanted to land in bed for life, but because I hoped that I too had a kind of secret intelligence that nobody, including me, had yet accessed.
Yet despite all the parallels, it’s hard to explain the gut level on which she mattered to me, or the range of emotions she brought out in me, from hope for myself to a kind of glee at the nasty acuity of the social skewerings that pepper her writing. From the bed into which she had collapsed, she energized me. Though there was no immediate change to my course. That state of feeling trapped by my own failings and failures lasted until I was in my forties; but all through those years Alice James helped me maintain a private belief that being a low-achieving “girl” in a high-achieving family didn’t necessarily mean that one has nothing to say, that one’s potential is, in fact, as limited as one’s performance.
I reread Alice’s diary every couple of years, and when I go back to it, I get an ever-larger sense of a wide intelligence that does not conform to any gender stereotypes—which may well be why her generation found no use for it. I also have a much deeper sense of the waste that was made of her gifts. When I was younger, I may have been angered by that—but it was on my own behalf. Now, I am angered for her. As was she, clearly, all that anger finding its way into the satire she wrote, and the sharp, cutting edge to all her words. She was constrained by her time and by her family, but she got that message of injustice across, and that is her revenge.
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Robin Black’s short story collection, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and an O, The Oprah Magazine summer reading pick. Her debut novel, Life Drawing, has received critical acclaim. Black’s forthcoming book, Crash Course: Fifty-Two Essays from Where Writing and Life Collide, will be out from Engine Books in April 2016.