Postscipt for Alice

It can be hard to walk away from certain subjects, especially those that elicit a passionate mental or emotional response.When your feelings are neatly arranged or easily explained, it is a simple matter to wrap up an article and move on to the next thing.You are content to know that you addressed the theme or person to whatever extent it takes to satisfy yourself artistically or intellectually.Yet,sometimes loose ends linger.In such cases, you return repeatedly to the obsession, chasing your unsatisfied muse down alternate mental and creative pathways.Such is my current state with Alice James.
The brain behind the wonderful 'Radiation Cinema' leaves astute and thoughtful commentary on many of my posts. As I was getting ready to answer one about Alice James, I realized that whittling down my thoughts to a few sentences would be impossible:too much remains to be said.Though little known,she is a subject guaranteed to lead you down many dark,tricky alleys.So here I stand, a woman staring at the heart of a twisting intersection,like a hydra's head, trying to decide which thought to pursue.
Alice James is intriguing,upsetting and maddening. Even possessing depths of historical perspective, and generous amounts of feminine sympathy, it is easy to become frustrated.Unfortunately,where perspective and sympathy meet, sympathy weakens and splinters off into dozens of other emotions,many of them negative.
She came from a good family. They had some money and, with five children, were not overburdened with a too-large brood.Eccentricity was rampant within the clan, as was intelligence,achievement and artistry.Many women who went after greatness,succeeded in spite of having so much more against them than Alice James ever did.
The list of such women, and what they overcame, could fill a ledger.Between them, Elizabeth Gaskell,George Sand, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters,Harriet Beecher Stowe and Margaret Oliphant--to spotlight a few nineteenth century writers-endured a litany of unimaginable hardships:the loss of young siblings and children,parents and husbands to early death;disease;grinding poverty;abuse;mockery;and social ostracism.That they wrote at all is surprising;that most of them managed to create at least one or two enduring works of faceted,scholarly and imaginative brilliance is remarkable.
Fellow New-Englander Emily Dickinson is, in a superficial way, a natural book-end to Alice James.Instead of openly fighting for intellectual and artistic sovereignty, they chose passive roles within their families and society.Emily's outward compliance hid an astonishing inner richness. She crafted in cherished obscurity the poems for which she is so widely revered.Alice did much the same yet her bitter eloquence gives lie to the fact that she wanted more, and failed to grasp it.This is why her story is so sad, and her self-enforced limitations are ultimately so useless.
Yet the trials and hardships of our inner lives cannot be discounted. The world as it is and the world as we perceive and live it do not always harmonize.Even though Alice James, as a mature woman, had love and companionship in what was then known as a "Boston Marriage",she seems to have been alone in the ways that can hurt the most:creatively,emotionally and psychologically.
Because others chose to march onto the playing field of life, and conquered all comers at any cost,they are rightly remembered for their literary contributions. An English canon without 'Middlemarch' or 'Jane Eyre' is unthinkable.An America without the legacy,however tainted and precious, of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' would be poorer.Dickinson was an anomaly in that she was writing for posterity and not instant gain.Alice James's legacy is a mix of the pathetic and the triumphant. Her aspirations and her means of achieving them were as effective a mix as oil and water yet shards of her unique voice still shine through.

FINIS