#alice james

[exhaled-spirals]

— From the diary of Alice James (June 1890)

[memoriesofthingspast]

Alice James - genius

[quietconiferousforest]

it's her tenth birthday. she's a little surprised.

[poetsandwriters]

Janine Joseph, author of Decade of the Brain (Alice James Books, 2023), on finding inspiration in the deep sea in a recent installment of Writers Recommend.

[quotesfrommyreading]

TB is disintegration, febrilization; it is a disease of liquids—the body turning to phlegm and mucus and sputum and, finally, blood—and of air, of the need for better air. Cancer is something hard: the body tissues degenerating, turning to stone. Alice James, writing in her journal a year before she died from cancer in 1892, speaks of “this unholy granite substance in my breast.” But this lump is alive, a fetus with its own will. Novalis, in an entry written around 1798 for his encyclopedia project, defines cancer, along with gangrene, as “full-fledged parasites—they grow, are engendered, engender, have their structure, secrete, eat.” Cancer is a demonic pregnancy. St. Jerome must have been thinking of a cancer when he wrote: “The one there with his swollen belly is pregnant with his own death.” (“Alius tumenti aqualiculo mortem parturit.”)

TB is a disease of time, the fever that hastens things. TB speeds up life; highlights it; spiritualizes it. In both English and French, consumption “gallops.” Cancer has stages rather than gaits; it is “terminal.” Cancer works slowly, insidiously: the standard euphemism in obituaries is that someone has “died after a long illness.” Every characterization of cancer describes it as slow, and so it was first used metaphorically. “The word of him creepeth as a cankir” is the way Wyclif translated, in 1382, a phrase in II Timothy 2:17. (Among the earliest figurative uses of cancer are as a metaphor for “ennuie” and for “sloth.”) Metaphorically, cancer is not so much a disease of time as a disease or pathology of space. Its principal metaphors refer to topography (cancer “spreads” or “proliferates”; tumors are surgically “excised”) and its most dreaded consequence, short of death, is the mutilation or amputation of part of the body.

  —  Illness as Metaphor (Susan Sontag)

[like-i-need-a-hole-in-my-head]

Writing four weeks before her death, Alice arrives at the perennial question of the nature of the self — or what Walt Whitman considered the paradox of identity — and where it resides. With unsentimental and almost buoyant poignancy, she observes that even as the body fails part by part, we adapt by folding the losses into our consent to reality, the integrity of our deepest sense of self remaining all the while intact:

This long slow dying is no doubt instructive, it is disappointingly free from excitements: “naturalness” being carried to its supreme expression. One sloughs off the activities one by one, and never knows that they’re gone, until one suddenly finds that the months have slipped away and the sofa will never more be laid upon, the morning paper read, or the loss of the new book regretted; one revolves with equal content within the narrowing circle until the vanishing point is reached, I suppose.

Vanity, however, maintains its undisputed sway, and I take satisfaction in feeling as much myself as ever, perhaps simply a more concentrated essence in this curtailment.

What allowed Alice to meet her mortality with such serenity was not a physical fact but the single most important psychological and emotional event of her life, which had taken place a decade earlier. When she was thirty-two, Alice had met Katharine Peabody Loring — an energetic young education reformer and activist, whom she described as having “all the mere brute superiority which distinguishes man from woman, combined with all the distinctive feminine virtues.” 

The two women shared the remainder of Alice’s life, and her family came to accept Katharine as one of them. Henry James admired her “strength of wind and limbs, to say nothing of her nobler qualities,” recognized that she and his sister were bonded by “a permanency,” and came to love the devotion with which Katharine simply loved Alice. (His novel The Bostonians, published four years after Alice’s death, would popularize the term “Boston marriage” — a domestic partnership between two women, financially independent of any man, likely modeled on his sister’s relationship with his sister-outside-law.) Katharine, for her part, assured Henry of her own desire “quite as strongly as Alice’s, to be with her to the end.”

(via How to Live to the Full While Dying: The Extraordinary Diary of Alice James, William and Henry James’s Brilliant Sister – Brain Pickings)

[sappho-and-the-lesbos]

The Bostonians by Henry James was a book written in the 1880's about the relationship of Olive and Verena, two suffragettes eager to end the suffering of their sex. The term Boston Marriage comes from this book, a union based off of the author's sister, Alice James and her lifelong companion, Katharine Loring.

[themindmovement]

There are some people who drive everywhere and admire nothing. How grateful I am that I actually do see, to my own consciousness, the quarter of an inch that my eyes fall upon.

Alice James