Alice James was an invalid all her adult life. She possibly took her invalidism to extremes, but it may simply be that, as a highly intelligent woman who kept a diary in which she analyzed herself and her illness remorselessly, we know more about her mental state than about that of many other women in a similar situation. Born in 1848, Alice James grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and by her twentieth birthday she was well on her way to becoming a professional invalid. No letter mentioned her without also mentioning her health; she underwent cures, treatments, therapies. No organic problems were discovered, and her mother referred to "nervous turns" brought on by "exertion"; she considered these periods "genuine hysteria."
After a period of normal life in her twenties, Alice relapsed as she approached her thirtieth birthday. Her father wrote, "Alice is half the time, indeed much more than half, on the verge of insanity and suicide." It is important to note that it was in this time that two of her brothers had married, had children, begun their professional lives; her third brother, William, was teaching at Harvard, and he too had married; Henry had started on his career as a novelist, and had settled into a permanent comfortable bachelorhood. Alice, by contrast, had for a brief time joined Miss Anna Ticknor's Society to Encourage Studies at Home, an early type of correspondence course for those without formal education. She had, in the terms of the middle-class social world, failed: she was not married, and she therefore had no children; she had no overriding concerns, no charity work, no novel-writing, not even a busy social life, all of which would have appeared sufficiently ladylike while giving her a focus. Illness was a a way of putting achievement definitively out of reach. This is not simply a modern take on the situation; her brother Henry wrote after her death that "tragic health was, in a manner, the only solution for her of the practical problem of life."
When Alice was given a purpose, her health recovered: after her mother's death she cared for her father for more than a year, until his own death, without any of her usual relapses. As soon as he began to fail, she failed too. The day after his funeral she collapsed and needed nursing for a year afterward.
In the 1880s Alice left America for England, where she remained for the rest of her life, mostly with her companion Katherine Loring. She remained an invalid in mind if not in body from now on. Improvements were hedged about with what her state "really" was. "I am gradually getting stronger & am able to do a great deal more, but as always happens as my physical strength increases my nervous distress & susceptibility grows with it, so that from an inside view it is somewhat an exchange of evils." Everything in the household had to revolve around the invalid: the least lack of care or attention was punished by relapse. When a window was left open an inch on a landing outside her sickroom, in "consequence I was laid up the next day with rheumatism in my head, unable to move or breath for twelve hrs." As Alice herself said in mockery, "How well one has to be, to be ill!"
The difference between Alice and many other invalids was her outspoken desire for death, if only to prove that her illnesses had been physical all along: "Doctors tell you that you will die, or recover! But you don't recover. I have been at these alternations since I was nineteen and I am neither dead nor recovered." When, in May 1891, she was finally diagnosed with an organic disease--breast cancer--she was jubilant: "To him who waits, all things come! ... Ever since I have been ill, I have longed and longed for some palpable disease." Finally, after a lifetime, she had found something to distinguish her. It was, she told William, "the most supremely interesting moment in life." As a person beyond hope of recovery one becomes, she noted, "suddenly picturesque to oneself, and one's wavering little individuality stands out with cameo effect."
Her wavering little individuality could be boosted only by her looming death. Not all invalids felt like that, but, as Alice was aware, not all families were like the Jameses. She noted, two weeks after the initial diagnosis, "Within the last year [Henry] has published the 'Tragic Muse,' brought out 'The American' & written a play .. combined with William's ['Principles of] Psychology[']. Not a bad show for one family! Especially if I get myself dead, the hardest job of all." When she had finally achieved her difficult task, Henry acknowledged her desire: "She lies as the very perfection of the image of what she had longed for years, & at the last with pathetic intensity, to be." William responded, "What a blessed thing to be able to say, that task is over!"
