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PARTISAN REVIEW
Mind and will, in her case, were present in such abundance as,
perhaps, to disable her for lesser adjustments. She was not very
attractive to men, and not strongly attracted to them. The role of the
self-abnegating and unreflecting madonna of the household,
represented by her mother, did not appeal to her; she admired and
would have emulated, instead, her restless, eccentric, philosopher–
father, the friend of Emerson. But spinsterhood was not a real alter–
native. Unmarried, she ran the risk of becoming an adjunct wife and
mother in one of her married brothers' households, like her Aunt
Kate, her mother's sister, a fixture in her own home. There was
really little else for a "polite" but meagerly educated woman to do .
Unless, of course, she made her escape as one who herself required
the caretaking of others. Yet, this done, she was too strong-minded
not to have remained alert to the ironies of her condition. In such
expressions of her personality as survive -letters and the journal she
kept in her last years - she shows that it was her desire to refute the
presumptions of health in an unbalanced society. She scorned what
it might have allowed her to have been. "How dreary to be–
Somebody!" she might have laughed, like Emily Dickinson who,
~y
unaccountable luck, discovered how to convert such scorn to poetry.
Alice's solution to life was curiously connected with the influ–
ence of her father.
It
was he who sentenced her, after all, to defeat.
His ideas of education, though liberal and even experimental in the
cases of his sons, were perfectly conventional in the case of his daugh–
ter. He desired that his boys should imbibe a "sensuous" and varied
experience by exposure to many ideas and places, by travel and a
sequence of different schools. While the boys were at one school or
another, however, Alice was generally left at home to absorb some
scraps of education from intermittent governesses. Her father
hardly thought she suffered by this discrimination. He expressed
himself in
Putnam's Monthly,
in an article entitled "Women and the
Women's Movement": "The very virtue of woman, her practical
sense, which leaves her indifferent to past and future alike, and
keeps her the busy blessing of the present hour, disqualifies her for
all didactic dignity. Learning and wisdom do not become her."
According to an "absolute decree of nature," James wrote, "woman
is . .. inferior to man .... She is his inferior in passion, his inferior in
intellect, and his inferior in physical strength . . .. Her aim in life is
... simply to love and bless man." Alice herself half believed him,
and remained ambiguous concerning the value of the education she
had missed. Yet it is possible to detect irony in her remark later in
