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PARTISAN REVIEW
William eventually found a mode of doing, indeed a philosophic
justification of it, as the founder of pragmatism. And Henry, of
course, wrote novels, but novels which celebrated the superiority of
perception to what happens externally.
Alice, in those stirring times, found herself to be only a girl, too
rich to take a man's place at the plow or in the factory, too young and
"nervous" to volunteer for nursing. She would recall forever how, in
the winter of 1862-63 when she was fourteen, she used to wander
over the cliffs at Newport, her "young soul struggling out of its swad–
dling clothes as the knowledge crystallized within [her] of what Life
meant for [her]." She analyzed what had happened: "Owing to
muscular circumstances my youth was not of the most ardent, but I
had to peg away pretty hard between 12 and 24, 'killing myself,' as
someone calls it - absorbing into the bone that the better part is to
clothe oneself in neutral tints, walk by still waters, and possess one's
soul in silence." This subjugation of active impulses she rightly
called "killing herself," yet it led to a means of survival on the level of
simply being.
In 1866 she was under treatment in the New York clinic of
Dr.
Charles Taylor, a member of the new school of therapy which was
rising to meet the needs of women like her.
Dr.
George M. Beard
had coined the word "neurasthenia" to cover a wide range of
symptoms - morbid fears, loss of appetite, neuralgia, weakness,
headaches.
Dr.
S. Weir Mitchell called "hysteria" the trance states,
hallucinations, outbursts of weeping or violence which some of his
patients exhibited.
Dr.
Taylor shared the views of his colleagues as
to the cause of these conditions. Girls, he had written, who were
exposed to excessive emotional and intellectual stimulation, might
find their systems "perverted from tissue-making, and absorbed, as it
were, in the sensational life. The body is literally
starved,
while the
nervous system is stimulated to the highest degree." He agreed with
Alice's father concerning the deleterious effects of education on
women. "While education in men makes them self-controlling,
deliberate, calculating, thinking out every problem . .. the intel–
lectual being the preponderating force, the so-called 'higher educa–
tion' for women seems to produce the contrary effect on them."
In 1868, when she was nineteen, she had her first acute break–
down. She recalled twenty years later: "As I used to sit immovable
reading in the library with waves of violent inclination suddenly
invading my muscles taking some one of their myriad forms such as
throwing myself out of the window, or knocking off the head of the
