Illness as Metaphor

A.R.T. New Stages will present the American premiere of Susan Sontag’s only play, Alice in Bed — a work which picks its subject from a prominent Cambridge family: the Henry James’s who lived from 1868 to 1882 in the house that was on the site that is now the Harvard Faculty Club. Susan Sontag has been drawn, perhaps by her own landmark 1978 essay, “Illness as Metaphor,” to a study of the pathetic invalid life endured by the youngest member of the James family (and the only girl), Henry James’ little sister, Alice. Deeply challenging the moral precepts she set out in “Illness as Metaphor,” Sontag discovers patterns of prostration in the imaginary and actual lives of nineteenth century women, and in her play, she boldly explores the metaphorical ramifications of lives apparently repressed into pathology.

In 1980, Jean Strouse published an award-winning study of the short, pathetic, life of Alice James (in photo below). Alice died of cancer in 1892, at the age of 43, and the enormous fame and accomplishment of her two eldest brothers — Henry (the novelist) and William (the psychologist/philosopher) — eventually brought attention to her terrible life of illness and , as W.H. Auden so unforgettably put it, her all-too human “unsuccess.” In the preface to Alice James, Jean Strouse introduced the subject of her complex and carefully researched biography as follows:

“When I am gone,” Alice James wrote to her brother William as she was dying, “pray don’t think of me simply as a creature who might have been something else, had neurotic science been born.” (ix)

Alice clearly foresaw that her famous psychologist brother — and perhaps others — would “interpret” her life, and she expressed a wish to forestall this indignity. Jean Strouse introduced the subject Sontag took up in her play: how did Alice collect the separated fragments of her shattered life into an identity, however dismal and disappointing it might appear to others. Strouse reports that Alice herself acknowledged her life to have been a failure, by all conventional measures:

She never married. She did not have children. She was not socially useful, particularly virtuous, or even happy. Her interests and talents might have led her to become the “something else” she referred to in her letter to William… Instead she became an invalid… she was “delicate,” “high-strung,” “nervous,” and given to prostration. She had her first breakdown at the age of nineteen, and her condition was called, at various points in her life, neurasthenia, hysteria, rheumatic gout, suppressed gout, cardiac complication, spinal neurosis, nervous hyperesthesia, and spiritual crisis. (p. x)

Thus the title, Alice in Bed (not to be confused with Cathleen Schine’s 1983 novel, which bears the same title), for the significant portion of Alice James’ life was spent in prostration, bedridden and waiting for death. Such a severely afflicted figure translates with difficulty into the title heroine of a play. But the metaphorical resonances of her medical and psychiatric plight give her a narrative “dramatic” utility she did not find in life. Most of the interest that attaches to Alice James is generated by the genius and enormous accomplishment of her two famous brothers — and this is a fact rife with feminist complications. Why did she not become a famous and accomplished person? Was it her will that failed her, and was her career as an invalid somehow chosen? The remainder of our fascination with Alice is fueled by the frequently forceful, sometimes startling letters and journals she left behind, for she belonged to a family that had perfected the art of self-regard and self-recording.

The elder Henry (a ponderous Victorian patriarch) was himself a gentleman-writer, and he fostered in at least three of his children an astonishingly articulate hypersophistication. The four “writing Jameses” — Henry, Sr., William (in photo, left), Henry, Jr. (in photo, right) and Alice — were graphimaniacal phenomena, turning all their minutest experiences into words-about-experience. The entire family anticipated by a generation the literary accomplishment of Marcel Proust, who transmuted his life (during years he spent in a cork-lined bedroom) into an all-but endless narrative discourse that could be cut off only by the death of the author. Some consider this death a mercy, and the now fashionable metaphor, “the death of the author,” has come to characterize the modern condition of fiction. But the historical Alice James left no doubt that she welcomed the literal death that brought her acute physical and emotional torments to a close.

Henry Sr. had loomed over the childhood of his five offspring (the two younger boys, Wilkie and Bob remain even more obscure than Alice) in a magisterial way, for he was thought in his time to be a prominent intellectual whose name would live on. He knew and associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, William Ellery Channing, and Margaret Fuller, the great American Transcendentalists who became familiar names to his children. Henry James, Sr. made his mark as a loopy Swendenborgian mystic whose religious insights were derived from a mental life destabilized by a horrible childhood burn, the indolence of inherited wealth, and an inexplicable mental collapse he learned (following Swedenborg) to call his “vastation.” History, however, bypasses many self-important intellectuals who seem to themselves and to their contemporaries unretrenchably “established” as important figures, and Bloomian theorists of “the anxiety of influence” can have a field day analyzing the example of the two prodigious James brothers decisively usurping their “venerable pater’s” imposing cultural pretensions.

But Alice was also afflicted with “anxieties of influence” and she has left us a startling description of her earliest nervous breakdown:

“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 benignant pater as he sat with his silver locks, writing at his table…”

Post-sixties feminism could not fail to be drawn to the immobile, yet raging and neglected female in the famous house. It sheds a different light on her sickly, “neurasthenic” life to read her confession to suicidal and/or patricidal impulses which were so strong they debilitated her. Susan Sontag has followed an irresistible tendency of recent feminism in lifting Alice James’ suppressed rage and pathetic inconsequence into the realm of metaphor, exploiting her condition (whatever it may have been medically) to illustrate the suppression of women and the destruction of their potential in heavily paternalistic settings. No family, it seems on the surface, better illustrates the success (for the men) and the terrible cost (for the women) of nineteenth-century patriarchy. Yet this metaphorical reading of the James’s family history ignores the dire (and equally-well documented) unhappiness and unsuccess of the two younger boys, Wilkie and Bob. They illustrate no currently popular paradigm of victimology, however, and consequently have no advocacy group ready to revive interest in their obscure destinies.

Director Bob McGrath, as he prepares to stage Alice in Bed at the Hasty Pudding, has noted that Alice in Susan Sontag’s play is high on some drug in almost every scene of the play. First she receives an injection of painkiller, then she takes laudanum, a widely prescribed nineteenth-century opiate. Later she smokes opium from a hookah, and finally she polishes off a flask of gin. Under the influence of one or another of these palliatives, Sontag’s Alice is visited by strange hallucinations, and a mad tea party modelled on the tea party in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland assembles various significant female figures from the nineteenth-century in a central allegory in the play. The great Cambridge educator, transcendentalist, and early feminist, Margaret Fuller is brought face to face with the reclusive “belle of Amherst” poet Emily Dickinson (in photo), and both join Alice James and the apparition of her dead mother in a scene which explores by comparison and contrast various alternatives which might have been available to Alice. This chorus of female role models is supplemented by two purely fictional women, the guilty sexual temptress Kundry from Wagner’s opera Parsifal, and the angry Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis, who, in the ballet Giselle, leads a fanciful corps de ballet of wronged and vengeful female spirits.

This scene in particular suggests a dream-like treatment of Sontag’s play, and A.R.T. artistic director Robert Brustein has asked a visionary young director from New York to work his stage magic on this play. Bob McGrath is the artistic director of an experimental opera and theatre company, the Ridge Theater, which has been active in New York City since 1987. His productions blend conventional stage craft with film images, slides and other multi-media effects. He won an Obie in 1994 for sustained excellence while directing all of Ridge’s productions since its inception. He will be directing a stage adaptation created by John Moran of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for the A.R.T. Loeb Stage in the 1996-97 season.