Alice in Bed - Susan Sontag Collected Works (An Eight-Act Play)

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2007-01-01
Features: Alice in Bed consists of eight acts and is described as a "fantasia based on a real person," the character being Alice James, who was born into a distinguished American family. She had two renowned brothers: Henry James, a celebrated 19th-century writer, and William James, a great 19th-century psychologist. Like her brothers, Alice possessed extraordinary intelligence and was also a well-known feminist icon. However, she began suffering from depression at the age of 19 and once attempted to take her own life. Ultimately, she died of illness at the age of 43. The play also features several appearances by Alice's younger brother, Henry James. In this brilliant fictional story, the dialogue is witty and concise, and the plot is tightly paced. Alice in Bed is a play "about women, about women's suffering, and about women's self-awareness": a fantasia based on the real-life Alice James—the youngest sister of Henry James, America's greatest novelist, and William James, America's greatest psychologist-ethicist. At the age of nineteen, the tide of melancholy overwhelmed her mind, and she once attempted to take her own life. She endured various inexplicable and intensely tormenting illnesses, she traveled far away, she lay in bed, she kept a diary, and she died at the age of forty-three. In Sontag's play about women, Alice James is once again conflated with the Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in imagination. Additionally, Sontag summons the spirits of two 19th-century American women writers: Emily Dickinson and Margaret Fuller, and two representative angry women from the 19th-century stage: Mélisande (from Giselle) and Kundry (from Wagner's Parsifal), to attend a "tea party of the mad." Alice in Bed is Sontag's only play, yet she once said, "I feel as if my entire life was preparation for writing Alice in Bed."