A Psychological Reading of Alice Adams

The anxiety in this book belongs first to a household. In the first chapter Virgil Adams lies awake, sure the night air will kill him, watching a night-light behind a newspaper strain against the dawn. The narrator calls it a painful little sketch of his life. The house below tells the same story. It was built fifteen years ago in the Colonial fashion and is already sagging, its painted columns chipped, its curtains grey with soft-coal soot.

Mrs Adams puts the fear into words. Everyone in town has changed except her husband, who counts a hundred dollars more every two years as prosperity. In the world as it is now, she says, money is family. This is the originating wound. It is not poverty, since the Adamses eat well and own their house. It is rank. Alice was courted at sixteen and then left behind when her friends went away to school and came home to be presented. She had been a belle too soon, and her adult life begins on a ladder that nobody admits is there.

Alice is a performer before she meets anyone worth performing for. We first see her at a three-leaved mirror, trying out sauciness, weariness and scorn, and dropping the act the moment her mother opens the door. On the street she smiles at a married man the way an actress would, imagining he will tell some unknown bachelor how mysterious she is. The narrator names her deepest belief: that other people see her only as she wishes to be seen.

The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott described a false self: a polished, compliant surface that a child builds to meet what the world demands, while the true self goes into hiding. Alice fits the pattern closely, and Tarkington lets her almost see it. After her first walk with Russell she goes back to the mirror and realises that nearly everything she told him was invented on the spot, as if some hidden self kept false pictures ready and handed them up to her. If he liked that picture, she thinks, he would not be liking Alice Adams. She whispers to the glass, 'Who in the world are you?' Something seems to gather behind her reflected eyes, and she jumps up in fright. A minute later she is whistling, rather pleased to be such a queer girl. The insight arrives and is at once turned into another pose.

Mrs Adams asks nothing for herself. She would do the washing and cooking for the rest of her life. But she has placed every hope she once had in Alice, and her love takes the form of pressure on her husband. Her tears are real, and they are also tools. In the second chapter they dry in the three steps between his room and Alice's.

Her method is to turn Alice's pain into Virgil's debt. A fine young man wants to take Alice to Henrietta Lamb's dance, and Henrietta has not invited her. When Virgil asks what she wants, she names the glue formula she promised never to mention. 'What do I care for my word?' she cries, and sinks to the floor. He calls it begging a man to be a dirty dog. She answers that she is begging him to be a man. Family therapists describe this pattern as enmeshment: a parent lives through a child's success, so the child's disappointments become the parent's injuries and the weapon in every marital quarrel. Alice is both the cause of the fight and its prize, and she never once asked for the glue.

Virgil's case is the moral centre of the book, and Tarkington is honest about it. Years ago J. A. Lamb paid him and a chemist named Campbell to find a cheap liquid glue that would really hold. They found it. Campbell died, Lamb lost interest, and the unwritten formula stayed in Virgil's head. For twenty-five years he refused to use it. If Lamb hired him to saw wood, he asked his wife, would the sticks belong to him? Then Alice cries over a dance she was never invited to, and he gives in.

What follows is a fine study of how a decent man lives with a wrong. He expected crushing shame. Instead, the narrator says, shame is the rarest thing in the world. What Virgil feels is a constant curiosity about his old employer's thoughts. He sends Lamb a letter through Charley Lohr and asks every evening what the old man said. He bathes and asks whether his wife can smell glue on him. She cannot. To him the whole town smells of it. This is guilt moved out of the conscience and into the senses. Virgil never needed Lamb's money as much as Lamb's trust, and what he took has cost him the one reward he valued: being the firm's oldest stand-by.

The novel's form carries its psychology. Almost all of Alice's courtship happens outdoors: on walks, on a park bench in a part of town where nobody they know will see them, and above all on the little veranda at night, with the front door shut behind her. Tarkington moves freely through the family's minds, but for most of the book he keeps Russell at a polite distance. When he finally enters Russell's head, on the day of the dinner, we learn what the veranda has been doing. Every picture of Alice in his mind stops at the closed door.

That line is the structure of the whole romance. Alice has built a stage with one exit, and the summer lasts exactly as long as nobody opens it. When she tells him that a girl who is talked about is not there to show who she really is, and that this is how the town kills her, she describes her own danger with perfect accuracy. The narrator adds a dry rule. Truth is usually simple, and lies, to work, should be as simple, but Alice's never are. Every sentence she speaks has to hold up another.

Walter is the family's open wound and its rejected voice. Alice says he acts for some mysterious audience inside himself and always gets its applause. It is the most exact description in the book of Alice herself. Walter has simply chosen a different audience. He walks down a street of back-room bars with a thin girl chewing gum on his arm, twirling the ivory-topped cane Alice once carried as a badge of class.

He also says what no one else will. When his father asks him to leave Lamb's for the glue works, he names a price of three hundred dollars, and asks whether his father would not pay that much to save his life. Later he demands three hundred and fifty, refuses to say why, and leaves with a sentence that lands like a verdict: neither of his parents ever did much for him. Walter shows what can happen to a child when a family's hope flows towards the sibling who might rise. He does not perform for the town. He steals from it, and then he runs. His flight on the night of the dinner is the moment the family's private failures become public fact.

The dinner is where the defences break, and Tarkington stages it as slow comedy in killing heat. Mrs Adams orders caviar, sweetbreads, larded fillet and fashionable Brussels sprouts, because they must not look like the kind of family that skimps. The hired waitress falls down the cellar stairs over a bucket Alice left there, then leans against the wall chewing. Virgil drops a damp caviar sandwich into the fireplace and catches Alice's eye, as if to say he is doing his best. Every part of the performance fails at once. The audience of one sits pale and silent, because at lunch he heard Mrs Palmer call Alice's father Mr Lamb's pet swindler.

What makes the scene painful is that Alice sees it all and keeps smoothing. She smooths her parents over for Russell, and Russell over for her parents, though he never knows what he owes her. Then, alone with him on the veranda, she does something new. She stops. Looking back over the summer, she sees every memory touched by the false haze of her own pretending, and she asks him plainly whether it is finished. The false self is not stripped from her by exposure. She lays it down herself, moments before her mother's cry from upstairs announces that Walter is short in his accounts. It is the first unperformed act of her adult life, and it costs her the man.

J. A. Lamb, eighty and rosy, is the town's great father. He answers Virgil's theft not with a lawyer but with a sign. A huge board goes up across the street from the glue sheds, announcing the J. A. Lamb Liquid Glue Company. He could not let Virgil walk off with it, he says, like swallowing a pat of butter. Virgil, wild-eyed, tells the old man that he looked up to him all his life and does not any more. Then he collapses, and Lamb brings his old clerk home, stricken, for the second time.

Then the father relents, and the way he does it matters. He comes back and asks, awkwardly, whether Virgil said anything about him. He drops the case against Walter if the money is repaid, and buys the little plant for enough to clear the mortgage and Walter's debt. And he sends a message: circumstances can beat the best of us. She is to tell Virgil he said the best of us. Lamb needs to be seen as a just man as badly as Virgil needs to be seen as a loyal one. Mercy lets him keep his power and his good opinion of himself together.

The last chapter moves to autumn, and the house is filling with boarders. Mrs Adams still urges Alice to wear more colour and show those girls she is holding her head up. Alice puts on a plain dark dress. The only good in pretending, she tells her mother, is the fun of fooling ourselves that we fool somebody. Near the tobacconist's she meets Russell, who reddens and stammers that he hopes to call some time. 'Yes, do!' she says, and walks on, through with all that.

Frincke's Business College has haunted the book. Alice has always pictured pretty girls going up its dusty stair and coming down as old maids, all of them a little like herself. Now she glances along the street and goes in. Halfway up, the shadows are heaviest. After that the steps grow brighter, and the top is lit by sunshine from an open window. Does the ending resolve the book's tension or suppress it? It resolves Alice's part. She has stopped asking the town to see her as she wishes, and the relief is real. Even her last romantic fantasy, a heroine taking the veil while a faithless lover trembles behind a statue, makes her smile at herself rather than obey it. But the town has not changed. Money is still family, and her mother still eyes the young lodger from the gas works as a prospect. Alice climbs out of the costume, not out of the class system, and Tarkington is too honest to pretend otherwise.

Few readers will reline an organdie dress for a dance. Many live inside a sharper version of Alice's problem. Daily life now offers endless small stages on which to show a better self: the chosen photograph, the edited detail, the home seen only from its best angle. Each pose needs another to support it, and the fear grows that someone will open the door behind the veranda. The Adamses' dread of falling behind, of lacking what the other families have, is the ordinary status anxiety of any society that measures worth by display.

The book also speaks to anyone who has carried a parent's hopes. Alice is pushed by love, not cruelty, and the pressure is harder to refuse for that reason. Her best moment is not a triumph. It is the plain discovery, on a dark stair, that the outcome she feared most can be survived, and that there may be no such thing as a finish.

Winnicott's false self and modern ideas of status anxiety were not Tarkington's terms. He wrote in 1921 as a social comedian of the American Midwest, and much of what this essay treats as inner life he may have meant as plain satire of a booming town and its manners. Alice's performances are also partly a sensible strategy. A young woman of her class had few roads to security other than marriage, and the business college she dreads was, for many real women of the time, a hard-won door to independence rather than a defeat.

The reading of the ending is the most open to dispute. Some readers find it bleak: Alice loses the man and the family its savings. Others see the sunlit stair as Tarkington softening a harsh story for a popular audience. This essay's view rests on a few lines of imagery set against the weight of the plot. Lamb's mercy can also be read less kindly, as a powerful man buying out a small rival at a good price and calling it forgiveness.

The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton, tells Alice's story from higher up the ladder. Lily Bart also lives by being seen, and also has no fortune behind the image. But Lily belongs to the rich set she performs for, and when the image fails she finds no stairway to climb; she cannot even keep a place trimming hats in a milliner's workroom. Great Expectations shares the shame of the parent's house. Pip, like Alice, dreads the moment a gentleman will see where he comes from, and learns too late that Joe was worth more than the image. Alice learns it at her own table, watching her father do his best.