Plot Spoilers Below.
Title: Alice Adams
Author: Booth Tarkington
Number of Pages: 188
Original Published Date: 1921
Pulitzer Prize Winner (Novel): 1922
Favorite Sentence(s): “Is it life to spend your time imagining things that aren’t so, and never will be? Beautiful things happen to other people; why should I be the only one they never can happen to?”
Summary of Novel
Alice Adams is the story of a young woman who fabricates her personality and social status to deceive a new-to-town wealthy bachelor that has taken a strong interest in her. She hides her working-class background and invents a false self in hopes of landing a highly-eligible husband.
To accomplish this goal, the beautiful Alice consciously and unconsciously puts on an act that draws her suitor in, the very eligible Arthur, all while questioning her reasons for such a deception.
“In this manner she outlined a playful scenario for her next interview with Arthur Russell; but grew solemn again, thinking of the impression she had already sought to give him…why had it been her instinct to show him an Alice Adams who didn’t exist?”
During this misleading wooing between Alice and Arthur her ambitious mother, after years of badgering, has finally convinced Alice’s father to leave his stable job and create a new company using proprietary data from his current boss. Although it’s believed this new endeavor will finally raise the family’s wealth and social status (something the mother believes has been holding Alice back from an eligible bachelor proposing) the new business does not end with great financial success. On the contrary, the family eventually loses the little they have and are only able to keep their house because her father sells his business to his former boss and the family begin taking in boarders to help pay their bills.
Alice’s business with her suitor also does not end with success as he eventually learns that Alice has been misleading him and he stops coming around. Throughout their courtship Alice always sensed that the deception wouldn’t last and that it would end the same as every courtship of her past.
“And it doesn’t seem to me as if our summer evenings could last very long. Something’ll interfere-somebody will, I mean-they’ll say something-“
Following the disastrous ending of her father’s business and her failed courtship, Alice enrolls in business college. At the beginning of the novel, she previously feared the darkened steps that lead to that same college because she believed it was for “pretty girls turning into old maids ‘taking diction’”. However, she takes those steps and finds that “the steps at the top were gay with sunshine”.
Alice’s Motivations
Alice Adams is from a working-class family who dreams of becoming a member of the upper class in her cliquey small town. Although she gets invited to many of their parties, which allows her to feel like she’s almost a member of their inner circle, most view her as an annoyance or someone to be ignored and any invites appear to be old habit from past schoolgirl friendships that have fizzled or were only ever one-sided. She is not one of them.
This self-awareness that she doesn’t belong isn’t impressed upon Alice so she continually loiters around the edge of their circles and focuses all her efforts and choices on trying to fit in and impress them. Her selection of attire, manner of speech, and even the way she walks down the street is all to paint a reality of an Alice that doesn’t exist. She has created a persona and doesn’t understand who the real Alice is.
“The cane in her right hand stopped short in its swing, while her left hand moved in a pretty gesture as if an impulse carried it toward the heart; and she smiled, with her under lip caught suddenly between her teeth. Months ago she had seen an actress use this smile in a play, and it came perfectly to Alice now, without conscious direction, it had been so well acquired; but the pretty hand’s little impulse toward the heart was an original bit all her own, on the spur of the moment…It was not for him-not even to impress him, except as a messenger. Alice was herself almost unaware of her thought, which was one of the running thousands of her thoughts that took no deliberate form in words…In Alice’s unworded thought, he was to be thus encouraged as in some measure a champion to speak well of her to the world; but more than this: he was to tell some magnificent unknown bachelor how wonderful, how mysterious, she was.”
During the dance that Alice attends she spends much of the evening trying to look less alone since most young men avoid her and no longer ask her to dance.
“…and Alice returned to her picture-making, so that once more, while two numbers passed, whoever cared to look was offered the sketch of a jolly, clever girl preoccupied with her elders.”
These same men used to court her during her teenage years, with each potential relationship starting out strong with the hope that one would make her a wife, yet all lost interest when her true social standing was revealed and the façade she wore was exposed. They all fall for her beauty, but it’s not enough to prevail against her family situation.
“Every one of them ought to have asked her for dances, she thought, and although she might have been put to it to give a reason why any of them “ought”, her heart was hot with resentment against them. For a girl who has been a belle, it is harder to live through these bad times than it is for one who has never known anything better.”
Although Alice has created a false reality for herself, she’s not oblivious to what she is doing. Her acts aren’t done with malicious intent and she often wonders why she puts on a performance for others. After an unplanned walk with Arthur, where she gives her best “Alice” impression, she questions why she showed him an Alice that didn’t exist.
“Almost everything she had said to him was upon spontaneous impulse, springing to her lips on the instant; yet it all seemed to have been founded upon a careful design, as if some hidden self kept such designs in stock and handed them up to her, ready-made, to be used for its own purpose. What appeared to be the desired result was a false-coloured image in Russell’s mind; but if he liked that image he wouldn’t be liking Alice Adams; nor would anything he thought about the image be a thought about her. Nevertheless, she knew she would go on with her false, fancy colourings of this nothing as soon as she saw him again; she had just been practicing them. ‘What’s the idea?’ she wondered. ‘What makes me tell such lies? Why shouldn’t I be just myself?’ And then she thought, ‘But which one is myself?’”
After this mental reflection, Tarkington describes Alice staring at herself in the mirror until the shape staring back at her “became almost an actual strange presence.”
Even though Alice knows the false persona cannot last and that the truth will one day be revealed, she can’t help herself. Throughout the story she is hopeful that her courtship with Arthur will lead to an engagement, yet at the same time she is always fearful of her name coming up in conversation around him and the picture of Alice as he knows her disappearing.
“Careful not to mix up the girl you might hear somebody talking about with the me I honestly try to make you see. If you do get those two mixed up-well, the whole show’ll be spoiled!?
She confesses this fear to Arthur and he assures her he is not “made of such soft material the slightest breeze will me all up”, but this is exactly what happens when Arthur’s family tells him about the betrayal of Alice’s father towards his faithful employer and the description of Alice as “a very pushing little person”.
The final destruction of Alice’s false persona in Arthur’s eyes occurs during a disastrous dinner with Alice’s family. Throughout the evening Alice can sense that something is amiss with Arthur and by the end of the evening, and even though he assures her all is well, she knows he will never return.
Following the realization that Arthur is gone and the family is in turmoil, Alice makes a change. She wakes one morning, dresses herself in something more serious, and takes herself down to the business college to enroll in a program. She had earlier dreaded this scenario as the representation that she had failed and become ordinary, but instead of the reader feeling dismayed that Alice had not succeeded in her plan of a favorable marriage, we are instead introduced to a new Alice who has brushed aside the need to exist for others acceptance and embraced a path of self-sufficiency and introspection.
“I’ve quit dressing at them, and if they saw me they wouldn’t think what you want ‘em to. It’s funny; but we don’t often make people think what we want ‘em to, mama. You do thus and so; and you tell yourself, ‘Now, seeing me do thus and so, people will naturally think this and that’; but they don’t. They think something else-usually just what you don’t want ‘em to. I suppose about the only good in pretending is the fun we get out of fooling ourselves that we fool somebody.”
Final Thoughts
This novel doesn’t have a traditionally happy ending. The protagonist doesn’t end up with her true love or riches, and instead has a realization that she may have to change her focused desires and create a new life for herself, a life she once feared as a great defeat.
Alice Adams as a character I found to be really interesting. She’s not mean or hurtful, just confused on how to be and who she is, and I think this is something that many of us can relate to, especially in our younger years. She has her desired goals, but for many reasons, she isn’t able to achieve them.
I can’t decide what the author, Tarkington, wanted the reader to believe and think about his protagonist, Alice Adams. Should we believe that her societal position ruined her goal of a financially favorable marriage which forced Alice to create a lie or that Alice’s deceptions sealed her fate? Was she trying to deceive others or more likely trying to deceive herself?
Tarkington impressed me with his ability to narrate the inner world of Alice’s mind and convey her insecurities and motivations. Either men share much of the same thought processes of women with navigating the world of gossip, masking our insecurities, and struggling with what we show the world, or Tarkington had a talent at understanding women.
Random Thoughts
I always love to read older novels since they provide the reader with nuance and insight into life as it once was and we get a peek into the culture of another period. For example, Alice’s mother doesn’t want Alice to wash the dishes because “It roughens the hands, and when a girl has hands like yours-”. This is such an odd worry in my opinion. Perhaps the detergent was much harsher a hundred years ago and since household rubber gloves were not in use at that time, rough hands were a concern. Whether true or not, I don’t know of any man that would avoid pursuing a woman he liked because her hands were rough. Were people judged on such triviality?
Alice’s mother drove me crazy. I’m torn on if she only wanted what was best for her daughter or if she was a harpy that pressed upon others until they became exasperated and finally gave in. The latter seems more fitting as she never takes responsibility for her role in the family’s misfortunes and even to the end, she only cares how Alice is perceived by others.
“I can’t see why you don’t wear more colour,” she said. “At your age it’s becoming and proper, too. Anyhow, when you’re going on the street, I think you ought to look just as gay and lively as you can manage. You want to show ‘em you’ve got some spunk!”
“You ought to let people see you’re still holding your head up because you are. You wouldn’t want that Mildred Palmer to think you’re cast down about-well, you know you wouldn’t want her not to think you’re holding your head up, would you?”