Religion, Science, and Gender in Henry Adams's Esther

Publication and Core Philosophical Themes. Esther (1884) marked a significant thematic turn in the literary career of Henry Adams. In 1884, under the pseudonym Frances Snow Compton, Adams published Esther, a novel that reflects much of the ongoing discussion of Adams's inner circle on subjects ranging from the validity of religious and scientific truth to what it means to be an American man or woman. Less overtly political than Democracy, Esther engages the issue of belief and the capacity of religion, science, and art to articulate absolute truths.

The heroine of Esther is an unmarried woman who is thrown into an existential crisis at the death of her father. At age 25, Esther Dudley, a New Yorker with paternal Bostonian ancestry, straddles the line between marriageability and spinsterhood, but her need of a husband is less her concern than that of her family and social circle. Nevertheless, she is not without a suitor: The Reverend Stephen Hazard, minister of a newly opened Neo-Gothic Episcopal church on Park Avenue, has wealth, social standing, and good looks to commend him.

Courtship, Intellectual Conflict, and Ruptured Relations. Reverend Stephen Hazard possesses a literary and artistic sensibility that makes him very compatible with the sophisticated and intellectually minded Esther. Needing little encouragement, Esther falls in love with Hazard, but when the suitor-as-theologian attempts to make a conquest of what he regards as her unregenerate soul, tempting her with images of an afterlife in which she reunites with her recently deceased father, Esther feels compelled to break off relations on the grounds of emotional and intellectual integrity. Indeed, Hazard attempts to convert Esther at a moment of signal weakness just after she has lost her father.

As with Democracy, Esther tells the story of a courtship that culminates in ruptured relations. If marriage is narratologically required for the renewal of a social order, both novels must be assessed as refinements of a pessimistic social vision.

Archetypes of Knowledge and the Female Protagonist. Esther, as does Democracy, has its full complement of period types. In addition to Hazard, the entrepreneurial minister of a prestigious church, are his male friends:

· George Strong, geologist and exponent of a post-Darwinian scientific outlook.

· Wharton, a painter whose most recent project has been the interior of Hazard's church.

Whereas Hazard's orientation to the question of truth is theological and intellectual, Strong's is abidingly scientific and skeptical, while Wharton's approach is artistic and emotional. The male positions are thus quite schematic and predictable. The same cannot be said, however, of Esther's: Fiercely resistant to what she regards as customary male appeals to her emotional fragility, her fear of death, and loss of loved ones, she marks out a space that is simultaneously intuitive and critically minded, emotionally responsive and insistently agnostic.

Resolution, Tragic Biographic Parallels, and Reception. Celebrated by her male observers as a new American type, a female variation only possible in the fluid family and social conditions of America, Esther languishes for lack of a partner who can requite her intellectual audacity and her need for emotional support. In the final scenes, set at a Niagara Falls depicted less as the traditional honeymoon setting and more as the image of ultimate force, Esther dismisses the final appeals of an implacable Hazard only to face prospects of a life that finds no use for her distinct gifts. Her life is at an impasse.

Adams instructed Henry Holt, publisher of Esther as well as Democracy, not to advertise the second novel's publication. Part of this novel's experiment was to see whether it would quietly attract a readership. In fact, it did not. The following year Marian Adams, whom Esther in many details closely resembles, took her own life in the midst of a depression triggered by the death of her father, and Adams thereafter was content for the book to slip into the obscurity that shielded it from the public gaze until well after his death.

For Discussion or Writing
1.In these fictional narratives of his middle period, what does Adams identify as the strengths of American society and culture? What does he identify as its weaknesses? Do you consider him an optimistic writer who sees a bright future for America or a realistic writer who sees a troubled future for the country he loves?

2. What accounts for Adams's interest in women's status and issues? What specific women's issues does he address through the female protagonists of Democracy and Esther?

3. Consider the ways that Esther Dudley's experiences parallel those of Lily Bart in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. Look especially at the role of class status and the difficulty an independent woman faces when confronting a male-dominated society that defines female achievement in terms of marriage.