Modernity, Power, and Self-Displacement in The Education of Henry Adams

The Contrast of Medieval Unity and Modern Disunity. In Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams creates a picture of 13th-century France as a society that was united in faith despite its social and political conflicts and that erected the great cathedrals as the material expression of unity in a spiritual ideal. In The Education of Henry Adams (1918), he traces the course of a world falling into perilous disunity and limns the portrait of a Henry Adams who throughout life strove unsuccessfully to educate himself for the purpose of understanding that world. This book, an autobiographical narrative in which the protagonist appears as a third person, provides a detailed view of life inside a prominent American political family together with fascinating portraits of an array of celebrated figures—including John Quincy Adams, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Stuart Mill, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Theodore Roosevelt.

The narrative withholds a direct account of the life's middle 20 years and thus does not discuss Adams's marriage, his wife's suicide, or his accomplishments as a historian. By turns satiric and somber, the book presents the thesis that the human race may not possess sufficient intelligence to control the vast stores of power that technology has placed in its hands and must therefore face the possibilities of its self-destruction. Completed in 1907 but not published until after Adams's death in 1918, the argument spoke urgently to a world that had just passed through World War I. In the century to follow, as the world became ever more vulnerable to human munitions and malevolence, the book would fully retain its appeal.

Autobiographical Models and Narrative Displacement. In his introduction to The Education, Adams acknowledges that two of his models in writing the book were Saint Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. However, he identifies his protagonist as a "manikin" upon which alternate wardrobes would be draped. Far from the transcendent individual of the romantics, Adams's object—ostensibly himself—seems little more than a cipher. Little wonder, then, that he chose to write the book in third-person narrative.

That narrative displacement of self has led to numerous debates over what genre the book represents. Is it autobiography? Adams himself avoided the word when describing the book, and from one perspective the book is less about Henry Adams than it is the world he inhabits and the ways in which the traditional, Enlightenment values and knowledge with which he was armed as a young man ill prepare him for the world he surveys at the dawn of the 20th century. The story of Henry Adams's attempt to grasp the transformations the United States was undergoing combined with his unique insider's view into American politics to create a narrative of personal and social change in which the macrocosmic perspective of the larger social order is refracted in the microcosmic person of Henry Adams. His status as a member of the first American aristocracy might disqualify him from serving as a modern Everyman, but his quizzical reaction to modernity continues to speak to generations of Americans attempting to understand the increasingly dramatic changes their world is undergoing.

Political Pose and the Concept of Educational Failure. The dramatic pose that Adams strikes in The Education is one of failure. For reasons of temperament he is incapable of living up to his family's political heritage, rendering him instead an observer and commentator on governmental intrigues rather than an actor on the political stage. He recounts early in the book his service as the private secretary for his father, Charles Francis Adams, during his tenure in Congress and more important as the American ambassador to Great Britain during the U.S. Civil War. The elder Adams is the recipient of great praise from his son for diligently working to prevent Britain from intervening in the Civil War at a time when intervention would have meant the success of the Southern secession. Those six years absorb approximately one-fifth of a book that theoretically spans almost 70 years. Adams has praise for few other American politicos, excepting toward the book's end, his tribute to his closest friend, John Hay, who served as secretary of state under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Hay, like Adams's father, is deserving of Adams's praise for selflessly seeking to advance policies that were, in Adams's view, in the best interest of the nation at large rather than those of narrow special interests.

His supposed failure extends beyond the arena of politics. His years spent as a professor of history at Harvard (1871–1877), for instance, are recounted in a chapter entitled "Failure," and in fact his entire education proved to be, Adams claims, tongue in cheek, one disappointment after another. When addressing the concept of education, Adams often refers to a practical education, the kind that prepares a person to function instrumentally in the world. His classical education was, when confronted with the modern world, thus impractical. Education as a concept for Adams also extends beyond the formal mechanism of instruction. One gains knowledge and experience from any number of venues: world's fairs, Gothic cathedrals, scientific experiments. Adams is eclectic in the sense that he is questing for any type of understanding that will aid him in comprehending the modern world and the forces driving it.

The Dynamo, Modern Physics, and Historical Acceleration. Underlying Adams's investigation is the desire to understand what forces function in a culture at a given moment, culminating in the chapter "The Dynamo and the Virgin". There Adams looks at the modern machine—symbolized by the electric dynamo—as an agent of force and compares the culturally transformative power it possesses to the religious power he reads in Gothic cathedrals, all of which were dedicated to Notre Dame, the Virgin Mary. Her power was beyond reason and empiricism; it was abstract or supersensual, in Adams's terms. As he surveys the modern world, Adams sees no force of comparable power except in the realm of modern science and technology. Just as the Virgin effected change in her world, modern technology has become the driving force in our culture, transforming and transmogrifying at increasingly dizzying speeds. As the Virgin does, technology functions quietly beyond our cognitive grasp, leaving us in a state of near-devotion to the machines upon which we depend in our ordinary existences. One explanation for the approbation The Education continues to garner resides in Adams's attempt to understand the tools of the modern world and his recognition that they will continue to operate beyond our capacity to understand or explain them. The technology gap that he experienced is if anything more pronounced a century after the appearance of the book.

The Education concludes with Adams's attempts to employ modern physics as the key to explain human history, and in typical fashion, he draws on various data points—ship size and speed, coal production—in order to project into the future and anticipate how modern technology will continue to advance in a process of acceleration. A breaking point seems inevitable to Adams, and he employs the image of a comet flying past the Sun as a metaphor for the trajectory of human history. The acceleration will continue up until the point when a directional change will occur, and at that time a new paradigm will emerge. The final tenor of the book is one of wistful sadness, as Adams looks around and finds himself all alone, with his two closest friends, John Hay and the geologist Clarence King, having preceded him in death. But, amid that sadness the curiosity that drove his educational quest remains intact as Adams muses over what the future will hold.

The Biographic Silence and Omission of Clover Adams. The greatest contributing factor to Adams's melancholic perspective is entirely absent from the book: the suicide of his wife, Marian (Clover) Adams. In fact, no mention is made of her in the entire book, leading scholars to puzzle over the strange omission. On the one hand, eliding the years spent with his wife can be read as signifying his profound grief at her gradual descent into a deep depression after her father's death, a descent that ended with her taking her life on December 6, 1885.

Others have questioned why Adams would omit any reference to the woman he was married to for 13 years, positing that perhaps theirs was not so happy a marriage as most people have assumed or even that the omission is a final silencing of Clover. Others have speculated that Adams's account of his sister Louisa's death is infused with the bereavement he felt at the loss of Clover. No matter how they are explained, the years that Adams deftly skips include the six years that followed Clover's death, years he passed in travel around the world, partially as a restorative after the emotional shock of her death.

For Discussion or Writing
1st point: In what ways does The Education of Henry Adams resemble other well-known autobiographies, such as Augustine's Confessions, Rousseau's Confessions, and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin? In what ways does The Education differ from these works?

2nd point: Adams is concerned with the forces that shape his age, and he gives particular attention to the dynamo that he presents as a modern embodiment of the force once associated with the Virgin Mary. Identify the primary features of this force and apply them to a parallel force in our own age. If you see no parallel force, account for its absence.

3rd point: One of Adams's complaints is that he did not receive a practical education. What, exactly, did he mean by that? Where does he most clearly demonstrate his failure to function effectively as a result of this gap in his education?