New Essays on The Education of Henry Adams (The American Novel)

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Summary: Scholarly essays explaining and interpreting Adams's work
Review: The five essays in this volume provide solid scholarly appreciations, as well as some much-needed background, for the rich confusion of "The Education of Henry Adams." (That this volume is part of the Cambridge University Press's "American Novel" series reinforces the view that Adams's masterpiece employs a fictional framework and contains undeniably ahistorical elements.)

Opening the volume, John Carlos Rowe's introduction is an astute commentary in its own right, offering indispensable context and reassessing Adams's work in light of Ernest Samuels's biographical research and Sacvan Bercovitch's scholarship on American puritanism. He also includes interpretative summaries of the four main entries.

Brook Thomas's "The Education of an American Classic: The Survival of Failure" uses the Harvard Classics (compiled by Charles W. Eliot, who hired Adams as a professor) as a means to assess the place in the canon of both Adams's work and his "rhetoric of failure." Framing this discussion within the academic dispute over content versus method, Thomas argues, "The importance of the 'Education' is not merely its capacity to raise questions but its challenge to face questions that we--like Adams before us--have inherited from the past."

Martha Banta's essay, "Being a 'Begonia' in a Man's World," looks at Adams's life and work from a feminist perspective. She tackles this neglected aspect from two fronts, looking at Adams's often sexist yet primitively empathetic views of women and analyzing his defensiveness of his own manliness (or, more accurately, his lack thereof). As a self-described "butterfly" and "dilettante" and as a blueblood member of the leisure class, Adams is excluded from the company of "real" men--those in the "process of gaining money rather than having it. Adams knew what money meant in defining American manhood." Banta sometimes lapses into the literally obvious ("Because Adams was genetically a male, with a male's rights in society") or the metaphorically ridiculous ("By means of 'internalization' and 'appropriation' of the kind that suggest the tribal ritual of cannibalism"), but her essay is the most original and provocative (and surprisingly witty) of the bunch.

The volume concludes with two essays that I'd wished I had before I read "The Education." Rowe's "Henry Adams's Education in the Age of Imperialism" dissects the complexities of Adams' friendship with Secretary of State John Hay and of the "decidedly neoimperialist" policies Hay advanced during the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations. He argues that, far from being a simple observer, "Adams was an active participant in the crucial diplomatic negotiations . . . from the end of the Spanish-American War and the annexation of the Philippines to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905."

In what is arguably the collection's best essay ("The Education and the Salvation of History"), Howard Horwitz examines Adams's work in light of contemporary intellectual debates--from New History to social Darwinism--and describes it as a meditation "on the nature of history and the office of the historian." For instance, Adams's autobiography "secures the benefits of the great-man theory of history even as it eschews the benefits of the great-man theory of history." Horwitz is especially adept at tackling and resolving the many perplexing contradictions Adams serves up to his readers.

Although written by literary critics, these essays wallow comfortably and competently in the historical foundations of "The Education of Henry Adams." (Only a thorough examination of Civil War diplomacy is missing.) Overall, the collection serves as both background for readers baffled by Adams's work and as a supplement for those looking for additional insights.