The Aesthetics of Doom: Nature, Science, and Art in Henry Adams's Dynamic Theory of History

The Education of Henry Adams and The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma reject the anthropocentric view of scientific history and its implied theme of human progress. In Darwin, Haeckel, the Curies, and other scientists Adams found a model for the study of history within the fabric of nature. Adams's “dynamic theory of history” argues for a wholistic view of history and nature.

The Reign of the Genteel

This conclusion examines some episodes in the formation of the narrative about 'the genteel tradition'. Having shown that Henry Adams, Henry James, Edith Wharton and their friend Barrett Wendell all contribute to a realist critique of a liberal idealism, American Snobs notes here that when George Santayana makes his own influential commentary on the 'genteel', he is responding to the same liberal Harvard milieu that provokes that realist critique. Wendell's Harvard students Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon Louis Parrington adapt this critique as they develop the narrative about the genteel for their own ends. Brooks, the conclusion shows, contributes to the distortions of that narrative by conflating Charles Eliot Norton's perspective with that of the much more reactionary Wendell. The book closes by considering the unsexy femininity that frequently figures the genteel, linking it to Reconstruction-era evocations of the schoolmarm and later references to sterile Anglo-Saxon womanhood that hastens racial decline. In later iterations of the narrative about the genteel, negative representations of this unsexy white femininity tend to serve progressive ends; in earlier iterations like those surveyed in American Snobs, however, such representations tend to serve a conservatism that is sceptical about democracy and understands itself as realist.

Introduction

This introduction announces American Snobs's argument and indicates how its work draws from and speaks to conversations amongst literary and historical scholars. Pointing to the historical specificity of the liberalism that the book discusses, the introduction describes the social and professional ties that connect the thinkers treated throughout the book, noting the centrality of Harvard University in the elite network that links Henry Adams, Henry James, and Edith Wharton to men like W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles William Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton and Barrett Wendell. The introduction then offers a brief historiography of 'the genteel tradition' before concluding with a rapid summary of the book's subsequent chapters.

American Snobs

Arguing that Henry Adams, Henry James and Edith Wharton articulated their political thought in response to the liberalism that reigned in Boston and, more specifically, at Harvard University, American Snobs shows how each of these authors interrogated that liberalism's arguments for education, democracy and the political duties of the cultivated elite. Coit shows that the works of these authors contributed to a realist critique of a liberal New England idealism that fed into the narrative about 'the genteel tradition', which shaped the study of US literature during the twentieth century.

Tricksterism, Anti-Semitism, and White Supremacy in The Education of Henry Adams: A Centennial Reassessment

Because of its place in American and world literature, The Education of Henry Adams has become enormously influential, but we have not fully understood the full scope of its impact, its subversive contexts, and Adams’s role in sustaining and furthering white supremacy. Indeed, although most of the text is devoted to the era of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Adams never employed the term. More importantly, because of the intensity of his racism and anti-Semitism, he dismissed the era that was dominated by strife over the nation’s future and the African American role in it as one simply overwhelmed with sordid political corruption, which had its origins in alleged Jewish intrigue both in the United States and Europe. By examining the background to Adams’s work and his brilliant ingenuity, we can more fully understand what Adams sought to accomplish and how. Neither an autobiography nor a history, Adams crafted a “trickster” novel to devalue African Americans and attack Jewish life. He wrote, perhaps, the most ingenious and dangerous book of the fin de siècle.

Of Lascivious Mysticism and Other Hibernian Matters

Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware recasts The Scarlet Letter as a Methodist minister’s romance with Catholics and fin-de-siècle intellectual Catholicism. The Reverend Theron Ware is a liberal progressive Dimmesdale update, happily married at the novel’s outset, who is assigned to a fundamentalist, anti-Catholic congregation yet comes increasingly under the spell of a trio of erudite, somewhat unorthodox Catholic leaders—one of whom, Celia Madden, the Hester Prynne update, is a single woman, seemingly independent yet Church-integrated, whose mastery of the organ and articulation of Continental aesthetics are all too provocative to be ignored. The resultant interplay between Theron’s late-century Protestant dissipation and the edgy Catholicism of Celia and her erudite comrades (one priest, one scientist) is lit in knowing commentary—religious anthropology cum wicked irony—that hangs in the air long after Theron’s hurtful sexploration comes to its merciful—mercy-filled, Angel-conducted—end. In The Damnation of Theron Ware, the Catholic-inspired, Catholic-tutored mythopoetics of Protestant self-consciousness take a mighty leap forward, in seeming lock-step with Henry Adams and in anticipation of such contemporary thinkers as Richard Rodriguez, Camille Paglia, and James T. Fisher. Religious wanderlust is seen to drive forbidden love at least as much as the original way around. And the narrative staging of Protestant wonderment and wanderlust, dramatized in terms of the Protestant-side tangle between its persisting Calvinism and emergent liberal pragmatism, takes a nasty 180-degree turn against itself, courtesy of its Catholic protagonists—though, really, of its Protestant author.