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Henry Adams Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres:

Sex as a Source of Force and Unity in History.

Unpublished Manuscript

Harvard University

August 10th

, 1998


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Henry Adams, the well-known historian, autobiographer and cultural critic,

wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartreswhich Oscar Cargill claims to be one of the

most eloquent tributes to the power of Woman ever penned by man. For whatever

she may have meant to the thirteenth century, and whatever she continues to mean

to the devout, the Virgin symbolized for Adams Woman enthroned (565). This deepinterest in Woman is peculiar for a man with a Puritan background writing in

America around the end of the nineteenth century. However, we know that Adams

had taught medieval history at Harvard and he would have been particularly

interested in the forces which shaped the history and society of this time. Also,

Adams use of women as protagonists in his novels Democracyand Estherclearly

shows that he was interested in a Womans force when confronted with science,

politics and religion.

Adams believes one of the greatest forces in history is sex; much similar tothe forces of law, nature and faith. His first systematic study of the Gothic

architecture of Normandy cathedrals and Saint-Mont-Michel in 1895 led him to

compare the force of the Virgin which inspired this architecture to the force of the

dynamo to which he was introduced while visiting the Paris Exposition in 1900

(Adams, 1214). Adams preferred the formers familiarity which not only stimulated

his intellectual curiosity but led him to make a serious study of the force of sex in

history about which he wrote in The Education of Henry Adams:

Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the

western world had ever felt, and had drawn mans activities to herself

more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had

ever done; the historians business was to follow the track of the

energy; to find where it came from and where it went to; its complex

source and shifting channels; its values, equivalents, conversions. It

could hardly be more complex than radium; it could hardly be

deflected, diverted, polarized, absorbed more perplexingly than other

radiant matter. Adams knew nothing about any of them, but as a

mathematical problem of influence on human progress, though all

were occult, all reacted on his mind, and he rather inclined to think

the Virgin easiest to handle. (1075)

One can begin to understand Adams interest in sex as a source of force when

reflecting on his own tragic life in matters of sex: his childless marriage which led to

his wifes suicide and his lifelong infatuation with a woman twenty years younger

than himself and her child. Also, being a product of the Puritan background into

which he was born and the society in which he lived where sex was never discussed

except in reference to an evil, might help to explain Adams interest in the Virgin and


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the importance that sex played in shaping society and history in the twelfth and

thirteenth centuries.

Above all, Adams wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartresto educate Woman

in the nineteenth century which he refers to his nieces by providing the Virgins

unifying force in medieval times as an example for their own source of force and role

in society (341). He believes that a Womans primal source of force is her maternity.

However, Adams feared that the importance of Womans maternal role was

disregarded in the United States in the nineteenth century. This greatly concerned

Adams who believed that this posed a serious problem to the unity of the family and

ultimately the unity of society. In The Education Adams says:

Of all movements of inertia, maternity and reproduction are the most typical,

and womens property of moving in a constant line forever is ultimate,

uniting history in its only unbroken and unbreakable sequence. Whatever,

else stops, the woman must go on reproducing, as she did in the Siluria of

Pteraspis; sex is a vital condition, and race only a local one. If the laws of

inertia are to be sought anywhere with certainty, it is in the feminine mind.

The American always ostentatiously ignored sex, and American history

mentioned hardly the name of a woman, while English history handled them

as timidly as though they were a new and undescribed species; but if the

problem of inertia summed up the difficulties of the race question, it involved

that of sex far more deeply, and to American vitally. (1123)

/ / /

Cargill writes that Adams makes it clear enough in Mont-Saint-Michel and

Chartresthat he believed it was Mariolatry and not religion which was the great

force in civilizing France in the thirteenth century (Cargill, 567). Mariolatry, which is

the worship of the Virgin grew in such intensity in the twelfth and thirteenth

centuries that it bordered heresy since it put the mother above the father and son.

Adams believes the rise in Mariolatry in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is due

to three main reasons: the superiority of women in this time as seen in the rule ofthree queens; the omission of the woman in the Trinity; and mans need of her

compassion and accessibility.

Adams explains that up until this time the church centered around the Trinity,

which symbolized unity and imposed the law as a higher paternal entity. However,

man was in need of something human, accessible and compassionate; that could

understand his mortal sins and pain, which he found in the maternal symbol of the

Virgin. He goes on to say:


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The Mother alone was human, imperfect, and could love; she alone

was Favor, Duality, Diversity. If the trinity was in essence Unity, the

Mother alone could represent whatever was not Unity; whatever was

irregular, exceptional, outlawed; and this was the whole human race. (584)

Adams believes that another reason for the rise in the Virgin was because women,

particularly at this time, were superior to men as he describes:

The superiority of the woman was not a fancy but a fact. Mans

business was to fight, or hunt, or feast or make love. The man was

also the travelling partner in commerce, commonly absent from home

for months together, while the woman carried on the business. The

woman ruled the household and the workshop; cared for the

economy; supplied the intelligence, and dictated the taste. Her

ascendancy was secured by her alliance with the Church, . (524)

Furthermore, Adams explains that the rise of the Virgin at this time was also due to

the rule of three women: Queen Eleanor of Guienne, Mary of Champagne and

Queen Blanche of Castille, who in turn exerted influence on every aspect of society,

particularly as seen in their influence over fashion, politics and the birth of

courteous love.Women in the thirteenth century dictated the taste in fashion.

Adams cites Orderic:

At this time effeminacy was the prevailing vice throughout the world . They

parted their hair from the crown of the head on each side of the forehead,

and their locks grow long like women, and wore long shirts and tunics, closely

tied with points . In our days, ancient customs are almost all changed for

new fashions . For a hundred and fifty years, the Virgin and Queens ruled

French taste and thought so successfully that the French man has never yet

quite decided whether to be more proud or ashamed of it. (529)

Adams goes on to say that the women of the thirteenth century were so powerful

that they dictated not only fashion but law.

In the twelfth century he [the Frenchman] wanted chiefly to please women,

as Orderic complained; Isolde came out of Britanny to meet Eleanor coming

up from Guienne, and the Virgin from the east; and all united in giving law to

society. In each case it was the woman, not the man who gave the law .

(542)

Adams makes note of the fact that Courteous love was avowedly a form of drama,

but not the less a force of society, a product of the love for Woman in this period;

he writes:


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If one has to make an exception, perhaps the passion of love was more

serious than that of religion, and gave to religion the deepest emotion, and

the most complicated one, which society knew. Love was certainly a passion;

and even more certainly it was, as seen in poets like Dante and Petrarchin

Romanslike Lancelot and Aucassinsin ideals like the Virgin, - complicatedbeyond modern conception. (542)

For these reasons the twelfth and thirteenth centuries gave birth to

Mariolatry, whose force in turn, according to Adams, gave birth to human endeavors

of such volume and greatness in honor of the Virgin as never before seen in the

history of mankind. The Virgins force is seenin the power she exerted in the

thought, economy and even warfare of the time. She inspired the religious thought

and writing of prominent religious figures of the time such as Abelard, Saint Bernard

and Thomas Aquinas who worshipped her. She also played a central role in theeconomy of the time, as Adams describes it:

The measure of this devotion which proves to any religious American mind,

beyond possible cavil, its serious and practical reality, is the money it cost.

According to statistics, in the single century between 1170 and 1270, the

French built eighty cathedrals and nearly five hundred churches of the

cathedral class, which would have cost, according to an estimate made in

1840, more than five milliards to replace. Five thousand million francs is a

thousand million dollars, and this covered only the great churches of a single

century. The same scale of expenditure had been going on since the year

1000, and almost every parish in France had rebuilt its church in stone; to this

day France is strewed with the ruins of this architecture, and yet the still

preserved churches of the eleventh and twelfth centuries alone, the churches

that belong to the Romanesque and transition periods, are numbered by

hundreds until they reach well into the thousands. The share of this capital

which was, - if one may use a commercial figure, - invested in the Virgin,

cannot be fixed, any more than the total sum given to religious objects

between 1000 and 1300; but in spiritual and artistic sense, it was almost the

whole, and expressed and intensity of conviction never again reached by any

passion, whether of religion, of loyalty, of patriotism, or of wealth; perhaps

never even paralleled by any single economic effort, except war. (428)

Adams also mentions the sacrilegious exploitation of the Virgins force for

military purposes as seen in the crusades:

Most surprising of all, the great military class was perhaps the most

vociferous. Of all inappropriate haunts for the gentle, courteous, pitying

Mary, a field of battle seems to be the worst, if not distinctly blasphemous;yet the greatest French warriors insisted on her leading them into battle, and


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in the actual melee when men were killing each other, on every battle-field in

Europe, for at least five hundred years, Mary was present, leading both sides.

(427)

As it is the historians business to follow the track of the energy; to find

where it [comes] from and where it [is going] to; likewise, it is the scholars business

to find the source of Henry Adams energy which inspired the writing of Mont-Saint-

Michel and Chartres. As Patricia OToole has pointed out: The intensity of his

attraction to a world in which men bowed to women opens the question of his own

submission to the forces of femininity (335).

/ / /

Henry Adams was married to Marian Clover Hooper for thirteen years

before she committed suicide at the age of forty-two, by taking potassium cyanidefrom among the chemicals she used to develop her photographs in the dark room of

her home. This tragedy naturally had a profound impact on Henry Adams who had

just published Esther, a novel which many critics say prophesied his wifes death.

Estheris a novel of a woman who closely resembled his wife, Marian, and who in the

end remains isolated after her fathers death and her refusal to marry the man she

loves because she cannot reconcile her love for him with his love for the church.

David Musto believes that Adams, who had predicted his wifes depression after her

fathers impending death, wrote with a therapeutic motive as he would read extracts

of the novel to Marian each night in the hope of giving her strength through theheroines struggle to cope with her life after death and isolation (279). Katherine

Simonds believes that the novel was so personal so close to his own life, problems

and friends that he gave it the pseudonym Frances Snow Compton in fear that

anyone might find out who it was (569). Many critics have also called it a roman a

clef since the characters clearly represent Adams close friends with the main

character, Esther, modeled on Mrs. Adams (Simonds, 566). However, Adams use of

a pseudonym could also stem from the fact that this genre might have damaged his

reputation as a serious historian, since at that same time he was also working on his

History of the United States during the Administration of Jefferson and Madison.

Deborah Schneider goes so far as to say: Nonetheless, Estheris a memorial

to the intensity of his feelings for Elizabeth Cameron and to his profound

dissatisfaction with his own marriage (71). Catherine Brooke, the orphan girl from

the west in the novel who was fresh as a summer morning, and [whose] co mplexion

was like the petals of a sweetbrier rose, is believed to have portrayed Elizabeth

Sherman Cameron, called Lizzie, with whom Adams was in love. However, the fact

that Adams was in love with Lizzie does not mean that he did not care for his wife

who suffered from depression: a fact which we know greatly distressed Adams. Sixmonths before her suicide, Adams attempted to help his wife overcome her


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depression by changing surroundings. First they went to Old Sweet Springs and then

to their Beverly farm but nothing seemed to help Clover who, as he wrote in his

letter: has been out of sorts for some time. Until she gets well we can do nothing

(Tehan, 85). They returned to Washington by mid-October and went into

seclusion. Arline Boucher Tehan writes, Rebecca Rae, a faithful friend called everyday to cheer her. After one visit, as Henry was showing her out, he thanked her.

For what? she asked. Because you made Clover smile, he said (88). This shows

his intensity of feelings to his wife which explains why Adams wrote to Elizabeth

Cameron: I care more for one chapter, or any dozen pages of Esther, than for the

whole History that I would not let anyone read the story for fear the reader should

profane it (Samuels, 1958, p. 226). Nevertheless, Adams experiment failed since

Marian ended up taking her life anyway, a fact which Adams best dealt with in

silence.

Simonds and Tehan argue that Mrs. Adams suicide was due to many reasons.

Primarily she was going through depression, which was the cause of many suicides in

her own family, and that with the death of her father on April thirteenth, 1885 this

condition became much worse. Also, a major factor to her depression was her

childless marriage which was a constant reminder of her failed and seemingly

purposeless life. She therefore had a greater dependence on her husband whose

pessimistic, cynical attitude towards life and ennui did not provide the support she

needed. Schneider claims that she was probably aware of Henrys infatuation with

Elizabeth Cameron, a woman twenty one years younger than he (80). Tehan believesthat the more intelligent Mrs. Adams was not jealous of Elizabeth Cameron but that

she saw the contrast between themselves. It was not difficult to notice how easily

Elizabeth attracted men with her beauty and charm, including Henry Adams,

whereas Marians intelligence and witty but very often spiteful remarks only won her

respect and fear, not affection and admiration (Tehan, 80-90). Tehan goes on to say

that a critical encounter [which] could have been the final blow to her self-esteem

was the visit Mrs. Adams paid to Mrs. Cameron two days before her death. Seeing

that Elizabeth was well into her pregnancy, the shattering realization that she

would never be a mother nor give her husband a child was more than she couldbear. She committed suicide after writing this note to her sister, Ellen Gurney: If I

had a single point of character or goodness I would stand on that and grow back to

life. Henry is more patient and loving than words can expressGod might envy him.

he fears and hopes and despairs hour after hour Henry is beyond words tenderer

and better than all of you even. R.P. Blackmur concludes by saying, Sex was the

energy that moved them both, and faith, if it had existed, would have clarified the

energy (304). As Harriet F. Bergman quoted Adams from his Primitive Rights of

Women, the only hope, for Adams, lies in the family, the strongest and healthiest


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of all human fabrics (63). Maybe their faith in marriage and a family were lost

with the bitter fact that they could have no children.

This tragedy left Henry Adams disillusioned, lonely and in pain. He was drawn

to the comforting company of Elizabeth Cameron, called La Donna by her close

friends, with whom he was in love and who was also lonely from neglect in her own

marriage. On June 25th

, 1886 she had a child which she named Martha. The mother

and child became the center of Henrys emotional and spiritual world as the

embodied Madonna and Child, a symbol which would haunt his imagination and

absorb his study for the rest of his life, leading him to make the pronouncement:

Women are naturally neither daughters, sisters, lovers, nor wives, but mothers

(Tehan, 94). The childless historian was captivated, and he turned his study into a

nursery for her, stocking it with dolls and toys, ginger snaps and chocolate drops

(Tehan, 99). Adams wrote to Lizzie in his later years: As I grow older, I see that allthe human interest and power that religion ever had was in the mother and child

and I would have nothing to do with a church that did not offer them both. There

you are again. You see the thought always turns back to you (Tehan, 290).

Even though Elizabeth Cameron cared deeply for Adams she could never love

him the way he loved her; she would always remain unattainable to the much older

and world-weary, Henry Adams. Realizing the danger to her reputation in his

infatuated pursuit of her she convinced him to go away and in 1890 he traveled

around the world. Their love grew in intensity with the distance that separated

them, as seen in the letters they exchanged during this time. Henry wrote, My only

source of energy is that I am actually starting on a ten thousand mile journey to

you! (Tehan, 119). In 1891, after fourteen months apart, they met again in Paris,

but their meeting was a disappointment when they both realized that the romance

they had been cultivating all these months did not parallel the reality. OTooles

description of their meeting helps us understand:

When Mr. Adams presented himself to Mrs. Cameron in her apartment near

the Champs-Elysees on Sunday, October 11, 1891, he was, as he had

promised at the start of his voyage, wholly white-haired. He was also gaunt

after fourteen months of living on fish and breadfruit, and his travels had cost

him several teeth. Standing before her in his ill-fitting suit, he looked much

older than his fifty-three years. Lizzie, not quite thirty-four, radiated

excitement and self-confidence. (252)

This realization changed Adams stance and their relationship forever. Never again

would Adams openly show such intensity of feelings. Even though they remained

friends and kept contact with each other throughout their lives Adams would now

concentrate all his energy in his travels and work and would love Mrs. Cameron fromafar, as Tehan describes it:


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From now on he would behave toward Lizzie with the gallantry of a knight in

the age of chivalry about which he would one day write. He would succeed in

mastering the elaborate ritual of courtly loveknowing he would never

possess his lady, he would devote his energies and gifts to study and writing.

(131)

Since he recognized that he would never possess La Donna, and since she

would always haunt his imagination, he would gradually learn to sublimate

his passion for her into the literary worship of the Virgin who dominated the

Middle Ages, and this would in turn lead him to write his Mont-Saint-Michel

and Chartres. But since he also knew that life in not worth living unless you

are attached to someone, he would force himself to be content with the only

role that she would allow himthat of faithful protector and tame cat. (129)

The women in Adams life were a source of force but also a lot of pain as seen

in their omission from The Education of Henry Adamsin which he wrote: Of all

studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew

no tragedy so heartrending as introspection (1114). However, this source of force

is what drove Adams in search of the Virgin with the same scientific accuracy with

which electricity sets a machine in motion, what Ernest Samuels calls the potent

alchemy of unfulfilled love (Gossip, 73).

/ / /

Adams wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres as an education for his nieces

and nieces in wish: the women of the late nineteenth century (341). Oscar Cargill

believes that Adams main message to women was that: if she were to absorb the

lesson of that [the thirteenth] century, she [could] go back to her own country to

create a society, even a matriarchy, which she [could] dominate through her sex

(566).

Henry Adams preferred the unity of the twelfth an thirteenth centuries which

revolved around the Virgin, to the sexless society of the nineteenth century. He

says in The Education of Henry Adamsthat the force of the Virgin was still felt at

Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays; but in America neither Venus nor

Virgin ever had value as force; -at most as sentiment. No American had ever been

truly afraid of either (1070). This posed a serious question for Adams who could not

understand why a great country like the United States of America had no symbol of

sex as ancient civilizations had had: Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite and the last

and greatest deity of all, the Virgin (523). Adams began to ponder, asking himself

whether he knew of any American artist who had ever insisted on the power of sex,

as every classic had always done; but he could think only of Walt Whitman; Bret


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Harte, as far as the magazines would let him venture; and one or two painters, for

the flesh-tones. All the rest had used sex for sentiment, never for force (1072).

Americas sexless society was partly due to the Puritan influence of the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of which Adams acknowledges himself to

have been a product, as he explains in The Education:

anyone brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous

age, sex was strength. Neither art nor beauty was needed. Everyone, even

among Puritans, knew that neither Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the

oriental Goddesses was worshipped for her beauty. She was Goddess

because of her force, she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction

the greatest and most mysterious of all energies, all she needed was to be

fecund. (1070)

Adams believes that unlike past societies, nineteenth century America

disregarded the importance of sex and maternity as a unifying force of the family

and society. The woman had lost her primal role in her pursuit to compete, by

imitating man, in a system governed by forces of technology and capitalism. Adams

explains in Primitive Rights of Women:

This was the path of imitation which had been forced on her by the mans

refusal to honor her own sphere and by his complete absorption in the world

of business and machinery. The typical American man had his hand on a

lever and his eye on a curve in his road He could not run his machine and a

woman too, he must leave her, even though his wife, to find her own way by

imitating him. To Adams view, then, modern industrialism and technology

were breaking down, in America faster than elsewhere, the most ancient

element in civilized human life, the family, strongest and healthiest of all

human fabrics. (333)

However, Adams claims this is not necessary, for her equality rests in her

fundamental strengthmaternity.

Her monopoly of reproduction the greatest and most mysterious of all

energies gave her a claim, through the family, to an equality rooted in

nature. She had but to believe in her own claim, or else become sexless like

the beesin a future reserved for machine-made, collectivist females. (334)

Adams discusses the danger this posed for society in his Primitive Rights and whom

George Hochfield quotes: her superiority to the man had not saved her from taking

a path that threatened not only her own identity but the very existence of society

(333).


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Adams believes the family is the strongest institution in society. He also

believes it is the mothers duty to uphold it and keep it together and supports this by

saying: the germ of the future family organization was embodied in the mother, not

the father (Adams, Primitive Rights, 337). Adams says in his Primitive Rights of

Women:

All new discoveries in the record of human development point to the familiar

facts that the most powerful instincts in man are his affections and his love of

property; that on these the family is built; that no other institution can be

raised on the same or on equally strong foundations; that for this reason the

family is the strongest and healthiest of all human fabrics. (360)

However, Adams claims that Woman in the nineteenth century failed to keep

the family and therefore society together as Robert F. Sommer points out when

quoting Adams remark: I admit that the American woman is a failure; that she has

held nothing together, neither State or Church, not Society nor Family (142).

Nevertheless, Adams says in The Education that if a woman were asked why she was

a failure without an instants hesitation, she was sure to answer: - Because the

American man is a failure! She meant it (1124). Adams most likely would have

been referring to mans submission to the forces of capitalism which were growing in

intensity in the United States in the late nineteenth century and which women felt

compelled to follow in order to compete and survive.

Nevertheless, Adams believes that the forces of capitalism had made Womana victim not of man or of the church like previous times but of a machine (Adams,

1128). Her exploitation as a source of labor for capitalistic purposes jeopardized not

only her identity, but the unity of the family and society. Adams discusses this in The

Education:

but the American woman had no illusions or ambitions or new resources,

and nothing to rebel against, except her own maternity, yet the rebels

increased by millions from year to year till they blocked the path of rebellion.

Even her field of good works was narrower than in the twelfth century.Socialism, communism, collectivism, philosophical anarchism, which

promised paradise on earth for every male, cut off the few avenues or escape

which capitalism had opened to the woman, and she saw before her only the

future reserved for machine-made, collectivist females. (1127)

/ / /

Henry Adams wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres in honor of Woman: a

source of force and unity in history. Adams, the autobiographer, obviously was

influenced by his own tragic life: his childless marriage, the loss of his wife and his


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unfulfilled love with Elizabeth Cameron. Even though the women of Henry Adams

life gave him the energy to study, travel and write about many of the things he did,

their omission from his life played a greater role since they created a void Adams

sought to fill.

Adams, the cultural critic, rebelled against the lack of unity experienced in

nineteenth century society with its negative attitude towards sex which Cargill

believes to have been one of the worst in our history which led him to seek the

Virgin of Chartres (569). Adams longed for unity. He saw how the Virgin had created

unity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries through her sex while this was lost in

the nineteenth century for Woman was becoming sexless like thebees in her

pursuit to attain equality with Man: in the process becoming a victim of a machine

and failing at keeping together, what Adams thought the most important fabric in

society: the family. Cargill believes Adams message to women is simple and clear:

He is at one with the nineteenth century in expecting the Woman to be

fruitful, and there is nothing in all his writing so filled with pain as that line in

his Prayer on the bareness of Protestantism with its inescapable double-

entendre, Ourselves we worship and we have no Son. In this bit of last,

honest self-recrimination is the epitome of Henry Adams. (569)

Adams, the teacher, wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartresto educate and empower

his nieces and nieces in wish. As a historian, he found a place in time when Woman

was most venerated to provide a model through which she may understand her truevital force which lies in her primordial role in sustaining the family which ultimately

and fundamentally shapes history and society.

REFERENCES

Adams, Henry. The Letters of Henry Adams.Ed. J.C. Levenson, Ernest Samuels,

Charles Vandarsee, Viola Hopkins Winner. Vol 2-5 (1868-1905) Cambridge, Mass:

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982.

Adams, Henry. Novels: Democracy, Esther, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. The

Education of Henry Adams, Poems.Ed. Ernest Samuels and Jayne N. Samuels. New

York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983.

Adams, Henry. Primitive Rights of Women. The Great Secession Winter of 1860-61

and other Essays.Ed. George Hochfield. New York: Sigamore Press Inc., 1958. 333-

360.


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Adams, Henry Mrs. The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams.Ed. Ward Thoron. Boston:

Little, Brown and Co., 1936.

Barber, David S. Henry Adams Esther. The Nature of Individuality and Immortality.

The New England Quarterly 45, 2 (June, 1972): 227-240.

Begmann, Harriet F. Henry Adams Esther. No Faith in the Patriarchy. The

Markham Review 10, (Summer, 1981): 63-67.

Bell, Millicent. Adams Esther: The Morality of Taste. Critical Essays on Henry

Adams.Ed. Harbert, Earl N. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1981. 104-114.

Blackmur, R.P. The Expense of Greatness: Three Emphases on Henry Adams.

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Blackmur, R.P. Novels of Henry Adams. The Sewanee Review 51,2 (April-June,

1943): 281-304.

Cargill, Oscar. Intellectual America: Ideas on the March.New York: The Macmillan

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Donoghue, Dennis. Henry Adamss Novels. Reading America: Essays on American

Literature.Ed. Joseph, Riddel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. 111-126.

Dusinberre, William. Henry Adams: The Myth of Failure.Charlottesville: UniversityPress of Virginia, 1980. 54-85.

Harbert, Earl. N. Clover Adams, Henry Adams, and the Conviction of Failure. The

Sewanee Review 88,2 (Spring, 1980): 266-270.

Harbert, Earl N. Henry Adamss Education and Autobiographical Tradition. Critical

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Kaledin, Eugenia. The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams. Philadelphia: Temple

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Koretz, Gene H. Augustines Confessions and The Education of Henry Adams.

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Samuels, Ernest. Henry Adams and the Gossip Mills. Essays in American and English

Literature. Ed. Max F. Schulz. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1967. 59-75.

Samuels, Ernest. [Introduction to Democracy and Esther: Two Novels by Henry Adams.]Ed.

Harbert, Earl N. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1981. 76-83

Samuels, Ernest. Henry Adams: The Middle Years.Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of

Harvard University Press, 1958. 218-258.

Samuels, Ernest. Henry Adams: The Major Phase.Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of

Harvard Univesity Press, 1964, 203-310.

Schneider, Deborah-Lucas. Henry Adams Esther: Woman as Artist and Woman as Artists

Model. Womens Studies and Literature.Erlangen: Palm and Enke, 1987. 58-82.

Simonds, Katherine. The Tragedy of Mrs. Henry Adams. The New England Quarterly 9, 4(Dec., 1936): 564-582.

Sommer, Robert F. The Feminine Perspectives of Henry Adams Esther. Studies in American

Fiction 18,2 (Autumn, 1990): 131-144.

Spiller, Robert E. The Oblique Light: Studies in Literary History and Biography. New York:

The Macmillan Co., 1948. 151-177.

Tehan, Arline-Boucher. Henry Adams in Love: The pursuit of Elizabeth Sherman Cameron.

New York: Universe Books, 1983.

Wolfe, Patrick. The Revealing Fiction of Henry Adams. The New England Quarterly 49,3

(Sept., 1976): 399-426.

Documents

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