| Henry Adams' thinking began and ended with forms, the models he was given that no longer worked, and the new forms he sought that might shape a future, or project its pattern. Dismayed by the experience of accelerating change, he tried to use history to identify and explain the forces at work. This dissertation explores Adams' search for an adequate explanation as a series of experiments in form. An examination of his major works, the History of the United States, Democracy and Esther, the Memoirs of Arii Taimai, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams, reveals the extent to which Adams always wrote as a historian and yet in resistance to the prescriptions of history. His experiments started with inherited models, which he tried to remake for a new age, but what Adams usually produced was not a reformation, but a proliferation of forms. Whatever their genre, Adams's texts continually rebel against expectations. By resisting a conventional emplotment, which is action fitted to historical time, in effect they rebel against history. Adams' experiments end in impasse, uncertainty, and questions, but his failures authorize new investigations. Adams' writing is full of irreconcilable elements and dialectics that can never be resolved; foremost among these is sexual difference. Treated as alternating polarities of form, these conflicts can be a source of creative tension and imaginative possibility. Adams insisted on history as both art and science despite the uneasy coexistence of the two. What scientific history meant to him shifted from a belief in a Rankean methodology, to the adoption of the explanatory language of the social and physical sciences, to the dream of a great generalization putting all human history under law. The legacy of his name made him a historian, yet one with an orientation to ultimate ends rather than origins. For Adams, history was written with a civic purpose. Questions of form could not be separated from that purpose, nor the vexed problem of finding an audience. |
