The Education of Henry Adams : A Bildungsroman

Abstract

The Education of Henry Adams:A Bildungsroman Andrew West (bio) Posing as his editor and good friend Henry Cabot Lodge, Henry Adams explains "the idea of the [book]."1 Quoting from chapter XXIX of his own text, he writes, "he hoped to project his lines forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from anyone who should know better."2 Adams' self-citation alludes to the first of the three overarching themes of The Education of Henry Adams, a theme which dominates the closing chapters of the book and for which Adams indicates a complicated yet genuine affinity: history. The aforementioned chapter's title, "The Abyss of Ignorance," says much about the second theme of Adams' autobiography: the failure of education. Lastly, the title of the preceding chapter, "The Height of Knowledge," evinces the defining formal mechanism of Adams' work, irony, which, more often than not, Adams uses in order to reinforce the failure of his education. When reading The Education, these three facets—education, history, and irony—represent, for most scholars, the interpretive trinity. In exposing the dialectical movement between education, as the goal or activity of the individual, and history, defined by and archived within the society, most scholars manage to provide a cogent account of the complex and dynamic relationship between The Education's dual themes.3 Having done this, these scholars assimilate into that account the irony that saturates Adams' text. And enough scholars have successfully synthesized these three key components so as to create a critical consensus. Yet this critical consensus troubles the first-time reader of Adams' autobiography because the accepted critical perspectives often fail to integrate two striking formal characteristics of The Education: the third-person narrator and the prevalence of essayistic material, e.g. digressions, commentaries, aphorisms, etc. Most scholars have underestimated the importance of these formal characteristics because of the difficulty of incorporating them into existing theories. This intractable critical dilemma results primarily from an inability to refine the generic definition of Adams' text. Prior critics acknowledge Adams' work to be an autobiography, yet most avoid making finer generic distinctions largely because these divisions have traditionally been formulated with reference to sociopolitical categories in which Adams cannot claim membership. As a result, scholars have done little to rework The Education's generic [End Page 91] categorization other than to associate it broadly with the beginning of American modernism. In so doing, however, they have neglected an autobiographical form derived from a type of novel that The Education powerfully instantiates: the Bildungsroman. Albert E. Stone argues that The Education "measur[es] the bewildering distance between what he once thought and what he knows now, between potential and accomplishment in all realms of experience" and that it "transcends the merely personal to create a cultural parable of modern historical existence."4 Stone's argument neatly, if perhaps unwittingly, summarizes the basic themes of the classic genre of the German novel. The Bildungsroman represents a potent instrument with which to examine The Education insofar as it integrates the major formal characteristics of Adams' text—the third-person pronoun, the essay, and the irony—into a theoretical framework based on the dual themes of education and history and, in so doing, resolves the tension between Adams' pervasive skepticism and his attenuated but enduring faith, which together constitute the foundation on which Adams constructs his ethics. As the autobiography of a member of America's ruling elite concerned with the education of "young [American] men, in universities or elsewhere,"5 and the formation of American society, The Education would appear to be anathema to any interpretive tool as thoroughly un American as the Bildungsroman. When used by American scholars as a lens through which to examine American texts, the Bildungsroman, as a type of autobiography, has typically been applied not to canonical texts but to the marginalia, autobiographies of writers and works relegated to subcategories defined by sociopolitical distinctions. One could claim that scholars' restricted application of this generic lens represents simply an opportunity lost, if not for the fact that the German philosophy which underpins the Bildungsroman contributes significantly to Western thought since the time of Adams and, more pointedly, contributes significantly to Adams' thought. In...