In 1918, the Massachusetts Historical Society published The Education of Henry Adams, a work devised in 1905, and privately printed in 1907 (as it was intended for a smaller audience), adding the subtitle ‘An Autobiography’ to the original title. Whether this act of publisher’s interruption decreases the intimacy of the original, implying in itself an end and a beginning, is left to literary historians to decide on. However, when read under the guise of being Henry Adams’s autobiographical text, the reader is faced with two important questions: first, whether The Education of Henry Adams is to be read and reviewed as the historical record of Henry Adams, and second, whether it is to be taken as a text that pursues one simple theme, that of the role education plays in a student’s life.
If we look at the author’s ‘Preface’ to the work, we fail to find in it the Henry Adams, the American patrician, the descendent of the Adams family line; instead, what we come across is a third-person narrative voice, speaking not of the man but of the ‘manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes.’ He then continues to add on this metaphor, informing us that the object of his study would not be the figure (Henry Adams, the historical self), but the garment (the educative experiences of one Henry Adams). If we decide to accept this treatment of a writing self, then we need to ascribe a sense of consciously chosen didacticism to Adams’s goal for his work. We can find support for such a claim in the work of Thomas R. Smith, titled ‘The Objectivity of The Education of Henry Adams’. Smith, in turn, looks to another critic (namely, Ross Lincoln Miller) while examining Adams’s intent along the lines of a thematic discourse. On page 152 of his study he states: ‘According to this reading of the Education, Adams sees his life as a long educative experience, and thus the writing of his book is an attempt to set down what he has learned, primarily for his own behalf.’ In that respect, ‘Adams’s didactic aim’ could be elucidated ‘as a displacement onto readers of his reason for writing so that it appears a reason for their reading the book.’ (152) Therefore, how do we as readers treat Adams’s choice for a third-person narration? Are we to see it as a mere strategic device, set to help Adams the author create the appropriate amount of objectivity and detachment, thus enabling the solidification of his personal experiences, portraying them ‘as a lack of significant education and a succession of failures and unsatisfying endeavors?’ (153, added question mark) Or are we to see it as a whim of a disappointed man, who introduces to us a passive and lifeless figure and the extent to which he, Henry Adams, suggests his own supposed sense of failure? Critics have argued that the failure to attain high political office provides the origin of Adams’s pervasive sense of dissatisfaction with his self, yet it remains a challenge to unearth any definition of success within the work, while neither his friends nor the reader could find it easy to promote his life as one lacking in achievement.
Nevertheless, if we decide to regard Adams’s work as an autobiographical text, the author’s choice for a third-voice narrative may not lead us any closer to closing the gap between the text’s didactic nature and life-writing vein. On that note, Thomas R. Smith looks at Jean Starobinski’s theoretical criticism as he uses the theorist’s notion of ‘solidification by objectivity’, in order to shed light on Adams’s intent to give forth his life suitable verification in the historical argument he tries to pose. Smith examines Starobinski’s principles behind this notion, applying them to The Education to withstand the text’s autobiographical nature. At first, Smith analyzes external information to ascertain that the hero and the author are indeed one and the same figure. He then proceeds to understand Adams’s choice for a third-person point of view narrative strategy as a cautious technique of self-effacement, thus allowing Adams to assume the desired role of the historian-educator. And last but not least, Smith emphasizes the importance of the objective third-person narration for the author’s intent to stress the importance of the undertaken narrative actions rather than the actuality of the narrative’s protagonist. According to Smith, these actions are not the historical events found in books of encyclopedic scope; quite the contrary they are ‘the effects of those external events on the protagonist.’ (157) Hence, Smith is content to summarize: ‘Adams’s attention is his own life seen as a history of possible education; his protagonist is the locus of the action and therefore does not receive the reflected “glitter of action” since he is the source and site of it.’ (157)
Albert E. Stone agrees with this exfoliation of Adams’s work, depicting The Education to be several things at once, that is ‘Adams’s comprehensive theme and all-embracing metaphor.’ For Stone, The Education is to be viewed as a genuine autobiographical text, whose metaphors embrace the didactic goals of the author, presented through the experiences of his younger persona, which, in turn, do not diminish the autobiographical nature of the text itself, since ‘the work compresses historical, literary, psychological, and metaphysical dimensions of experience as recovered and imaginatively recreated by a final self.’ (43) Thus, Stone finds justification for this assertion in Adams’s incorporation of the Carlylean image of the tailor, the manikin, and the suit for clothes. Then again my own dilemma regarding the nature of this narrative is not with the validity of the narrative voice; I am more than willing to believe in the authority of Adams’s narrating voice. What I am still puzzled by is the overwhelming didactic nature of this autobiographical text, so pervasive that it threatens to swallow up both the protagonist and the author. The idea of education seen through his own, personal experiences, now given the status of historically creditable events, seems to override the self-invention narrative process of Adams’s life story.
In 1919, T. S. Eliot wrote a review of The Education, where he stipulated: ‘It is doubtful whether the book ought to be called an autobiography, for there is too little of the author in it; or whether it may be called Memoirs – for there is too much of the author in it; or a treatise on historical method, which in parts it is.’ For that reason, if the larger lesson here be one of welcoming change, not one of personal failure (meaning, man seeking to recapture a sense of instinctive unity within the realm of art), then the whole story may be viewed as an experiment in didactic art, where education transforms from an end to a means to an end. But, then again, to achieve this, the author feels the needs to focus his attention on a central human figure, Henry Adams the person, allowing it to grow from childhood into manhood, trying, for the reader’s benefit, to experience an extensive variety of educational acts.
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