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The Feminine Perspectives of Henry Adams' Esther

In his 1918 review of The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Osborn Taylor said of his former teacher that "there was never a touch of cynicism or disillusionment in anything he had to say of symbolical or dead women, any more than in his conversation with their living daughters."1 In retrospect, the remark is surprising because although Henry Adams has often been associated with cynicism and disillusionment, he also devoted much of his creative energy to developing feminine themes and subjects, from his early "Primitive Rights of Women" (1876) to his later interpretations of the Virgin of Chartres. Taylor's comment implies that Adams wore a darkly ironic mask when not writing about or speaking with women and took it off (or perhaps changed masks) when he was. Adams' second novel, Esther (1884), provides a useful perspective on this apparent gender-based dichotomy in his early work. He published the novel under a female pseudonym in a literary market he understood to be dominated by women readers and writers. Further, he translated his artistic problem of being a man and writing about women into a literary theme in the novel. Esther Dudley, herself an artist, finds that she is at odds with a triad of men who attempt to influence her in artistic, intellectual, and emotional matters. Esther finally resists their influence, but her victory is an empty one that leaves her alone, drifting beyond the tide of history and society. Adams finally suggests that this apparently unresolvable gender conflict represents a historical tension between anarchy and determinism, chaos and order, a conflict that becomes evident when his "feminine" novels, Esther and Democracy (1880), are placed beside his "masculine" History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (1891—92), which occupied him professionally during the years when he wrote the novels.