292 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900Mont-Saint-Michel, is intellectual and speculative: Adams is considering himself as
a unique but also representative man, typical of his time, and he is using his
experiences as a source of meditation, a means of considering what it is like to be
alive at the turn of the nineteenth century. That strategy comes out, with particularly
memorable intensity, in the chapter titled “The Dynamo and the Virgin.” Here,
Adams picks up his earlier meditations on the Virgin. “Symbol or energy, the Virgin
had acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt,” Adams argues, “and had
drawn man’s activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or
supernatural had even done.” “She was the goddess because of her force,” he suggests;
“she was reproduction – the greatest and most mysterious of all energies.” As such,
her absence from American thought and culture has a particular poignancy.
“American art, like the American language, and American education,” is “as far as
possible sexless,” Adams avers because “this energy” embodied in her is “unknown to
the American mind.” “An American Virgin would never dare command,” Adams
concludes; “an American Venus would never dare exist.”
These speculations on the absence of the female principle from American life, as
a source of power unity, occur during Adams’s account of his visit in 1900 to the
Great Exposition in Paris. Entering “the great hall of dynamos” there, in the company
of aeronautics pioneer Samuel P. Langley, Adams began, he says, “to feel the forty-
foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.” Langley
was enthusiastic about the power of the modern motors, although he confessed
himself worried about the anarchic potential of newly discovered forces. Adams,
however, declares that those motors were unequivocally a “nightmare” for him; he
had, he tells the reader, “his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces
totally new.” “Woman had once been supreme” as an agent of social, cultural, and
intellectual unity. Now, as image and instrument of his place and time, Adams
speculates, there was and is only “this huge wheel, revolving ... at some vertiginous
speed,” reducing matter and mind to nothing more or less than a “sequence of
force.” “He had entered a supersensual world,” Adams says of himself at this moment
in the hall of motors, “in which he could measure nothing except by chance collisions
of movement imperceptible to his senses, perhaps even imperceptible to his
instruments, but perceptible to each other, and to some known ray at the end of the
scale.” For Adams, this experience was representative, like all the others recounted
in the Education; and it was also seminal. All, he felt now, was a delirium of change.
For the centripetal cultural energies of a female age, at once gentler and more
energetically powerful, had been substituted the centrifugal forces focused and
figured in the dynamo. A sense of being in the world, with substance, meaning,
and power, Adams believed and argued here, had been replaced by a feeling of
merely surviving in a world over which we have marginal control and of which
we enjoy minimal knowledge. Adams can be faulted on particular issues. His
reverence for the past, American or medieval, can be excessively uncritical. There
may be some intellectual imposture in his utopian notion of the age of ascendancy
for Catholicism; there is certainly some posturing in his accounts of his spiritual
trials. But his two major works are masterly innovations, extravagantly humble,GGray_c03.indd 292ray_c 03 .indd 292 8 8/1/2011 7:54:24 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 24 AM