as familiar as it is alarming (Fisher 2004 ). One imagines, furthermore, that few
readers, in the USA or elsewhere, would Wnd that narrative surprising. If
Americans were willing to use satanic rebellion to identify themselves in the
months after the signing of the Declaration, why not now? But the language of
crusades and satanic rebellion does not serve non-American audiences any
better than it serves American ones.
The exceptionalist attempt to sum up the ‘‘essential American soul’’ is
pervasive enough that attempting just to move beyond it is insuYcient.
American exceptionalism (as Smith’s attempt at tracing multiple traditions
reminds us) is too central to American political thought to be eradicated
through legal or conceptualWat. American exceptionalism can no more be
eradicated than novelistic genres like the detective story or the romance can
be. We may alter its form—as an audience weWnd particular variations more
or less compelling. But the narrative itself is the favorite form of American
national autobiography, a bildungsromanwhose protagonist must achieve
unique and persuasive narrative purity, no matter what the cost. Perhaps,
then, another kind of bildungsromanmight point us the way to a more
skeptical reading of exceptionalism.
The Education of Henry Adams is a very diVerent form of American
autobiography, an attempt by the descendant of two American presidents
to understand himself and his role in a nation utterly transformed by civil
war. Adams insists repeatedly that he does not wish to critique or attack the
‘‘new’’ United States; he merely wants toWnd his place in it. His autobiog-
raphy is essentially a record of his failed attempts—spanning a life that he
insists was shaped for the eighteenth century, and that, therefore, partakes of
three ‘‘American centuries’’—toWnd out what the nation is about, and what
his place in it should be. By the book’s end, Adams is both utterly familiar
with most of the narratives of American identity and alienated from them.
Indeed, this alienation is central to the perspective of the book—the author
insists upon referring to himself in the third person throughout, he writes an
introduction in the name of another man, and he tells the reader in the book’s
preface that he is only a mannequin. This perspective on American identity,
while problematic, is far better, I argue, than Smith’s exhortation that Ameri-
cans redouble their rational love for their country. Adams is alienated but
familiar, utterly conversant with the diVerent narratives of Americanness
without ever being wed to any of them. Adams is not an ideal model. Leaping
over twenty years in his autobiography, he hides from the things heWnds
most painful, and this is hardly an adequate policy for democratic citizens.
294 ronald j. schmidt, jr.