Henry Adams discussion summary

You all raised a wealth of interesting and important points in class today, and since we didn't have a chance to summarize them at the end of class I wanted to post them on the blog.

What does education mean? You suggested some preliminary answers:
- Formal education: e.g. Latin School, Harvard College, Civil Law study in Berlin
- Facts (“they could have learned from books or discussion in a day more than they could learn from him in a month” [55])
- Experience
- Skills, like technical knowledge (e.g. how to build a railroad: "society dropped every thought of dealing with anything more than the single fraction called a railway system. This relatively small part of its task was still so big as to need the energies of a generation, for it required all the new machinery to be created---capital, banks, mines, furnaces, shops, power-houses, technical knowledge, mechanical population, together with a steady remodeling of social and political habits, ideas, and institutions to fit the new scale and suit the new conditions" [181])
- Emotional knowledge: e.g. his sister’s death (216-218)
- Relevant knowledge or usable knowledge

What genre is this book? How would you classify it?
- Historical? But it doesn’t give us a coherent timeline, and it doesn’t treat the most important historical events of the period. For example, Lincoln’s assassination gets one paragraph (158).
- Autobiographical? But it excludes what most people would consider significant experiences like his wife’s suicide and his younger brother’s death. It doesn’t focus on the protagonist’s emotional or personal growth.
- Scientific or philosophical? Why write it in the form of a 3rd-person narrative rather than a treatise?

The book's generic instability, or resistance to classification, gets at the point several of you made about reading strategies. When you read a text you bring certain assumptions to it (e.g. autobiographies will be about the life and growth of an individual); those assumptions shape your interpretative strategies. What happens when you encounter a text that resists and confounds your expectations? How do you know how to read and interpret it when your old, accustomed methods don't work? That is, what happens when your education fails you? Does this dilemma sound familiar at all? Does it sound a lot like Henry Adams's dilemma?

For next class:

1)Why does Adams write in the 3rd person?

It is extremely important to separate Henry Adams (i.e. the protagonist of The Education of) from the author, Henry Adams. For convenience’s sake we were collapsing the two in class today, but Adams (the writer) actively discourages us from doing that by writing in the 3rd person.

2)Think about Adams’s use of humor and irony.

Here’s just one example (this was in the slide show, but we didn’t get a chance to talk about it): In “The Battle of the Rams” chapter, Adams uses martial language and imagery to describe the diplomatic controversy between his father and the English government (Earl Russell and Lord Palmerston). There was never “a campaign more beautiful” than his time in London in the spring of 1863 (126). He refers to the controversy over the ironclads as “the English campaign” (130) and notes that Minister Adams “would never fight another campaign of life and death like this” (130); it was “a long and desperate struggle” (130). His father sends a note to Russell that ends with “the famous sentence: ‘It would be superfluous in me to point out to your lordship that this is war!’” (129); Henry Adams calls this note “Mr. Adams’s declaration of war” (132). Even the title of the chapter “The Battle of the Rams” is martial, and perhaps alludes to the two battles of BULL Run.

Why would Henry Adams, safe in London while thousands of men his age are fighting and dying in the US, write about this diplomatic controversy using martial language?