The Many Faces of the Many and the One - William Merrill Decker

Titre: The Many Faces of the Many and the One - William Merrill Decker
Créateur: William Merrill Decker
extracted text: THE MANY FACES OF THE MANY AND THE ONE

William Merrill Decker, Ph.D.
Oklahoma State University / Regents Professor

Over the course of his long career, Henry Adams produced thousands of pages
across a wide spectrum of literary genres. His bibliography rivals those of Mark Twain
and Henry James, the more celebrated figures of his literary generation. Asked to name
a single title as Adams’s magnum opus, the Adams specialist would undoubtedly cite
the nine-volume History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889-1891), an achievement historians continue to honor for
its depth of research and narrative refinement. Nevertheless, along with his many books,
essays, and letters chronicling six decades of day-to-day life, the History is not nearly as
well known as the one title that attained best-seller status: The Education of Henry Adams
(completed in 1907 but published posthumously in 1918). If this single item can overshadow a multi-volume historical narrative, how much more it must eclipse the short but critically important volume that serves as the centerpiece of our 2023 colloquium: Memoirs
of Ariitaimai (1901).
Readers who have any familiarity with Adams are likely to know only the Education
and to have focused their attention on the two chapters that most frequently appear in
anthologies: “Quincy” and “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” both of which advance unity and
multiplicity as Adams’s signature theme. In this essay I address that theme as it relates to
Adams’s South Pacific sojourn. In doing so I explore the ethos by which the unity-seeking
Adams established bonds with a multiple human world, and I speak to Ariitaimai’s role
in deepening those bonds. My aim is twofold: to rescue Adams and his reader from his
fixation with the need to unify, a compulsion that arises from epistemological panic and
that leads to reductive rather than expansive views of the world, and to underscore the
centrality of Tahiti and the Teva clan in his celebration of a life-affirming human plurality.
Seduced by the multiple, Adams is always at his best.
159

Adams acquired his unity fixation honestly enough. As the descendent of two
United States presidents, the first of whom participated directly in the nation’s founding,
he was aware from childhood of the divisiveness that characterized American politics. As
a student in Boston’s Latin School, he might well have been asked to parse the national
motto, E pluribus unum, whose thirteen letters represent the original colonies (pluribus,
or many) forming the one nation (unum). Just after Adams graduated from Harvard University, he would see that nation dissolve and the country plunge into civil war. By the light
of his youthful experience, then, disunity is contention, conflict, chaos. It is no wonder
that in the Education’s first chapter, Adams identifies the quest for unity as a categorical imperative: “From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always
been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy,
science, art, politics, and economy.”136 In context, however, Adams subjects this statement
to sharp qualification: as emphatically as he underscores the need for unity, he exalts the
multiplicity of idyllic Quincy, the family’s summer residence, with its abundance of natural sensation, and he recalls the child’s abhorrence of school discipline imposed on summer freedom: “a boy’s will is his life,” Adams writes, “and he dies when it is broken” (731).
The boy’s will, in the broader reach of Adams’s writing, is one that delights in color, texture,
and the allure of daily living. “Winter was always the effort to live; summer was tropical
license” (728) he observes, and the latter phrase resonates with his memory of the South Pacific. As a man, and particularly as a traveler, Adams let himself be absorbed in the
phenomenology of the passing moment. As he formulates the unity/multiplicity binary,
he acknowledges the pervasive duality of life and does so as an individual whose life and
selfhood are themselves irreducibly multiple.
The multiplicity of Henry Adams is visible in the Education’s narrative premise—
his decision to tell his life story in the third person, substituting “he” for “I.” Adams writes
about himself as though he were already a deceased person, establishing unity in the fiction of a completed life, even as his living intellect wrestles with future possibilities. We
see that restless intellect in the book’s most famous chapter, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,”
which combines an aspirational “scientific history” with something more like “lyric history”: an impressionistic historiography that seeks resolution in metaphor—specifically,
the Virgin/Dynamo dyad. Adams’s adventure in lyric history had come to full flower in
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904), predecessor to The Education of Henry Adams. In
these two books, often referred to as his late masterworks, Adams invokes the Virgin or,
alternatively, the Eternal, Primitive, or Archaic Woman, as one of two unifying forces in
human experience. How Adams, the product of a Calvinist, patriarchal culture, acquires a
reverence for this transcultural matriarchal figure requires close consideration of his re-

136 Democracy, Esther, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, The Education of Henry Adams, edited by Ernest Samuels and Jayne N. Samuels (New York: Library of America, 1983), 731. Subsequent citations are provided in text.

160

lationships to and perception of women, and it is here, after a little more context-setting,
that we will turn our attention to the South Pacific and those passages in his letters from
Tahiti where he writes of Ariitaimai as a living, breathing, and magnetic presence.
The women in Adams’s life are a well-known matter of biography.137 His celebrated
great-grandmother, Abigail Adams, died twenty years before Henry was born, but lived on
in the family circle as a strong mythic figure. His grandmother, Louisa Catherine Johnson
Adams, an elderly personage whose delicacy and resilience fascinated the child Henry,
appears in the Education’s opening chapter as a subtly formative personality. Of his difficult and needy mother, Abigail Brooks Adams, Henry has little to say, but his sister, Louisa,
to whom he was much attached, assumes a pivotal role in the Education. Adams provides
a glimpse of Louisa’s character in recounting her daring excursion to the Alps during the
Austro-Prussian War. Having crossed from the Italian frontier into Austrian-held territory, she is able to charm the sentries into allowing the party (which includes her brother,
Henry) to continue their journey: “the eternal woman,” as Adams refers to his sister in this
scene, “[…] when she is young, pretty, and engaging, had her way” (799). But Louisa features more climactically in the Education as the victim of an accidental puncture wound
and, in her excruciating death from tetanus, Adams’s first crushing experience of bereavement: “For the first time,” Adams writes of the shock of Louisa’s death in the prime of
life, “the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked,
vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting,
and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect” (983). In its invocation of an evolutionary process beset by inexplicable catastrophe,
this passage is key to practically everything Adams ever wrote, and we will come back to
it later for what it contributes to our understanding of the “unity and multiplicity” theme. For now, it suffices to focus on the phrase “for the first time.” The loss of Louisa had
its sequel in the death of Adams’s wife Marian Hooper Adams, who took her own life on
December 6, 1885, while Henry was in the middle of writing the History. The Education
makes no mention of Marian, known familiarly as “Clover,” and it does not need to because
the terrible death of the brilliant Louisa serves as proxy.
Louisa and Clover Adams exemplify for Adams the “highly civilized,” “modern” woman of Adams’s Anglo-American generation. So too do Madeleine Lee and Esther Dud137 Biographical treatment of Henry Adams and the women in his life is extensive. See Ernest Samuels, The
Young Henry Adams (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), Henry Adams: The Middle Years (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1958), and Henry Adams: The Major Phase (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964);
Eugenia Kaledin, The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981); Edward Chalfant, Both Sides of the Ocean: A Biography of Henry Adams. His First Life, 1838-1862 (Hamden: Archon Books,
1982), Better in Darkness: A Biography of Henry Adams. His Second Life, 1862-1891 (Hamden: Archon Books, 1994),
Improvement of the World: A Biography of Henry Adams. His Last Life, 1891-1918 (Hamden: Archon Books, 2001);
Arline Boucher Tehan, Henry Adams in Love: The Pursuit of Elizabeth Sherman Cameron (New York: Universe Books,
1983); Natalie Dykstra, Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2012);
David S. Brown, The Last Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams (New York: Scribner Books, 2020).

161

ley, the protagonists of his two novels. In his characterization of the contemporary white
upper-class American woman, real and imaginary, we see brilliant individuals struggling
to achieve personal identity as well as fulfill conventional expectations of marriage and
childbearing. They offer the image of a highly evolved but impaired womanhood that
contrasts with the pre-modern woman Adams would see in various incarnations, including Ariitaimai. Democracy (1880) and Esther (1885), both of which predate Clover’s suicide,
explore the dilemma faced by gifted women who seek definition beyond that of wife and
mother. In Democracy, Madeleine Lightfoot Lee finds little meaning in her luxurious Manhattan life following the deaths of her husband and child, and as a young, sophisticated,
newly single woman in need of distraction she moves to the nation’s capital to observe
the workings of what at the time is an exclusively male federal government. Attracting the
attention of a powerful United States senator, she briefly considers assenting to his marriage proposal before learning the truth of his corrupt and cynical character. The novel
ends with her retreat to a life of solitude and celibacy. In Esther, the daughter of a wealthy
New York physician is courted by a prominent Anglican minister with whom, in theory,
she should form an ideal alliance, but Esther declines his proposal in accordance with her
unshakeable agnosticism. Both protagonists are marked by bereavement: Madeleine by
the loss of husband and infant, Esther by the death of her father, the trauma of which eerily foreshadows the trauma Clover would experience in the loss of her father, Dr. Robert
Hooper, an event that no doubt contributed to the severe depression that preceded her
suicide. Scholars and biographers of Henry and Clover Adams have identified striking parallels between Clover, Madeleine, and Esther. Like Clover, both fictional characters possess a critical intelligence that clashes with patriarchal expectations of women. Both, like
Clover, must bear the stigma of childlessness.
“The American woman at her best,” Adams writes in the Education, “[…] exerted
great charm […] but not the charm of a primitive type. She appeared as the result of a long
series of discards, and her chief interest lay in what she had discarded” (1126). Through
the evolutionary process that produced the American woman in her white, Protestant,
upper-class presentation, she had, in Adams’s view, chiefly discarded motherhood in her
effort to follow what were then considered male intellectual callings. In keeping with his
era’s fundamentally binary gender expectations, Adams assesses the women of his cohort as a peculiar combination of strength and deficiency: they exhibit moral rectitude,
emotional depth, intellectual capacity, and strong personality, but also, very pointedly, an
inability to perform, as women, in the assigned social and biological roles. Dissatisfied as
they may be by their relegation to those roles, their failure to achieve motherhood weighs
heavily upon them, although the dysfunction, Adams observes, is not theirs alone.
For the men of his cohort, in his estimation, are similarly impaired. “The scientific mind is atrophied,” he writes in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (“scientific” and “male”
being virtually synonymous), “and suffers under inherited cerebral weakness, when it co162

mes in contact with the eternal woman—Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last
and greatest deity of all, the Virgin” (523). Here, as in the previous quotation, the “primitive,” “eternal,” “archaic” woman is the benchmark of vibrant human capacity. Her vitality is incomprehensible to the overcivilized European male, detached as he has become
from sexuality and procreative function. In “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” Adams critiques
his polite culture’s repressive attitudes toward the human body, its perception of sex as
scandal and its sublimation of eros in sentiment. In the fictional Madeleine and Esther, he
depicts female figures whose sexual and reproductive power is suffocated under genteel
convention. In both Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and the Education, Adams exalts the
Virgin as an apotheosis of sexuality and reproductive capacity. By contrast, as “highly evolved” types, the contemporary white upper-class male and female have discarded a biological but also a spiritual viability. They have become emotionally unavailable, and paralysis has overtaken their capacity to express affection.
On both sides of the Atlantic, social theorists had advanced the thesis that those
same Europeans who had produced Western Civilization and colonized the world had
entered a racial death spiral signaled by such evidence as hair loss, tooth decay, alcoholism, but most tellingly a decline in birth rate.138 Adams readily subscribed to the view that
white people like himself manifested a progressive physical decline whereas non-Europeans, if not annihilated by the European colonizer, demonstrated a more robust and
generative physical constitution. His dissatisfaction with the Anglo-American woman
and doubts about his own sexual and procreative viability led to his fetishizing not only
of what he imagines as the strong, fecund woman of prior European generations but also
of non-European women. For Adams and other theorists dabbling speculatively in genetics, non-Europeans retained the health and vitality of a mythic early humanity and
exerted “archaic” powers of social integration. In line with Enlightenment-era models
that propose all human societies to have evolved through the same stages, Adams in his
travels examined non-European people (such as indigenous Polynesians) as clue to the
character of his own Western predecessors: hence, in the letters he writes from the South Pacific, we see recurrent comparisons of Samoan and Tahitian natives to the Greeks
of the Homeric period.139 Looking more closely for the “primitive and archaic” among his
Anglo-Norman ancestors, he identifies the ascendency of the Virgin in France as the last
sustained instance in his own genealogy of the pre-modern woman’s appearance in a Eu138 See such works as Charles Henry Pearson’s National Life and Character: A Forecast (1893) and Brooks Adams’s The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History (1896).
139 For a lucid exploration of stadialism especially as manifested in nineteenth-century American literature,
see George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Chapter 3.
In his diary letters from Samoa and Tahiti, Adams frequently likens native men and women to figures of Greek
antiquity. In a letter to Clarence King dated April 22, 1891, from Moorea, he suggests that Polynesian cultures
must predate by many generations the human evolutionary stage represented by the Homeric epics. See Letters
of Henry Adams (6 volumes), edited by J. C. Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee, and Viola Hopkins
Winner (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982/1988), 3:462-468. Subsequent citations to Letters of Henry
Adams are provided in text.

163

ropean culture as well as the last moment of a social unity founded on the model of the
nuclear and extended family, allegorized in a vision of a harmonious cosmos materially
expressed in the gothic cathedral. In Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Adams celebrates
that moment while also identifying it as a threshold beyond which theological, philosophical, and scientific inquiry, driven by men and culminating in the European Enlightenment, set the West on a course in which no model of unity could thereafter contain the
proliferating ways of knowing and experiencing the world. As he contemplated Europe’s
escalating rivalries and increasing stockpiles of military ordnance, he rightly concluded
that no organic vision of oneness could prevent the great imperial powers from applying
such knowledge toward acquisitive and destructive ends.
Adams’s extensive travels in the non-western world following his completion of
the History figure as a critical incubation period for both Mont Saint Michel and Chartres
and the Education. The letters Adams wrote from the South Pacific document alternating
intervals of rapture and boredom as well as distress over his confusing relationship with
Elizabeth Cameron, a married woman twenty years his junior with whom he had long
been enamored, the recipient of his most detailed and intimate letters. Along with his
friend, the artist John La Farge, Adams had embarked on his Polynesian adventure full
of preconceptions concerning the erotic expressiveness and permissive sexuality of native women, and as spectators of the Siva in Samoa, Adams and La Farge had indulged in
the agonized pleasure of middle-aged white male voyeurism—agonized because, more
than any other experience, viewing the display of young, scantily-dressed, brown female
bodies confirmed Adams’s suspicion that he was no longer a candidate for anything like
physical contact with other human beings. A short, bald, self-shaming older man with a
body racked by age-related pains, Adams felt mortified by the spectacle of tall, lithe, beautiful figures—“Naked to the waist, their rich skins glistened with cocoanut oil” (3:291)—he
encountered in the South Pacific. By the time he and La Farge arrived in Tahiti, Adams had
largely tired of their excursion, yet it was here, after several weeks, that both men succeeded in forging genuine cross-cultural human relationships. Ariitaimai, her daughter
Marau, and son Tati, offered the American travelers their one opportunity to establish something other than observational contact with indigenous Polynesia. As offspring of a Tahitian mother and an English father, Marau and Tati (along with their brothers and sisters)
provided access to their historic Tahitian first family, the Tevas, and as their friendship
developed Marau and Tati facilitated formal adoption of Adams and La Farge into the
clan, a process that could only proceed with Ariitaimai’s wholehearted approval. Adams
must certainly have been aware that Tati Salmon sought favor with the wealthy Americans who had entered their isolated social sphere, but he regarded adoption into the Teva
clan, along with his adoptive name, Taura-atua i Amo, as a great personal honor, and as
acknowledgement on the part of a noble family of his own patrician standing.

164

Much as Henry Adams took to Marau and Tati, he developed a profounder regard
and deeper affection for Ariitaimai. What was it about the contact between a rich, aging,
white widower beset by grief and exhaustion, adrift in the tropics with fixed notions as
to the nature of non-Europeans, and, on the other, an elderly native Tahitian woman, the
widowed mother of nine children fathered by a Jewish Englishman, that marks an epoch
in Adams’s life and work? Why did the nonwestern, non-English-speaking Hinarii seated
on her mat exert such power over a man who entered the South Pacific with the presumption and arrogance of the white colonist if also a recognition of the degree to which European imperialism had disrupted indigenous life? What, finally, was it about Ariitaimai that
inspired him to take on an exceedingly challenging literary project, the complicated narrative genealogy that comes down to us as Memoirs of Ariitaimai, a work in which Adams
lends his own highly idiosyncratic voice to the Teva matriarch?
My answers to these questions are partly speculative but stem from the observation that something nearly unprecedented occurs in those passages of Adams’s letters
where he describes his interactions with the Tevas. Upon first arriving in Tahiti, Adams is
not at all charmed by what he sees in Papeete: a port of call in which an indigenous culture
is even more disrupted than what he had witnessed in Samoa. He complains of boredom
and restlessness. He is eager to be on his way to Fiji, India, and thence to Paris where he
anticipates reuniting with Elizabeth Cameron. But his foul mood rapidly dissipates as he
meets and almost instantly forms attachments with Marau and Tati, the English-speaking,
worldly, younger-generation Tevas, whose mother enigmatically and magically presides
in the background. Formal adoption of Adams and La Farge quickly follows, and Adams
refers to Marau as his sister, Tati as his brother, and their mother, Hinarii (Ariitaimai), as
“our grandmother.” Although he cannot exchange words directly with Hinarii, and must
rely on Marau to serve as interpreter, he forms a reverence and affection for her, and they
cultivate a rapport that has no parallel in Adams’s life and work. To his credit, Adams recognized that Ariitaimai possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the history and folkways
of Tahiti in urgent need of transcription, but his response to her far exceeds imperatives
of historic preservation. In the following passage, Adams exhibits a capacity for intimacy
rarely witnessed in any of his writing:
“The dear old lady has been quite unwell. The other evening I was taken in to
see her, and found her sitting on her mat on an inner verandah. When I sat
down beside her, she drew me to her and kissed me so affectionately that
the tears stood in my eyes. She was looking very badly, but it is better now;
all right, I hope. Marau gave us a feast yesterday at Faaa, and I was only sorry
that the old lady could not be there. La Farge is not in love with her as I am;
he takes more to Marau and the girls; but I think Hinarii is worth them all.”
(3:477)

165

Readers of the Education might see in this passage a foreshadowing of Adams’s
affectionate reminiscence of his grandmother Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams, but no
such kiss plays any part in Adams family bonding rituals; almost nowhere in Adams’s writing, even in the novels which are purportedly love stories, do we see physical expressions
of love. Rarely does he portray himself as someone who sheds tears. Here is another passage in which Adams details Ariitaimai’s ability to access his emotional core. It is the eve
of his departure:
“[…] we had a gay breakfast; but I cared much less for the gaiety than I did
with the parting with the dear old lady, who kissed me on both cheeks—after
all she is barely seventy, va!—and made us a little speech, with such dignity
and feeling, that though it was in native, and I did not understand a word of
it, I quite broke down. I shall never see her again, but I have learned from her
what the archaic woman was.” (3:485)
Adams concedes far more than he generally does in such phrases as “I quite broke
down,” yet (and here we return to the unity and multiplicity theme) he is quick to contain
his emotional response to the human multiple (Ariitaimai) in the cerebral unity of the abstract concept (“I have learned from her what the archaic woman was”). In writing Memoirs
of Ariitaimai, he would set himself to the task of establishing a genealogical sequence that
clarifies and honors the Teva lineage and that foregrounds Ariitaimai as the heroic figure
who brokered a measure of peace in a world shattered by European incursion. In the Memoirs she is at once the instance and the abstract concept. In the letters, however, Ariitaimai is first and foremost a person who radiates love that language is powerless to dilute.
“Historians undertake to arrange sequences,” Adams observes in the Education,
“[…] assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect” (1068). Any such sequence proposes that we understand human experience as a coherent, cause-driven, evolutionary
progression, but what evolves must also devolve: high achievement is followed by unmaking, whether we are speaking of a nation, a culture, or a species. In his later years, preoccupied by a modern world riven by intensified conflict, Adams strove to formulate a law
of devolution: a coherent way to understand the destructive multiplicity he experienced
in the first shock of bereavement: “the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in
a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.” The
single formulation that he finally settled upon was the second law of thermodynamics,
also known as the principle of entropy: the oneness of universal death.140 Very much in
character, Adams offers multiple visions even of death—violent, agonizing, traumatic
death, such as he witnessed in the demise of Louisa and Clover, and such as the wars of
140 See especially A Letter to American Teachers of History collected in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, edited by Brooks Adams (1919. Reprint. New York: Peter Smith, 1949).

166

the modern era must massively bring, or easeful death, tidings of which he felt in the exquisite atmosphere of Tahiti surrounded by his adoptive family.141 As the title of this essay
suggests, there are many faces of the many and the one to be found in Henry Adams’s writing, but for Adams the most enduring, emotionally persuasive, and life-affirming unity
remained that of the family centered in the mother: agent of multiplicity. In Tahiti, and
in Ariitaimai, Adams reports that he “learned what the archaic woman was,” but he more
convincingly attests to having felt at last the unifying power of the family kiss.

Works Cited
Adams, Henry, Democracy, Esther, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, The Education of
Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels and Jayne N. Samuels, New York, Library of
America, 1983.
Adams, Henry, The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J. C. Levenson, et al., Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1982/1988, Vol. 1-6.
Additional references are featured in the footnotes.

Abstract
“Historians undertake to arrange sequences,” Henry Adams observes in The Education of Henry Adams, “assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect.” He thereby lays
the groundwork for the special thesis of “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” the much-anthologized chapter that outlines the rupture of sequence Adams identifies as a hallmark of modernity. To arrange a sequence is to exert a measure of epistemological control, to forge
a unity from disparate parts, and to allay the panic that stems from recognition that the
forces that drive collective experience play fast and loose with our systems of knowledge.
In Chapter 1, Adams had affirmed the seeking of unity as a categorical imperative: “From
cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always
be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics,
and economy.” By the end of the book, however, the best he can propose are alternative
if necessary fictions of unity, those that align with the Virgin carrying, for him, the most
weight—as consolation if not as “truth.” In this paper, accordingly, I probe the symbolic
value of the sequence Adams arranges in the Memoirs of Ariitaimai as well as the affective
unity he sought in the transcultural appearance of what he calls “the eternal woman,” of
whom Ariitaimai figures as avatar. Beneath the symbolism Adams the widower contrived
141 To Elizabeth Cameron, 19 April 1891, from Opunohu Bay, Moorea, Adams writes: “Taïti is lovely; the
climate is perfect; we have made a sort of home here; and I shall never meet another spot so suitable to die in.
The world actually vanishes here” (3:459).

167

to assuage his bereavement and grief, and beneath the caste-consciousness he constantly invoked to support a tenuous self-esteem, this paper will seek to recover the essential
human contact a vulnerable and humbled Adams achieved among the Tevas and, most
of all, with Ariitaimai herself, as he wandered “over the dark purple ocean, with its purple
sense of solitude and void.”
William Merrill Decker is Regents Professor of English at Oklahoma State University.
He has held visiting positions at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Fulbright) and Universität Paderborn (DAAD). His books on Henry Adams include The Literary Vocation of
Henry Adams (1990) and Henry Adams and the Need to Know (2005), coedited with Earl
N. Harbert. He is also the author of Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before
Telecommunications (1998), Kodak Elegy: A Cold War Childhood (2012), Geographies of
Flight: Phillis Wheatley to Octavia Butler (2020), and Writing Distance: Genres of Travel
and Separation (forthcoming).

Résumé
« Les multiples facettes du grand nombre et de l’unique »
Ainsi que l’écrit Henry Adams dans son ouvrage The Education of Henry Adams,
« les historiens se chargent d’arranger les séquences en supposant en silence l’existence
d’une relation de cause à effet ». Il jette ainsi les bases de la thèse spécifique du chapitre
« The Dynamo and the Virgin » (« La dynamo et la Vierge »), chapitre d’anthologie qui décrit la rupture de séquence qu’Adams considère comme étant une marque de modernité.
Organiser une séquence, c’est appliquer une mesure de contrôle épistémologique, c’està-dire reconstruire une unité à partir de parties disparates afin d’apaiser le sentiment
de panique qui émerge de la prise de conscience du fait que les forces qui gouvernent
l’expérience collective ne ménagent aucunement nos systèmes de connaissance. Dans le
chapitre 1, Adams affirme que la recherche de l’unité est un impératif catégorique : « Du
berceau à la tombe, ce souci de rétablir l’ordre naturel à travers le chaos, de la direction
à travers l’espace, de la discipline par la liberté, de l’unité par la multiplicité, a toujours
été, et doit toujours être, la tâche de l’éducation, comme elle est la morale de la religion,
de la philosophie, de la science, de l’art, de la politique et de l’économie ». À la fin du livre,
cependant, il n’a guère mieux à proposer que des fictions alternatives, si nécessaires,
pour atteindre l’unité, celles qui s’inscrivent dans la lignée de la Vierge, figure qui revêt,
selon lui, la plus grande importance—comme consolation si ce n’est comme « vérité ».
Ainsi, dans le présent document, j’évalue la valeur symbolique de la séquence qu’Adams
construit dans les Mémoires de Ariitaimai ainsi que l’unité affective qu’il recherchait dans
la présence transculturelle de ce qu’il appelle « la femme éternelle », dont Ariitaimai est
l’incarnation. Sous le symbolisme, le veuf qu’était Adams est parvenu à apaiser son deuil
168

et son chagrin, et, sous la conscience de caste qu’il invoquait constamment afin de préserver un sentiment précaire d’estime de soi, cet article cherchera à retrouver le contact
humain essentiel qu’un Adams vulnérable et humble a atteint parmi les Teva et, surtout,
au contact de Ariitaimai elle-même, tandis qu’il errait « sur l’océan pourpre foncé, avec
son sens pourpre de solitude et de vide ».
Professeur de chaire en anglais à l’Université d’État de l’Oklahoma, William Merrill
Decker a enseigné au titre d’allocataire d’une bourse Fulbright à l’Université catholique de
Louvain et à l’Université Paderborn (DAAD) en Allemagne. Ses ouvrages sur Henry Adams
comprennent The Literary Vocation of Henry Adams (1990) ainsi que Henry Adams and
the Need to Know (2005), coédité avec Earl N. Harbert. Il est également l’auteur de Epistolary
Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications (1998), Kodak Elegy: A
Cold War Childhood (2012), Geographies of Flight: Phillis Wheatley to Octavia Butler (2020)
et Writing Distance: Genres of Travel and Separation (à paraître).

169

170

Fait partie de The Many Faces of the Many and the One - William Merrill Decker