Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1994 Murderous Historian: Henry Adams, Modernity, and the Problem of Subjectivity. (Volumes I and II). Martha Moseley Regalis Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Regalis, Martha Moseley, "Murderous Historian: Henry Adams, Modernity, and the Problem of Subjectivity. (Volumes I and II)." (1994). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 5700. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/5700 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 MURDEROUS HISTORIAN: HENRY ADAMS, MODERNITY, AND THE PROBLEM OF SUBJECTIVITY VOLUME I A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Martha Moseley Regalis B.A., Clemson University, 1975 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1980 May 1994 ©Copyright 1994 Martha Moseley Regalis All Rights Reserved ii For Fathers and Mothers and Teachers In All of Their Intermingled Identities: John Z. and Elizabeth M. Moseley and Lewis P. Simpson iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation had a complicated genesis in the realms of mind before it ever acquired a physical habitation and a name on paper, and in writing it I have accumulated a special set of debts. The idea for this project occurred to me in a seminar with Lewis P. Simpson as an extension of an earlier study of Emerson's conception of the Logos. My greatest scholarly debt in life is to Professor Simpson, who first acquainted me with the problems of consciousness, modernity, and language that I have begun to address here merely as a footnote to his own monumental achievements as a latter-day humanist and man of letters. Other debts to my teachers at Louisiana State University are of scarcely less weight. James Olney helped me frame my ideas about the evolution— or perhaps dissolution— of the idea of the autonomous self in terms of the traditional canon of life-writing, and has lent both useful admonitions and support to me during the composition of this piece in an infinite variety of ways. His investments, particularly of time and energy as I shaped and edited this project, have ranged far beyond what any student could ask of any teacher. I first tackled the issue of medieval nominalism and the flowering (or blight) that it engendered as it became internalized in the intellectual life of the Reformation, and in Restoration and eighteenth- century English literature with John Fischer, and later iv explored these questions with Aubrey Williams, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Florida. I am immensely grateful to both for their insight and for their endless willingness to explore ideas on these and other topics in conversation. Such exchanges are the breath of academic life, and without them we find ourselves lapsing into the silences of the solipsism that terrified Henry Adams. John R. May first introduced me to the work of Walter Ong, and with Professor May I explored the relationship between the technology of print culture and book-making, and the emergence of modern self-consciousness that is the focus of Adams's view of western intellectual history. Professor May has also been of immense value as a tireless liaison with the Graduate School and the Department of English at LSU since, as Henry Adams tended to be, I am frequently absent instead of present at designated points in physical space and time. Joseph V. Ricapito offered me insights on the picaresque which have informed my own discussion of Adams's mode of narrative in The Education of Henry Adams. Other professors from outside the community at LSU have also been generous with their time and advice. James M. Cox, Avalon Professor of English Emeritus of Dartmouth College, listened as I talked my way toward a shape for my argument at a succession of MLA meetings, and was a continuing source of enthusiasm and inspiration, as well as an example of courage and intellectual integrity. His view of Henry Adams v has colored my own thinking and writing as certainly as his view of teaching and learning has altered my understanding of the life of the scholar. Thanks are also due to Professor Kenneth Surin of the Program in Literature at Duke University for his unfailing generosity with his time, and for his persistent and probing questions which, while daunting, made it easier for me to grapple with the problems of modernity, postmodernism, and the idea of a trans­ personal concept of identity. Professor Ronald G. Witt of the Department of History at Duke helped me chart a path through the complexities of the diffusion of the nominalist view of language in medieval and Renaissance Europe in an NEH summer seminar in 1993. His assistance was invaluable as I picked my way through the tangled history of the view of language that Henry Adams believed to be at the heart of modernity. While we do not always read the Renaissance in identical ways, Professor Witt's rigor and his insistence on precision have helped me clarify my views on any number of issues in early modern intellectual history. Differing from these debts to my teachers, but no less, is my debt to Gregory Boyce Lyon, my former student, who is now a graduate student himself in early modern history at Princeton University. I first read Gilles Deleuze's The Logic of Sense in his company, as he first read Ficino's commentary on Plato's Symposium in mine, and I have found vi that the greatest reward of teaching is that our students become our teachers. Finally, I would like to thank those who supplied help in more material ways. Virginia S. Wilson and William Youngblood, of The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, were a unified source of unfailing encouragement and of release time for trips back to LSU in the early days of my writing and research. Marcelline Barron, Dean of Academic Programs and Research at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, awarded curriculum development grants and travel money which facilitated my research and allowed me to explore my ideas by teaching them in non-traditional courses. The staff at the Massachusetts Historical Society allowed me remarkable freedom of access to Henry Adams's personal library and papers in the summer of 1984. Many of the volumes in his library are extensively annotated, and some are mentioned here. Adams's copies of William James and Henry Maudsley and Karl Marx, as well as his readings on the emerging science of entropy were of crucial importance as he formulated the views of self and history that are the subject of my own study. Reading his annotations in the actual bodily artifacts of his books rather than on microfilm invested my time at the Historical Society with his (appropriately) ghostly presence. Perhaps greater than all of these debts which have to do with the public world and public life are those private vii and nameless ones that I owe to my parents, whose kindness and integrity, and whose generous support have made this rather extended project possible. While living in exile on his farm, Machiaveili once wrote that his greatest pleasure in life came at the moment when he could strip off the muddy clothes of laborer and exchange them for metaphorical robes of state. In this '•graver dress," he wrote, he could enter his study, and visit the "antique courts of the ancients" where he could taste at will the food of mind that seemed to him, as he roamed the historicized and secularized versions of Augustine's courts and palaces of memory, to be his alone.