“The End of Art” - ETD - University of Notre Dame

1.3) “Historical Neck Broken”: Adams on Autobiography and History
…his education was chiefly inheritance…
—Henry Adams, (E, 26)
In The Education of Henry Adams, autobiography provides a means of dissecting or
breaking down a self, not of building one up. Autobiography neither reconstructs Adams’s
life nor retrospectively justifies his actions and choices nor rationalizes his limitations nor
apologizes to necessity. In The Education, rather, autobiography is a vehicle for scrutinizing
his experiences while acknowledging at every turn the resistance of those experiences to
complete understanding or “education.” Autobiography becomes a self-reflexive form of
writing insofar as it allows Adams to seek the “forces” (as he calls them) behind his
sensibilities, the reasons why he knows and acts or fails to know and fails to act in the world
in a certain way. For Adams, autobiography is an attempt to wrap his mind around his
inheritance and to grasp how the past determines his present being. Whereas the tendency in
scholarship is to treat autobiography as a purely constructive genre, as if it involved an
elaborate representation of the author’s self, Adams takes autobiography in the opposite
direction. This distinction is made apparent when he cites the seminal autobiography of
Western literature, Rousseau’s Confessions, and says it “erected a warning against the Ego” (E,
xxxviii). For Adams, the virtue of Rousseau is his awareness that a person is largely a
creature of social conditions—which is where autobiography must focus in order to really
understand a person. Just so, at the very outset Adams alerts us that his main concern is not
personal experience, which might be expected from autobiography, but rather the
“education” that provides whatever sense he can make of his life. As he says, “The object of
study is the garment, not the figure. The tailor adapts the manikin as well as the clothes to
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