Henry Adams Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres:

Sex as a Source of Force and Unity in History.

Unpublished Manuscript
Harvard University
August 10th, 1998

Henry Adams, the well-known historian, autobiographer and cultural critic,

wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres which Oscar Cargill claims to be one of the
most eloquent tributes to the power of Woman ever penned by man. For whatever
she may have meant to the thirteenth century, and whatever she continues to mean
to the devout, the Virgin symbolized for Adams Woman enthroned (565). This deep
interest in Woman is peculiar for a man with a Puritan background writing in
America around the end of the nineteenth century. However, we know that Adams
had taught medieval history at Harvard and he would have been particularly
interested in the forces which shaped the history and society of this time. Also,
Adams use of women as protagonists in his novels Democracy and Esther clearly
shows that he was interested in a Womans force when confronted with science,
politics and religion.
Adams believes one of the greatest forces in history is sex; much similar to
the forces of law, nature and faith. His first systematic study of the Gothic
architecture of Normandy cathedrals and Saint-Mont-Michel in 1895 led him to
compare the force of the Virgin which inspired this architecture to the force of the
dynamo to which he was introduced while visiting the Paris Exposition in 1900
(Adams, 1214). Adams preferred the formers familiarity which not only stimulated
his intellectual curiosity but led him to make a serious study of the force of sex in
history about which he wrote in The Education of Henry Adams:
Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the
western world had ever felt, and had drawn mans activities to herself
more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had
ever done; the historians business was to follow the track of the
energy; to find where it came from and where it went to; its complex
source and shifting channels; its values, equivalents, conversions. It
could hardly be more complex than radium; it could hardly be
deflected, diverted, polarized, absorbed more perplexingly than other
radiant matter. Adams knew nothing about any of them, but as a
mathematical problem of influence on human progress, though all
were occult, all reacted on his mind, and he rather inclined to think
the Virgin easiest to handle. (1075)
One can begin to understand Adams interest in sex as a source of force when
reflecting on his own tragic life in matters of sex: his childless marriage which led to
his wifes suicide and his lifelong infatuation with a woman twenty years younger
than himself and her child. Also, being a product of the Puritan background into
which he was born and the society in which he lived where sex was never discussed
except in reference to an evil, might help to explain Adams interest in the Virgin and

the importance that sex played in shaping society and history in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries.
Above all, Adams wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres to educate Woman
in the nineteenth century which he refers to his nieces by providing the Virgins
unifying force in medieval times as an example for their own source of force and role
in society (341). He believes that a Womans primal source of force is her maternity.
However, Adams feared that the importance of Womans maternal role was
disregarded in the United States in the nineteenth century. This greatly concerned
Adams who believed that this posed a serious problem to the unity of the family and
ultimately the unity of society. In The Education Adams says:
Of all movements of inertia, maternity and reproduction are the most typical,
and womens property of moving in a constant line forever is ultimate,
uniting history in its only unbroken and unbreakable sequence. Whatever,
else stops, the woman must go on reproducing, as she did in the Siluria of
Pteraspis; sex is a vital condition, and race only a local one. If the laws of
inertia are to be sought anywhere with certainty, it is in the feminine mind.
The American always ostentatiously ignored sex, and American history
mentioned hardly the name of a woman, while English history handled them
as timidly as though they were a new and undescribed species; but if the
problem of inertia summed up the difficulties of the race question, it involved
that of sex far more deeply, and to American vitally. (1123)
/ / /
Cargill writes that Adams makes it clear enough in Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres that he believed it was Mariolatry and not religion which was the great
force in civilizing France in the thirteenth century (Cargill, 567). Mariolatry, which is
the worship of the Virgin grew in such intensity in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries that it bordered heresy since it put the mother above the father and son.
Adams believes the rise in Mariolatry in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is due
to three main reasons: the superiority of women in this time as seen in the rule of
three queens; the omission of the woman in the Trinity; and mans need of her
compassion and accessibility.
Adams explains that up until this time the church centered around the Trinity,
which symbolized unity and imposed the law as a higher paternal entity. However,
man was in need of something human, accessible and compassionate; that could
understand his mortal sins and pain, which he found in the maternal symbol of the
Virgin. He goes on to say:

The Mother alone was human, imperfect, and could love; she alone
was Favor, Duality, Diversity. If the trinity was in essence Unity, the
Mother alone could represent whatever was not Unity; whatever was
irregular, exceptional, outlawed; and this was the whole human race. (584)
Adams believes that another reason for the rise in the Virgin was because women,
particularly at this time, were superior to men as he describes:
The superiority of the woman was not a fancy but a fact. Mans
business was to fight, or hunt, or feast or make love. The man was
also the travelling partner in commerce, commonly absent from home
for months together, while the woman carried on the business. The
woman ruled the household and the workshop; cared for the
economy; supplied the intelligence, and dictated the taste. Her
ascendancy was secured by her alliance with the Church, . (524)
Furthermore, Adams explains that the rise of the Virgin at this time was also due to
the rule of three women: Queen Eleanor of Guienne, Mary of Champagne and
Queen Blanche of Castille, who in turn exerted influence on every aspect of society,
particularly as seen in their influence over fashion, politics and the birth of
courteous love. Women in the thirteenth century dictated the taste in fashion.
Adams cites Orderic:
At this time effeminacy was the prevailing vice throughout the world . They
parted their hair from the crown of the head on each side of the forehead,
and their locks grow long like women, and wore long shirts and tunics, closely
tied with points . In our days, ancient customs are almost all changed for
new fashions . For a hundred and fifty years, the Virgin and Queens ruled
French taste and thought so successfully that the French man has never yet
quite decided whether to be more proud or ashamed of it. (529)
Adams goes on to say that the women of the thirteenth century were so powerful
that they dictated not only fashion but law.
In the twelfth century he [the Frenchman] wanted chiefly to please women,
as Orderic complained; Isolde came out of Britanny to meet Eleanor coming
up from Guienne, and the Virgin from the east; and all united in giving law to
society. In each case it was the woman, not the man who gave the law .
(542)
Adams makes note of the fact that Courteous love was avowedly a form of drama,
but not the less a force of society, a product of the love for Woman in this period;
he writes:

If one has to make an exception, perhaps the passion of love was more
serious than that of religion, and gave to religion the deepest emotion, and
the most complicated one, which society knew. Love was certainly a passion;
and even more certainly it was, as seen in poets like Dante and Petrarch in
Romans like Lancelot and Aucassins in ideals like the Virgin, - complicated
beyond modern conception. (542)
For these reasons the twelfth and thirteenth centuries gave birth to
Mariolatry, whose force in turn, according to Adams, gave birth to human endeavors
of such volume and greatness in honor of the Virgin as never before seen in the
history of mankind. The Virgins force is seen in the power she exerted in the
thought, economy and even warfare of the time. She inspired the religious thought
and writing of prominent religious figures of the time such as Abelard, Saint Bernard
and Thomas Aquinas who worshipped her. She also played a central role in the
economy of the time, as Adams describes it:
The measure of this devotion which proves to any religious American mind,
beyond possible cavil, its serious and practical reality, is the money it cost.
According to statistics, in the single century between 1170 and 1270, the
French built eighty cathedrals and nearly five hundred churches of the
cathedral class, which would have cost, according to an estimate made in
1840, more than five milliards to replace. Five thousand million francs is a
thousand million dollars, and this covered only the great churches of a single
century. The same scale of expenditure had been going on since the year
1000, and almost every parish in France had rebuilt its church in stone; to this
day France is strewed with the ruins of this architecture, and yet the still
preserved churches of the eleventh and twelfth centuries alone, the churches
that belong to the Romanesque and transition periods, are numbered by
hundreds until they reach well into the thousands. The share of this capital
which was, - if one may use a commercial figure, - invested in the Virgin,
cannot be fixed, any more than the total sum given to religious objects
between 1000 and 1300; but in spiritual and artistic sense, it was almost the
whole, and expressed and intensity of conviction never again reached by any
passion, whether of religion, of loyalty, of patriotism, or of wealth; perhaps
never even paralleled by any single economic effort, except war. (428)
Adams also mentions the sacrilegious exploitation of the Virgins force for
military purposes as seen in the crusades:
Most surprising of all, the great military class was perhaps the most
vociferous. Of all inappropriate haunts for the gentle, courteous, pitying
Mary, a field of battle seems to be the worst, if not distinctly blasphemous;
yet the greatest French warriors insisted on her leading them into battle, and
4

in the actual melee when men were killing each other, on every battle-field in
Europe, for at least five hundred years, Mary was present, leading both sides.
(427)
As it is the historians business to follow the track of the energy; to find
where it [comes] from and where it [is going] to; likewise, it is the scholars business
to find the source of Henry Adams energy which inspired the writing of Mont-SaintMichel and Chartres. As Patricia OToole has pointed out: The intensity of his
attraction to a world in which men bowed to women opens the question of his own
submission to the forces of femininity (335).
/ / /
Henry Adams was married to Marian Clover Hooper for thirteen years
before she committed suicide at the age of forty-two, by taking potassium cyanide
from among the chemicals she used to develop her photographs in the dark room of
her home. This tragedy naturally had a profound impact on Henry Adams who had
just published Esther, a novel which many critics say prophesied his wifes death.
Esther is a novel of a woman who closely resembled his wife, Marian, and who in the
end remains isolated after her fathers death and her refusal to marry the man she
loves because she cannot reconcile her love for him with his love for the church.
David Musto believes that Adams, who had predicted his wifes depression after her
fathers impending death, wrote with a therapeutic motive as he would read extracts
of the novel to Marian each night in the hope of giving her strength through the
heroines struggle to cope with her life after death and isolation (279). Katherine
Simonds believes that the novel was so personal so close to his own life, problems
and friends that he gave it the pseudonym Frances Snow Compton in fear that
anyone might find out who it was (569). Many critics have also called it a roman a
clef since the characters clearly represent Adams close friends with the main
character, Esther, modeled on Mrs. Adams (Simonds, 566). However, Adams use of
a pseudonym could also stem from the fact that this genre might have damaged his
reputation as a serious historian, since at that same time he was also working on his
History of the United States during the Administration of Jefferson and Madison.
Deborah Schneider goes so far as to say: Nonetheless, Esther is a memorial
to the intensity of his feelings for Elizabeth Cameron and to his profound
dissatisfaction with his own marriage (71). Catherine Brooke, the orphan girl from
the west in the novel who was fresh as a summer morning, and [whose] complexion
was like the petals of a sweetbrier rose, is believed to have portrayed Elizabeth
Sherman Cameron, called Lizzie, with whom Adams was in love. However, the fact
that Adams was in love with Lizzie does not mean that he did not care for his wife
who suffered from depression: a fact which we know greatly distressed Adams. Six
months before her suicide, Adams attempted to help his wife overcome her
5

depression by changing surroundings. First they went to Old Sweet Springs and then
to their Beverly farm but nothing seemed to help Clover who, as he wrote in his
letter: has been out of sorts for some time. Until she gets well we can do nothing
(Tehan, 85). They returned to Washington by mid-October and went into
seclusion. Arline Boucher Tehan writes, Rebecca Rae, a faithful friend called every
day to cheer her. After one visit, as Henry was showing her out, he thanked her.
For what? she asked. Because you made Clover smile, he said (88). This shows
his intensity of feelings to his wife which explains why Adams wrote to Elizabeth
Cameron: I care more for one chapter, or any dozen pages of Esther, than for the
whole History that I would not let anyone read the story for fear the reader should
profane it (Samuels, 1958, p. 226). Nevertheless, Adams experiment failed since
Marian ended up taking her life anyway, a fact which Adams best dealt with in
silence.
Simonds and Tehan argue that Mrs. Adams suicide was due to many reasons.
Primarily she was going through depression, which was the cause of many suicides in
her own family, and that with the death of her father on April thirteenth, 1885 this
condition became much worse. Also, a major factor to her depression was her
childless marriage which was a constant reminder of her failed and seemingly
purposeless life. She therefore had a greater dependence on her husband whose
pessimistic, cynical attitude towards life and ennui did not provide the support she
needed. Schneider claims that she was probably aware of Henrys infatuation with
Elizabeth Cameron, a woman twenty one years younger than he (80). Tehan believes
that the more intelligent Mrs. Adams was not jealous of Elizabeth Cameron but that
she saw the contrast between themselves. It was not difficult to notice how easily
Elizabeth attracted men with her beauty and charm, including Henry Adams,
whereas Marians intelligence and witty but very often spiteful remarks only won her
respect and fear, not affection and admiration (Tehan, 80-90). Tehan goes on to say
that a critical encounter [which] could have been the final blow to her self-esteem
was the visit Mrs. Adams paid to Mrs. Cameron two days before her death. Seeing
that Elizabeth was well into her pregnancy, the shattering realization that she
would never be a mother nor give her husband a child was more than she could
bear. She committed suicide after writing this note to her sister, Ellen Gurney: If I
had a single point of character or goodness I would stand on that and grow back to
life. Henry is more patient and loving than words can express God might envy him.
he fears and hopes and despairs hour after hour Henry is beyond words tenderer
and better than all of you even. R.P. Blackmur concludes by saying, Sex was the
energy that moved them both, and faith, if it had existed, would have clarified the
energy (304). As Harriet F. Bergman quoted Adams from his Primitive Rights of
Women, the only hope, for Adams, lies in the family, the strongest and healthiest

of all human fabrics (63). Maybe their faith in marriage and a family were lost
with the bitter fact that they could have no children.
This tragedy left Henry Adams disillusioned, lonely and in pain. He was drawn
to the comforting company of Elizabeth Cameron, called La Donna by her close
friends, with whom he was in love and who was also lonely from neglect in her own
marriage. On June 25th, 1886 she had a child which she named Martha. The mother
and child became the center of Henrys emotional and spiritual world as the
embodied Madonna and Child, a symbol which would haunt his imagination and
absorb his study for the rest of his life, leading him to make the pronouncement:
Women are naturally neither daughters, sisters, lovers, nor wives, but mothers
(Tehan, 94). The childless historian was captivated, and he turned his study into a
nursery for her, stocking it with dolls and toys, ginger snaps and chocolate drops
(Tehan, 99). Adams wrote to Lizzie in his later years: As I grow older, I see that all
the human interest and power that religion ever had was in the mother and child
and I would have nothing to do with a church that did not offer them both. There
you are again. You see the thought always turns back to you (Tehan, 290).
Even though Elizabeth Cameron cared deeply for Adams she could never love
him the way he loved her; she would always remain unattainable to the much older
and world-weary, Henry Adams. Realizing the danger to her reputation in his
infatuated pursuit of her she convinced him to go away and in 1890 he traveled
around the world. Their love grew in intensity with the distance that separated
them, as seen in the letters they exchanged during this time. Henry wrote, My only
source of energy is that I am actually starting on a ten thousand mile journey to
you! (Tehan, 119). In 1891, after fourteen months apart, they met again in Paris,
but their meeting was a disappointment when they both realized that the romance
they had been cultivating all these months did not parallel the reality. OTooles
description of their meeting helps us understand:
When Mr. Adams presented himself to Mrs. Cameron in her apartment near
the Champs-Elysees on Sunday, October 11, 1891, he was, as he had
promised at the start of his voyage, wholly white-haired. He was also gaunt
after fourteen months of living on fish and breadfruit, and his travels had cost
him several teeth. Standing before her in his ill-fitting suit, he looked much
older than his fifty-three years. Lizzie, not quite thirty-four, radiated
excitement and self-confidence. (252)
This realization changed Adams stance and their relationship forever. Never again
would Adams openly show such intensity of feelings. Even though they remained
friends and kept contact with each other throughout their lives Adams would now
concentrate all his energy in his travels and work and would love Mrs. Cameron from
afar, as Tehan describes it:
7

From now on he would behave toward Lizzie with the gallantry of a knight in
the age of chivalry about which he would one day write. He would succeed in
mastering the elaborate ritual of courtly love knowing he would never
possess his lady, he would devote his energies and gifts to study and writing.
(131)
Since he recognized that he would never possess La Donna, and since she
would always haunt his imagination, he would gradually learn to sublimate
his passion for her into the literary worship of the Virgin who dominated the
Middle Ages, and this would in turn lead him to write his Mont-Saint-Michel
and Chartres. But since he also knew that life in not worth living unless you
are attached to someone, he would force himself to be content with the only
role that she would allow him that of faithful protector and tame cat. (129)
The women in Adams life were a source of force but also a lot of pain as seen
in their omission from The Education of Henry Adams in which he wrote: Of all
studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew
no tragedy so heartrending as introspection (1114). However, this source of force
is what drove Adams in search of the Virgin with the same scientific accuracy with
which electricity sets a machine in motion, what Ernest Samuels calls the potent
alchemy of unfulfilled love (Gossip, 73).
/ / /
Adams wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres as an education for his nieces
and nieces in wish: the women of the late nineteenth century (341). Oscar Cargill
believes that Adams main message to women was that: if she were to absorb the
lesson of that [the thirteenth] century, she [could] go back to her own country to
create a society, even a matriarchy, which she [could] dominate through her sex
(566).
Henry Adams preferred the unity of the twelfth an thirteenth centuries which
revolved around the Virgin, to the sexless society of the nineteenth century. He
says in The Education of Henry Adams that the force of the Virgin was still felt at
Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays; but in America neither Venus nor
Virgin ever had value as force; -at most as sentiment. No American had ever been
truly afraid of either (1070). This posed a serious question for Adams who could not
understand why a great country like the United States of America had no symbol of
sex as ancient civilizations had had: Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite and the last
and greatest deity of all, the Virgin (523). Adams began to ponder, asking himself
whether he knew of any American artist who had ever insisted on the power of sex,
as every classic had always done; but he could think only of Walt Whitman; Bret

Harte, as far as the magazines would let him venture; and one or two painters, for
the flesh-tones. All the rest had used sex for sentiment, never for force (1072).
Americas sexless society was partly due to the Puritan influence of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of which Adams acknowledges himself to
have been a product, as he explains in The Education:
anyone brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous
age, sex was strength. Neither art nor beauty was needed. Everyone, even
among Puritans, knew that neither Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the
oriental Goddesses was worshipped for her beauty. She was Goddess
because of her force, she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction
the greatest and most mysterious of all energies, all she needed was to be
fecund. (1070)
Adams believes that unlike past societies, nineteenth century America
disregarded the importance of sex and maternity as a unifying force of the family
and society. The woman had lost her primal role in her pursuit to compete, by
imitating man, in a system governed by forces of technology and capitalism. Adams
explains in Primitive Rights of Women:
This was the path of imitation which had been forced on her by the mans
refusal to honor her own sphere and by his complete absorption in the world
of business and machinery. The typical American man had his hand on a
lever and his eye on a curve in his road He could not run his machine and a
woman too, he must leave her, even though his wife, to find her own way by
imitating him. To Adams view, then, modern industrialism and technology
were breaking down, in America faster than elsewhere, the most ancient
element in civilized human life, the family, strongest and healthiest of all
human fabrics. (333)
However, Adams claims this is not necessary, for her equality rests in her
fundamental strength maternity.
Her monopoly of reproduction the greatest and most mysterious of all
energies gave her a claim, through the family, to an equality rooted in
nature. She had but to believe in her own claim, or else become sexless like
the bees in a future reserved for machine-made, collectivist females. (334)
Adams discusses the danger this posed for society in his Primitive Rights and whom
George Hochfield quotes: her superiority to the man had not saved her from taking
a path that threatened not only her own identity but the very existence of society
(333).

Adams believes the family is the strongest institution in society. He also

believes it is the mothers duty to uphold it and keep it together and supports this by
saying: the germ of the future family organization was embodied in the mother, not
the father (Adams, Primitive Rights, 337). Adams says in his Primitive Rights of
Women:
All new discoveries in the record of human development point to the familiar
facts that the most powerful instincts in man are his affections and his love of
property; that on these the family is built; that no other institution can be
raised on the same or on equally strong foundations; that for this reason the
family is the strongest and healthiest of all human fabrics. (360)
However, Adams claims that Woman in the nineteenth century failed to keep
the family and therefore society together as Robert F. Sommer points out when
quoting Adams remark: I admit that the American woman is a failure; that she has
held nothing together, neither State or Church, not Society nor Family (142).
Nevertheless, Adams says in The Education that if a woman were asked why she was
a failure without an instants hesitation, she was sure to answer: - Because the
American man is a failure! She meant it (1124). Adams most likely would have
been referring to mans submission to the forces of capitalism which were growing in
intensity in the United States in the late nineteenth century and which women felt
compelled to follow in order to compete and survive.
Nevertheless, Adams believes that the forces of capitalism had made Woman
a victim not of man or of the church like previous times but of a machine (Adams,
1128). Her exploitation as a source of labor for capitalistic purposes jeopardized not
only her identity, but the unity of the family and society. Adams discusses this in The
Education:
but the American woman had no illusions or ambitions or new resources,
and nothing to rebel against, except her own maternity, yet the rebels
increased by millions from year to year till they blocked the path of rebellion.
Even her field of good works was narrower than in the twelfth century.
Socialism, communism, collectivism, philosophical anarchism, which
promised paradise on earth for every male, cut off the few avenues or escape
which capitalism had opened to the woman, and she saw before her only the
future reserved for machine-made, collectivist females. (1127)
/ / /
Henry Adams wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres in honor of Woman: a
source of force and unity in history. Adams, the autobiographer, obviously was
influenced by his own tragic life: his childless marriage, the loss of his wife and his
10

unfulfilled love with Elizabeth Cameron. Even though the women of Henry Adams
life gave him the energy to study, travel and write about many of the things he did,
their omission from his life played a greater role since they created a void Adams
sought to fill.
Adams, the cultural critic, rebelled against the lack of unity experienced in
nineteenth century society with its negative attitude towards sex which Cargill
believes to have been one of the worst in our history which led him to seek the
Virgin of Chartres (569). Adams longed for unity. He saw how the Virgin had created
unity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries through her sex while this was lost in
the nineteenth century for Woman was becoming sexless like the bees in her
pursuit to attain equality with Man: in the process becoming a victim of a machine
and failing at keeping together, what Adams thought the most important fabric in
society: the family. Cargill believes Adams message to women is simple and clear:
He is at one with the nineteenth century in expecting the Woman to be
fruitful, and there is nothing in all his writing so filled with pain as that line in
his Prayer on the bareness of Protestantism with its inescapable doubleentendre, Ourselves we worship and we have no Son. In this bit of last,
honest self-recrimination is the epitome of Henry Adams. (569)
Adams, the teacher, wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres to educate and empower
his nieces and nieces in wish. As a historian, he found a place in time when Woman
was most venerated to provide a model through which she may understand her true
vital force which lies in her primordial role in sustaining the family which ultimately
and fundamentally shapes history and society.

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