Modern Nervousness: Henry Adams, George Beard, and the Symptoms of Historical Change

TIMOTHY MELLEY Modern Nervousness: Henry Adams, George Beard, and the Symptoms of Historical Change The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appeats. Antonio Gramsci Not long after Henry Adams ended his term as its editor, the North American Review published Dr. George Beard's "English and American Physique," one of the many papers that would eventually comprise American Nervousness (1881), Beard's popular treatise on neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion. All of Beard's work is nervous about nervousness, but none of it so much as American Nervousness, which asserts that "modern civilization" has caused a "very rapid increase of nervousness" in America (vi). Initially, Beard argues that nervousness is caused primarily by the proliferation of five things: "steampower , the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women" (vi). The fact that "the mental activity of women" could end up in this list of technological and discursive shifts requires an astonishing leap to which I will later return. Equally bizarre is the way this rather short list of causes begins to grow as Beard attempts to account more rigorously for the rise of neurasthenia. By the end of American Nervousness, he has enumerated scores of secondary and tertiary causes, and eventually this proliferation itself seems to strike him. "More than all, perhaps," he says, is "the heightening and extending complexity of modern education in and out of schools and universities, Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 1, Spring 2003 Copyright © 2003 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 61 o 6oTimothy Melíe;y the inevitable effect of the tise of modern science and the expansion of history in all its btanches" (99-100). What Beard finds truly nervewracking , in other words, is the proliferation of knowledge or discourse itself—a proliferation his own work not only augments, but actually imitates in its endless, quasi-mechanical inventory of causes. It would be hard to find a more thoughtful or sustained expression of this anxiety than The Education ofHenry Adams, Adams' autobiographical attempt to understand the breakneck modernization of the late nineteenth century.1 Like Beard, Adams expresses concern about the increasing tendency of women to enter the workforce. He also worries about the "rapid increase" of new technologies across America. "The railways alone," he complains, "approached the carnage of war; automobiles and fire-arms ravaged society, until an earthquake became almost a nervous relaxation" (1 172). But such technological changes are not nearly as troubling to Adams as is the potential difficulty of ordering and explaining them in an historical narrative. "In 1867," Adams writes, the historian entered "a universe of unities and uniformities. In 1900 he entered a far vaster universe, where all the old roads ran about in evety direction, overrunning, dividing, subdividing, stopping abruptly, vanishing slowly, with side-paths that led nowhere, and sequences that could not be proved" (1085). Adams' narrative of the fall from nineteenth -century "unity" to twentieth-century "complexity," "multiplicity " (1083), and "chaos" (1132) is the organizing principle of both the Education and the two-volume project it completes (the first volume of which is Mont St. Michel and Chartres). This narrative structure and the anxieties it represents are symptomatic of late nineteenth-century attempts to represent modernization and modernity.2 Like Beard, Adams is not only worried that the world is spinning out of control, but that he will no longer be able to reduce its transformations to a clear and uniform sequence—a history. In the pages to follow, I want to trace the outlines of this epistemological anxiety through The Education and very briefly through American Nervousness. By juxtaposing the enduring figure of Adams with a debunked neurologist and entrepreneur I do not mean to equate their work or even to suggest they were fellow-travelers. Rather, I hope to illustrate the widespread popularity of a particular conception of modernization and its social consequences. One of the most interesting features of this conception, I will suggest, is the way it disrupts its own Modem Nervousness6 1 description. As Adams and Beard attempt to explain the social effects...