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  • The Souls of Henry Adams: Du Boisian Aspects of The Education
  • Emily Donaldson Field (bio)

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness. . . . One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

With such standards, the Bostonian could not but develop a double nature. Life was a double thing. . . . The bearing of the two seasons on the education of Henry Adams was no fancy; it was the most decisive force he ever knew; it ran through life, and made the division between its perplexing, warring, irreconcilable problems, irreducible opposites. . . . for him, life was double.

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

In 1907 Henry Adams privately circulated a hundred copies of his newly completed autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, a literary effort that would not become widely available until its posthumous publication in 1918, whereupon it promptly won a Pulitzer Prize. Adams begins his sprawling work with a meditation on the "double nature" of his young life, a doubleness he views as constitutive of his alienation from contemporary society (14). Along with his famous skepticism, Adams's dual stance of both insider and outsider, privileged and marginalized, has made him, in the words of John Carlos Rowe, "one of the archetypes of modernist selfhood" (Literary 19). But I will argue that we should read Adams's insistence on his divided self and his theme of unity and multiplicity within the context of turn-of-the-century concerns about the stability of racial, ethnic, and class hierarchies. In so doing, we should reconsider his famous declarations of doubleness through the lens of a contemporaneous text that may have [End Page 61] served as their unacknowledged, and perhaps unlikely, source: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois's 1903 The Souls of Black Folk.

Adams's self-definition as essentially double functions as a claim that oppression and marginality in the U.S. belong not solely to African Americans but also to the allegedly beleaguered and declining white intellectual aristocracy. 1 Hardly the first or last white author to identify with the oppressed, Adams describes his own psychological state and social status in terms that echo and parody Du Bois's notion of double-consciousness, attempting through mocking mimicry to contain and purge the threat posed by Du Bois's anti-racist, anti-imperialist politics and his suggestion of African Americans as a model of national selfhood. The later chapters of The Education reveal an Adams concerned with saving his race from the swarming multiplicity of new immigrants, which he attempts to do by identifying himself with the quintessential American victims, African Americans, thereby planting his flag of relevancy in the fertile territory of the new century.

There is no incontrovertible evidence that Adams read Du Bois's book, let alone that he was influenced by it or referred directly to it. I will make the case here, however, that sufficient contextual and textual evidence exists at least to entertain the notion of such a relationship. Whether or not we can establish with certainty that Adams read and drew from Du Bois, the unconventional pairing of these texts allows us to see two contemporaries with vastly different interests struggling to identify themselves in a changing world, which they each do by appropriating the available discourses about the self in ways that rewrite race and class. Read with Du Bois in mind, Adams's explicit assertion of his own exotic doubleness and resemblance to African Americans become a commentary on the exigencies of white American selfhood in the period. Drawing from Robert Stepto, Henry Louis Gates writes in a 1989 introduction to The Souls of Black Folk that Du Bois's book has served as the "silent second text" of many African American writers' works (xvii). In addition to its well-known position vis-à-vis African American letters, The Souls of Black Folk may function as the "silent second text" of The Education of Henry Adams.

Henry Adams's and W. E. B. Du Bois's stays at Harvard...

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