Martin Eden and the Education of Henry Adams: The Advent of Existentialism in American Literature

By James Burrill Angell

This volume argues that Jack London's Martin Eden and Henry Adams' The Education of Henry Adams are two of the first works in American literature to embody the motif of existentialism. The development of the existential dilemma in each work will be supported through references to earlier European existentialist writers, with Nietzsche as a focal point.

The 19th century fin de siècle was a time of tremendous change, both materially and philosophically. The dawn of the last century was a time of great wealth and imperialistic expansion for Western civilization, but also a time in which the seeds were sown for later military conflict; the enormity of which the world had never witnessed before. From the vantage point of the post-World War years, the materialism of the fin de siècle was a decorative façade that concealed from view the underlying reality of the human abyss. The outbreak of the First World War changed all of that, and the two works examined here anticipated that change. Henry James described the underlying reality of the fin de siècle when he remarked: "To have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while making for and meaning is too tragic for any words." Henry Adams and Jack London mirror this sentiment in their respective works by depicting the philosophical turbulence of the 19th century fin de siècle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 24, 2006
• ISBN: 9780595834457

James Burrill Angell

James Burrill Angell received an M.A. in English literature from San Francisco State University and a B.A in English from the University of Oregon. While posted with the Foreign Service overseas, James Burrill Angell has lectured for the University of Maryland Asian Division. His work has appeared in The Foreign Service Journal, The Sun, The Pinehurst Journal & online at AmericanDiplomacy.org.

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MARTIN EDEN and THE EDUCATION of HENRY ADAMS

THE ADVENT OF EXISTENTIALISM IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Copyright © 2006 by James Burrill Angell

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any

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critical articles and reviews.

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Since science had stripped religion of all validity and because the revelations of science were equally suspect, both London and Adams confronted a world devoid of meaning.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

BACKGROUND ON WRITERS

MARTIN EDEN

JOHN BARLEYCORN

THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS

INFLUENCE ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

SUMMARY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

This volume argues that Jack London’s Martin Eden and Henry Adams’ The Education of Henry Adams are two of the first works in American literature to embody the motif of existentialism. The development of the existential dilemma in each work will be supported through references to earlier European existentialist writers, with Nietzsche as a focal point.

The 19th century fin de siècle was a time of tremendous change, both materially and philosophically. The dawn of the last century was a time of great wealth and imperialistic expansion for Western civilization, but also a time in which the seeds were sown for later military conflict; the enormity of which the world had never witnessed before. From the vantage point of the post-World War years, the materialism of the fin de siècle was a decorative facade that concealed from view the underlying reality of the human abyss. The outbreak of the First World War changed all of that, and the two works examined here anticipated that change. Henry James described the underlying reality of the fin de siècle when he remarked: To have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while making for and meaning is too tragic for any words. Henry Adams and Jack London mirror this sentiment in their respective works by depicting the philosophical turbulence of the 19th century fin de siècle.

HISTORICAL

DEVELOPMENT

The 19th century fin de siècle was an age of intellectual transformation. The scientific and industrial revolutions had changed some of the ways humanity interpreted the world, and as a result the traditional beliefs of religion were becoming irrelevant. It was the beginning of a secular age in which the discoveries of science, and not the word of God, began to dictate the actions of Western civilization. Yet in this new world, where humanity increasingly lived by reason alone, mankind came to experience the feeling of alienation.

Science stripped nature of its human forms and presented man with a universe that was neutral, alien in its vastness and force, to his human purposes. Religion, before this phase set in, had been a structure that encompassed man’s life, provided him with a system of images and symbols…With the loss of this containing framework man became not only a dispossessed but a fragmentary being.¹

The scientific revolution, although bringing great material wealth and prosperity to many nations, created a rational view of the world, which couldn’t cope with the depths of human existence once explained by religion. Thus, existentialism attempted to come to terms with the new human condition stripped of the containing framework which had sustained Western civilization. Grounded in the word, existence, it strived to return to the sources of being, to the things themselves, as the philosopher Husserl said, in order to discover a truth with which to confront the world. Existentialism, whether successfully or not, has attempted instead to gather all the elements of human reality into a total picture of man.²

Existentialism didn’t exist in the vocabulary of fin de siècle America, and the movement it defines couldn’t possibly have been imagined by the majority in a civilization indoctrinated with the slogan of manifest destiny. This is precisely why the introspective elements of The Education of Henry Adams and Martin Eden are so unusual for the period in which they were written. William Barrett, in his book Irrational Man (1958), describes the American mentality of the day: The American has not yet assimilated psychologically the disappearance of his own geographical frontier…and as yet he has not lived through the crucial experience of human finitude³, as the European has. Also, the positivist philosophy representative of the period would not have known what to make of the total picture of man characterized by existential traits such as anxiety, nihilism, alienation, and dread, because analytic science did not allow for psychological categories of that which is dark and questionable in human experience. Existentialism, then, was a more honest expression of the nature of existence, and consequently, a philosophical attempt to live one’s life more authentically in a world stripped of the old meanings. In a description of the philosophy of Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), one can clearly see what the early existentialism of the Education and Martin Eden was prefiguring:

Jaspers sees the historical meanin g of existential philosophy as a struggle to awaken in the individual the possibilities of an authentic and genuine life, in the face of the great modern drift toward a standardized mass society.⁴

Since London and Adams were writing during the 19th century fin de siècle, many of the more famous existential writers and philosophers of the 20th century, such as Jaspers, Sartre, and Camus, obviously had no influence upon them, but one earlier philosophical figure certainly did: Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900). However, in any discussion of Nietzsche, one must first mention the individual generally regarded as the father of existential philosophy, Soren Kierkegard (1813-1855). Although neither of these two were academic philosophers, their compositions were so in advance of their time that it was only in the following century when they were wholly understood by the academic world. Kierkegard was interested in the relevance of Christianity in an age that paid only lip service to its teachings. He thought society should confess to this charade and admit to its spiritual bankruptcy. The essence of his existential writings, as expressed in such appropriately titled works as Fear and Trembling, and The Sickness Unto

Death, is the terrifying realization that if Christ and his teachings are mythical and untrue, as science purports, then humanity exists in a precarious world devoid of meaning and filled with dread. In Kierkegard, the self is essentially intangible and must be understood in terms of possibilities, dread and decisions.⁵ The realization that a leap of faith is necessary when one is confronted with such truths led Kierkegard (and Dostoevski) to an existential Christianity thatposedthefearfulquestion:ifnotChrist,thenwhat?Thisquestion,ofcourse, leads us to Friedrich Nietzsche, who readily admits to the spiritual bankruptcy Western civilization would not confess to.

God is dead, says Nietzsche, and European man, if he were more honest, courageous, and had keener eyes for what went on in the depths of his own soul would know that this death has taken place there, despite the lip service paid to the old formulae and ideals of religion.⁶

After such a revelation, one can only ask of civilization, as Henry Adams did shortly after Nietzsche’s death, how long and how far? (345), or, what happens to the race when at long last it has severed the umbilical cord that bound it for millennia to the gods and a transcendent world beyond this earthly world?⁷ Because Denmark was under the influence of German philosophical thought at the time of Kierkegard’s work, his writings, coupled with those of Nietzsche, suggest Germany as the birthplace of existential philosophy. The romantic idealism which characterized German philosophy after the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, contrasts starkly here with the anxious personal introspection of an existential philosophy attempting to come to terms with a world which has severed the umbilical cord to the old traditions. This is not to say existentialism was solely of German manufacture, but its issues certainly found focus there. If anything, existentialism is a European creation precisely because of its shrinking geographical horizon and subsequent recognition of human finitude. Since 19th century Europeans could no longer physically escape into the wilderness, they were forced inward, into the uncharted realms of being. The existential realities confronted on these interior journeys are found in works such as Goethe’s Faust, Carlyle’s Teufelsdrockh in the Everlasting No chapter of Sartor Resartus, as well as in the anxiety