The current essay is centered on Henry Adams’s famous essay The Dynamo and The Virgin which is the part of his book The Education of Henry Adams which was disseminated between his close friends and colleagues presenting the story of Adams’s life and his attitude to the burning problems and challenges of the humankind. The main intention of this essay however is not to provide a mere analysis of Adams’s work but to find out how the depiction of woman’s image and historical role as conceived by Adams resonates with modern problems of virginity, feminism, motherhood, womanhood, sexuality, and body.
To this end, we put the emphasis on the personality of a famous woman and we have chosen US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Considerably drawing on Adams’s essay and Rice’s political career and personal life (to the extent of available data) we will try to show how Adams’s stance on a woman in modern society is reflected in Rice’s personality and political career.
The discussed essay is by large Adams’s vision of modernity as opposed to Christianity and traditionalism. For him, the premodern period of history is associated with the Virgin Mary as a reflection of all-embracing divinity and aspiration of God’s kingdom on the Earth, deep feeling of humanity’s deficiency and peccancy. In contrast with Christianity modernity is the movement of infinite progress expressed in dynamo machines and modern technology.
That is the way Adams describes his own attitude towards technology which he considers to be one of the main catalysts of progress and modernity: ‘To him, the dynamo itself was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight; but to Adams, the dynamo became a symbol of infinity’ (p. 178).
Adam’s important assumptions state that Christianity deprived woman of her unique natural force that is sexuality and ‘the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam’. Women were worshiped not for their beauty as Adams claims but for their natural energy and strength which is represented in the image of Greek and Roman goddesses. This makes Adams compare women with dynamo machines claiming that historically they had much in common.
Here we find important parallels with the personality of Condoleezza Rice who is much known for her energy and the presence of vital strengths and vigor which is evident if we throw a glance at her political career and younger years. There is no denying the importance of the fact that this woman was a vigorous supporter of the Civil Rights Movement when she was a young woman. Rice opposed racial discrimination in every form is it blatant violence or institutional discrimination.
Besides this, her energy and will are evident if we look at the pass that she made to the Secretary of State office. Her political position vis-à-vis other states is also widely known as she is an effective promoter of the American interests and political agenda all over the world. Her ‘manly’ features of characters and the ability to behave rightly in politics and to have an influence on men in a distinct than ‘fascination’ way show that the impulse of woman’s vitalism, as opposed to sexuality, is still in place in modern politics.
There is no denying the fact that modern dynamo machines deeply transformed Christian attitude to a woman as a keeper of a fireplace as women are playing more important roles in modern society as the case of Condi Rice shows. Apart from being the second woman to hold the office of Secretary of State, Rice is the second person with black skin after Collin Powell to occupy such an influential place in American politics.
This partly proves Adams’s concept of modernity as the process of infinite development and liberalization of human society. Rice managed to overcome racial discrimination following her father’s advice that blacks have to be twice as hard-working and diligent as whites to have success in this difficult life. Going beyond prejudices and limitations Rice shows that no barriers exist in the modern world except those created by subjective passiveness.
Adams’s anticipation of dynamo creating feminine and at the same time, effective society is quite congruent with Rice’s trajectory in politics. There is no denying the importance of the fact that sex and sexuality are important markers of a woman in modern society as it is mainly controlled by masculine symbols and traditions. But something different is observed in politics where the women succeed due to realizing those features of characters which are for a long time being connected with masculinity. Hence Rice is successful in her political career due to strictness, will, and calmness which helps her to control her Office, organize the network of political and social capital and use it as a tool for career growth and promotion.
Hence, Adam’s account of sexuality becomes two-folded. On the one hand, we see that his aspiration of sexuality taking appropriate place in a society breaking Christian taboos became the reality of the 20th century when mass culture occupied people’s consciousness with the images of beautiful women that are used to advertise different goods. Women’s bodies became a symbolic good itself. But on the other hand, we see that the political realm represents the antic representation of womanhood, that is strength and energy of the goddess of the Greek and Roman pantheon.
To sum it up, Adams’s book and Condi Rice’s political career and the conditions that fostered it has many parallel trajectories which postulate the fact that Adams’s text is important for understanding sexuality and woman’s role in modern society.