Esther & Stencil

[Mark Kohut]

A real head-slapping D'oh moment for me..................

I have JUST noticed the two Esthers....Adams' & Pynchon's!

I have not yet read Adams Esther, although I want to. 
I have been writing about Esther of the Nose Job....

Does Grant companiate the connection? or just Alice? 



----- Original Message ----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Mon, August 2, 2010 12:43:38 PM
Subject: Re: Esther & Stencil

Adams published _Esther_ under a pen name, a women's name. And, any
close reader of  _The Education_ can not fail to see that Esther's
"Dilettantism" (one of the chaptet title of The Education) is actually
biographical or Henry's delight in art and, of course, another of his
impersonations. Henry is a spy in the house of art and love.


I think you, Mark, have got most of it in your sumation below.

Esther, like most women, was timid, and wanted to be told when she could
be bold with perfect safety, while Hazard's grasp of all subjects,
though feminine in appearance, was masculine and persistent in reality.
To be steadily strong was not in Esther's nature. She was audacious only
by starts, and recoiled from her own audacity. Before long, Hazard began
to dominate her will. She felt a little uneasy until he had seen and
approved her work. More than once he disapproved, and then she had to do
it over again. She began at length to be conscious of this impalpable
tyranny, and submitted to it only because she felt her own dependence
and knew that in a few days more she should be free. If he had been
clerical or dogmatic, she might have resented it and the charm would
have broken to pieces on the spot, but he was for the time a painter
like herself, as much interested in the art, and caring for nothing
else.



On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 10:51 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Here is one simple perspective, from the time of my lifetime, on Adams
> and women.....and its potential relevance for V. and P's vision through his
> works.
>
> Adams idealized women, ala all the below. He idealized them by raising to an
> intellectual
> level the societal stereotype that they were 'feeling', sensibility", not 
mind,
> rationality......
> that they were not fit for business or politics since they were not 
emotionally
> hard enough...
> they were soft...warmth, compassion, etc.....The Virgin Mary, etc....
>
> Men, who were emotionally hard and brainy.................were ruining/had
> ruined the world..........
>
> So, women qua women were condescended to at all levels of society........just 
>as
> we know about the 50s, sixties etc. ..until the second feminist
> revolution...........
> Their softness was exploited........Esther's
> passivity???..........................
>
> Rachel, caught between old ideas (of woman) and the new(er) woman?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Mon, August 2, 2010 9:08:37 AM
> Subject: Esther & Stencil
>
> http://blue.utb.edu/gibson/Esther.htm
>
> Throughout his literary career, Henry Adams displayed an insatiable
> interest in the nature of woman. In his early essay entitled, the
> “Primitive Rights of Woman," Adams attempted to demonstrate the
> importance of woman in the earliest foundations of  the family and
> society. Adams' Tahiti (1901)demonstrated how primitive woman
> utilizing her intuition, protected the society from man-caused
> disaster. In his Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904) and Education
> of Henry Adams (1905), \ Adams established woman, particularly the
> European woman of the twelfth century, as a symbol of natural forceand
> instinct.  Adams' "A Letter to American Teachers of History" (1910)
> demonstrated what he regarded as scientific proof of the superiority
> of instinct, which he depicted as the force underlying woman's great
> force in society, over reason, which he regard­ed as the faculty most
> used by man. In the Chartres and the Education, Adams offered the
> theory that the highest point of unity in man's history had been
> reached in the period of time, 1150 to 1250 A.D.  In these works and
> in his "A Letter to American Teachers of History" he attempted proof
> that mankind had steadily dissipated its energies from the thirteenth
> century in accordance with Kelvin's Second Law of Thermo-dynamics thus
> arriving at itspresent state of multiplicity in the twentieth century.
> The period 1150 to 1250 A.D. was chosen by Adams as the period in
> which "man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in a unified
> universe" because of the strong cohesive nature of the Christian faith
> at that time--a faith which resulted in the crusades and the great
> cathedrals.  This period was marked by great feminine influence as
> evidenced in the intense worship of the Virgin Mary and the erection
> of many of the cathedrals, particularly  Chartres,in her honor.  Also
> Adams recorded as proof the great power wielded by the three queens,
> Eleanor of Guienne, Mary of Champagne, and Blanche of Castile, all of
> whom helped to initiate the cult of courteous love.  As a contrast to
> the position of woman in the thirteenth century, Adams noted in the
> Education what he perceived as the degraded position of American woman
> in the twentieth century.          Both of Adams' novels, Democracy
> (1879) and Esther (1884) have as protagonists women unable to accept
> suitors because of moral or religious conflicts.  Many critics writing
> on these novels see these women as prototypes to Adams' conception of
> the twelfth century woman.  While there is a small case for this
> position, I believe it may be demonstrated that the two protagonists
> resemble the modern American woman described in the Education much
> more closely and, furthermore, that they show points of marked
> dissimilarity to the Virgin of Chartres, Adams' symbol of twelfth
> century womanhood.
>
>       Esther, Henry Adams' second and last novel, was published in
> 1884 under the penname of Francis Compton Snow (Spiller iii).  Most
> critics writing on the subject of Esther Dudley, heroine of the novel,
> have made the error of identifying her with Adams' Virgin of Chartres
> because they make too much of her intuition. The resemblance of Esther
> Dudley to the modern American woman described in the Education is much
> more marked. In Esther, one finds a heroine unable to unite with a
> suitor and to assume a role within a family because of her
> agnosticism, her suitor being Stephen Hazard--an Episcopalian
> minister. The stage of the conflict corresponds to one of the two
> spheres in which Adams believed women had and then lost influence the
> church and the state.                                        Esther
> Dudley is described  by another character as “one of the most marked
> American types I ever saw” (26).  Later he said of Esther's type, "The
> thing is too subtle and it is not a grand type like what we are used
> to in the academies (28)."  The image given in the description of
> Esther's dress and figure is reminiscent of the passage in the
> Education in which Adams wrote of the "monthly magazine-made American
> female [who] had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam
> (384)."  Sex as a force in Esther's appearance was not mentioned; it
> would be, I believe, a quality of the "grand type" as depicted perhaps
> in Renaissance European art as well as in Adams' Virgin of Chartres,
> whose predecessor was Venus (384).  A little later in the same
> conversation, the same character noted that Esther is also modern:
> “There is nothing medieval about her.” (28). Thus we find that unlike
> the Virgin of Chartres, who was European and medieval, Esther was not
> only American born but also American in type and, furthermore,
> extremely modern.  This in itself indicates that Esther may well have
> more in common with the American woman described in the Education than
> with the Virgin of Chartres.                    Also,unlike the
> Virgin, Esther was independent.  In the course of the novel, Esther
> lost her father who had been the only member of her family, her mother
> having died when Esther was young.
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