ABSTRACT
It is ironic, to say the least, that someone who so idolizes the power of women in his autobiographical account of his life can find no space for his wife. A relatively simple explanation of that disparity is that his praise of women in general is in fact a reference to the importance, or perhaps even dominance, of his wife. Adams’s act of omission has led to vociferous debates among critics, and Eugenia Kaledin’s reason for writing a biography of Marian Hooper, entitled The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams, was outrage.4 By re-reading The Education for coded references, it is possible to offer some suggestions for Marian Hooper’s appearance in the text, most notably perhaps the description of the death of Louisa, Adams’s sister.5 Her structural absence in literally the middle of the text paradoxically asserts Mrs Adams’s presence. The entire text bears the marks of a veiled monument to his wife and is evidence of what Freud has called ‘profound mourning’:
Profound mourning, the reaction to the loss of a dead person, contains the same feeling of pain, loss of interest in the outside world-insofar as it does not recall the dead one-loss of capacity to adopt any new object of love, which would mean a replacing of one mourned, the same turning from every active effort that is not connected with thoughts of the dead. It is easy to see that this inhibition and circumscription in the ego is the expression of an exclusive devotion to its mourning, which leaves nothing over for other purposes or other interests.6
