Survivors are faced with many questions and choices after the loss of a close relation. For them, death is no longer an abstraction but a reality that has caused a loved one to vanish; they must try to extract meaning from this seemingly senseless event. Their responses are highly personal yet they are also shaped by the context of their era. Most Americans who lived through the Civil War had experienced death in multiple ways. The story of Marian Adams’s suicide and her husband’s quest to survive this sudden, mind-ravaging act provides an apt beginning for exploring the new patterns of memorialization that appeared.
The life of Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918) has often been described as a tale of high expectations dashed. Indeed, when the couple married in June 1872, Henry and Marian Hooper Adams (1843–1885) both moved easily in Boston’s circles of privilege. He was the great-grandson of President John Adams, the grandson of President John Quincy Adams, and the son of Charles Francis Adams, U.S. envoy to England, and Abigail Brooks Adams, heiress to one of Boston’s great fortunes. After graduating from Harvard University and serving as a private secretary in the London legation that his father, a strong opponent of slavery, headed during the Civil War, Henry pursued journalistic ambitions for a time in Washington, D.C. He then taught medieval history at Harvard, where he also edited the prestigious North American Review.1
Marian, known as “Clover” to her friends, was the dark-haired, free-spirited daughter of physician Robert W. Hooper and Transcendental poet Ellen Sturgis Hooper. Based on the surviving correspondence, her life emerges as a story of lively talents and a fragile ego frustrated and constrained. Although she had lost her mother to tuberculosis when she was five years old, Clover was raised amid many caring relations who numbered among Boston’s cultural elite. She was educated at the progressive school for young women run by the wife of Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz in Cambridge. There she studied Latin and German, the art of conversation, poetry and good manners, piano and the waltz. During the Civil War, Clover and her sister Ellen seized every opportunity to work at the Sanitary League, the Civil War equivalent of the Red Cross, where female volunteers rolled bandages, stamped blankets, and visited wounded soldiers. Her cousin Robert (Bob) Gould Shaw wrote of “a very pleasant” party she hosted in early 1863 as he was preparing to assume command of the Fifty-Fourth regiment of African Americans, the pride of Boston’s abolitionist circles; that summer she mourned his death in the assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina.2 Clover penned a vivid account of her trip to Washington to witness the grand review of the victorious Union armies—columns of troops clad in blue stretching for twenty-five miles—at the close of the Civil War, to see the blood-soaked pillow in the room where Abraham Lincoln died, and to stop in at the trial of the conspirators charged in the president’s death.3 She apparently met Henry Adams at a legation dinner in London after the war.
Figure 1.
“Henry Adams with Dog Possum, Seated in Profile.” Photograph by Marian Hooper Adams, 1884. From the Marian Hooper Adams Photographs. Photograph number 50.118. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
By the time of their marriage in June 1872, Clover was twenty-eight and Henry five years older (Figures 1, 2). He was already balding, a condition that drew increased attention to his high, serious forehead, long straight nose, and the somewhat impish ears that signaled a droll private humor behind his reserved, often blunt or prickly public manner. The bearded, mustachioed Adams was slight of build, just an inch taller than five-foot-two Clover, whom he had characterized on the occasion of their engagement as “not handsome” but not “quite plain” either, with her own decided wit and loquaciousness. It was difficult, he wrote his brother, to “resist the fascination of a clever woman who chooses to be loved.”4 Clover apparently was sensitive about her appearance, and few photographs of her survive. In the best-known picture of her as an adult, she holds her small, well-formed body perfectly erect and looks away from the camera as she sits sidesaddle on an alert, well-groomed horse. Riding was a beloved pastime she and Henry shared. With her eyes shaded by a light-colored bonnet, her mouth closed, and her riding habit buttoned firmly to the neck, she reveals little of the lively character friends described. Another undated tintype hints at her irreverence toward convention, however, as she conceals her face behind a large straw hat while attempting to hold her fidgeting pet terrier up for display (Figure 3). Henry wrote affectionately of her eccentricity and resolute naughtiness in making judgments about people. Clover, he said, “takes malicious pleasure in shocking the prejudices of the wise and the good.”5
Figure 2.
“Marian Hooper Adams on Horseback at Beverly Farms.” Tintype by unknown photographer, 1869. From the Marian Hooper Adams Photographs. Photograph number 50.131. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
The couple eventually settled in Washington, which was taking its place among the most fashionable cities in the nation. In 1880 they moved into 1607 H Street, an elegant residence on the north side of Lafayette Square that featured thirteen-foot ceilings and a view of the White House.6 Adams found his niche in the capital city as historian, writer, and observer of society and government. While the path to national political power no longer seemed open to members of his family, he could follow the traditions of Boston intellectualism and idiosyncrasy. He completed biographies of Albert Gallatin and John Randolph, and began a nine-volume History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison. He has also been credited with writing two novels, Democracy (some said Clover was the actual author because of its stinging satire) and Esther, but he concealed his authorship of these works of fiction from all but a few close friends by publishing the first anonymously and the second under a pseudonym. Marian Adams, whose animated wit could be piercingly candid, presided over an exclusive salon of political, literary, and artistic notables at their well-situated home.
Figure 3.
“Marian Hooper Adams, Holding Dog, Face Obscured by Bonnet.” Tintype by unknown photographer, ca. 1875–85. From the Marian Hooper Adams Photographs. Photograph number 50.137. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
With statesman John Hay and his wife, Clara, and geologist Clarence King, the Adamses formed an even more impenetrable inner stratum, an intimate quintet of friends they called the “Five of Hearts.” Their transatlantic network of personal acquaintances included writers Henry James (who once referred to Clover as the “incarnation” of her native land and at another time as a Voltaire in petticoats), Edith Wharton, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, and Matthew Arnold; historians George Bancroft and Francis Parkman; Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.; politician Henry Cabot Lodge; and architect Henry Hobson Richardson. Clover Adams took up photography in 1883 and made camera portraits of a number of these friends, eventually filling three leather-bound albums with her pictures.7 The Hoopers were great art lovers and, with the help of Clover’s brother Edward (Ned), the couple formed a significant collection of British watercolors and drawings including works by John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Richard Parkes Bonington, and William Blake (whose strange productions were especially beloved) as well as a less securely attributed array of old master drawings and curios from Asia. Her father gave them a painting by Winslow Homer. Clover, who Henry had once quipped “dressed badly,” acquired a cosmopolitan taste for gowns from the famously expensive Paris couturier Charles Frederick Worth. At home the couple doted on a succession of pet terriers named Boojum, Marquis, Possum, Scalawag, and Waggles. In nostalgic hindsight that denied any evidence of the couple’s marital tensions or cares, Henry Adams spoke later of the “twelve years of perfect happiness” he and Clover spent together.8
The thirteenth year, however, began an extended season of mourning. The death on April 13, 1885, of Dr. Hooper, at age seventy-five, was the first of a chain of personal tragedies. Within a few years, Adams would see his wife, both his parents, a sister-in-law, and a brother-in-law pass away.
Having lost her mother early, Marian Adams had always maintained a close relationship with her father, who raised her, her sister, and her brother. She managed his household before marrying and afterward faithfully wrote lengthy letters to Dr. Hooper each Sunday from Washington. She and Henry also usually summered in the cottage they had built near Hooper’s Beverly Farms residence on the North Shore of Massachusetts. She helped to care for her father at her sister’s house in Cambridge during his final six weeks of life—a wearying, emotionally draining experience. “The poor old doctor is fading away like a Stoic; without a murmur of complaint,” Henry Adams told a friend. “I wish we might all face death as coolly and sensibly; but the process is harsh and slow.”9
Adams shuttled back and forth to Washington, where the couple and the Hays were building attached houses designed by Richardson, a Harvard classmate. When at last Marian could write that her father “went to sleep like a tired traveler,” Henry joined her for the funeral services and interment at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. By all accounts, Clover was profoundly affected by this loss. She was now an orphan who had failed to become a mother herself; her marriage had produced no children. Henry worried about her health after “a long and hard spell of nursing at her father’s bedside.”10 Scholars have also speculated that her depression and nervousness related to the restrictions placed on women of her high intelligence and education in this period, even at her level of society. They point to evidence that her husband could be distant and difficult: he refused, for example, to allow her to publish one of her photographs, saying it was inappropriate for his wife to expose her talents publicly in that way and that it was best for the family to guard its privacy. Writer Natalie Dykstra has described her life as “gilded and heartbreaking.” The constraints Adams insisted upon, his natural reserve, and his occasional outbursts of impatience must all have exacerbated his own grief afterward, when he reconsidered his sometimes ungenerous words and actions.11
By November, Adams was mentioning in letters that Clover was “unwell,” a polite term that sanitized his increasing concern about her state of deepening depression. She “has been, as it were, a good deal off her feed this summer,” he told one friend, “and shows no such fancy for mending as I could wish.”12 Marian in general shunned company, but neighbor Rebecca Dodge took her for regular drives in an attempt to lift her gloomy mood. She described how Clover wore as mourning garb “a little black net bonnet,” and then later, “I got her a black silk one” as the weather turned cooler.13
Henry’s older brother, Charles Francis Adams II, recalled that Clover appeared lethargic and severely depressed when he met the couple on the train between Boston and New York a few days before her death. “She sat there, pale and care-worn, never smiling, hardly making an effort to answer me, the very picture of physical weakness and mental depression,” he wrote. “Physically and mentally, she was, during the months preceding her death, an object for the most profound compassion.”14
On December 6, 1885, Henry set out to visit Dr. Edward Maynard, a dentist who lived just four blocks away on F Street. As he was leaving home, however, he encountered “a friend of Mrs. Adams who had come to pay her a visit,” according to one newspaper report.15 Adams returned to the house and found his wife’s unresponsive form. Astonishingly, her heart had stopped; she breathed no longer, and her eyes appeared glazed. She had crossed the line between life and death as the poison did its work within a matter of minutes.
Adams later noted that Clover’s death split his life into two. Time stopped, and he began a new life that he measured from the moment of her departure. His emotional reserve low, he warded off others’ efforts to reach out to him, saying he could not speak about the tragedy. “Wait til I have recovered my mind,” he wrote Dodge, who sent word to him on the day of Clover’s death. “I can see no one now.… Don’t let anyone come near me.” To his close friend John Hay, he wrote of “the first feeling of desperation” and his sense that the struggle would not soon end. “Never fear me,” he said in closing his short note, however. “I shall come out all right from this—what shall I call it—Hell!”16 Adams knew that through his wife’s death his own life had been changed forever.
To make matters worse, the newspapers revealed that Marian Adams had taken her own life, and some reports questioned her character, adding to the family’s maelstrom of emotions the shadow of public scandal in the upper echelons of Washington and Boston society. “Was It a Case of Suicide?” the Washington Critic asked in the headline over its brief report on the coroner’s visit. “The late Mrs. Henry Adams,” it reported later, had “a reputation of saying bitter things of men and measures, and of her fellow women too, and although an entertaining talker, was generally distrusted and failed to become socially popular.”17 Her suicide was seen as another form of ungenerous self-indulgence, perhaps, or at least a form of moral or psychic frailty. Writer Henry James, in a letter from London to Clover’s young acquaintance Elizabeth Boott, confirmed that all society was talking about the scandal, saying, “I suppose you have heard the sad rumours as to poor Clover Adams’ self-destruction. I am afraid the event had everything that could make it bitter to poor Henry.”18
Clover’s brother Ned Hooper and sister Ellen Gurney arrived from Massachusetts the day after her death, when, Ellen wrote, Henry was “almost like a child in his touching dependence.”19 Ellen described the private trials he and other family members had been going through while trying to pull Clover out of her depression. Clover, well aware that two of her aunts had suffered frail mental health and that one had committed suicide, had feared institutionalization in one of the new asylums, expansive, publicly funded structures with lush grounds built as part of the mid-nineteenth-century movement to reform “lunatic” care in America.20 Her father was a trustee of the Worcester Asylum for the mentally ill and, according to one account, had sometimes taken his daughters with him on his visits to see patients there.21 One of Clover’s childhood friends had been hospitalized at the McLean Asylum near Boston.22 Henry had firmly rejected that course, however, and the family “had been consumed with anxiety,” Ellen Gurney wrote an acquaintance afterward:
Probably others think if we had only done this or that. I have no such feeling. We did the best we knew how, and … I think any other course [institutionalizing Clover] would have been cruelty. The courage and manliness and wisdom and tenderness, and power of meeting so intense a strain, for days and nights—months and months—at first looking for the cloud to lift within a few months—finally satisfied that it might be years before it did—which Henry Adams went through we only knew—his family were wholly ignorant of it—and we felt it might kill him or worse.… He went out to the Dentist’s for a short time Sunday morning and when he returned—she was at peace. God knows how he kept his reason those hours.23
The death of a spouse is one of life’s most difficult experiences, and a sudden or violent death extends and deepens the grieving process. Psychiatrists have described these typical responses to loss: denial and isolation, followed by anger at abandonment, guilt and concern that the survivor is responsible for what happened (mentally replaying the circumstances over and over), depression, and, ultimately, some form of resolution or acceptance.24 Henry Adams, a widower at forty-seven, can be expected to have gone through such stages, although he attempted to tightly control and conceal his emotions in public. While many Americans at this time suffered diseases such as tuberculosis that caused a lingering death and gave relatives time to prepare for loss and to resolve conflicts, Clover’s death was sudden—shockingly so. Not only was Adams denied the notion of death as a passage through an illness, but his wife’s action of self-destruction (suicide was often referred to as “self-murder” at this time) also denied survivors the consolations of a “good death.” The commemorative tablets in the church in Quincy, Massachusetts, where the Adams presidents are buried describe the enduring dedication of his grandmother and great-grandmother to stoic duty and to their appropriate supportive gender roles despite all life’s challenges. His wife had not mustered that same strength and courage in the face of the trials and assaults of modern times, and by her act she had further violated Christians’ responsibility to accept their life through faith instead of surrendering to despair. Through her lack of self-restraint, which could be interpreted as a form of moral weakness or cowardice, she also disrupted the polite surface harmony imposed by societal forces.
The need to notify others, to relate the story of what happened, to organize a service and burial, and to decide on an appropriate memorial are initial steps in the long process of changing grief to nostalgia; it can eventually bring some closure to survivors. Adams held a solitary vigil over Clover’s body until relations could arrive. A neighbor recalled seeing him at one point alone at the window.25 In the following weeks he tried to move swiftly, however, to return order to his life. For example, he invited State Department librarian Theodore F. Dwight to move into the new house with him as a companion and assistant. Adams never discussed in public his feelings after his wife’s sudden death, maintaining a famous self-imposed silence about Clover and her demise for most of his remaining years. In his world-weary third-person autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, he famously left blank the period from their marriage to her passing, simply entitling the next chapter “Twenty Years After.” But he did recall in detail in that book his feelings after his sister Louisa Kuhn’s tortured death at age forty in the summer of 1870. She developed lockjaw following a carriage accident in Italy and expired in convulsions with Adams helplessly looking on. He must have been combining his thoughts about the loss of these two important women in his life when he described how he felt about Louisa’s struggle. Adams wrote that he knew “by heart the thousand commonplaces of religion and poetry” about human mortality intended “to deaden one’s sense and veil the horror.” Yet these did not comfort him as he watched Louisa die amid the beauty of the Tuscan countryside. “Impressions like these are not reasoned or catalogued in the mind; they are felt as part of violent emotion; and the mind that feels them is a different one from that which reasons; it is thought of a different power and a different person.”26 For Adams, the usual anodynes of society seemed mere artifice in the face of a close family member’s tormented death. “The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman … could not be held for a moment.… God might be, as the Church said, a substance, but He could not be a person.”27
In the days immediately after his wife’s passing, Adams told his closest friends, “I have got to live henceforward on what I can save from the wreck of her life,” and “I am going to keep straight on, just as we planned it together and, unless I break in health, I shall recover strength and courage before long.”28 Adams soon adopted a more guarded stance though, allowing only subtle, indirect allusions to his emotional state and preferring to make a genteel stoicism and silence his outward response to this personal tragedy. His inability to stop dwelling on his loss linked him to the nineteenth century’s grand, ritual obsession with death, which came to its climax amid the aestheticism of the Gilded Age. At the same time, his silence linked him to newer trends and to the future, when talk of grief and death would become a great societal taboo. Clover’s suicide occurred at a time when highly regulated mourning customs were being questioned and the period of a mourner’s seclusion from the world was being reduced.29
A brief funeral service was held December 9 at the rented house, presided over by the Reverend Edward Henry Hall of First Church (Unitarian) of Cambridge, a minister sent for by the Hoopers.30 While no transcript of Hall’s remarks remains, the fifty-four-year-old minister might well have struck a theme he favored in another sermon about death, urging survivors to reject “idle grief” and focus instead on how the life of the deceased could make the path of the next generation “richer in meaning and fuller of possibilities.… Our best homage is paid in calm recognition of what the departed have been and done.”31 Hall, like other progressive clergymen of his time, was wont to celebrate the life just ended rather than dwell on visions of hellfire for the errors of a woman who had suffered mental distress.32 A greater simplicity in funerals—especially in the case of a suicide—was deemed in good taste as the century came to a close. Sentimental expressions of faith were giving way to a growing emphasis on the mysteries of death and the duties of the living.33
In his search for an understanding that extends beyond the rational and a form of consolation that goes beyond the sentimental, Henry Adams turned away from his family’s Unitarian heritage and explored alternative concepts outside conventional Western Protestant understanding. In June 1886, six months after his wife’s suicide, he set out on a trip to Japan with the older Roman Catholic painter John La Farge in search, they joked, of “Nirvana.”34 The two men shared an interest in religious philosophy, especially at this time Buddhism and its concept of nirvana, which they saw as complete release from the cycles of life and death, desire and pain—a final extinction of the passions resulting in inner quietude, a kind of psychic serenity. Adams hoped the trip might bring him peace. Like Clover’s cousin William Sturgis Bigelow, who lived and studied in Japan for seven years, connoisseur Ernest Fenollosa, collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, and others of Adams’s set, the pair participated in an elite interest at century’s end in Asia and Buddhism. Their trip was partly a curious quest for exoticism and adventure and partly a serious search for new means and rituals to restore life’s wholeness in a changing world. With Bigelow acting as their “master of ceremonies,” Adams and La Farge visited temples, shrines, and markets, “read Buddhism” and Taoism, and viewed Mount Fuji and the Giant Buddha of Kamakura (which Adams photographed for La Farge) during a five-month stay (Figure 4).
Aboard ship on the trip home, they hashed over their reactions with Fenollosa and a Japanese colleague, Okakura Kakuzo. La Farge had collected Japanese prints since the 1850s and sought to make and understand art as a prophetic force that could help viewers to see beneath the mere surface of things; his work had been admired and respectfully collected by Clover’s cousin Alice Sturgis Hooper and by her brother Ned.35 Fenollosa preached a doctrine of artistic and cultural pluralism, attacking Western art’s literary or storytelling heritage. Art had “several languages,” and no “single set of laws” should dominate it, he insisted.36
Figure 4.
“View of Daibutsu. Kamakura.” Photograph by Henry Adams, 1886. From the Henry Adams Photographs. Photograph number 40.282. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Upon their return, Adams, with La Farge’s help, set events in motion for the creation of a sculptural memorial to his wife that shared many of these same ideas and goals. He referred to the work in progress as “my Buddha” in his diary but later simply called the resulting bronze figure, with chin resting on hand, “the Peace of God.”37 It would serve to give shape to absence and to the continuing relationship with a lost spouse—with her unsettling, and then perhaps more wistful and nostalgic, hauntings as the decades unfolded.