Modernist Mary

Abstract

Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Henry Adams, in “The Dynamo and the Virgin” (1900), in The Education of Henry Adams (published in 1906), reflected:

Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man’s activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done; the historian’s business was to follow the track of the energy; to find wherever it came from and where it went to; its complex source and shifting channels; its values, equivalents, conversions.¹