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" When they shook hands with visitors at the reception, they used "...the mechanical action of toy dolls" (86). Madeleine said to Mr. French, who was accompanying her, "I had no conception how shocking it was!" To witness such phony, mechanical people going through mindless motions.
On page 87, Adams explains to the readers that besides Madeleine, there was not one person "...who felt the mockery of this exhibition." Everyone else thought the reception ("...the deadly dullness") was "natural and proper" but to Madeleine is was more like "a nightmare," or the twisted vision an opium addict might see. She felt a "sudden conviction" that this boring, mechanical scene represented "the end of American society." think this was Adams' way of showing his distaste for politics and for the way important powerful people go about their lives. Adams' father, after all, was a congressman and so Adams knew what the routine was like in the halls of Congress and the White House. I also think that Adams' book was showing the difference between men and women; men were (and still are) into power, business, politics and money. Women - at least the idealized version of women - were more into culture, the arts, charity work, duty to family and intimate friendships. But in this book, it seems that Madeleine, although she doesn't really accept the way that Senator Ratcliffe believes and behaves, needs Ratcliffe to be able to have her own access to POWER. In a way then, she is no better than the rest of the stiff, mechanical people she detests.
No doubt there are Madeleine-type women in Washington today, like there were after the Civil War; and these women today probably are searching for moral reasons to justify...
But if they run into the same people and problems that Madeleine ran into, they may find that they sell out to get their hands on some of that POWER. Madeleine and what's left of her morality seem to get in the way of Ratcliffe's plan to get out of a politically tight situation. But she refuses his offer of marriage; he wants her to "share in the profits of vice" with him and she is not willing to do that. But on page 177 she says she must "confess my sins" and she admits that "life is more complicated than I thought." Adams is making his point here about how corrupt Washington D.C. had become and how ordinary people (in this case Madeleine) have no idea how bad it is until they get there. After she has refused to marry him, and refused to give him the advice he wants she wonders "What was there in her aimless and useless life" that made it so precious that she could not afford to fling it into the gutter, if need be, on the bare chance of enriching some fuller existence?" (p. 180) think that Adams was very cynical, and rightly so, about the political life of America following the Civil War; and his novel at that time put those issues into focus, although maybe the country wasn't ready to be confronted with those truths about their elected "leaders." Indeed, Adams seems to be saying, as an author and a political observer: Madeleine didn't have that much going - why not get down in the gutter with the rest of the politicians and see if the money and POWER that comes with that ascension into the sewer feels pretty good after all?
Works Cited
Adams, Henry. 1908. Democracy, an American Novel. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Works Cited
Adams, Henry. 1908. Democracy, an American Novel. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
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