SOURCE: "Bret Harte and the Power of Sex," in Western American Literature, Vol. VIII, No. 3, Fall, 1973, pp. 91-109.

In the following essay, Thomas focuses on the dynamic power of erotic desire in Bret Harte's short fiction.

Reflecting dolefully on his life and times, Henry Adams seized upon the Virgin Mary and the electric dynamo as crucial symbols of the contrast he saw between the moral unity of the Middle Ages and the soulless multiplicity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In "The Dynamo and the Virgin," the twenty-fifth chapter of his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, Adams discussed the nature and meaning of these two symbolic forces: the Virgin, whose works he had studied reverentially at Chartres and the Louvre, and the Dynamo, which he had contemplated with awe and misgiving at the Chicago Exposition of 1893 and the Paris Exposition of 1900. In the course of his discussion...