Chapter 24 The Dynamo and The Virgin (1900) Summary

Adams begins to develop his theory of Force. Guided by Langley of the Smithsonian, he attends the new Chicago Exhibition; it is amazing and revealing. The dynamo seems to him to call force from nothing, from the earth, and speeds everything up. Adams struggles to make sense of all this progress, and finds himself "caught between two kingdoms of force." He names these the Virgin and the Dynamo. The Virgin is the representative of the old unified sense of force, while the Dynamo represents its manifestation in modern life. Women had represented force in the past because of their power of reproduction. Force and sex had come together in the goddess, but now he says, if it survived at all, sex was only sentiment, blotted out of American life and art by the...