The Genius of Democracy. Victoria Olwell
of sympathy, just as it also moves beyond the ordinary boundaries of personhood and any straightforward operation of agency. Christie’s speech moves her into the realm of the magically metapersonal. Rather than galvanize sentimentality in the public sphere, it shifts into the register of genius.
More particularly, Alcott turns in this scene to a transcendentalist formulation of genius as oriented toward concrete political goals, such as public activism and the vote. An early speech by Alcott’s father’s close friend Ralph Waldo Emerson provides perhaps the most useful gloss on Alcott’s deployment of this figure. Entitled simply “Genius” (1838), this speech articulates the concept of genius with democratic structures, figuring genius as both a route to democratic publicity and an implicit answer to the difficulties—pragmatic and conceptual—that plague the project of forming viable publics. Examining how Emerson’s “Genius” dramatizes the problem of democratic subjectivity and the public it might inhabit makes it possible to specify how the convention of female genius, and Alcott’s usage in particular, reshaped “genius” in order to politicize women outside of the terms provided by either domestic sentimentality or its constitutive opposite, liberal rationality.
Emersonian Genius and the Problem of Democratic Publicity
Emerson was a successful enough adapter of romantic conceptions of genius for American culture that he seemed to be not only its chief advocate but also its national representative. Emerson’s development of the European discussion of genius fuels his theories of language, selfhood, and national belonging, and it propels many of his canonical essays, notably “The Artist,” “The Poet,” and “The Intellectual.” Some of the key passages of those essays were earlier delivered in “Genius.”35 While this speech shares a great deal with the more vividly remembered essays that developed from its seed material, “Genius” is distinguished by the way in which Emerson situates his formulation of genius within the concrete institutional practices of democracy, rather than, say, linking it to the creation of art and poetry. The literal scene of political deliberation that Emerson depicts here sets the terms for Christie’s emergent genius in Work.
Emerson stresses those aspects of the romantic discourse on genius that would open it from the context of art to that of thought more generally and that would propose genius to be potentially available to all people. He echoes earlier Enlightenment formulations of genius as a spectacular aspect of ordinary intellect but with significant differences. In Emerson’s formulation, genius becomes a common human property not as ordinariness but as what we can only call its transcendent universality, its issuance, in his terms, from the shared transcendental soul: “It is, as it were, the voice of the Soul, of the Soul that made all men, uttered through a particular man; and so, as soon as it is apprehended it is accepted by every man as a voice proceeding from his own inmost self” (“G,” 70). As Emerson unfurls this supernaturalism, he discloses psychological and democratic ramifications. Although he sometimes locates genius in iconic “great men”—Alexander the Great and Leonardo da Vinci, for instance—he more often finds it in the generic second person of his address, in the “you” in whom he expects already to recognize the experience of genius he describes: “To believe your own thought,—that is genius” (“G,” 77).
This last declaration later appeared in a slightly extended version in the opening of “Self-Reliance” and was significant enough to Alcott that she copied it into her scrapbook; she took, it seems, the second-person address at its word.36 The ownership that this “you” is posited to have over the thought, however, is significantly permeable, refusing the closures of private property. Even as the “you” believes the thought, it becomes something other than “your own thought” as the “you” thinks, “It is my own, and It is not my own” (“G,” 79). Emerson translates this simultaneous possession and dispossession from the supernaturalism of “the soul of all men” to a rhetoric of democracy: “Genius is always representative…. The man of genius apprises us not of his wealth but of the commonwealth” (“G,” 81). The way in which genius is “not my own” in this instance becomes its formal democratic fungibility. It mediates the fundamental problem of representative democracy—the problem of the citizen’s legislative representation—by closing, through its very ambiguity, the distance between one’s own thought and representative positions. At the same time, genius moves subjects past their privatizing interest in their property to the collective threshold of the commonwealth.
Emerson dramatizes this genius in a concrete scene of democratic debate staged in Boston’s Faneuil Hall the night before citizens go to the polls. He opens his description of the meeting in the key of the grotesque. The assembled citizens are so grossly embodied that they cannot seem to form a body politic at all, but rather congeal in a “solid block of life”:
Join the dark, irregular thickening groups that gather in the old house when fate hangs on the vote of the morrow. As the crowd grows and the hall fills behold that solid block of life; few old men: mostly young and middle aged, with shining heads and swoln veins…. The pinched, wedged, elbowed, sweltering assembly, as soon as the speaker loses their ear by the tameness of his harangue, feel sorely how ill-accommodated they are, and begin to forget all politics and patriotism, and attend only to themselves and the coarse outcries made all around them. Each man in turn is lifted off his feet as the press sways now this way, now that. They back, push, resist and fill the hall with cries of tumult. (“G,” 83)
Each man in the meeting is dramatically isolated, locked within his own irritated sensorium and incapable of either the abstraction of “patriotism” or the discursive traffic of politics; the men “attend only to themselves.” At the same time, however, the voters are not individuated enough; each individual will is swamped and annihilated by the mass of bodies that sway, push, and cry.
The mob’s tumult provides an inauspicious prologue to the men’s actions as voters the next day; they seem incapable even of the mob action that Alcott worries the working women in Work might stage when they are massified through sensation. Emerson’s embodied mob, however, transforms from a weltering mass absorbed in selfish concerns into an elevated unity when the genius stands and speaks:
At last the chosen man rises, the soul of the people, in whose bosom beats audibly the common heart. With his first words he strikes a note which all know; his word goes to the right place; as he catches the light spirit of the occasion his voice alters, vibrates, pierces the private ear of every one; the mob quiets itself somehow, —every one being magnetized, —and the house hangs suspended on the lips of one man. Each man whilst he hears thinks he too can speak; and in the pauses of the orator bursts forth the splendid voice of four or five thousand men in full cry, the grandest sound in nature. (“G,” 83)
A great deal transpires in this passage: the men in the hall enter a new experience of embodiment; their identity blurs with that of the speaker; and they raise their voices in assent in response to magnetizing power. Each of these transformations of the crowd is key to how agency is imagined to circulate through genius and needs to be set out in turn.
Before the genius takes the podium, the men’s bodies isolate them in embodied discomfort. Rather than sweeping away the body, the speaker uses the faculties of his own body to transform the bodies of the men: not his writing or his words but his embodied “voice” pierces every “private ear,” tearing the film that has until this moment held each man within his private sensorium. The speaker’s body—his heart and voice—invites corporeal identification that turns the mob into a unified body, with voices raised. When the auditors assume the collective body of this trope, they lose their asocial absorption in their particular bodies. Emerson is describing, that is, not a disembodied public but rather an abstractly embodied one.
The identification pictured here is not a personal or sympathetic identification with the speaker of “Genius.” The auditors do not mimic the speaker’s pain or love with their own feelings. They do not think he is a person like them or think of him as a person at all. Neither, however, do they leave themselves entirely behind as the speaker catches “the light spirit of the occasion.” Instead they enter an ambiguous state definitive not only of listening to genius but also of having it; in fact, listening to genius becomes a mode of having it. Each man “whilst he hears thinks he too can speak,”