The Genius of Democracy. Victoria Olwell
that of the public.20 Unlike sentimentality, genius never had the fully lived-in quality of a culture, though in the romantic era it was sometimes called a cult. What it provided was a set of metaphors through which controversies over gender and citizenship could be conducted and conceptualized, in ways beyond those made possible by the major recognized political frameworks of the time.
Examining appeals to genius illuminates major predicaments surrounding women’s identities and public standing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing how they were understood, contested, and, in instances sometimes practical and at others imaginary, overcome. In pursuing this claim, this book joins other recent investigations into the political life of the genius. Literary criticism once used “genius” as an evaluative term; of late it has been more productively concerned with understanding the many uses “genius” had as a category or a discourse for authors, critics, and Euro-American literary culture at large. The connection between particular claims to have genius and the desire to enter an exclusive scene of public life is well established. Anne E. Boyd and Naomi Z. Sofer have in different ways shown how “genius” was a term that nineteenth-century American women writers applied to themselves in order to establish their literary credentials and appeal for entry into a literary culture that increasingly defined itself as a national high culture.21
By contrast, in the modernist moment of high culture in the twentieth century, authorial claims to possess genius could serve something similar to the opposite function, reconciling the author’s hieratic difficulty with the demands of the market and celebrity culture.22 In Andrew Elfenbein’s account, though, the category of genius in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had less to do with claims about the aesthetic value of a literary work than with what it was possible, or impossible, to say about sexual identity. The “deviance” associated with genius from romanticism through twentieth-century science made it, Elfenbein argues, the perfect trope for staging incipient queer identities in literary culture.23 Gustavus Stadler’s recent analysis of genius as a discursive construction forged from the political contradictions of American culture is perhaps closest to my own commitments. Stadler argues that genius functioned as a discourse of “cultural and intellectual labor” that “was ultimately most useful for rendering, on a mass scale, the consumption of aesthetic culture as a necessary and vital part of the ‘freedom’ known as good citizenship.”24 Where Stadler analyzes how genius mediated theories of race, work, and consumption from the mid to late nineteenth century, my discussion here emphasizes the ways that genius organized conceptions of gender, citizenship, and public life in the historical moment of women’s civic inclusion. Doing so requires tracking specific instances of the discursive formation of genius in relation to gender, from its romantic through its scientific incarnations, and charting particular scenes of the public imagined through genius. The public scenes most relevant to my discussion include political lectures, suffrage activism, mass culture, literary writing, and antiracist political activism staged through the medium of high culture. “Genius,” like “gender” and “the public,” was a multiple formation. Discerning the shifting configurations among these terms promises to develop our sense of the political imaginary of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States and to bring into focus the particular controversies that defined gendered political subjectivity during the massive reconception of political life necessitated by the erosion of separate spheres ideology.
The work that discourses of genius performed in relation to gender and public life has remained obscure, primarily because of the critical suspicion that has been so generously heaped on conceptions of genius. Genius, in short, has a bad reputation. Critically speaking, “genius” has been roundly condemned as a category of mystification, one that in bad faith suspends creative acts, performed in a seemingly abstracted sphere of “culture,” above the social, political, or economic realities that we know are really responsible for the production of poems, symphonies, paintings, scientific discoveries, and other inventive moments conventionally attributed to the sudden inspirations of genius. Genius, in other words, stands accused of fetishizing transcendent individuality at the expense of more social understandings of how ideas or meanings emerge and circulate in the world. Perhaps most famously, Foucault earns his critical suspicion of genius in his canonical essay “What Is an Author?’ by defining the discursive principle of limitation locatable in the figure of the author. In Foucault’s words, “if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion.” Rather than creating limitlessly, the genius “is a certain functional principle by which … one impedes the free circulation of, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.”25 “The genius” is an instance, then, of the “individualization” of culture. “Genius” cloaks social life and its contentious relations of labor, power, materiality, identity, production, and discourse, squelching the potentially utopian possibilities of “free circulation.”
It gets worse. Feminist scholars have given genius an adjective that Foucault does not: “masculine.” Christine Battersby has shown in detail how the category of genius was defined explicitly to exclude women, even as it designated a kind of gender ambiguity, in the European philosophical and aesthetic discussions that set the terms for most American aesthetic philosophy that aspired to seriousness.26 Françoise Meltzer, moreover, has connected the idea of “originality” that was central to genius to the specifiably masculine subjectivity of possessive individualism. According to the logic of originality as Meltzer describes it, women of genius were “unimaginable.”27 For Rachel Blau DuPlessis, the literary figure of the “woman of genius” was profoundly incongruous, which is exactly what made it valuable for expressing the situation of bourgeois women in the late nineteenth century, who inhabited two mutually incommensurate ideological positions: that of individuality and that of domestic femininity. The figure of the female genius according to DuPlessis thus renders visible a “contradiction in bourgeois ideology between the ideals of striving, improvement, and visible public works, and the feminine version of that formula: passivity, ‘accomplishments,’ and invisible private acts.”28 In keeping with such insights, the feminist position on genius thus far has been to expose its implicit and explicit masculinity and to reveal how historical women who aspired to artistic or intellectual achievement managed this particular expression of misogyny.
There are good reasons for taking the view that genius is a category expressive of individualism, especially if one is working with what turns out to be a limited archive on the topic of genius, one based in the high European tradition of aesthetic philosophy, where the most undiluted praise for individual creativity can be found. It is also undeniably the case that many of the most authoritative definitions of genius from the Enlightenment through twentieth-century scientific models were expressly misogynistic, explicitly contending that women could not possess it. One need only dip a hand in the stream of historical discourses of genius to draw out a sampling of gender-differentiating pronouncements. Benjamin Rush’s Enlightenment-era medical model of the mind held that the faculty of “understanding” was “less vigorous and less comprehensive in the female,” which was why “a Newton, a Bacon, and a Napier, has never appeared among them,” and that “the same may be said of their imaginations”; “hence a Homer, a Shakespear [sic], and a Milton, has never appeared among them.”29
At the turn of the twentieth century, Otto Weininger, whose infamous pseudo-scientific Sex and Character (1903) exerted a formative influence on Gertrude Stein and was often cited in the U.S. context, declared that “from genius itself, the common quality of all the different manifestations of genius, woman is debarred.”30 Havelock Ellis’s 1930 edition of his major work on sexual difference, Man and Woman, asserted women’s lack of genius as an immutable biological condition, claiming that women “possess less spontaneous originality in the highest intellectual spheres. This is an organic tendency which no higher education can eradicate.”31 Women’s lack of genius was seen as a scientific and philosophical truism. In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States the prospect of women’s fuller citizenship gave point to this truism for those opposed to reform. As a writer for the Scientific American made the connection between genius and citizenship in 1894, “The