The Genius of Democracy. Victoria Olwell
the conditions” of “womankind as a whole” to the “neglect of the importance of the subject” (“FG,” 496). Kristeva sees “feminine genius” to include both a feminine particularity, not limited to biological or socially recognized women but realized in a psychoanalytically intelligible feminine sexuality, and a unique individual creativity irreducible to the social conditions that surround it and therefore capable of opposing them. As she writes, modern freedom becomes possible “through the risks that each of us is prepared to take by calling into question thought, language, one’s own age, and any identity that resides in them. You are a genius to the extent that you are able to challenge the sociohistorical conditions of your identity” (“FG,” 504).
It would be possible to read assertions of women’s genius in the fiction and print culture of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States through Kristeva’s conception, linking them to expressly psychosexual creativity. But that is not what I am attempting here. While Kristeva approaches “feminine genius” as an actually existing resource for social transformation and the production of democratic freedom, I am interested instead in how and why the idea of female genius became associated, historically and conceptually, with social transformation and democratic emancipation. Indeed, from my perspective, Kristeva’s formulation, for all of its theoretical sophistication and complex grounding in the lives of extraordinary twentieth-century women, looks like a modern extension of the historical discourse I want to uncover. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, narratives of female genius developed the idea that genius possessed world-transforming capacities and that these served feminist and activist purposes.
Consider, for instance, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s short story “The Two Offers,” published in the Anglo-African in 1859. Best known today for her widely taught novel about slavery and Reconstruction, Iola Leroy (1892), Harper was an abolitionist, antiracist activist, and advocate for women’s rights who lectured and wrote widely on these topics during her long career over the second half of the nineteenth century. “The Two Offers” puts the conceit of female genius in tension with the conventions of romantic fiction and sets it against the institution of slavery. The story opens on the scene of two cousins, Janette Alston and Laura Lagrange, sitting together while Janette knits and Laura writes letter after letter, only to tear up each one. Laura explains, “Well, it is an important matter: I have two offers for marriage, and I do not know which to choose.”52 Her problem, it seems, is one of the most familiar dilemmas of romance fiction, perhaps the dilemma. In keeping with the conventionality of the problem, Janette offers predictable counsel, advising Laura not to marry at all since she feels “not love enough for either to make a choice.” Without love, Janette warns, the marriage would commodify her and “only be a mere matter of bargain and sale” (“TO,” 106). Laura concedes that she does not “regard either [man] as a woman should the man she chooses for her husband” but worries that if she refuses both, “there is the risk of being an old maid, and that is not to be thought of” (“TO,” 106). Janette then urges her to consider that “a loveless home” might be much worse than “the lot of the old maid who accepts her earthly mission as a gift from God” (“TO,” 106). As it turns out, Laura falls in love with one of her suitors and marries him. He is a cad, though, and briefly regards her as a “prize”—she has apparently been sold even though she was in love—before he resumes his life of drink and dissipation. She suffers “deep anguish” at the loss of their only child, and after several years she succumbs to “a slow wasting of the vital forces, the sickness of the soul” (“TO,” 113). On her deathbed she vainly calls out for her husband to return, but he never arrives. Since love has killed her, we can easily imagine that she would have fared rather better in a “loveless home.”
Yet even then she could hardly have fared as well as her cousin. Janette, we learn, is a genius. At the time of her opening conversation with her cousin, she is already famous: “The achievements of genius had won her a position in the literary world, where she shone as one of its bright particular stars” (“TO,” 107). As Laura slips away into death, Janette’s vitality grows. She resolves to “kindle the fires of her genius” in the service of abolition: “In her the downtrodden slave found an earnest advocate” (“TO,” 114).
On the face of it this is, quite frankly, a puzzling story. It opens by establishing a set of binary choices: the choice between one man and another, the choice between marrying for love and marrying for money, and the choice between a sham marriage and the life of a useful old maid. The story, though, never seriously pursues these oppositions; indeed, once having introduced them, it goes out of its way to display their irrelevance. We are never given a way to assess Laura’s “two offers” as we usually would be within the conventions of romantic fiction. One of the suitors is never sketched at all, and the cad whom Laura marries is depicted only after the wedding. The choice between a loving and a loveless marriage is similarly moot. Janette warns Laura that she should not marry because she does not love, but then Laura does fall in love with one of her suitors; in the narrator’s words, “she learned that great lesson of human experience and woman’s life, to love the man who bowed at her shrine” (“TO,” 109). The opposition between the sham marriage and the useful life of an old maid similarly collapses, not only because the disastrous marriage is one based on love—the kind of marriage that Janette’s criteria would have urged Laura to accept—but also because it has to bear the enormous weight of Janette’s genius.
To make the point that an unmarried woman can contribute to the community and derive satisfaction from doing so, Harper would need only to show Janette pursuing useful but ordinary activities—visiting the sick, helping her family, engaging in philanthropic activities, working as a nurse or teacher, or choosing a life of service such as the one she later imagines for the heroine of Iola Leroy. Instead, Harper gives her a life far beyond the means of choice. Janette is a woman “whose genius gave life and vivacity to the social circle” (“TO,” 107); in consequence, “Men hailed her as one of earth’s strangely gifted children, and wreathed garlands of fame for her brow” (“TO,” 108). When she politicizes her genius, she does not simply work for abolition as anyone might; she instead “had a higher and better object in all her writings than the mere acquisition of gold, or acquirement of fame. She felt that she had a high and holy mission on the battlefield of existence” (“TO,” 114). But fame she still gets: “Little children learned to name her with affection, the poor called her blessed…. Her life was like a beautiful story, only it was clothed with the dignity of reality and invested with the sublimity of truth” (“TO,” 114). Although her life is “like a beautiful story,” it is a distinctly different story than the one with which we seemed to have begun. Janette’s life—her genius—looms in extraordinary excess to the frame of choice and the narrative paths that initiate the story.
In the grips of such excess, the story teeters on the brink of incoherence and incomprehensibility—at least for us. The discourse on female genius that this story organizes, however, renders the story intelligible as an inquiry into the grounding conditions of women’s political life. The main opposition in the story is between Laura’s stasis and Janette’s ability to transform and be transformed. Laura is entirely constrained by the social, economic, and conceptual limits of bourgeois womanhood. These frame her choice between this man and that, love or instrumentality. Incapable of thinking beyond them, Laura cannot even entertain the idea of a useful spinsterhood—hardly a radical option—that Janette suggests. Laura’s catastrophic narrative arc toward lonely death demonstrates that such choices are not really choices because their preconditions already constrain agency. She wastes her life by trying to live within the primary written convention of a woman’s life—the marriage plot—a situation metaphorized by the paper she wastes in the opening as she writes one unsatisfactory letter after another, unable to write her own satisfactory conclusion. In parallel with her paper, her own body becomes waste material as she slowly and inexorably dies. In contrast, Janette’s genius is a principle of transformation. Janette has her own drama of failed romance, but rather than killing her, it feeds her developing genius. When her affair develops, “love quickened her talents, inspired her genius” (“TO,” 107). After she separates from her lover and his death prevents any chance of reunion, “her genius gained strength from suffering and wonderous power and brilliancy from the agony hid