The Genius of Democracy. Victoria Olwell
becomes an ardent abolitionist.
Where Laura suffers the deadening effects of conventional bourgeois femininity, Janette not only transforms herself but also, as Kristeva would hope, is “a genius to the extent that [she is] able to challenge the sociohistorical conditions of [her] identity” (“FG,” 504). She gains this superabundant political agency, moreover, through the attenuation of her personal agency. Where Laura’s agency is stunted by the social and cognitive conventions of bourgeois womanhood that prevent her from not only having options but also being able to think about this situation, Janette’s personal agency is deferred to her genius. Janette does not have genius; it has her. In a crucial and literally grammatical sense, Janette is the indirect object, rather than the subject, of her genius; as the narrator notes, “The achievement of her genius had won her a position in the literary world” (“TO,” 107). It is not Janette but her “genius” that “gave life and vivacity to the social circle,” her “genius that gathered strength from suffering.” The fact of her possession by genius then enables her fight against an illegitimate possession, that of one person by another under slavery, so that her negated agency helps her strive to ameliorate, in a sense, the negated agency of the slave. She becomes a political agent, then, by channeling an agency authentic to her but not the same as her. This is the circuitous structure of agency characteristic of the tropes of female genius, and it typically operates not to affirm but to complicate and often ameliorate conventional feminine dilemmas of action, thought, and political possibility What is the significance of Janette’s abolitionism and how does it relate to the conditions of her identity? If the direction of her political energy is a narrative surprise, then Laura’s story prepares the groundwork for it. Laura’s inadvertent “self sale” forms part of the story’s critique of the existing state of marriage. Laura’s husband regards marriage as a means of gaining her as a piece of legal human property: “he looked upon marriage not as a divine sacrament for the soul’s development and human progression, but as the title-deed that gave him possession of the woman he thought he loved” (“TO,” 109). As if in response to this parallel, Janette responds to women’s predicament in the domain of bourgeois gender by turning her genius to the task of alleviating the slave’s predicament in the national domain of race. In light of this move from gender to race, it might be tempting to read Janette and “The Two Offers” more generally according to Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s critique of white feminist abolitionists who protested the sexual suffering of slave women as a way of safely opposing some of the constraining conditions of their own lives.53 But there is more here than a figurative connection between bourgeois marriage and slavery. Laura and Janette are assigned no race in the story, and their bodies bear the slightest descriptive burdens; at most, the narrator calls Janette “that pale intellectual woman” (“TO,” 107), and Laura at her death has “dark locks” on her “marble brow” (“TO,” 114).
In a white-authored American text published in a white-directed periodical, such minimal racial marking would affirm white racial privilege by meaning that they were white. “The Two Offers,” though, is, as far as we know, the first short story published by an African American, and it appeared in the Anglo-African, a periodical featuring African American writers and directed toward an African American audience.54 Janette’s paleness is a weak indication of whiteness, given Harper’s frequent turn in her fiction to light-skinned African American heroines. Janette’s abolitionist work mirrors Harper’s own tireless political activism, giving her the character of an author surrogate. One kind of argument would insist that Harper embraces the American national default of whiteness here in and through her attempt to represent characters definitive of bourgeois womanhood. Another would see African American abolitionism as the explicit assumption of readers of the Anglo-African. Yet although I would agree with the latter claim, it remains conspicuous that Harper, who so often defines her heroines through explicit predicaments of ambiguous racial identity, remains reticent about the heroine’s race here but not about slavery. The answer to this puzzle lies in the way that discourses of female genius manage bodily particularity. The general pattern, as in “The Two Offers,” is to vault over the politically freighted body in the service of articulating and protesting its conditions, not leaving it conceptually behind but mediating between particular distressed embodiments and an abstract domain of genius. Janette might, in Kristeva’s words, possess a genius capable of creating “the breakthrough that consists in going beyond the situation” (“FG,” 496), but she moves beyond the situation in order to address it, smashing convention and transforming context.
Discourses on genius and gender were widespread in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. They sometimes coalesced into coherent conversations and recognized debates. There were, to be sure, historically long-running threads of systematic inquiry—essays defining genius, chapters of scientific or aesthetic monographs either supporting or denying women’s capacity for it, feminist and antifeminist speculations on women’s “special” genius, and so on. In their totality, though, they were far from constituting a systematic body of thought. They existed, rather, as a loose confederation of tropes, critical moves, scientific problems, clichés, genres, and aesthetic inquiries; and analyzing these is a crucial aspect of this project. The primary focus for my discussion, however, is literary fiction that situates female genius in particular scenes of women’s emergent publicity. There are, of course, other possible ways to locate the issue of female genius, just as there are other approaches to transformations in the gender of public life and citizenship more generally. One could look to the autobiographical writings of painters, poets, or dancers; to journalism and nonfiction about famous “women of genius,” such as Margaret Fuller, who were salon hostesses; to theories of acting onstage and in film or to theories of musical performance in relation to both live audiences and recording; to shifting conceptions of poetry writing and gender from romanticism through postmodernism; or to the larger history of the conceptions of genius as a kind of characteristic spirit that exists above the materiality of the nation yet defines national life. Reviewing scenes such as these has been part of the work of writing this book, and many of them are relevant to the discussion that follows.
But fiction has provided a particularly productive ground of inquiry because within it, the scattered tropes and discursive instantiations of female genius were organized into sustained investigations. Prose fiction featuring female genius in relation to public life did not simply register political debates or contests over gender that were happening elsewhere, though they need to be situated in relevant discussions; nor did it merely thematize a set of problems surrounding the new woman, women’s citizenship, liberalism, or transformations in gender. Instead fiction served as the primary cultural institution where the scattered tropes of gender and genius achieved form as political narratives. One reason that fiction could serve this purpose is because of its relatively broad accessibility. The misogynistic constructions of genius in aesthetic philosophy and the sciences—the constructions that have so far been granted the most visibility in current scholarship—had enormous cultural authority behind them but also a necessarily restricted audience and an even more dramatically restricted authorship. Fiction writing and reading were by far more accessible, and the novel’s famous capacity to consume and reconstruct other languages and discourses allowed it to incorporate but also transform authoritative models of genius. There is not, then, a “whole” theory of genius of which each invocation of genius in novels is a part. But there are patterns of emergence that prose fiction allows us to see, and these can help us reconstitute the problematics of women’s social and state citizenship that the genius discourse framed, and the hopes, moreover, that it uniquely fostered.
Rather than attempting to discern the unified field constituted by notions of female genius, then, I turn to novels that work out this trope at length, that orchestrate it in ways that produce its critical salience and a highly specified form of coherence—the formal coherence, as far as there is any, of the fictional narrative. It is within fiction that the discourses of female genius become, as it were, fully discursive, subject to the kinds of “development” that novels formally pursue by, for instance, engaging the conventions of love story, Bildung, realism and romance and those of character and linear time, as well as through the ability of novels to absorb and reshape the languages of other disciplines, other genres. Just as the discourses of gender and genius have no monolithic form, they have no special genre of fiction, though