The Genius of Democracy. Victoria Olwell
Künstlerroman typically concerns the figure of the artist in opposition to conventional social expectations, and in the case of those about women deals extensively with the conflict between vocation and domesticity, tropes of genius have specifically to do with distinct cognitive formations of creativity and the dialectics between universality and particularity, public and private, agency and attenuated will that genius was thought to sustain.
There also exist, however, profound tensions between the forms of the novel and the construct of genius, and these demand our attention as well. In some ways the logic of genius grates against the grain of prose fiction. Genius indicates a sudden break with existing forms and paradigms, and so its emergence as a topic, or as a dramatized experience, jars the worlds of novels whose narrative principles otherwise objectify incremental development or long chains of causality. Genius, in other words, often does not fit within the narratives that stage it, and that very misfit, or excess, produces its conspicuous alterity to the ordinary interpretive paradigms for understanding the mechanisms of political change. Each chapter in this book materializes a nexus of problems around a particular scene of women’s relation to public and civic life; each centers in a novel exemplary of that problem and then radiates selectively into those shards of the discourse on female genius most necessary to illuminate the novel’s organization of the genius trope.
The chapters that follow are organized around readings of novels that open the way to particular constellations of genius, gender, and public life. The first chapter traces the U.S. translation of the aesthetic theory of genius into a political trope. Stretching back to the late eighteenth century, the operation of women’s “genius”—defined as their distinctive talents and spiritual liveness—was held by Enlightenment pedagogy to signify America’s freedom from tyranny, as realized in women’s freedom to actualize their personal capacities on their own behalf, even if they were dispossessed of actual civil authority and economic power. The romantic revolution in aesthetic philosophy reached the United States by the 1830s; one of its primary Americanizers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, folded its developments into his work, linking it at the same time with concerns about American democratic forms. Reasonable debate and self-proprietorship, this chapter argues, had long been dominant—but contested—ideals. Where critics of disinterested deliberation worried that it failed to engage the passions, that it produced only grudging forms of consent, and that it failed to form a satisfactory collective social life from its populace’s disparate opinions, Emerson proposed genius as a force that would forge authentic collectivity from an otherwise atomized franchise. Emerson’s model of genius proved a useful one for legitimizing the authority and appeal of women’s political speech; insofar as women were disqualified from political debate because they were held not to possess the reason, disinterest, and universality of men, the trope of genius provided another, more attainable route of access. At the same time, however, Emerson’s implicit critique of the public sphere of rational debate made “genius” not only a convenience for female speakers but also a critical discourse useful for conceptualizing and resisting the terms of women’s exclusion from politics. As a way of demonstrating this, I explore the critical operations of the female genius discourse in Louisa May Alcott’s novel Work: A Story of Experience, which concludes by framing a protofeminist activist movement grounded in female genius.
While Chapter 1 considers the history of genius as a trope for counterliberal public making that could be used to imagine women’s civic and political inclusion, Chapter 2 explores the continuity between genius and modalities of thought associated with women’s privacy. At the same time that the trope of genius has a public life, its emphasis on passivity, intuitive knowledge, self-fracture, and instinct brings it remarkably close to the stereotypes of domestic femininity. The genius’s creativity is theorized as supremely innocent, uncalculated, and unwilled. In some ways the passivity of the genius to his inspiration coincides with women’s ideal passivity; the genius asserted himself through negation, mirroring women’s ideal selflessness. Chapter 2 considers Henry James’s satirical exploitation of this latent analogy in The Bostonians (1886). In this semihistorical novel James models the character of Verena Tarrant on the figure of the female genius-orator discussed in Chapter 1. However, while the convention of female genius oration stood in critical relation to the dominant frameworks for citizenship and proposed alternative models of women’s participation in political activism and collective struggle, James sees the conventions of female genius only as proliferating and diversifying forms of privacy, flooding the public with privacy’s desires, affects, and sensations. James stages Verena’s genius as a historically new destruction of the boundary between public and private, accomplished when the women’s movement intrudes women and their conventional privacy into the public and abetted by the ability of the mass press to commodify and publicize private life.
Yet while this is the problem that the novel defines for itself, the novel also, I argue, symptomatizes another condition: that the definition of privacy had recently expanded from the sphere of private property to the personal sphere and, with that transition had delegitimized radical politics and languages that had their roots in the pre–Civil War United States. With this movement discourses of the personal, erotic, and sentimental that had previously enjoyed political life in such settings as the free love movement, abolitionism, and U.S. associationist social experiments thus looked, retrospectively, obscenely personal and antipolitical. This chapter describes one trajectory along which the public/private split was increasingly reified during the second half of the nineteenth century, creating conditions that depleted the resources for flexible, affective, and radical publics.
In The Bostonians the fractured female psyche becomes the means by which Verena is cleared from the public; in George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) it becomes the means of mapping mass publicity. Chapter 3 argues that Trilby catalyzes contemporary psychological understandings of dissociated states of consciousness in order to provoke a crisis in the concept of originality that, in turn, undermines the legal and conventional association between originality and intellectual property. If, as Michel Foucault has argued and historians of copyright have demonstrated, the concept of authorship, anchored in the figure of the original genius, ties creativity to the concept of the individual in order to facilitate a system of property exchange, then this chapter argues that Trilby challenges such an ideology of individualism and property by staging Trilby’s split personality and hypnotic collaboration with Svengali. When the “origin” of Trilby’s genius for singing is ambiguated, so is its proprietary status. The problem of ambiguated originality that the novel thematizes became central in its reception, as the novel’s copyright holders found themselves embroiled in a seemingly endless set of disputes over their proprietary right in a fiction that was being pirated, staged in unlicensed productions, and adapted in part by circus performers, amateur actors, parodists, photographers, and advertisers. The general tendency of the mass cultural reception, I argue, was to claim Trilby as a collectively held fiction, available for multiple appropriations and reworkings. This possibility gains a liberatory dimension when seen in light of the novel’s own narrative of the ways in which the concept of individual authorship obscures more complex relations of identity and production. Ultimately, however, the implications of Trilby’s relation to genius for a freer circulation of fiction reaches its disappearing point in the intersection between the discourse of advertising and the psychological discourse on split consciousness, which saw the divided mind as an ideal medium for transmitting discourses and ideas unconsciously absorbed from the atmosphere and mistaken by the subject for its own original ideas. As stage parodies and advertising burlesques of Trilby suggest, the divided mind and the ambiguated originality it promised could become a cipher for advertising, rather than a rebuke to a restrictive system of intellectual property.
Chapter 4 centers on the American novelist Mary Hunter Austin’s writings on women, citizenship, and genius: her 1912 novel, A Woman of Genius; her 1918 citizenship guide, The Young Woman Citizen; and her 1923 self-help book, Everyman’s Genius. I situate these texts within a scientific and popular debate about whether or not women could possess genius and if they could,