The Genius of Democracy: Fictions of Gender and Citizenship in the United States, 186-1945

By Victoria Olwell

In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, ideas of genius did more than define artistic and intellectual originality. They also provided a means for conceptualizing women's participation in a democracy that marginalized them. Widely distributed across print media but reaching their fullest development in literary fiction, tropes of female genius figured types of subjectivity and forms of collective experience that were capable of overcoming the existing constraints on political life. The connections between genius, gender, and citizenship were important not only to contests over such practical goals as women's suffrage but also to those over national membership, cultural identity, and means of political transformation more generally.

In The Genius of Democracy Victoria Olwell uncovers the political uses of genius, challenging our dominant narratives of gendered citizenship. She shows how American fiction catalyzed political models of female genius, especially in the work of Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Mary Hunter Austin, Jessie Fauset, and Gertrude Stein. From an American Romanticism that saw genius as the ability to mediate individual desire and collective purpose to later scientific paradigms that understood it as a pathological individual deviation that nevertheless produced cultural progress, ideas of genius provided a rich language for contests over women's citizenship. Feminist narratives of female genius projected desires for a modern public life open to new participants and new kinds of collaboration, even as philosophical and scientific ideas of intelligence and creativity could often disclose troubling and more regressive dimensions. Elucidating how ideas of genius facilitated debates about political agency, gendered identity, the nature of consciousness, intellectual property, race, and national culture, Olwell reveals oppositional ways of imagining women's citizenship, ways that were critical of the conceptual limits of American democracy as usual.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: May 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9780812204971

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The Genius of Democracy

THE GENIUS OF DEMOCRACY

Fictions of Gender and Citizenship in the United States, 1860–1945

VICTORIA OLWELL

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2011 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

1  3  5  7  9  10  8  6  4  2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Olwell, Victoria.

The genius of democracy : fictions of gender and citizenship in the United States, 1860–1945 / Victoria Olwell. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4324-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. American fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Women in public life—United States—History. 5. Women and democracy—United States—History. 6. Genius. 7. Genius in literature. 8. Women in literature. I. Title.

PS374.W6O46 2011

813’.4093522—dc22

2011002074

For John

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Work of Genius

Chapter 1. It Spoke Itself: Genius, Political Speech, and Louisa May Alcott’s Work

Chapter 2. Genius and the Demise of Radical Publics in Henry James’s The Bostonians

Chapter 3. Trilby: Double Personality, Intellectual Property, and Mass Genius

Chapter 4. Mary Hunter Austin: Genius, Variation, and the Identity Politics of Innovation

Chapter 5. Imitation as Circulation: Racial Genius and the Problem of National Culture in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s There Is Confusion

Coda: Gertrude Stein in Occupied France

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

The Genius of Democracy

INTRODUCTION

The Work of Genius

IN an 1855 speech, the labor and women’s rights advocate Frances Gage argued in support of married women’s control over their own earnings, hoping to nullify married men’s legal ownership of their wives’ wages. At her rhetorical zenith she proclaimed, Let us own ourselves, our earnings, our genius.¹ Within the familiar idiom of liberal democracy, Gage’s exhortation is exactly two-thirds intelligible. Gage’s first two demands, that women own themselves and their wages, clearly spring from the Lockean framework of possessive individualism, under which freedom is grounded, in Locke’s words, on the premise that every man has a property in his own person and that the labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.² By invoking possessive individualism, Gage shows here that she understands married women’s ownership of their wages to have larger implications than merely giving women control over the money they earn, although she respects that goal. She also is asserting that owning wages will bring women closer to the condition of full democratic citizenship as it was understood within the main tradition of liberal political philosophy and had been recently expanded to include men of small property and male laborers.³ She asks that married women—and here she means specifically free working-class women, since enslaved women had neither legal self-ownership nor wages and upper-class white women’s wealth generally derived from property rather than work—be assimilated to the same form of citizenship that free working men enjoyed.

But she also breaks this frame. She adds to her philosophically familiar call for women workers to own themselves and their wages another demand, that they own their genius. What could she mean by this? Gage creates a syntactical equivalence, but genius differs from her other terms in striking ways. A married woman’s ownership of her earnings could be accomplished by changes in the law, and slowly it was. Owning ourselves is a related, more abstract political-philosophical goal, but also one widely asserted and theorized. Owning genius, though, is an aspiration beyond the remedies of the law and outside of the main idiom of post-Lockean democracy. Given how urgently women’s rights activists felt the need to alleviate wage-earning women’s economic powerlessness and exclusion from the forms and privileges of full citizenship, why would Gage spend any breath on genius? What is our genius, and how could owning it assert, as she says, our right to be free?

This book recovers the topos on which Gage’s last demand—and many other discussions of women’s citizenship couched in similar language—becomes intelligible. Genius was a familiar term in struggles over women’s state citizenship and public presence more generally in the United States during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, a time when gender and public life were together transformed by the forces of political, economic, and cultural modernity. Over this time period, genius never designated a monolithic conception. Rich and diverse, references to genius were poised atop a highly elaborated set of inquiries into creativity, innovation, and the nature of the mind, most often explicitly in relation to some scene of public life, including such specific entities as audiences, readerships, and political meetings, as well as more abstract projections such as national culture, national character, or universal humanity.

Viewed through a wide lens, discourses on genius contributed to many different cultural and intellectual projects and had effects on aspects of American culture too numerous to list. My major contention here is that the discourses of genius exerted a shaping force over controversies about women’s identity, civil status, and participation in public life. In an obvious way discourses on genius provided a location, among many cultural locations, for debates about what women were and what they could or ought to do in the world. Debates raged over whether or not women could possess something called genius and how possessing it (or not) might matter (or not) for settling questions about their nature, destinies, opportunities, or access to such benefits of full citizenship as voting. Debates about women’s possession of genius, however, stood apart from debates about other characteristics that were used to establish sexual difference. Conceptions of genius had a special status in a long history of thinking about the connections between cognitive experience and democratic culture. This history often pitted models of genius against democratic business as usual, seeing genius as a force capable of overcoming conventional and institutional obstacles to a more egalitarian America.

For this reason, discourses of genius provided means for conceptualizing women’s identities and citizenship in opposition to the political forms and ideas that produced their marginality. These oppositional uses of conceptions of genius have been hard to discern because they lie scattered across the discourses and documents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They never achieved a consolidated theory; indeed, part of their utility derived from their unformalized state, which permitted many different kinds of appropriation. Prose fiction, however, had a strong role in wielding conceptions of female genius for oppositional purposes. Within prose fiction, conventions of narrative and characterization organized tropes of genius into sustained conceptual meditations. So while we must first turn to aesthetic and scientific theory to grasp the primary conceptual dimension of genius, fiction ultimately demands the most sustained attention if we hope to comprehend how discourses of genius formulated gender in relation to public life.

Historically, discussions of the nature and significance of genius had their first major development within romanticism. The term genius had long denoted the special character or nature of a person, place, or abstract social entity, as in the common phrase the genius of the age and other similar constructs. This sense of genius as distinct character is part of what Frances Gage conveys in her call for wage-earning women to own their genius, and it allows her both to give value to women, as people possessed of a character not reducible to the labor or wages that they nevertheless deserve to control, and to imagine them as a natural political collectivity bound to agitate for their common interest. The idea of special character persisted in discussions of genius through the twentieth century (and still exists), but it also gave rise in the late eighteenth century to a more specialized usage that defined genius as a highly valued mode of creative cognition marked by originality, spontaneity, and instinct. This romantic theory of creativity displaced an older emphasis on the imitation of masters, sustained effort, and learnedness. More than simply a body of theory about how works of art or technological invention come into the world, though, conceptions of genius redefined the mind and the experience of subjectivity. Genius indicated a split state of consciousness and an attenuated state of will by figuring creativity as inspiration, a sudden rushing into the mind of an idea that was totally authentic to its creator and at the same time completely alien to the creator’s conscious mind or sense of self.

Formulations of the will-destroying and consciousness-breaching force of genius were common in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century print culture, but Ralph Waldo Emerson’s are perhaps the most indelible. In Self-Reliance and elsewhere Emerson attached the authenticity of genius to its attenuation of the will: Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due.⁴ Genius, in Emerson’s formulations as in others, was a force that invaded the mind; the person in the grips of genius suffer[ed] the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him.⁵ The trope of creativity as a possession is at least as old as classical philosophy, but it became the dominant model of valued creativity and, moreover, a general model of human consciousness in the nineteenth century. Theories of genius were related to other discourses about the mind’s capacity for altered states of consciousness and will, such as those developed in radical Protestantism, spiritualism, mesmeric fads, and even modern theories of psychology that posited unconscious cerebration, double personality, and the more familiar unconscious of psychoanalysis. Discussions about genius shaped these other models of the mind and were in turn shaped by them.

In this broader context of mind theory, however, calling a split state of mind or invaded will genius gave it a special character, distinguished not only by the cultural value of the poems, paintings, or speeches that the person of genius produced but also by its means of convening a public. Romantic genius was imagined to create collective moments of shared thought by coordinating particular minds with universal truth. It apparently did so in a way that was magical without being supernatural. As such, genius represented a secularization of Christian conceptions of divine inspiration and conversion. In this secular mode the genius was conceived of as a person both highly distinct and completely representative. Emerson once again provides the most ringing and concise formulation in his description of the ideal poet: The poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common wealth.⁶ The term common wealth here is both figurative and literal; genius was a concept not just for figuring an abstract common good but also for thinking about the formal and social dimensions of a shared political and cultural order.

Despite the precision and similarity of many definitions of genius, one persistent and treasured claim about it was that it exceeded the capacity of words to define it. A writer for the American Phrenological Journal enthused in 1859, for instance, that we may work away at our adumbration of [genius] till we are gray, and then we shall fail to ‘body it forth’ with any entireness.⁷ Three generations later, well after phrenological models of the mind had been supplanted by pragmatism and then Freudian psychology, a writer for the Living Age began a 1924 review of a recent biography of Olive Shreiner by asserting in similar terms that genius was at once instantly recognizable and impossible to specify, a very certain incertitude: We cannot define [genius]; but we recognize it, although we may be hard put to it to say what it is.⁸ The undefinability, and one might say excess to language, of genius allowed it to signify a kind of human value that maintained its integrity by transcending the dissections of analysis and even dispute. It also made genius a fertile ground for controversy, since the apparent presence of genius inspired certitude but defied proof. Anyone could claim that anything was genius and would necessarily have to feel passionately while doing so, but the claim was also necessarily open to dispute since anyone could disagree. The controversial character of genius was especially pronounced when it intersected with contests over women’s capabilities.

Romantic conceptions such as these were remarkably long lived; indeed they are undoubtedly still familiar today. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the scientific disciplines of biology, neurology, psychology, and statistics undertook investigations of genius that overlapped romantic and popular models. The scientific discussion was profoundly ambivalent about genius. It defined genius in biological or statistical terms, primarily as a deviation or variation from the normal human type. Scientific treatises sometimes exalted genius and sometimes deplored it as a kind of degeneration. Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin and one of the founders of eugenics, praised the variation of genius in his paradigm-setting work Hereditary Genius (1869). Galton reframed genius according to the law of deviation from an average, which made genius a rare but predictable factor: Thus, the rarity of commanding ability, and the vast abundance of mediocrity, is no accident, but follows of necessity from the very nature of these things.⁹ The Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, by contrast, saw genius as a biological, rather than statistical, form of variation and as a kind of monstrosity, calling it a special morbid condition and congenital mental abnormality.¹⁰

American discussions cited both of these scientific models and also expressed both praise and horror of genius, sometimes simultaneously, as in a 1919 article: It is the variant … with new ideas, new methods, and new impulses who makes the great success. It is the variant, with new ideas, who commits the crime that curdles the blood.¹¹ Unlike romantic aesthetic theory, scientific models of genius understood it as a highly explicable phenomenon, although they disagreed over the terms of explicability. Scientific models also differed markedly in their conception of the representative person; they replaced the romantic model of the universal genius with a new conception of the representative person not as the genius but as the average or normal type. Scientific discourses of genius were part of a larger, baldly ideological project of categorizing human types, by gender, of course, but also by race, ethnicity, and nation. Specifically feminist tropes of genius often had to contend with the scientific models, but scientific ways of conceiving of the origin and circulation of creativity also shaped the feminist conversation, changing its ways of understanding the construction of gender, of representative personhood, and of the body in relation to creativity and social life.

The discourses of genius in their various manifestations were in no way inherently liberating. They could be turned in any number of directions for any number of purposes, and were. But they had recognizably liberating uses in relation to women’s status. One of the major reasons that conceptions of genius could serve this oppositional function was that, as in Gage’s ringing invocation, they could be placed in tension with the dominant political constructs of liberal democracy. Where liberal democracy defined proper citizenship in terms of rationality, individuality, and autonomy, models of genius defined alternative visions of democratic life based on inspiration, collectivity, and magical permutations of agency. Conceptions of genius in general could be used to challenge the social and subjective world described by a liberal democratic order, and they were appropriated by political positions that traversed the spectrum from radically reactionary to radically progressive. Particular feminist adaptations of ideas of genius, however, yoked them to two deeply connected purposes: to reconstructing gender as a political identity category and to imagining political worlds outside of the liberal universe that marginalized women.

Even beyond these explicitly and intentionally feminist uses, discourses of genius provided a set of terms for posing crucial questions about democracy under conditions of an expanding franchise and an emerging mass society. Tropes of genius made it possible to frame such questions as the following: How can particular identities and needs be reconciled with collective aims? Who has the privilege of being a representative person? How can agency be deployed under social and political conditions that constrain it? What purpose does a national culture serve, and how is legitimate membership in it determined? How can people excluded from state citizenship and cultural inclusion remedy their marginalization? And most pressing, how can social or political life be radically transformed?

Several factors made these questions urgent in connection with women’s identities and status in particular in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. The most obvious and in a sense finite of these was the struggle for women’s suffrage. As suffragists and their opponents well knew, granting women the vote at the national level would change, in a single stroke, women’s categorical political status by giving them access to the public sphere of the state, by making them full citizens and eliminating one of the major ways in which the law defined them as private beings. For this reason the decades preceding suffrage and directly following it witnessed controversies over the constitution of women as a categorical entity and over the arrangement of public and private spheres traditionally and legally defined by sexual difference, by a masculine public and a feminine private sphere.¹² Discourses of genius in this context took part in struggles over the reconstruction of gendered subjectivity at the same time that they were also projections of alternative ways of creating democratic publics; indeed these two purposes intersected. The time period leading up to and directly following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 thus defines the major historical focus of this book.

Although the formal threshold of the vote was an undeniable factor in reconstructing gender in relation to democracy, it was hardly the only arena where gender and public life were redefined through the language of genius. The public scenes of genius were as many as the publics that women seemed to be entering so visibly at the turn of the twentieth century. Before and after becoming full state citizens, women participated in many kinds of political activity not defined by their status in relation to the state, including utopian social experiments, abolitionist and labor activism, club work, settlement houses, conventions, and politically engaged writing.¹³ Genius was a frequent trope of these inventive political formations. In this era, mass culture produced a variety of public spaces and kinds of social encounter that were open to women. Mass culture saturates public life with the interests of capital; at the same time it provides means of participation, often through consumption and spectatorship, for people excluded from full legal standing in the nation.¹⁴ In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mass culture produced a distinct sense of anxiety over the shifting and perhaps collapsing relationship between private and public life, and conceptions of genius could be summoned to mediate these anxieties. As different as improvisational political activism and mass culture might seem to be, they both were conceivable in terms of genius. Indeed in a work such as Henry James’s The Bostonians, the term genius organizes a meditation on the apparent conflation of radical politics and mass culture.¹⁵

Perhaps the most obvious formation of public life that genius helped to define, however, was that of national culture. Conceptions of genius were ubiquitous in discussions of whether, and to what purpose, the United States could be understood to possess a national culture at all, or at least one whose standing could compete with that of Europe’s most admired national cultures. Emerson’s calls for American genius to create an original American culture are familiar, and they invite a collective and original effort. One less regarded legacy of this model is that the ideal of a national literary and artistic culture, and of its origins in genius, became useful to those who wanted to create either expansive or exclusionary models of national culture, who wanted, that is, to employ the concept of culture to adjudicate the parameters of legitimate national membership. In the contexts of these discussions, conceptions of genius could be used to define women as either authentic or inauthentic cultural citizens. The idea of national genius became key to the racialization of citizenship in biological terms in the first decades of the twentieth century, a development that sapped the utopian potential from the most progressive models of genius.

In examining the political visions articulated through conceptions of genius, the discussion in this book joins other recent work in American literary studies dedicated to enriching our understanding of the history of struggles over participation in U.S. public life. A rich field of scholarship has diagnosed the limits that the primary categories of American democracy place on citizenship and uncovered other languages through which excluded people generated optimistic visions of new and inclusive political worlds. As Priscilla Wald has established, the major narratives of U.S. culture created exclusive visions of national life that were assailed by inventive literary narrative forms.¹⁶ Other illuminating work has focused our attention on the limiting social vision of liberalism in particular.

Legal state citizenship—the form of national belonging for which suffragists fought—requires a subject stripped of all particular characteristics, a subject that can enter the domain of universality and impartial deliberation by leaving behind the particular body and its interests. As Russ Castronovo has argued, this political form is deadening but at the same time an object of desire for aspirants to full citizenship, who are defined as overembodied because marked by race, gender, ethnicity, class, or other evidence of particularity.¹⁷ Women’s citizenship in the United States is complexly constructed, defined by class, race, region, immigration status, and other factors. In a categorical sense, however, women’s relation to citizenship has been historically mediated through the institution of marriage. For married women in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, aspiring to the ghostly form of citizenship available through liberalism promised relief from their technical legal death under the laws of coverture, which filed their citizenship under that of their husbands and existed in some of its provisions until well into the 1930s. Marriage in its broader conventional forms, as Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has argued, defined the legal apparatus and structures of feeling that defined women’s subordinate citizenship and contradictory relation to a literary public sphere defined in large part by genres of domestic privacy.¹⁸

At the same time that these limits constrained women’s cultural and state citizenship, however, alternative and critical modes of civic engagement and political subjectivity developed. Recent work has shown how expressive voices, such as those of lecturers and singers or even ranting mobs, were imagined capable of expressing political desires that could not reach articulation through the formal mechanisms of the state, such as the franchise, or the public sphere of disembodied rational deliberation.¹⁹ The cultures of sentimentality, however, have provided the richest field of inquiry into liberalism and its discontents. Lauren Berlant’s work has been particularly instructive about the appeal that sentimentality had and still has for excluded subjects, as well as the way that sentimental culture functions in tandem with liberalism to depoliticize the desires and subjects it articulates by defining citizenship as proper feeling and collapsing the private and intimate spheres into 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 present very active and enlightening agitation over the question of women’s suffrage calls up again the many now established facts about the physiological differences in the nervous system of the sexes. Women’s supposed lack of genius was considered not only a clear marker of their unbridgeable difference from men but also a deficit that specifically proved their incapacity for public life, because it expressed a more general inability to be representative thinkers, innovators, or beings capable of originating new thoughts that could invigorate the polis.

To be sure, the gendering of genius in this tradition is complex. Although some of the same distinctions between men’s and women’s minds were repeated over centuries, these distinctions were grounded in a succession of historical models of the mind that were very different in their basis, and also in models of gender that changed through time. The significance of these shifts forms the subjects of the chapters that follow. It was also the case that discourses of genius sometimes provided room for disarticulating gender from the body.³² The contortions of this tradition are fully evident, for instance, in the Goncourt brothers’ self-consciously elliptical and oft-quoted phrase There are no women of genius; women of genius are all men.³³ Without a doubt, the men of genius often presented their own category deviations; their supposed intuition, instinctiveness, spontaneity, and even physical delicacy associated them with stereotypical femininity.³⁴ As one commentator summarized this problem, It would seem, then, that genius must possess the emotional qualities that are the natural endowment of woman; while woman herself is excluded from genius.³⁵ At the same time, though, scholars of this tradition have not failed to note that the gender ambiguity of the genius trope in aesthetic and scientific discourses is wrapped in the certainty of the ultimate masculinity of genius, whether or not it is attached to something that is legible as a male body (though it almost always is). My examples fully suggest that as familiar and long-lived as the assertion of the masculinity of genius was, there was also apparently an imperative to repeat it over and over again, across paradigms of knowledge, as the decades passed.

But, this kind of repetition was necessary only because genius was a controversial rather than an uncontested index of sexual difference or gendered being. Although prestigious aesthetic philosophers and scientists claimed that women of genius were, as Meltzer notes, unimaginable, the textual archives of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States show that they were imagined all the time, often in moments of contention over the being of women and their place in public. When we broaden our archive beyond the works of a handful of Euro-American philosophers and scientists—that is, if we do not by default give priority to the thinkers who already have prestige—we can discern a wide-ranging set of contests over gender and democracy waged in the idiom of genius. When we do so, we can immediately see that feminists and their allies always disputed the claim that women were incapable of possessing the capacity for genius. They sometimes suspected that there was something absurd in having to do so in order to sue for full civic inclusion. As one advocate for women’s rights asked in the New York Times in 1915, Has anyone proposed to make inventive genius a test of citizenship?³⁶ Speaking literally, the answer to her rhetorical question was, of course, no, but her reductio ad absurdum logic points to the fact that in a well-understood figurative sense, the answer was yes.

Genius figured in debates over what women were, what they could do, and how their capacities mattered for their legal and social status. By stepping outside of the narrow philosophical archive of genius and into what turns out to be a broad conversation conducted across different strata of culture and across diverse public spheres, we can see that genius was less a fetish performing the work of ideologically driven concealment and more the field on which competing visions of sexual difference and social organization were staged, and on which feminist critical leverage was often gained. Unfolding these intricate contests will be the work of this book, but it is necessary to say at the outset that they were motivated by the striking fit between models of genius and women’s particular forms of exclusion from state membership and national culture membership.

Looking closely at the historical and theoretical conditions of women’s exclusion that made conceptions of genius so central to debates about gender and citizenship, one of the primary problems we find is this: as feminist political theory