Austin’s conception of genius in A Woman of Genius and The Young Woman Citizen allies women with a principle of variation that promises not only to sponsor their greater civic participation but also to make the identity category of “woman” the object of women’s self-conscious expansion, variation, and transformation. But if “woman” becomes a space of change and politics in these works, Austin’s self-help book, Everyman’s Genius, exposes the depoliticizing tendency latent in the emancipatory identities she imagined through the trope of genius in her earlier work. Drawing on recent developments in ethnology and psychology, Austin ultimately racializes and psychologizes genius. While genius had operated in debates before suffrage as a trope for transformation and change that could be staged publicly and collectively, this postsuffrage work allies genius with an ontology of the untransformability of racial identity and the privacy of the psyche and its mysteries. In this turn genius ultimately functions as a category of reification rather than improvisation, of organic determinism rather than democratic open-endedness, and of therapeutic self-improvement rather than collectivity.
Chapter 5 charts Jessie Redmon Fauset’s intervention into the racial reifications of the genius discourse in her novel There Is Confusion (1924). The discourse on racial genius had interacted with that on gendered genius since at least the late eighteenth century, when political philosophies of universal equality were counterbalanced by constructions of essential differences of race and gender that were designed to account for the civic exclusion of women and racial others, particularly African Americans. In tandem with the increasing racialization of U.S. citizenship in the 1920s, however, racial genius became a primary cultural ground of contest not only over equality but also over national cultural membership. Within these contests, ethnologists and scientists within the white supremacist tradition not only denied the existence of black genius but also claimed that the lack of genius rightfully excluded African Americans from national cultural membership. Such arguments exploited a proprietary logic of creativity, in which originality legitimated ownership and ownership defined membership. At the same time African American intellectuals and artists undertook their own improvisations on the theme of genius, sometimes asserting that equal genius proved black equality with whites, sometimes elaborating a logic of black genius as a revolutionary means of creating resistant black collectivity, and sometimes using the proprietary logic of the genius trope to argue for black cultural ownership of U.S. national culture and, by a parallel logic, economic ownership of the national wealth that African American labor had created. Working against the grain of these approaches, Fauset shows the limits of the genius discourse for African American cultural politics. In its place she advances a cultural logic of imitation. Her protagonist, Joanna Marshall, fulfills the stereotypes of both women and blacks as imitative, and her narrative arc suggests how copying could function as a means of cultural collaboration and perpetuation if only it could avoid the operations of the market.
My investigation concludes with a coda on two of Gertrude Stein’s war memoirs, “The Winner Loses” (1940) and Wars I Have Seen (1945). Stein made herself into a widely recognized icon of modernist genius, abstracted from the kinds of political terrain the concept of genius inhabited in the United States. Her situation in occupied France during World War II, however, was characterized by the complete suspension of civil order and rights, by the constant terror of violence and the abrogation of agency. It was also characterized by her own compromised position as an early supporter of the Vichy regime who accepted the help of a longtime friend who was later convicted of Nazi collaboration. In this context Stein employs “genius” as a distressed trope through which she represents the traumas of war and abnegated citizenship while also dramatizing a predicament of agency that has absorbed recent critical models of her work done during the war.
Thus this book ultimately examines how the emancipatory possibilities carried by the genius discourse reach their limits. Yet however much the seeds of such an end may have been carried in the discourse on genius throughout the period of its relevance to women’s citizenship, this ultimate end did not fully determine or structure the meaning of “genius” for the particular contexts and moments when it offered a language for posing liberatory and often critical alternatives to the usual and legitimate frameworks for democratic capacity and citizenship. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commentators often saw genius as a kind of productive pathology, a symptom of underlying organic problems that, nevertheless, produced marvelous and cherished effects because of its deviations from the normative and ordinary. We can see in their attitude an apt metaphor for the project that follows: if genius can be traced at certain points to ideologies obstructive to models of democracy and personality that we might wish to stand behind, then it also breaks the frame of normative constructions of democracy in a manner we need to observe and might come to value.
CHAPTER 1
“It Spoke Itself”: Genius, Political Speech, and Louisa May Alcott’s Work
LOUISA May Alcott’s 1872 novel, Work: A Story of Experience, concludes with the opposite of “work”: genius. The novel has taken its heroine, Christie Devon, through a highly fragmented narrative of labor where work has had many guises and involved many travails but is experienced in such an episodic and incoherent way that its larger social and economic dimensions are hard to trace. In the novel’s final chapter, however, she enters an emergent public when she goes to “one of the many meetings of working-women, which had made some stir of late.”1 Where her work has been defined by its local conditions and often her isolation, she now finds herself poised before an abstract collectivity, “working-women,” that is struggling in the postbellum moment to form itself into a liberating movement. Women’s work is its basis of organization, but as Christie witnesses, the women in attendance seem unable to leap from their individual experiences as workers to a collective program—until, that is, Christie rises on “a sudden and uncontrollable impulse” (W, 332) and speaks—or rather is spoken through. Speech flows through her in alterity to her person and in excess of her agency, as she explains: “I don’t deserve any credit for the speech, because it spoke itself, and I couldn’t help it” (W, 342).
Christie’s speech makes use of a convention of U.S. public discourse in which the person speaking is understood as a cipher, a convention that went, in certain circumstances, by the name “genius.” The operations of genius are on full display, for instance, in J. B. Pond’s Eccentricities of Genius: Memories of Famous Men and Women of the Platform and Stage (1900). Pond, a lyceum organizer, repeatedly recollects acts of expression that overcome agency and identity. He recalls, for instance, that the abolitionist and suffragist Julia Ward Howe told him that she wrote the lyrics to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in a spontaneous burst, feeling herself to be their passive transcriber. She had heard a few Union soldiers singing the gruesome and repetitive “John Brown’s Body Lies A-Mouldering in the Grave” and thought that the tune deserved more stirring words. The next morning, as she recalls, she awoke “in the gray of the early dawn, and, to my astonishment, found that the wished-for lines were arranging themselves in my brain. I hastily rose, saying to myself, ‘I shall lose this if I don’t write it down.’ Immediately I searched for the sheet of paper and an old stump of pen that I had had the night before, and began to scrawl the lines almost without looking. Having completed that, I lay down again and fell asleep, but not without feeling that something of importance had happened to me.”2 Howe experiences this act of composition as a break in self-continuity. Her words make her their passive object; they “happened to” her. Giving another example of the “eccentricity of genius,” Pond retells the women’s rights advocate Anna E. Dickinson’s account of her first—and