Alcott’s obsession with genius is everywhere evident in her work: in her depiction of Jo’s writing in Little Women (1868); in her stories of frustrated women artists, such as “A Modern Cinderella” (1860), “Psyche’s Art” (1868), and A Marble Woman (1865); in her depictions of masculine genius and its counterfeits in the long short story “The Freak of a Genius” (1866) and its gothic revision as A Modern Mephistopheles (anonymously published in 1877); and in her journals, where she struggles over how to describe her own capacities and aspirations. For critics such as Naomi Z. Sofer and Anne E. Boyd, Alcott returns to the idea of genius in order to thematize her own ambition in particular and the role of the woman artist in general. Sofer sees Alcott’s writing as an extended critique of genius, understood as a privileged “identity” closed to women in any and every circumstance: “Alcott’s anonymous and pseudonymous fiction and her own biography suggest that even for women who enjoy the privileges of access and education … genius is an intellectual identity that is both unavailable to and undesirable for women to occupy. For as Alcott understood, the identity of genius represents a masculine intellectual identity that women—of any class—do not have access to.”3 Looking to Alcott’s journals and scrapbook, Boyd sees a more complex picture: that Alcott often claimed genius as her own but just as often expressed ambivalence about the ambition implied in the term. In Boyd’s account, “genius” designates a set of competing discourses about the identity of the artist, some of which “helped to create the possibility for women to envision themselves as potential geniuses,” while others denied women a recognized category to inhabit as artists.4
Alcott’s writing, then, exhibits the full range of tensions between the identity of the artist and the identity of the woman. Writing at odds with this approach, Gustavus Stadler sees genius in Alcott’s writing, and more generally in the public sphere, less as an available role than as a discursive formation central to the major problematics of U.S. culture in the mid-nineteenth century. Stadler discerns in Alcott’s fiction, primarily Little Women and “The Freak of a Genius,” a “relational model of genius” in which performative same-sex erotics take part in a “historical pattern linking sexuality and culture as discourses of the individual interior.” The “queerness” of genius in Alcott, then, marks the effect of culture in constituting selfhood, “the personal stakes of the individual’s relationship to culture” where culture regulates norms and marginality.5
Alcott’s Work, however, takes us to the point at which genius challenges constituted selfhood, as the subjective alterity of Christie’s speech attests. It also takes us past the self-evidence of “art” or “culture” as domains of genius and toward the construct of female genius as a figure for conceiving women’s citizenship beyond the models of political life that condition their marginality. Work opens up the broader context in which genius appears as something besides an identity or role. At its most strictly denotative, the term “genius” designated theories of the mind, intelligence, and creativity, and in this role it was a precursor to modern theories of psychology. As a matter of function, it produced cultural value and authority, and for this reason it became an object of contest over who could claim that value and authority and under what circumstances. Among the most visible of these contests was that over gender and genius, especially as philosophical positions hardened against women’s capacity for genius. But popular and literary tropes of women’s genius were still widespread throughout nineteenth-century U.S. culture despite such philosophical positions, and they occupied a special role in mediating women’s capacity for public and collective life. The trope of women’s genius could do this because the discourses of genius more generally generated, in tandem with their theories of mind, models of social and collective life distinct from those available within the political culture of liberalism. These models provided the means both to conceive of women’s public experience and to highlight the deficiencies of liberal political culture in conceiving democratic models of agency, consensus, and collectivity.
Yet, as a figure for women’s capacity for public making, genius presents problems for interpretation. Like romantic genius more generally, the public formation of female genius assumes its authority insofar as it provides knowledge by spontaneous intuition rather than rational deliberation or calculated effort, even when intuitions turn out to be perfectly in keeping with standards of logic. This mode of knowledge also configures political agency as a paradox. The force and “rightness” of Christie’s words—and of Howe’s and Dickinson’s historical words—depend on the condition that the woman has no intention of writing or speaking and, moreover, does not experience the words she expresses as her own. Just as Christie’s speech speaks itself, Howe’s lines “arrange themselves,” and Dickinson is “astonished” to hear her own speech. At the same time genius produces a complementary paradox in its audience, whose ability to engage the genius’s form of knowledge is conditioned by its own attenuated state of agency. When Dickinson’s speech overcomes her sense of self-possession, it also overpowers her listeners; as Pond remembers, she “never failed to thrill and enthrall her audiences” (EG, 153). Likewise the women’s rights orator Mary A. Livermore “held her audience spell-bound” (EG, 157), and the orator Maude Ballington Booth possessed “magnetism” (EG, 177). Invaded and subverted by the alterity of genius, these women and their audiences are emphatically not rational republicans or possessive individuals imbued with some form of free agency, the ideal subjects of normative democratic theory. Both are moved out of their ordinary consciousness as their minds are invaded and subverted by the alterity of genius.
What can we say about political speech so clearly severed from agency and consciousness? Given the cultural prohibitions on women’s public speaking and overt political involvement in the nineteenth century, it is tempting to see genius as a strategy of mitigation. If, for instance, Dickinson did not mean to speak, can she really be held responsible? Women channeling genius might appear to be sidestepping controversy over the propriety of speaking publicly and politically by not really speaking at all, or at least not speaking as themselves. Their availability to sudden inspirations might seem to retell the story of women’s essential passivity and partial agency, just as their spontaneity might appear to express their stereotypical impulsiveness. Women speaking politically through the convention of genius certainly resemble the trance speakers who, Anne Braude has argued, were permitted the platform because they channeled a content not their own, and who thereby created a public forum organized by the same qualities associated with women’s essential privacy—passivity, submissiveness, virtue, and compassion.6
To frame it this way, however, would be to miss how the construct of genius was at odds with the ideological distinction between public and private that required women to cloak their public ambitions in the mantle of their privacy. The political force and importance of female genius lay in its ability to constitute an epistemology, a mode of agency, and a form of social personhood distinct from other established forms and yet positioned among them in specifically critical and utopian ways. In its critical capacity, constructs of female genius exerted pressure on the central assumptions of liberal democratic culture. At its center nineteenth-century democratic discourse was structured by a seemingly endless series of polarities that function as exclusions—between public and private, interest and disinterest, particulars and the universal; between rational debate and emotive or subcompetent rhetorical styles; between valid political objectives and mere organic necessity; between people qualified to grant consent to governance and those deemed essentially incapable of consent (slaves, dependents, certain immigrants, and women).7 The figure of female genius challenged those structuring conditions of democracy, a challenge abetted by the fact that it was not itself a politically organized formation. For this reason we might construe it, to borrow and transform Pond’s term, as eccentric. In its most developed formulations, female genius not only establishes its own difference from normative political discourse but also provides hope for an eccentric democracy, capable of constituting collectivities and political subjects from positions outside of the antinomies that organize democratic forms and ideologies at the social center. It denominated an eccentric rhetorical space, symbolically