Female Genius and U.S. Political Cultures
It has become a critical commonplace that the definition of “genius” as it developed in the eighteenth century categorically excluded women.8 The literature of the eighteenth century, however, provides a more complex picture. From the early days of the republic, conceptions of female genius linked definitions of national political culture to women’s citizenship. These conceptions, though, were historically distinct. They initially formed under paradigms of the intellect vastly different from those that developed in the nineteenth century and still hold sway today. Female genius began its American career as an aspect of women’s ordinary human intellect, rather than as a distinct epistemology. Whereas “genius” would later come to define a qualitatively distinct cognitive style or capacity that set its bearer apart, through much of the eighteenth century “genius” meant “animating spirit” or “characteristic disposition”; “genius” could also indicate something as prosaic as “inclination.” At the same time, the concept of genius retained the supernatural aura of its older meaning as either an attendant guardian spirit or an evil spirit.9 This supernaturalism was key, paradoxically, to “genius’s” humanity—the illuminating light of genius vivified the other intellectual faculties, raising their functions from the mechanistic plane to that of the human. But while genius resided in the intellect as a vital principle, it was not in and of itself definitive of a person’s cognitive character. Rather, it functioned as a principle of the many faculties cultivated within a refined but in no way extraordinary mind.
As Lorraine Daston reminds us, the eighteenth century understood intelligence to be a plural entity composed of what looks to us to be a stunning array of qualities—not only the Cartesian categories of reason, memory, and imagination but also many other qualities, including judgment, stamina, virtue, and quickness. The nineteenth century would leave faculty psychology behind and simplify the intellect under the conception of “general intelligence,” defined as abstract synthetic ability.10 In the eighteenth century, by contrast, plural intelligence was vitalized and humanized by a “genius” that signified a magnitude of power, rather than a coherently theorized species of thought.
The Enlightenment discourse on the human intellect gendered intelligence, but in a manner distinct from the rigid binary that nineteenth-century science would instantiate. Within the conventions of European philosophies of mind that set the initial terms of U.S. conceptions, women’s intelligence occupied a lower order than did men’s. Following Aristotelian theories of intellect, philosophers considered women’s intelligence to be based in less valued attributes of the mind, such as precocity, fancy, and a memory for facts, while men’s intelligence was allied with abstract analytical ability, stamina, reason, and judgment.11 Judith Sergeant Murray therefore begins her 1790 call for equal female education by confirming that “the province of imagination hath long since been surrendered up to us,” and that “memory, I believe, must be allowed us in common.”12 Women’s excellence in the lower faculties of intelligence did not contradict the possibility that they had genius. Although women’s genius was thought to imbue lower orders of the hierarchy of intellectual faculties, it was genius nonetheless. As a value distributed across a vertical hierarchy of intellectual attributes, genius occupied what Thomas Laqueur has called the “one-sex” model of sexual difference, in which difference was understood to be a matter of rank rather than kind.13 It was thus conceivable that, given unusual gifts and a proper education, a few women might attain the upper reaches of intellectual accomplishment. Such women may have been considered “marvels” or “wonders,” as Daston has noted, but were not imagined to have deviated irreparably from the formation of their gender.14 As a speaker on behalf of the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia expressed it, educated women would overturn the idea that they were merely excellent memorizers and quick studies; they would “surprise the world with the meridian lustre of unrivalled genius, in the most intricate speculations.”15
The place that genius occupied in the cultivated female intellect becomes clear in an acrostic poem on the ideal “maid,” written about a graduating student, Ann Smith, by an unnamed fellow student at the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia and publicly presented at their commencement in 1794. Genius is but one facet of the “maid’s” excellence:
A ccept sweet maid, the tribute friendship pays,
N or blush to read the well-requited praise;
N ature has fram’d thee, with a noble heart
S weet sensibility, devoid of art:
M ajestic graces in thy form appear;
In genius brigxht, in judgement sound and clear.
T hus blest by nature, with a form so fair,
H eav’n be thy guardian, and its laws thy care.16
Even though the poet credits “Nature” with framing the ideal maid, forming the poem from a student’s name literalizes (literally, as in “puts in letters”) the connection between the formal act of composition, which configures the student’s name into a metrical list of virtues, and the project of education, which composes the student’s mind as a set of complementary, mutually informing faculties of knowledge. The poem thus indicates not only the place of genius amid other capacities, but also the shaping role that formal knowledge and aesthetic refinement played in developing and organizing the mind. Whereas genius would later be construed as an assertive native ability that would shine forth no matter what level of education its possessor attained—or as an ability whose valued lay in its immunity to the banalizing effects of conventional education—eighteenth-century genius began, rather than ended, with “nature.”17
Among late eighteenth-century advocates of female education in the United States, the cultivation of female genius was more than a matter of self-culture; it was conceived as part of the project of republican citizenship. A 1795 celebratory commencement poem mapped the political terrain of women’s genius by claiming that despotic government squelched it: “Strange tyrant customs … dim’d [women’s] genius by its dark control.” Republican education, by contrast, sought “T’illume their genius.”18 This poem figures women’s genius as a historical casualty of the social and political forms that preceded the recent political revolution; its liberation and cultivation signify the achievements of the republic. Developing women’s genius was necessary to forming a refined and virtuous citizenry, whose balanced and carefully composed ethos would link domestic order with a well-ordered nation.19 Moreover, educating women’s genius bound them to the formal structures of the nation and secured their “influence … in favor of our government and laws, as it were in their infancy.” Women’s inclination and ability to advocate for the political system that favored their education would serve as a “bulwark round our inestimable constitution.”20
This premium on women’s genius in the making—or constitution, as it were—of the new nation is in part why Clara Wieland’s intellectual character in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1797) serves to index the health of republican nationhood in the novel. Clara had been, for Henry Pleyel, a paragon of female republican virtue. “Not a sentiment you uttered, not a look you assumed, that were not, in my apprehension, fraught with the sublimities of rectitude and the illuminations of genius,” he spitefully tells her after he has come to believe she is carrying on a depraved love affair with Carwin.21 The seeming balance of her genius with her other attributes had provided the characterological basis for a new civil order; its vulnerability to derangement by what Clara calls “evil geniuses” demonstrates, in this antirevolutionary novel, the perils of grounding the new national warrant in refined minds or the compacts formed among them.22 Women’s genius thus functions in the republican era