Such meanings of “genius” were not markedly specialized or precise. Over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, genius became an object of intensive theorization, and new conceptions of it existed in tension with an emerging liberal political culture defined by a separation of public and private spheres and the autonomous individuality of its ideal political subject. The romantic revolution in aesthetics made “genius” a central term for its investigations into creativity and the place of art in forming collectivities, such as audiences, peoples, nations, and humanity. By becoming more fully specified, genius became a coherent enough concept to possess internal contradictions, and it became a central enough value to become an object of contest. Under romantic theories of creativity, genius came to indicate an exceptional kind of thought—spontaneous, original creativity—different in kind rather than magnitude from ordinary intelligence. The apparent singularity and autonomy of genius allied it with an emergent individualism.23 The genius seemed to stand free of social relations and to have a unique claim on its own productions, conditions, as Françoise Meltzer has noted, that tied genius to the liberal political formation of possessive individualism and the masculine subject it privileged.24
At the same time, however, romantic genius also cut powerfully against these trends. Where liberal politics idealized rationality driven by self-interest, genius was theorized as an irrational force that fragmented individual selfhood. The productions of genius sprang from within their bearer not only as an organic realization of the self but also, paradoxically, as a subversion of the self. Genius fractured individuality, rising up from within the mind like an internal alien and moving out into the world on the momentum of what was imagined to be its universality and consequent irresistible persuasiveness.25 Genius’s universal and impersonal qualities are what often made it, for such continental theorists of genius as Kant and Schopenhauer, inimical to womanhood. Women’s ostensible orientation toward the personal and particular, coupled with their concrete and mimetic minds, barred them from the achievements of genius. But this gendering could take place only at another threshold of contradiction—the intuitive, instinctive qualities of genius were coded as feminine at the same moment that they were held to be nearly impossible for women to possess.26 With theories of genius, gender was highly polarized and essentialized and at the same time highly unstable. This paradoxical organization—autonomous but overtaken, individual but invaded, singular but universal, feminized but unambiguously masculine—made genius a disruptive and volatile formation of subjectivity, as capable of undermining dominant conceptions of gender and personhood as of expressing them.
One effect of genius’s disruptions is that it easily escaped the limits put on it in the strictly philosophical discussion and became available to transformation, appropriation, and development. One of these developments was the figure—as in character and trope—of female genius. While philosophical and later medical discussions continued to define the universality of genius in opposition to the intellectual characteristics credited to women since Aristotle, popular and literary discourse still posited women of genius. These formulations were driven not by a static gendered opposition but by a dialectic that performed complicated mediating work for the category of femininity, not despite but because of the tension between women’s particularity and the abstract, impersonal universalism of genius. Through this dialectic, female genius in the first half of the nineteenth century asserted a mode of knowledge and presence whose staging of the relation between sexual difference and citizenship per se was much less direct than it had been in late eighteenth-century writing. Where eighteenth-century female genius expressed the liberty and health of the nation, imagined as a continuity between cultivated minds and constitutional forms, mid-nineteenth-century models of female genius confounded the terms of a political order based on the distinction between public and private, men and women, and rationality and irrationality.
Lydia Sigourney’s 1840 “Essay on the Genius of Mrs. Hemans” suggests how fully this was the case even in writing not overtly concerned with political life. In this essay Sigourney introduces an American edition of the collected works of Felicia Hemans, the wildly popular, prolific, and then recently deceased British poet. Sigourney garbs Hemans in the conventions of romantic genius. She narrates the first appearance of Hemans’s genius in “infantine indications,” rather than finding it cultivated by proper education or revealed in mature speculations.27 Whereas eighteenth-century female genius required careful education and democracy to free it from the obscurity in which ignorance and “tyranny” had wrapped it, Hemans’s genius is described not only to have emerged naturally but also to have educated itself by instinct: “the never-resting love of knowledge was her schoolmaster…. Such branches of knowledge as were congenial to her taste, she seemed to acquire, without the toil of investigation—in pastime, or instinctively” (“MH,” x–xi). Never resting and never toiling, genius accrues value and authority from its difference from leisure and labor alike, a condition that becomes crucial to Christie’s speech in Work. Hemans’s apparent effortlessness represents at the same time an attenuation of her personal agency, which is supplanted her by “congeniality”—literally a co- or joint “genius” with what she learns.
As natural as Hemans’s genius may be to her, however, it is at the same time dissociated from her personality. Although her genius works by instinct, and thus seems to be anchored in her by nature, it is an internal alien, a familiar romantic echo of the older conception of genius as a possessing spirit and a staple, as we have seen, of the public speaking convention of female genius. Sigourney writes of Hemans’s genius as if it were an entity independent of her person, noting “the circumstances of its education” (“MH,” vii) and the “influence of Mrs. Hemans’s genius on her own character” (“MH,” xx). Sigourney frames Hemans as the trustee of genius rather than as someone who is “a genius”: “The possessor of this genius evinced both an innate consciousness of its powers, and a determination to devote them to their legitimate purposes. She held on her way, not in self-esteem, but in reverence for the loftiness of her vocation, and with a continually heightening gratitude for the entrusted treasure” (“MH,” xiv). Genius, then, is not Hemans’s own; it is a collective possession merely held and fostered by her. In other words, it is the opposite of private. For this reason Hemans’s trusteeship can establish, among other things, her personal disinterest in her own gifts. Her gift, that is, is not hers at all but everyone’s; her interest in its expression becomes a form of disinterest. The possession of genius pries the woman loose from conventional formations of gender that associate women with privacy and personality, from those that accuse them of elevating personal interest above collective or public good. Although Sigourney’s essay is not immediately oriented toward a political frame, the formation of gender she disturbs—that of the private woman characterized by personal interest—is precisely one used to establish women’s disqualification from public life and the franchise.
Yet gender does not drop out of the equation. The dissociation of genius from its possessor—and its elevation to the level of a public trust—gains special significance in light of how Sigourney leagues Hemans’s genius with her femininity. Sigourney emphasizes, “Both critics and casual readers have united in pronouncing her poetry to be essentially feminine” (“MH,” xv). When Sigourney writes that the “genius of Mrs. Hemans was as pure and feminine in its impulses, as in its out-pourings” (“MH,” xix), she does more than defend Hemans against the charge of gender deviance to which women pursuing public careers were often vulnerable. By finding femininity to be channeled by the personally held but essentially impersonal category of “genius,” Sigourney moves femininity itself decisively beyond its status as a sign of privacy that retains or even augments its private aura when deployed in public as a point for collective identification.
This movement is amplified by the manner in which genius destabilizes the boundary between ordinary, particular personhood and extraordinary or representative iconicity. As a genius, Hemans is at once markedly “peculiar” and perfectly representative. This is a relatively new paradox of genius in the nineteenth century. Eighteenth-century advocates of female education lamented that dismal educations made women’s genius rare, but they did not regard genius as an extraordinary possession, however supernaturally auratic it might be. Following romantic conventions of genius,