Alcott’s Work and Reforming Female Genius
As the construct of an impersonal subjectivity, female genius unwound the logic by which womanhood took form as a position of privacy and particularity. Yet female genius accomplished this work, as the example of Sigourney’s essay on Hemans shows, not by making women public in any straightforward sense of the phrase. Genius, rather, complicated the major distinctions of liberal culture that grounded women’s marginality. At the same time, it coordinated the relation between the personal and the impersonal, the particular and the universal, and the individual and the collective according to its own distinctive logic, and this distinctiveness gives it, in the context of U.S. politics, a critical function.
In Alcott’s Work, genius erupts into a novel in which the language of separate spheres already does not make sense but in which no conceptually coherent other model has arisen to take its place. This becomes at certain points a problem for Christie and at others a problem for the novel itself, as it struggles to accommodate the heroine’s competing desires—for affection, for kinship, for liberty, for money, for romantic love, for acclaim, for social justice, for political coalition, for self-culture, for social inclusion, for greatness. As has often been noted, separate spheres ideology aspired to universalize a gendered binary between a feminine domestic sphere and a masculine public sphere, comprised of economic and political life, but was a very socially and historically specific formulation, belonging to the capitalist bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century. Its primary effect was mystification. It obscured the interpenetration of domestic life with economic and political life. It hid the economic life that women led as consumers and, especially, as workers, since it effaced working women almost entirely. It made political activity conducted by even bourgeois women look like an extension of their private functions. For modern critics, the question has been one not only of accounting for the effects of rendering women as private but also one of disinterring women from the realm of privacy, either by displaying the truly public nature of their activities or by showing privacy to be itself a construct of public life. Alcott’s Work allows us to turn this problem in a different direction. In Christie’s life the distinction between public and private is never adequate to her experiences or desires, and for this reason the relationships of both labor and domesticity to collective political action pose a conceptual problem. Genius is its solution.
The novel begins as did the nation, as Christie proclaims, “Aunt Betsey, there’s going to be a new Declaration of Independence” (W, 5). Her “new Declaration” shows the incompleteness of the original Declaration, whose language of universal rights and universal consent had no intent—or effect—of creating full consensual citizenship for women. What she has in mind initially seems limited to the dream of economic autonomy as self-governance: “I hate to be dependent; and now that there’s no need of it, I can’t bear it any longer” (W, 5). But it quickly turns out that economic independence is not primarily what she wants. Eschewing work “with no object but money” (W, 10), Christie hopes her work will make her “useful” (W, 11)—that is, that her labor will provide a means of social participation and world betterment. At the same time, though, her projected future is vaguely and incoherently imagined. She desires work as self-culture: “the best success this world can give us, the possession of a brave and cheerful spirit, rich in self-knowledge, self-control, self-help” (W, 12). She also wants interpersonal satisfaction and, in the same breath, a grandiose but indefinite scope, what she calls “love and a larger, nobler life” (W, 13). Or maybe she primarily wants relief for a set of internal pressures, a “vent for her full heart and busy mind” (W, 13). She piles metaphors on top of each other: she compares herself to bread dough fermenting with an abundance of yeast and, a moment later, to a blazing log on the hearth. She balances her metaphor of the Declaration with a fantastical narrative when she claims that she wants “like the people in fairly tales, [to] travel away into the world and seek my fortune” (W, 5). Her allusion to the Declaration, then, serves primarily as a placeholder for the political theorization she cannot yet formulate, one that would move beyond possessive individualism. At the same time her incoherent aspirations show how difficult it is for a young woman to conceive of something besides “the commonplace life of home” (W, 12).
The jobs that Christie takes compound this difficulty. Some of Christie’s jobs are indistinguishable from “the commonplace life of home,” though they make a brutal display of how the home functions as a place not only of heightened affect but also of inequality, exploitation, and contest. When she works as a servant, a governess, and a hired companion, “home” is her place of labor. Rather than appearing in its ideological guise as a retreat from the brutalities of capitalism, the home is shown to be saturated by economic transaction and class conflict and, at the same time, overwhelming intensities of feeling. She leaves “home” behind but amplifies femininity when she becomes an actress, and by playing such roles as “the Queen of the Amazons” (W, 31) she is cast into dilemmas of authenticity. She experiences the contradiction that arises from commodifying the spectacle of femininity: “The very ardor and insight which gave power to the actress made that mimic life unsatisfactory to the woman” (W, 48). The apparent distinction between the actress and the woman disappears in this sentence; the qualities—ardor and insight—that make her a good actress are the same ones that make her a woman, and it thus becomes impossible to distinguish her “mimic life” from her real one. Christie later takes an iconically feminine job as a needlewoman, after her painful turn as a companion to a suicidal girl, because she “felt a great repugnance to accept any place where she would be mixed up with family affairs again” (W, 102). Without a family, though, she has no protection against the economic hardship that comes when illness prevents her from working and her landlady hounds her for rent. She finds, then, that her life is broken into a series of jobs, some genteel but others so unremunerative that they expose her to her raw physical needs for food and shelter. At each turn her status as a worker fuses with her identity as a woman, naturalizing both of these conditions and therefore making her hardships appear inimical to political action and remote from political community.
The first solution to this problem in the novel is the introduction of a new kind of home, one conceived as part of a network of activist thinking and intent. By this point Christie’s life of work has taken her to the brink of suicidal despair, and by a stroke of luck she is taken in at first by Mrs. Wilkins and then by Mrs. Sterling, both of whom have homes characterized by intensive domesticity and, at the same time, economic activity and activist permeability. Christie revels in the comfort of each home while she works hard to contribute to the economic life of each. Both homes function as halfway houses for women suffering the effects of the structural vulnerability they occupy in relation to the economy and the law. Christie is but one of a seemingly endless series of women whom each household has incorporated; we hear in particular about a child whose father appropriated her factory wages and nearly let her starve and an elderly woman freed from slavery by her daughter. In each home domestic space is open to the outside and domestic nurture takes on a social character. These two homes are part of a larger network centered in the church and home of a radical minister, Mr. Power. When Christie goes to work in Mr. Power’s home, she discovers that it is a nonstop international salon: “Sitting