For this reason, discourses of genius provided means for conceptualizing women’s identities and citizenship in opposition to the political forms and ideas that produced their marginality. These oppositional uses of conceptions of genius have been hard to discern because they lie scattered across the discourses and documents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They never achieved a consolidated theory; indeed, part of their utility derived from their unformalized state, which permitted many different kinds of appropriation. Prose fiction, however, had a strong role in wielding conceptions of female genius for oppositional purposes. Within prose fiction, conventions of narrative and characterization organized tropes of genius into sustained conceptual meditations. So while we must first turn to aesthetic and scientific theory to grasp the primary conceptual dimension of genius, fiction ultimately demands the most sustained attention if we hope to comprehend how discourses of genius formulated gender in relation to public life.
Historically, discussions of the nature and significance of genius had their first major development within romanticism. The term “genius” had long denoted the special character or nature of a person, place, or abstract social entity, as in the common phrase “the genius of the age” and other similar constructs. This sense of genius as distinct character is part of what Frances Gage conveys in her call for wage-earning women to own their genius, and it allows her both to give value to women, as people possessed of a character not reducible to the labor or wages that they nevertheless deserve to control, and to imagine them as a natural political collectivity bound to agitate for their common interest. The idea of special character persisted in discussions of genius through the twentieth century (and still exists), but it also gave rise in the late eighteenth century to a more specialized usage that defined genius as a highly valued mode of creative cognition marked by originality, spontaneity, and instinct. This romantic theory of creativity displaced an older emphasis on the imitation of masters, sustained effort, and learnedness. More than simply a body of theory about how works of art or technological invention come into the world, though, conceptions of genius redefined the mind and the experience of subjectivity. “Genius” indicated a split state of consciousness and an attenuated state of will by figuring creativity as inspiration, a sudden rushing into the mind of an idea that was totally authentic to its creator and at the same time completely alien to the creator’s conscious mind or sense of self.
Formulations of the will-destroying and consciousness-breaching force of genius were common in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century print culture, but Ralph Waldo Emerson’s are perhaps the most indelible. In “Self-Reliance” and elsewhere Emerson attached the authenticity of genius to its attenuation of the will: “Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due.”4 Genius, in Emerson’s formulations as in others, was a force that invaded the mind; the person in the grips of genius “suffer[ed] the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him.”5 The trope of creativity as a possession is at least as old as classical philosophy, but it became the dominant model of valued creativity and, moreover, a general model of human consciousness in the nineteenth century. Theories of genius were related to other discourses about the mind’s capacity for altered states of consciousness and will, such as those developed in radical Protestantism, spiritualism, mesmeric fads, and even modern theories of psychology that posited “unconscious cerebration,” double personality, and the more familiar unconscious of psychoanalysis. Discussions about genius shaped these other models of the mind and were in turn shaped by them.
In this broader context of mind theory, however, calling a split state of mind or invaded will “genius” gave it a special character, distinguished not only by the cultural value of the poems, paintings, or speeches that the person of genius produced but also by its means of convening a public. Romantic genius was imagined to create collective moments of shared thought by coordinating particular minds with universal truth. It apparently did so in a way that was magical without being supernatural. As such, genius represented a secularization of Christian conceptions of divine inspiration and conversion. In this secular mode the genius was conceived of as a person both highly distinct and completely representative. Emerson once again provides the most ringing and concise formulation in his description of the ideal poet: “The poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common wealth.”6 The term “common wealth” here is both figurative and literal; “genius” was a concept not just for figuring an abstract “common good” but also for thinking about the formal and social dimensions of a shared political and cultural order.
Despite the precision and similarity of many definitions of genius, one persistent and treasured claim about it was that it exceeded the capacity of words to define it. A writer for the American Phrenological Journal enthused in 1859, for instance, that “we may work away at our adumbration of [genius] till we are gray, and then we shall fail to ‘body it forth’ with any entireness.”7 Three generations later, well after phrenological models of the mind had been supplanted by pragmatism and then Freudian psychology, a writer for the Living Age began a 1924 review of a recent biography of Olive Shreiner by asserting in similar terms that genius was at once instantly recognizable and impossible to specify, a very certain incertitude: “We cannot define [genius]; but we recognize it, although we may be hard put to it to say what it is.”8 The undefinability, and one might say excess to language, of genius allowed it to signify a kind of human value that maintained its integrity by transcending the dissections of analysis and even dispute. It also made genius a fertile ground for controversy, since the apparent presence of genius inspired certitude but defied proof. Anyone could claim that anything was genius and would necessarily have to feel passionately while doing so, but the claim was also necessarily open to dispute since anyone could disagree. The controversial character of genius was especially pronounced when it intersected with contests over women’s capabilities.
Romantic conceptions such as these were remarkably long lived; indeed they are undoubtedly still familiar today. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the scientific disciplines of biology, neurology, psychology, and statistics undertook investigations of genius that overlapped romantic and popular models. The scientific discussion was profoundly ambivalent about genius. It defined genius in biological or statistical terms, primarily as a deviation or variation from the normal human type. Scientific treatises sometimes exalted genius and sometimes deplored it as a kind of degeneration. Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin and one of the founders of eugenics, praised the variation of genius in his paradigm-setting work Hereditary Genius (1869). Galton reframed genius according to the “law of deviation from an average,” which made genius a rare but predictable factor: “Thus, the rarity of commanding ability, and the vast abundance of mediocrity, is no accident, but follows of necessity from the very nature of these things.”9 The Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, by contrast, saw genius as a biological, rather than statistical, form of variation and as a kind of monstrosity, calling it “a special morbid condition” and “congenital mental abnormality.”10
American discussions cited both of these scientific models and also expressed both praise and horror of genius, sometimes simultaneously, as in a 1919 article: “It is the variant … with new ideas, new methods, and new impulses who makes the great success. It is the variant, with new ideas, who commits the crime that curdles the blood.”11 Unlike romantic aesthetic theory, scientific models of genius understood it as a highly explicable phenomenon, although they disagreed over the terms of explicability. Scientific models also differed markedly in their conception of the representative person; they replaced the romantic model of the universal genius with a new conception of the representative person not as the “genius” but as the “average” or “normal” type. Scientific discourses of genius were part of a larger, baldly ideological project of categorizing human types, by gender, of course, but also by race, ethnicity, and nation. Specifically feminist tropes of genius often had to contend with the scientific models, but scientific ways of conceiving of the origin and circulation of creativity also shaped the feminist conversation, changing its ways of understanding the construction