model but displays opposite effects.
1 Other characters identify Verena with genius. Seeing Verena for the first time, the ancient abolitionist Mrs. Birdseye predicts that “she would probably be remarkable as a genius.”
2 When Olive Chancellor has her first private interview with Verena, the girl’s apparent deficiency in “powers of reflection” prompts Olive, recalling the brilliance of her speech the night before, to conclude that “Verena’s genius was a mystery” (
B, 104). Later, when urging Olive to put Verena on the lecture circuit right away, the journalist Matthias Pardon tells her to stop wasting time in training her protégée: “Miss Verena was a natural genius…. she had got the great thing that you couldn’t learn, a kind of divine afflatus, as the ancients used to say, and she had better just begin on that” (
B, 156). Even Basil Ransom, whose aim is to “strike her dumb” by marrying her, sincerely proclaims her “the very genius!” (
B, 315, 328).
