The discourses of genius in their various manifestations were in no way inherently liberating. They could be turned in any number of directions for any number of purposes, and were. But they had recognizably liberating uses in relation to women’s status. One of the major reasons that conceptions of genius could serve this oppositional function was that, as in Gage’s ringing invocation, they could be placed in tension with the dominant political constructs of liberal democracy. Where liberal democracy defined proper citizenship in terms of rationality, individuality, and autonomy, models of genius defined alternative visions of democratic life based on inspiration, collectivity, and magical permutations of agency. Conceptions of genius in general could be used to challenge the social and subjective world described by a liberal democratic order, and they were appropriated by political positions that traversed the spectrum from radically reactionary to radically progressive. Particular feminist adaptations of ideas of genius, however, yoked them to two deeply connected purposes: to reconstructing gender as a political identity category and to imagining political worlds outside of the liberal universe that marginalized women.
Even beyond these explicitly and intentionally feminist uses, discourses of genius provided a set of terms for posing crucial questions about democracy under conditions of an expanding franchise and an emerging mass society. Tropes of genius made it possible to frame such questions as the following: How can particular identities and needs be reconciled with collective aims? Who has the privilege of being a “representative” person? How can agency be deployed under social and political conditions that constrain it? What purpose does a national culture serve, and how is legitimate membership in it determined? How can people excluded from state citizenship and cultural inclusion remedy their marginalization? And most pressing, how can social or political life be radically transformed?
Several factors made these questions urgent in connection with women’s identities and status in particular in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. The most obvious and in a sense finite of these was the struggle for women’s suffrage. As suffragists and their opponents well knew, granting women the vote at the national level would change, in a single stroke, women’s categorical political status by giving them access to the public sphere of the state, by making them full citizens and eliminating one of the major ways in which the law defined them as private beings. For this reason the decades preceding suffrage and directly following it witnessed controversies over the constitution of “women” as a categorical entity and over the arrangement of public and private spheres traditionally and legally defined by sexual difference, by a masculine public and a feminine private sphere.12 Discourses of genius in this context took part in struggles over the reconstruction of gendered subjectivity at the same time that they were also projections of alternative ways of creating democratic publics; indeed these two purposes intersected. The time period leading up to and directly following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 thus defines the major historical focus of this book.
Although the formal threshold of the vote was an undeniable factor in reconstructing gender in relation to democracy, it was hardly the only arena where gender and public life were redefined through the language of genius. The public scenes of “genius” were as many as the publics that women seemed to be entering so visibly at the turn of the twentieth century. Before and after becoming full state citizens, women participated in many kinds of political activity not defined by their status in relation to the state, including utopian social experiments, abolitionist and labor activism, club work, settlement houses, conventions, and politically engaged writing.13 “Genius” was a frequent trope of these inventive political formations. In this era, mass culture produced a variety of public spaces and kinds of social encounter that were open to women. Mass culture saturates public life with the interests of capital; at the same time it provides means of participation, often through consumption and spectatorship, for people excluded from full legal standing in the nation.14 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mass culture produced a distinct sense of anxiety over the shifting and perhaps collapsing relationship between private and public life, and conceptions of genius could be summoned to mediate these anxieties. As different as improvisational political activism and mass culture might seem to be, they both were conceivable in terms of genius. Indeed in a work such as Henry James’s The Bostonians, the term “genius” organizes a meditation on the apparent conflation of radical politics and mass culture.15
Perhaps the most obvious formation of public life that genius helped to define, however, was that of national culture. Conceptions of genius were ubiquitous in discussions of whether, and to what purpose, the United States could be understood to possess a national culture at all, or at least one whose standing could compete with that of Europe’s most admired national cultures. Emerson’s calls for American genius to create an original American culture are familiar, and they invite a collective and original effort. One less regarded legacy of this model is that the ideal of a national literary and artistic culture, and of its origins in genius, became useful to those who wanted to create either expansive or exclusionary models of national culture, who wanted, that is, to employ the concept of culture to adjudicate the parameters of legitimate national membership. In the contexts of these discussions, conceptions of genius could be used to define women as either authentic or inauthentic cultural citizens. The idea of national genius became key to the racialization of citizenship in biological terms in the first decades of the twentieth century, a development that sapped the utopian potential from the most progressive models of genius.
In examining the political visions articulated through conceptions of genius, the discussion in this book joins other recent work in American literary studies dedicated to enriching our understanding of the history of struggles over participation in U.S. public life. A rich field of scholarship has diagnosed the limits that the primary categories of American democracy place on citizenship and uncovered other languages through which excluded people generated optimistic visions of new and inclusive political worlds. As Priscilla Wald has established, the major narratives of U.S. culture created exclusive visions of national life that were assailed by inventive literary narrative forms.16 Other illuminating work has focused our attention on the limiting social vision of liberalism in particular.
Legal state citizenship—the form of national belonging for which suffragists fought—requires a subject stripped of all particular characteristics, a subject that can enter the domain of universality and impartial deliberation by leaving behind the particular body and its interests. As Russ Castronovo has argued, this political form is deadening but at the same time an object of desire for aspirants to full citizenship, who are defined as overembodied because marked by race, gender, ethnicity, class, or other evidence of particularity.17 Women’s citizenship in the United States is complexly constructed, defined by class, race, region, immigration status, and other factors. In a categorical sense, however, women’s relation to citizenship has been historically mediated through the institution of marriage. For married women in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, aspiring to the ghostly form of citizenship available through liberalism promised relief from their technical “legal death” under the laws of coverture, which filed their citizenship under that of their husbands and existed in some of its provisions until well into the 1930s. Marriage in its broader conventional forms, as Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has argued, defined the legal apparatus and structures of feeling that defined women’s subordinate citizenship and contradictory relation to a literary public sphere defined in large part by genres of domestic privacy.18
At the same time that these limits constrained women’s cultural and state citizenship, however, alternative and critical modes of civic engagement and political subjectivity developed. Recent work has shown how expressive voices, such as those of lecturers and singers or even ranting mobs, were imagined capable of expressing political desires that could not reach articulation through the formal mechanisms of the state, such as the franchise, or the public sphere of disembodied rational deliberation.19 The cultures of sentimentality, however, have provided the richest field of inquiry into liberalism and its discontents. Lauren Berlant’s work has been particularly instructive about the appeal that sentimentality had and still has for excluded subjects, as well as the way that sentimental culture functions in tandem with liberalism