Both lines of argument offered tactical benefits to feminists, but together they reflected a theoretical impasse that feminism still struggles with today. Difference-based arguments bound women to the exact construction of their identities that had sponsored their political exclusion in the first place. Such arguments had no power to alter the major terms of liberal democracy, which, as the political theorist Wendy Brown has recently argued, still define the viable political subject through a series of exclusions that operate to marginalize women nearly a century after the achievement of formal equality. Legitimate political subjectivity was and is still based in terms defined by their excluded opposites, opposites that are, as Brown puts it, “marked as ‘feminine’”: equality as against difference, liberty as against necessity, autonomy as against dependence, rights as against needs, individuals as against family, self-interest against selflessness, public against private, contract in opposition to consent; and we could add to Brown’s list universality against particularity. The legitimacy of every dominant term, as Brown writes, “is achieved through its constitution by, dependence upon, and disavowal of the subordinate term,” guaranteeing the exclusive rather than universal nature of political incorporation and limiting the possible array of intelligible political needs and demands. Women’s “difference” thus operates simultaneously as their mode of entry and the means for their marginalization. It produces the political subject denominated by the term “women” as one that is included precisely through foundational gestures of negation, establishing liberalism, in Brown’s words, “as a discourse of male dominance.”42
By the same token, sameness arguments that emphasize women’s universal humanness tend to flounder because of the particular content of the universal subject. Appeals to equality can be powerful and effective, resulting in the practical extension of rights. At the same time, however, women and other subjects marked by difference from this particular construct of the universal always register as themselves particular, rather than universal, and as inescapably embodied, rather than as possessing the capacity of bodily abstraction that defines normative democratic standards of reasoned deliberation and political participation.43 For these reasons, in Joan W. Scott’s apt phrase, liberal democratic theory has had “only paradoxes to offer” feminist attempts both to gain and to conceptualize full citizenship.44
Liberalism framed, and still frames, the major conceptions and institutions of constitutional democracy, and thus will continue to command our attention, but it did not engross all possible constructions of subjectivity, participation, and collective life. Stepping from the topos of state citizenship to the topos of genius, as so many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers and thinkers did, meant entering a different conceptual order, one where liberalism’s constitutive dualisms were reorganized, depolarized, or rendered moot. Within the primary discourses of genius, terms that are incommensurable and mutually exclusive within liberalism are, by contrast, staged dialectically. Consider, for instance, three of the oppositions that operate historically within liberalism: those between autonomy and dependence, the private and the public, and particularity and universality. These become instead relations characteristic of genius.
To return to Emerson’s elaborations of “genius,” which set the paradigm for American discussions for decades, genius is conceived of as at once an authentic possession of the self and alien to the self, private and public, particular and universal. As he writes in “Self-Reliance” (1844), “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.”45 The thought is private but true for all, particular but universal. Directly addressing his readers in the second person, Emerson uses the phrase “your own,” but as he writes in “The Poet,” genius is a highly ambiguous possession: “In our way of talking we say, ‘That is yours, this is mine’; but the poet knows well that it is not his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you; he would fain hear the like eloquence at length.”46 The genius is a self-reliant individual who can set his will against convention and social opinion, and also a cipher, overtaken and controlled by an alien power. Despite the critical contention that “genius” is an individuating category, the split and possessed self of the romantic model confounds the autonomous selfhood of liberal democracy, rendering it an impoverished reduction, just as it replaces the polarities of private and public, particular and universal with mediations.
Emerson gendered genius male by default, but feminist appropriations of genius often seized on the critical response to liberalism generated by romanticism and turned it to their own purposes, seeing the figure of female genius to address questions about authority and consensus in ways that emphasized women’s public inclusion. This was in part possible because of a remarkable dovetailing of many of the tropes of genius—spontaneity, intuition, instinct, and attenuated personal agency prime among them—with what were otherwise marginalizing stereotypes of female subjectivity—that women were intuitive rather than rational and possessors of highly compromised agency. As one early twentieth-century writer on gender expressed this connection, “So also with all the mental qualities we shall find, I believe, the same connection between the special characters of woman and those of genius.”47 At certain moments, as the chapters that follow more fully show, the discourse on female genius exploited this coincidence to intervene in contests about women’s formal state citizenship and enfranchisement. Yet even when this was the case, the complexity of each exemplary instance of female genius in narrative fiction suggests how reductive it would be to see the discourse on female genius merely as reinscribing stereotypes of femininity. Wrenched from the liberal ideology of separate spheres and resituated within notions of genius, these stereotypes are no longer really, simply themselves. They stage, rather, ambiguations within the realm of gender and destabilize some of the major structuring categories of public life.
More than this, the attenuated personal agency of genius was imagined to realize extremely potent forces of world-transforming agency. Not only does genius violate agency in the service of agency’s fuller manifestation, but it also unleashes the ability to reconceptualize and renovate social life. Emerson formulated this idea concisely in “Politics” (1844): “Every thought which genius and piety throws into the world, alters the world.”48 In its emphasis on transformation, this conception of genius resonates with more recent theoretical models of both politics and female genius. The world-altering power ascribed to genius points toward the grounding conditions of political life, insofar as the political is based in the principle of transformability. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, has perhaps most forcefully argued that nothing that is untransformable can properly attain a political character, which is why for her, the private, in both the domestic and economic senses, must be kept separate from the political, because the private is the realm of necessity where bodies are reproduced and sustained according to inexorable dictates of biological life. Freedom, for Arendt, is the opposite of necessity, where action realizes the principle of newness. “To act,” she writes, “in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin.” In this understanding, beginning takes the form of radical rupture: “It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before … the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.”49
Genius figured in just such a miracle. For some theorists, it still does. In a recent essay on “feminine genius,” Julia Kristeva rhetorically asks, “Is not genius precisely the breakthrough that consists in going beyond the situation?”50 When Kristeva frames this question, she means to describe what she terms “feminine genius” to be an actually existing conceptual resource, a kind of unique individual force of creativity defined by a feminine psychosexual particularity (“FG,” 499–501).51 (Interestingly, Hannah Arendt is one of her exemplars of feminine genius.) Kristeva sees current debates over women’s modern social status to be stuck in “the