The Genius of Democracy: Fictions of Gender and Citizenship in the United States, 186-1945 9780812204971

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The Genius of Democracy

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THE GENIUS OF DEMOCRACY Fictions of Gender and Citizenship in the United States, 1860–1945

VICTORIA OLWELL

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

Copyright © 2011 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Olwell, Victoria. The genius of democracy : fictions of gender and citizenship in the United States, 1860–1945 / Victoria Olwell. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4324-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. American fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Women in public life—United States—History. 5. Women and democracy—United States—History. 6. Genius. 7. Genius in literature. 8. Women in literature. I. Title. PS374.W6O46 2011 813’.4093522—dc22 2011002074

For John

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contents

Introduction: The Work of Genius

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Chapter 1. “It Spoke Itself ”: Genius, Political Speech, and Louisa May Alcott’s Work

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Chapter 2. Genius and the Demise of Radical Publics in Henry James’s The Bostonians

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Chapter 3. Trilby: Double Personality, Intellectual Property, and Mass Genius

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Chapter 4. Mary Hunter Austin: Genius, Variation, and the Identity Politics of Innovation

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Chapter 5. Imitation as Circulation: Racial Genius and the Problem of National Culture in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s There Is Confusion

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Coda: Gertrude Stein in Occupied France

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

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The Genius of Democracy

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introduction

The Work of Genius

I

N an 1855 speech, the labor and women’s rights advocate Frances Gage argued in support of married women’s control over their own earnings, hoping to nullify married men’s legal ownership of their wives’ wages. At her rhetorical zenith she proclaimed, “Let us own ourselves, our earnings, our genius.”1 Within the familiar idiom of liberal democracy, Gage’s exhortation is exactly two-thirds intelligible. Gage’s first two demands, that women own themselves and their wages, clearly spring from the Lockean framework of possessive individualism, under which freedom is grounded, in Locke’s words, on the premise that “every man has a property in his own person” and that the “labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.”2 By invoking possessive individualism, Gage shows here that she understands married women’s ownership of their wages to have larger implications than merely giving women control over the money they earn, although she respects that goal. She also is asserting that owning wages will bring women closer to the condition of full democratic citizenship as it was understood within the main tradition of liberal political philosophy and had been recently expanded to include men of small property and male laborers.3 She asks that married women—and here she means specifically free workingclass women, since enslaved women had neither legal self-ownership nor wages and upper-class white women’s wealth generally derived from property rather than work—be assimilated to the same form of citizenship that free working men enjoyed. But she also breaks this frame. She adds to her philosophically familiar call for women workers to own themselves and their wages another demand, that they own their “genius.” What could she mean by this? Gage creates a syntactical equivalence, but “genius” differs from her other terms in striking ways. A married woman’s ownership of her earnings could be accomplished

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by changes in the law, and slowly it was. Owning “ourselves” is a related, more abstract political-philosophical goal, but also one widely asserted and theorized. Owning “genius,” though, is an aspiration beyond the remedies of the law and outside of the main idiom of post-Lockean democracy. Given how urgently women’s rights activists felt the need to alleviate wage-earning women’s economic powerlessness and exclusion from the forms and privileges of full citizenship, why would Gage spend any breath on “genius”? What is “our genius,” and how could “owning” it assert, as she says, “our right to be free”? This book recovers the topos on which Gage’s last demand—and many other discussions of women’s citizenship couched in similar language— becomes intelligible. “Genius” was a familiar term in struggles over women’s state citizenship and public presence more generally in the United States during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, a time when gender and public life were together transformed by the forces of political, economic, and cultural modernity. Over this time period, “genius” never designated a monolithic conception. Rich and diverse, references to “genius” were poised atop a highly elaborated set of inquiries into creativity, innovation, and the nature of the mind, most often explicitly in relation to some scene of public life, including such specific entities as audiences, readerships, and political meetings, as well as more abstract projections such as national culture, national character, or universal humanity. Viewed through a wide lens, discourses on genius contributed to many different cultural and intellectual projects and had effects on aspects of American culture too numerous to list. My major contention here is that the discourses of genius exerted a shaping force over controversies about women’s identity, civil status, and participation in public life. In an obvious way discourses on genius provided a location, among many cultural locations, for debates about what women were and what they could or ought to do in the world. Debates raged over whether or not women could possess something called “genius” and how possessing it (or not) might matter (or not) for settling questions about their nature, destinies, opportunities, or access to such benefits of full citizenship as voting. Debates about women’s possession of genius, however, stood apart from debates about other characteristics that were used to establish sexual difference. Conceptions of genius had a special status in a long history of thinking about the connections between cognitive experience and democratic culture. This history often pitted models of genius against democratic business as usual, seeing genius as a force capable of overcoming conventional and institutional obstacles to a more egalitarian America.

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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-

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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

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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

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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 of gender, of representative personhood, and of the body in relation to creativity and social life. 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

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identities and status in particular in the late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury 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

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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

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through the institution of marriage. For married women in the nineteenthand 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 to depoliticize the desires and subjects it articulates by defining citizenship as “proper feeling” and collapsing the private and intimate spheres into that of the public.20 Unlike sentimentality, genius never had the fully lived-in quality of a culture, though in the romantic era it was sometimes called a cult. What it provided was a set of metaphors through which controversies over gender and citizenship could be conducted and conceptualized, in ways beyond those made possible by the major recognized political frameworks of the time. Examining appeals to genius illuminates major predicaments surrounding women’s identities and public standing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing how they were understood, contested, and, in instances sometimes practical and at others imaginary, overcome. In pursuing this claim, this book joins other recent investigations into the political life of the genius. Literary criticism once used “genius” as an evaluative term; of late it has been more productively concerned with understanding the many uses “genius” had as a category or a discourse for authors, critics, and EuroAmerican literary culture at large. The connection between particular claims to have genius and the desire to enter an exclusive scene of public life is well

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established. Anne E. Boyd and Naomi Z. Sofer have in different ways shown how “genius” was a term that nineteenth-century American women writers applied to themselves in order to establish their literary credentials and appeal for entry into a literary culture that increasingly defined itself as a national high culture.21 By contrast, in the modernist moment of high culture in the twentieth century, authorial claims to possess genius could serve something similar to the opposite function, reconciling the author’s hieratic difficulty with the demands of the market and celebrity culture.22 In Andrew Elfenbein’s account, though, the category of genius in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had less to do with claims about the aesthetic value of a literary work than with what it was possible, or impossible, to say about sexual identity. The “deviance” associated with genius from romanticism through twentieth-century science made it, Elfenbein argues, the perfect trope for staging incipient queer identities in literary culture.23 Gustavus Stadler’s recent analysis of genius as a discursive construction forged from the political contradictions of American culture is perhaps closest to my own commitments. Stadler argues that genius functioned as a discourse of “cultural and intellectual labor” that “was ultimately most useful for rendering, on a mass scale, the consumption of aesthetic culture as a necessary and vital part of the ‘freedom’ known as good citizenship.”24 Where Stadler analyzes how genius mediated theories of race, work, and consumption from the mid to late nineteenth century, my discussion here emphasizes the ways that genius organized conceptions of gender, citizenship, and public life in the historical moment of women’s civic inclusion. Doing so requires tracking specific instances of the discursive formation of genius in relation to gender, from its romantic through its scientific incarnations, and charting particular scenes of the public imagined through genius. The public scenes most relevant to my discussion include political lectures, suffrage activism, mass culture, literary writing, and antiracist political activism staged through the medium of high culture. “Genius,” like “gender” and “the public,” was a multiple formation. Discerning the shifting configurations among these terms promises to develop our sense of the political imaginary of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States and to bring into focus the particular controversies that defined gendered political subjectivity during the massive reconception of political life necessitated by the erosion of separate spheres ideology. The work that discourses of genius performed in relation to gender and public life has remained obscure, primarily because of the critical suspicion

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that has been so generously heaped on conceptions of genius. Genius, in short, has a bad reputation. Critically speaking, “genius” has been roundly condemned as a category of mystification, one that in bad faith suspends creative acts, performed in a seemingly abstracted sphere of “culture,” above the social, political, or economic realities that we know are really responsible for the production of poems, symphonies, paintings, scientific discoveries, and other inventive moments conventionally attributed to the sudden inspirations of genius. Genius, in other words, stands accused of fetishizing transcendent individuality at the expense of more social understandings of how ideas or meanings emerge and circulate in the world. Perhaps most famously, Foucault earns his critical suspicion of genius in his canonical essay “What Is an Author?’ by defining the discursive principle of limitation locatable in the figure of the author. In Foucault’s words, “if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion.” Rather than creating limitlessly, the genius “is a certain functional principle by which . . . one impedes the free circulation of, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.”25 “The genius” is an instance, then, of the “individualization” of culture. “Genius” cloaks social life and its contentious relations of labor, power, materiality, identity, production, and discourse, squelching the potentially utopian possibilities of “free circulation.” It gets worse. Feminist scholars have given genius an adjective that Foucault does not: “masculine.” Christine Battersby has shown in detail how the category of genius was defined explicitly to exclude women, even as it designated a kind of gender ambiguity, in the European philosophical and aesthetic discussions that set the terms for most American aesthetic philosophy that aspired to seriousness.26 Françoise Meltzer, moreover, has connected the idea of “originality” that was central to genius to the specifiably masculine subjectivity of possessive individualism. According to the logic of originality as Meltzer describes it, women of genius were “unimaginable.”27 For Rachel Blau DuPlessis, the literary figure of the “woman of genius” was profoundly incongruous, which is exactly what made it valuable for expressing the situation of bourgeois women in the late nineteenth century, who inhabited two mutually incommensurate ideological positions: that of individuality and that of domestic femininity. The figure of the female genius according to DuPlessis thus renders visible a “contradiction in bourgeois ideology between the ideals of striving, improvement, and visible public works, and the feminine

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version of that formula: passivity, ‘accomplishments,’ and invisible private acts.”28 In keeping with such insights, the feminist position on genius thus far has been to expose its implicit and explicit masculinity and to reveal how historical women who aspired to artistic or intellectual achievement managed this particular expression of misogyny. There are good reasons for taking the view that genius is a category expressive of individualism, especially if one is working with what turns out to be a limited archive on the topic of genius, one based in the high European tradition of aesthetic philosophy, where the most undiluted praise for individual creativity can be found. It is also undeniably the case that many of the most authoritative definitions of genius from the Enlightenment through twentieth-century scientific models were expressly misogynistic, explicitly contending that women could not possess it. One need only dip a hand in the stream of historical discourses of genius to draw out a sampling of genderdifferentiating pronouncements. Benjamin Rush’s Enlightenment-era medical model of the mind held that the faculty of “understanding” was “less vigorous and less comprehensive in the female,” which was why “a Newton, a Bacon, and a Napier, has never appeared among them,” and that “the same may be said of their imaginations”; “hence a Homer, a Shakespear [sic], and a Milton, has never appeared among them.”29 At the turn of the twentieth century, Otto Weininger, whose infamous pseudo-scientific Sex and Character (1903) exerted a formative influence on Gertrude Stein and was often cited in the U.S. context, declared that “from genius itself, the common quality of all the different manifestations of genius, woman is debarred.”30 Havelock Ellis’s 1930 edition of his major work on sexual difference, Man and Woman, asserted women’s lack of genius as an immutable biological condition, claiming that women “possess less spontaneous originality in the highest intellectual spheres. This is an organic tendency which no higher education can eradicate.”31 Women’s lack of genius was seen as a scientific and philosophical truism. In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States the prospect of women’s fuller citizenship gave point to this truism for those opposed to reform. As a writer for the Scientific American made the connection between genius and citizenship in 1894, “The present very active and enlightening agitation over the question of women’s suffrage calls up again the many now established facts about the physiological differences in the nervous system of the sexes.” Women’s supposed lack of genius was considered not only a clear marker of their unbridgeable difference from men but also a deficit that specifically proved their

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incapacity for public life, because it expressed a more general inability to be representative thinkers, innovators, or beings capable of originating new thoughts that could invigorate the polis. To be sure, the gendering of genius in this tradition is complex. Although some of the same distinctions between men’s and women’s minds were repeated over centuries, these distinctions were grounded in a succession of historical models of the mind that were very different in their basis, and also in models of gender that changed through time. The significance of these shifts forms the subjects of the chapters that follow. It was also the case that discourses of genius sometimes provided room for disarticulating gender from the body.32 The contortions of this tradition are fully evident, for instance, in the Goncourt brothers’ self-consciously elliptical and oft-quoted phrase “There are no women of genius; women of genius are all men.”33 Without a doubt, the “men of genius” often presented their own category deviations; their supposed intuition, instinctiveness, spontaneity, and even physical delicacy associated them with stereotypical femininity.34 As one commentator summarized this problem, “It would seem, then, that genius must possess the emotional qualities that are the natural endowment of woman; while woman herself is excluded from genius.”35At the same time, though, scholars of this tradition have not failed to note that the gender ambiguity of the genius trope in aesthetic and scientific discourses is wrapped in the certainty of the ultimate “masculinity” of genius, whether or not it is attached to something that is legible as a male body (though it almost always is). My examples fully suggest that as familiar and long-lived as the assertion of the masculinity of genius was, there was also apparently an imperative to repeat it over and over again, across paradigms of knowledge, as the decades passed. But, this kind of repetition was necessary only because genius was a controversial rather than an uncontested index of sexual difference or gendered being. Although prestigious aesthetic philosophers and scientists claimed that women of genius were, as Meltzer notes, “unimaginable,” the textual archives of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States show that they were imagined all the time, often in moments of contention over the being of “women” and their place in public. When we broaden our archive beyond the works of a handful of Euro-American philosophers and scientists—that is, if we do not by default give priority to the thinkers who already have prestige—we can discern a wide-ranging set of contests over gender and democracy waged in the idiom of genius. When we do so, we can immediately see that feminists and their allies always disputed the claim that

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women were incapable of possessing the capacity for genius. They sometimes suspected that there was something absurd in having to do so in order to sue for full civic inclusion. As one advocate for women’s rights asked in the New York Times in 1915, “Has anyone proposed to make inventive genius a test of citizenship?”36 Speaking literally, the answer to her rhetorical question was, of course, “no,” but her reductio ad absurdum logic points to the fact that in a well-understood figurative sense, the answer was “yes.” Genius figured in debates over what women were, what they could do, and how their capacities mattered for their legal and social status. By stepping outside of the narrow philosophical archive of genius and into what turns out to be a broad conversation conducted across different strata of culture and across diverse public spheres, we can see that genius was less a fetish performing the work of ideologically driven concealment and more the field on which competing visions of sexual difference and social organization were staged, and on which feminist critical leverage was often gained. Unfolding these intricate contests will be the work of this book, but it is necessary to say at the outset that they were motivated by the striking fit between models of genius and women’s particular forms of exclusion from state membership and national culture membership. Looking closely at the historical and theoretical conditions of women’s exclusion that made conceptions of genius so central to debates about gender and citizenship, one of the primary problems we find is this: as feminist political theory has so richly established, the standard of equal citizenship is framed as a universal standard but is nevertheless built on a particular kind of subjecthood, that of white bourgeois manhood. The universal subject, in other words, is a particular subject. The ideal of universal equality on which liberal democracy is based is thus a condition of limited equality and enfranchisement. This is a contradiction that feminist scholars have described in both historical and theoretical terms. The historical roots of the particular content of the universal subject lie in the Euro-American political revolutions of the eighteenth century, which did away with the ancient regime’s basis of power in rank and replaced it with a “natural” and “universal” equality among citizens who create a political order by mutual consent. This universal subject, however, was defined by very particular conditions.37 In the first instance, it was defined through property ownership, a condition that excluded dependents—white women, wage laborers, children, and with brutal completeness, slaves—and put citizenship within reach only of white men of means and standing.

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15

As property lost salience as a norm of citizenship in the early nineteenthcentury United States, constructions of essential difference took over the work of justifying the exclusion of most of these groups. Only white wage laborers were largely exempt from this process and assimilated to new norms of citizenship based in reason, taxpaying, and military service.38 By contrast, slaves were increasingly racialized, children were rendered as essentially distinct in kind rather than degree from adults in emerging theories of child rearing and pedagogy, and women were retheorized as men’s ontologically complementary but subordinate opposites. These processes were unequal in their effects; children often benefited greatly from emerging standards of nurture and the relief from labor that followed from their new status as essentially distinct beings, while the naturalization of slavery as race deepened the oppression of enslaved men and women and imperiled at every moment the civic inclusion and protection of even free blacks in the North.39 Across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the peculiar form of white women’s newly posited “essential difference” produced their peculiarly incoherent relation to citizenship. Women’s rights advocates from the mid-nineteenth century on argued for admission to full state citizenship on the theoretical basis on which white men ostensibly enjoyed it—that is, on abstract universal equality. By this point, however, they were fighting a losing battle with newly consolidated models of womanhood marked by characteristics in harmony with women’s ideal cultural location under separate spheres ideology and associated with motherhood, characteristics that carried value in the culture, such as moral superiority, delicacy, and a maternal orientation toward care. In response, women’s rights advocates in the late nineteenth century began to add to the rhetoric of equality that had defined the midcentury efforts of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony another and seemingly contradictory set of arguments based on notions of women’s special nature.40 This was a profoundly class- and race-based construction of the category of “woman” shaped by white, bourgeois ideals attainable by few and strictly lived by even fewer. Yet given the power of this class, it is no surprise that it functioned as the universal construct of femininity for many debates about suffrage and women’s rights more broadly. These formations of domestic femininity had enormous cultural power that gave them a certain pragmatic and often sentimental appeal, in keeping with the typically sentimental content of bourgeois constructions of women’s being and difference. They were essentially conservative in terms of gender ideology. When turn-of-the-century antisuffragists argued that women

16

Introduction

should be barred from the vote because their nature suited them to nurture children and exert moral influence, suffragists countered by essentially repeating antisuffragist claims about women’s nature while insisting that this nature fitted women for citizenship. Women would use their ability to nurture to help clean up the streets, make sure that food was distributed to needy children, and advocate for better education; their moral superiority would elevate a franchise corrupted by machine politics and the instrumentalities of capitalism. Women’s particularity would define their contributions to civic and public life. As the historian Nancy Cott has noted, in turn-of-the-century women’s rights advocacy, both equality-based and difference-based arguments flourished: “A tension stretched between emphasis on the rights that women (like men) deserved and emphasis on the particular duties or services that women (unlike men) could offer society. . . . No collective resolution of these tensions occurred and seldom even did individuals permanently resolve them in their own minds.”41 This incoherence reflected the contradictions that defined women’s marginality. 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

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17

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

18

Introduction

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

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19

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 question of their equality or their difference with regard to men,” the very binary that plagued early twentieth-century suffrage advocacy (“FG,” 503). Feminist theory, she contends, totalizes women’s condition, concerning itself “only with the conditions” of “womankind as a whole” to the “neglect of the importance of the subject” (“FG,” 496). Kristeva sees “feminine genius” to include both a feminine particularity, not limited to biological or socially recognized women but realized in a psychoanalytically intelligible feminine sexuality, and a unique individual creativity irreducible to the social conditions that surround it and therefore capable of opposing them. As she writes, modern freedom becomes possible “through the risks that each of us is prepared to take by calling into question thought, language, one’s own age, and any identity that resides in them. You are a genius to the extent that you are able to challenge the sociohistorical conditions of your identity” (“FG,” 504). It would be possible to read assertions of women’s genius in the fiction and print culture of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States through Kristeva’s conception, linking them to expressly psychosexual creativity. But that is not what I am attempting here. While Kristeva approaches “feminine

20

Introduction

genius” as an actually existing resource for social transformation and the production of democratic freedom, I am interested instead in how and why the idea of female genius became associated, historically and conceptually, with social transformation and democratic emancipation. Indeed, from my perspective, Kristeva’s formulation, for all of its theoretical sophistication and complex grounding in the lives of extraordinary twentieth-century women, looks like a modern extension of the historical discourse I want to uncover. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, narratives of female genius developed the idea that genius possessed world-transforming capacities and that these served feminist and activist purposes. Consider, for instance, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s short story “The Two Offers,” published in the Anglo-African in 1859. Best known today for her widely taught novel about slavery and Reconstruction, Iola Leroy (1892), Harper was an abolitionist, antiracist activist, and advocate for women’s rights who lectured and wrote widely on these topics during her long career over the second half of the nineteenth century. “The Two Offers” puts the conceit of female genius in tension with the conventions of romantic fiction and sets it against the institution of slavery. The story opens on the scene of two cousins, Janette Alston and Laura Lagrange, sitting together while Janette knits and Laura writes letter after letter, only to tear up each one. Laura explains, “Well, it is an important matter: I have two offers for marriage, and I do not know which to choose.”52 Her problem, it seems, is one of the most familiar dilemmas of romance fiction, perhaps the dilemma. In keeping with the conventionality of the problem, Janette offers predictable counsel, advising Laura not to marry at all since she feels “not love enough for either to make a choice.” Without love, Janette warns, the marriage would commodify her and “only be a mere matter of bargain and sale” (“TO,” 106). Laura concedes that she does not “regard either [man] as a woman should the man she chooses for her husband” but worries that if she refuses both, “there is the risk of being an old maid, and that is not to be thought of ” (“TO,” 106). Janette then urges her to consider that “a loveless home” might be much worse than “the lot of the old maid who accepts her earthly mission as a gift from God” (“TO,” 106). As it turns out, Laura falls in love with one of her suitors and marries him. He is a cad, though, and briefly regards her as a “prize”—she has apparently been sold even though she was in love—before he resumes his life of drink and dissipation. She suffers “deep anguish” at the loss of their only child, and after several years she succumbs to “a slow wasting of the vital forces, the sickness of the soul” (“TO,” 113). On her deathbed

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she vainly calls out for her husband to return, but he never arrives. Since love has killed her, we can easily imagine that she would have fared rather better in a “loveless home.” Yet even then she could hardly have fared as well as her cousin. Janette, we learn, is a genius. At the time of her opening conversation with her cousin, she is already famous: “The achievements of genius had won her a position in the literary world, where she shone as one of its bright particular stars” (“TO,” 107). As Laura slips away into death, Janette’s vitality grows. She resolves to “kindle the fires of her genius” in the service of abolition: “In her the downtrodden slave found an earnest advocate” (“TO,” 114). On the face of it this is, quite frankly, a puzzling story. It opens by establishing a set of binary choices: the choice between one man and another, the choice between marrying for love and marrying for money, and the choice between a sham marriage and the life of a useful old maid. The story, though, never seriously pursues these oppositions; indeed, once having introduced them, it goes out of its way to display their irrelevance. We are never given a way to assess Laura’s “two offers” as we usually would be within the conventions of romantic fiction. One of the suitors is never sketched at all, and the cad whom Laura marries is depicted only after the wedding. The choice between a loving and a loveless marriage is similarly moot. Janette warns Laura that she should not marry because she does not love, but then Laura does fall in love with one of her suitors; in the narrator’s words, “she learned that great lesson of human experience and woman’s life, to love the man who bowed at her shrine” (“TO,” 109). The opposition between the sham marriage and the useful life of an old maid similarly collapses, not only because the disastrous marriage is one based on love—the kind of marriage that Janette’s criteria would have urged Laura to accept—but also because it has to bear the enormous weight of Janette’s genius. To make the point that an unmarried woman can contribute to the community and derive satisfaction from doing so, Harper would need only to show Janette pursuing useful but ordinary activities—visiting the sick, helping her family, engaging in philanthropic activities, working as a nurse or teacher, or choosing a life of service such as the one she later imagines for the heroine of Iola Leroy. Instead, Harper gives her a life far beyond the means of choice. Janette is a woman “whose genius gave life and vivacity to the social circle” (“TO,” 107); in consequence, “Men hailed her as one of earth’s strangely gifted children, and wreathed garlands of fame for her brow” (“TO,” 108). When she politicizes her genius, she does not simply work for aboli-

22

Introduction

tion as anyone might; she instead “had a higher and better object in all her writings than the mere acquisition of gold, or acquirement of fame. She felt that she had a high and holy mission on the battlefield of existence” (“TO,” 114). But fame she still gets: “Little children learned to name her with affection, the poor called her blessed. . . . Her life was like a beautiful story, only it was clothed with the dignity of reality and invested with the sublimity of truth” (“TO,” 114). Although her life is “like a beautiful story,” it is a distinctly different story than the one with which we seemed to have begun. Janette’s life—her genius—looms in extraordinary excess to the frame of choice and the narrative paths that initiate the story. In the grips of such excess, the story teeters on the brink of incoherence and incomprehensibility—at least for us. The discourse on female genius that this story organizes, however, renders the story intelligible as an inquiry into the grounding conditions of women’s political life. The main opposition in the story is between Laura’s stasis and Janette’s ability to transform and be transformed. Laura is entirely constrained by the social, economic, and conceptual limits of bourgeois womanhood. These frame her choice between this man and that, love or instrumentality. Incapable of thinking beyond them, Laura cannot even entertain the idea of a useful spinsterhood—hardly a radical option—that Janette suggests. Laura’s catastrophic narrative arc toward lonely death demonstrates that such choices are not really choices because their preconditions already constrain agency. She wastes her life by trying to live within the primary written convention of a woman’s life—the marriage plot—a situation metaphorized by the paper she wastes in the opening as she writes one unsatisfactory letter after another, unable to write her own satisfactory conclusion. In parallel with her paper, her own body becomes waste material as she slowly and inexorably dies. In contrast, Janette’s genius is a principle of transformation. Janette has her own drama of failed romance, but rather than killing her, it feeds her developing genius. When her affair develops, “love quickened her talents, inspired her genius” (“TO,” 107). After she separates from her lover and his death prevents any chance of reunion, “her genius gained strength from suffering and wonderous power and brilliancy from the agony hid within the desolate chambers of her soul” (“TO,” 107–8). Faced with her own heartbreak, she transforms. Faced with Laura’s death from heartbreak, she becomes an ardent abolitionist. Where Laura suffers the deadening effects of conventional bourgeois femininity, Janette not only transforms herself but also, as Kristeva would hope, is “a genius to the extent that [she is] able to challenge the sociohistorical

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conditions of [her] identity” (“FG,” 504). She gains this superabundant political agency, moreover, through the attenuation of her personal agency. Where Laura’s agency is stunted by the social and cognitive conventions of bourgeois womanhood that prevent her from not only having options but also being able to think about this situation, Janette’s personal agency is deferred to her genius. Janette does not have genius; it has her. In a crucial and literally grammatical sense, Janette is the indirect object, rather than the subject, of her genius; as the narrator notes, “The achievement of her genius had won her a position in the literary world” (“TO,” 107). It is not Janette but her “genius” that “gave life and vivacity to the social circle,” her “genius that gathered strength from suffering.” The fact of her possession by genius then enables her fight against an illegitimate possession, that of one person by another under slavery, so that her negated agency helps her strive to ameliorate, in a sense, the negated agency of the slave. She becomes a political agent, then, by channeling an agency authentic to her but not the same as her. This is the circuitous structure of agency characteristic of the tropes of female genius, and it typically operates not to affirm but to complicate and often ameliorate conventional feminine dilemmas of action, thought, and political possibilityWhat is the significance of Janette’s abolitionism and how does it relate to the conditions of her identity? If the direction of her political energy is a narrative surprise, then Laura’s story prepares the groundwork for it. Laura’s inadvertent “self sale” forms part of the story’s critique of the existing state of marriage. Laura’s husband regards marriage as a means of gaining her as a piece of legal human property: “he looked upon marriage not as a divine sacrament for the soul’s development and human progression, but as the title-deed that gave him possession of the woman he thought he loved” (“TO,” 109). As if in response to this parallel, Janette responds to women’s predicament in the domain of bourgeois gender by turning her genius to the task of alleviating the slave’s predicament in the national domain of race. In light of this move from gender to race, it might be tempting to read Janette and “The Two Offers” more generally according to Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s critique of white feminist abolitionists who protested the sexual suffering of slave women as a way of safely opposing some of the constraining conditions of their own lives.53 But there is more here than a figurative connection between bourgeois marriage and slavery. Laura and Janette are assigned no race in the story, and their bodies bear the slightest descriptive burdens; at most, the narrator calls Janette “that pale intellectual woman” (“TO,” 107), and Laura at her death has “dark locks” on her “marble brow” (“TO,” 114).

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In a white-authored American text published in a white-directed periodical, such minimal racial marking would affirm white racial privilege by meaning that they were white. “The Two Offers,” though, is, as far as we know, the first short story published by an African American, and it appeared in the Anglo-African, a periodical featuring African American writers and directed toward an African American audience.54 Janette’s paleness is a weak indication of whiteness, given Harper’s frequent turn in her fiction to light-skinned African American heroines. Janette’s abolitionist work mirrors Harper’s own tireless political activism, giving her the character of an author surrogate. One kind of argument would insist that Harper embraces the American national default of whiteness here in and through her attempt to represent characters definitive of bourgeois womanhood. Another would see African American abolitionism as the explicit assumption of readers of the Anglo-African. Yet although I would agree with the latter claim, it remains conspicuous that Harper, who so often defines her heroines through explicit predicaments of ambiguous racial identity, remains reticent about the heroine’s race here but not about slavery. The answer to this puzzle lies in the way that discourses of female genius manage bodily particularity. The general pattern, as in “The Two Offers,” is to vault over the politically freighted body in the service of articulating and protesting its conditions, not leaving it conceptually behind but mediating between particular distressed embodiments and an abstract domain of genius. Janette might, in Kristeva’s words, possess a genius capable of creating “the breakthrough that consists in going beyond the situation” (“FG,” 496), but she moves beyond the situation in order to address it, smashing convention and transforming context. Discourses on genius and gender were widespread in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. They sometimes coalesced into coherent conversations and recognized debates. There were, to be sure, historically long-running threads of systematic inquiry—essays defining genius, chapters of scientific or aesthetic monographs either supporting or denying women’s capacity for it, feminist and antifeminist speculations on women’s “special” genius, and so on. In their totality, though, they were far from constituting a systematic body of thought. They existed, rather, as a loose confederation of tropes, critical moves, scientific problems, clichés, genres, and aesthetic inquiries; and analyzing these is a crucial aspect of this project. The primary focus for my discussion, however, is literary fiction that situates female genius in particular scenes of women’s emergent publicity. There are, of course, other possible ways to locate the issue of female genius, just as there are other ap-

Introduction

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proaches to transformations in the gender of public life and citizenship more generally. One could look to the autobiographical writings of painters, poets, or dancers; to journalism and nonfiction about famous “women of genius,” such as Margaret Fuller, who were salon hostesses; to theories of acting onstage and in film or to theories of musical performance in relation to both live audiences and recording; to shifting conceptions of poetry writing and gender from romanticism through postmodernism; or to the larger history of the conceptions of genius as a kind of characteristic spirit that exists above the materiality of the nation yet defines national life. Reviewing scenes such as these has been part of the work of writing this book, and many of them are relevant to the discussion that follows. But fiction has provided a particularly productive ground of inquiry because within it, the scattered tropes and discursive instantiations of female genius were organized into sustained investigations. Prose fiction featuring female genius in relation to public life did not simply register political debates or contests over gender that were happening elsewhere, though they need to be situated in relevant discussions; nor did it merely thematize a set of problems surrounding the new woman, women’s citizenship, liberalism, or transformations in gender. Instead fiction served as the primary cultural institution where the scattered tropes of gender and genius achieved form as political narratives. One reason that fiction could serve this purpose is because of its relatively broad accessibility. The misogynistic constructions of genius in aesthetic philosophy and the sciences—the constructions that have so far been granted the most visibility in current scholarship—had enormous cultural authority behind them but also a necessarily restricted audience and an even more dramatically restricted authorship. Fiction writing and reading were by far more accessible, and the novel’s famous capacity to consume and reconstruct other languages and discourses allowed it to incorporate but also transform authoritative models of genius. There is not, then, a “whole” theory of genius of which each invocation of genius in novels is a part. But there are patterns of emergence that prose fiction allows us to see, and these can help us reconstitute the problematics of women’s social and state citizenship that the genius discourse framed, and the hopes, moreover, that it uniquely fostered. Rather than attempting to discern the unified field constituted by notions of female genius, then, I turn to novels that work out this trope at length, that orchestrate it in ways that produce its critical salience and a highly specified form of coherence—the formal coherence, as far as there is any, of the

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Introduction

fictional narrative. It is within fiction that the discourses of female genius become, as it were, fully discursive, subject to the kinds of “development” that novels formally pursue by, for instance, engaging the conventions of love story, Bildung, realism and romance and those of character and linear time, as well as through the ability of novels to absorb and reshape the languages of other disciplines, other genres. Just as the discourses of gender and genius have no monolithic form, they have no special genre of fiction, though the overlap with the female Künstlerroman is clear. However, where the Künstlerroman typically concerns the figure of the artist in opposition to conventional social expectations, and in the case of those about women deals extensively with the conflict between vocation and domesticity, tropes of genius have specifically to do with distinct cognitive formations of creativity and the dialectics between universality and particularity, public and private, agency and attenuated will that genius was thought to sustain. There also exist, however, profound tensions between the forms of the novel and the construct of genius, and these demand our attention as well. In some ways the logic of genius grates against the grain of prose fiction. Genius indicates a sudden break with existing forms and paradigms, and so its emergence as a topic, or as a dramatized experience, jars the worlds of novels whose narrative principles otherwise objectify incremental development or long chains of causality. Genius, in other words, often does not fit within the narratives that stage it, and that very misfit, or excess, produces its conspicuous alterity to the ordinary interpretive paradigms for understanding the mechanisms of political change. Each chapter in this book materializes a nexus of problems around a particular scene of women’s relation to public and civic life; each centers in a novel exemplary of that problem and then radiates selectively into those shards of the discourse on female genius most necessary to illuminate the novel’s organization of the genius trope. The chapters that follow are organized around readings of novels that open the way to particular constellations of genius, gender, and public life. The first chapter traces the U.S. translation of the aesthetic theory of genius into a political trope. Stretching back to the late eighteenth century, the operation of women’s “genius”—defined as their distinctive talents and spiritual liveness—was held by Enlightenment pedagogy to signify America’s freedom from tyranny, as realized in women’s freedom to actualize their personal capacities on their own behalf, even if they were dispossessed of actual civil authority and economic power. The romantic revolution in aesthetic philosophy reached the United States by the 1830s; one of its primary Americanizers,

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, folded its developments into his work, linking it at the same time with concerns about American democratic forms. Reasonable debate and self-proprietorship, this chapter argues, had long been dominant— but contested—ideals. Where critics of disinterested deliberation worried that it failed to engage the passions, that it produced only grudging forms of consent, and that it failed to form a satisfactory collective social life from its populace’s disparate opinions, Emerson proposed genius as a force that would forge authentic collectivity from an otherwise atomized franchise. Emerson’s model of genius proved a useful one for legitimizing the authority and appeal of women’s political speech; insofar as women were disqualified from political debate because they were held not to possess the reason, disinterest, and universality of men, the trope of genius provided another, more attainable route of access. At the same time, however, Emerson’s implicit critique of the public sphere of rational debate made “genius” not only a convenience for female speakers but also a critical discourse useful for conceptualizing and resisting the terms of women’s exclusion from politics. As a way of demonstrating this, I explore the critical operations of the female genius discourse in Louisa May Alcott’s novel Work: A Story of Experience, which concludes by framing a protofeminist activist movement grounded in female genius. While Chapter 1 considers the history of genius as a trope for counterliberal public making that could be used to imagine women’s civic and political inclusion, Chapter 2 explores the continuity between genius and modalities of thought associated with women’s privacy. At the same time that the trope of genius has a public life, its emphasis on passivity, intuitive knowledge, self-fracture, and instinct brings it remarkably close to the stereotypes of domestic femininity. The genius’s creativity is theorized as supremely innocent, uncalculated, and unwilled. In some ways the passivity of the genius to his inspiration coincides with women’s ideal passivity; the genius asserted himself through negation, mirroring women’s ideal selflessness. Chapter 2 considers Henry James’s satirical exploitation of this latent analogy in The Bostonians (1886). In this semihistorical novel James models the character of Verena Tarrant on the figure of the female genius-orator discussed in Chapter 1. However, while the convention of female genius oration stood in critical relation to the dominant frameworks for citizenship and proposed alternative models of women’s participation in political activism and collective struggle, James sees the conventions of female genius only as proliferating and diversifying forms of privacy, flooding the public with privacy’s desires, affects, and sensations. James stages Verena’s genius as a historically new destruction of

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the boundary between public and private, accomplished when the women’s movement intrudes women and their conventional privacy into the public and abetted by the ability of the mass press to commodify and publicize private life. Yet while this is the problem that the novel defines for itself, the novel also, I argue, symptomatizes another condition: that the definition of privacy had recently expanded from the sphere of private property to the personal sphere and, with that transition had delegitimized radical politics and languages that had their roots in the pre–Civil War United States. With this movement discourses of the personal, erotic, and sentimental that had previously enjoyed political life in such settings as the free love movement, abolitionism, and U.S. associationist social experiments thus looked, retrospectively, obscenely personal and antipolitical. This chapter describes one trajectory along which the public/private split was increasingly reified during the second half of the nineteenth century, creating conditions that depleted the resources for flexible, affective, and radical publics. In The Bostonians the fractured female psyche becomes the means by which Verena is cleared from the public; in George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) it becomes the means of mapping mass publicity. Chapter 3 argues that Trilby catalyzes contemporary psychological understandings of dissociated states of consciousness in order to provoke a crisis in the concept of originality that, in turn, undermines the legal and conventional association between originality and intellectual property. If, as Michel Foucault has argued and historians of copyright have demonstrated, the concept of authorship, anchored in the figure of the original genius, ties creativity to the concept of the individual in order to facilitate a system of property exchange, then this chapter argues that Trilby challenges such an ideology of individualism and property by staging Trilby’s split personality and hypnotic collaboration with Svengali. When the “origin” of Trilby’s genius for singing is ambiguated, so is its proprietary status. The problem of ambiguated originality that the novel thematizes became central in its reception, as the novel’s copyright holders found themselves embroiled in a seemingly endless set of disputes over their proprietary right in a fiction that was being pirated, staged in unlicensed productions, and adapted in part by circus performers, amateur actors, parodists, photographers, and advertisers. The general tendency of the mass cultural reception, I argue, was to claim Trilby as a collectively held fiction, available for multiple appropriations and reworkings. This possibility gains a liberatory dimension when seen in light of the novel’s own narrative of the ways in which the concept of indi-

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vidual authorship obscures more complex relations of identity and production. Ultimately, however, the implications of Trilby’s relation to genius for a freer circulation of fiction reaches its disappearing point in the intersection between the discourse of advertising and the psychological discourse on split consciousness, which saw the divided mind as an ideal medium for transmitting discourses and ideas unconsciously absorbed from the atmosphere and mistaken by the subject for its own original ideas. As stage parodies and advertising burlesques of Trilby suggest, the divided mind and the ambiguated originality it promised could become a cipher for advertising, rather than a rebuke to a restrictive system of intellectual property. Chapter 4 centers on the American novelist Mary Hunter Austin’s writings on women, citizenship, and genius: her 1912 novel, A Woman of Genius; her 1918 citizenship guide, The Young Woman Citizen; and her 1923 self-help book, Everyman’s Genius. I situate these texts within a scientific and popular debate about whether or not women could possess genius and if they could, of what it might consist. Most commonly we consider sexual difference to position women as different from men, who form a standard in relation to which women are a deviation. The controversies over women’s genius, however, reveal another construction in which men are marked by self-difference, realized in their capacity for variation, and women are marked by sameness; women, in one feminist’s summary of the antifeminist argument, differ from men in that they are less prone to the organic and intellectual variations in which progressive biological evolution and transformative politics alike are imagined to take place: “The male is the agent of variation; the female is the agent of type conservation.”55 Austin’s conception of genius in A Woman of Genius and The Young Woman Citizen allies women with a principle of variation that promises not only to sponsor their greater civic participation but also to make the identity category of “woman” the object of women’s self-conscious expansion, variation, and transformation. But if “woman” becomes a space of change and politics in these works, Austin’s self-help book, Everyman’s Genius, exposes the depoliticizing tendency latent in the emancipatory identities she imagined through the trope of genius in her earlier work. Drawing on recent developments in ethnology and psychology, Austin ultimately racializes and psychologizes genius. While genius had operated in debates before suffrage as a trope for transformation and change that could be staged publicly and collectively, this postsuffrage work allies genius with an ontology of the untransformability of racial identity and the privacy of the psyche and its mysteries. In this

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turn genius ultimately functions as a category of reification rather than improvisation, of organic determinism rather than democratic open-endedness, and of therapeutic self-improvement rather than collectivity. Chapter 5 charts Jessie Redmon Fauset’s intervention into the racial reifications of the genius discourse in her novel There Is Confusion (1924). The discourse on racial genius had interacted with that on gendered genius since at least the late eighteenth century, when political philosophies of universal equality were counterbalanced by constructions of essential differences of race and gender that were designed to account for the civic exclusion of women and racial others, particularly African Americans. In tandem with the increasing racialization of U.S. citizenship in the 1920s, however, racial genius became a primary cultural ground of contest not only over equality but also over national cultural membership. Within these contests, ethnologists and scientists within the white supremacist tradition not only denied the existence of black genius but also claimed that the lack of genius rightfully excluded African Americans from national cultural membership. Such arguments exploited a proprietary logic of creativity, in which originality legitimated ownership and ownership defined membership. At the same time African American intellectuals and artists undertook their own improvisations on the theme of genius, sometimes asserting that equal genius proved black equality with whites, sometimes elaborating a logic of black genius as a revolutionary means of creating resistant black collectivity, and sometimes using the proprietary logic of the genius trope to argue for black cultural ownership of U.S. national culture and, by a parallel logic, economic ownership of the national wealth that African American labor had created. Working against the grain of these approaches, Fauset shows the limits of the genius discourse for African American cultural politics. In its place she advances a cultural logic of imitation. Her protagonist, Joanna Marshall, fulfills the stereotypes of both women and blacks as imitative, and her narrative arc suggests how copying could function as a means of cultural collaboration and perpetuation if only it could avoid the operations of the market. My investigation concludes with a coda on two of Gertrude Stein’s war memoirs, “The Winner Loses” (1940) and Wars I Have Seen (1945). Stein made herself into a widely recognized icon of modernist genius, abstracted from the kinds of political terrain the concept of genius inhabited in the United States. Her situation in occupied France during World War II, however, was characterized by the complete suspension of civil order and rights, by the constant terror of violence and the abrogation of agency. It was also

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characterized by her own compromised position as an early supporter of the Vichy regime who accepted the help of a longtime friend who was later convicted of Nazi collaboration. In this context Stein employs “genius” as a distressed trope through which she represents the traumas of war and abnegated citizenship while also dramatizing a predicament of agency that has absorbed recent critical models of her work done during the war. Thus this book ultimately examines how the emancipatory possibilities carried by the genius discourse reach their limits. Yet however much the seeds of such an end may have been carried in the discourse on genius throughout the period of its relevance to women’s citizenship, this ultimate end did not fully determine or structure the meaning of “genius” for the particular contexts and moments when it offered a language for posing liberatory and often critical alternatives to the usual and legitimate frameworks for democratic capacity and citizenship. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commentators often saw genius as a kind of productive pathology, a symptom of underlying organic problems that, nevertheless, produced marvelous and cherished effects because of its deviations from the normative and ordinary. We can see in their attitude an apt metaphor for the project that follows: if genius can be traced at certain points to ideologies obstructive to models of democracy and personality that we might wish to stand behind, then it also breaks the frame of normative constructions of democracy in a manner we need to observe and might come to value.

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chapter 1

“It Spoke Itself ”: Genius, Political Speech, and Louisa May Alcott’s Work

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OUISA May Alcott’s 1872 novel, Work: A Story of Experience, concludes with the opposite of “work”: genius. The novel has taken its heroine, Christie Devon, through a highly fragmented narrative of labor where work has had many guises and involved many travails but is experienced in such an episodic and incoherent way that its larger social and economic dimensions are hard to trace. In the novel’s final chapter, however, she enters an emergent public when she goes to “one of the many meetings of workingwomen, which had made some stir of late.”1 Where her work has been defined by its local conditions and often her isolation, she now finds herself poised before an abstract collectivity, “working-women,” that is struggling in the postbellum moment to form itself into a liberating movement. Women’s work is its basis of organization, but as Christie witnesses, the women in attendance seem unable to leap from their individual experiences as workers to a collective program—until, that is, Christie rises on “a sudden and uncontrollable impulse” (W, 332) and speaks—or rather is spoken through. Speech flows through her in alterity to her person and in excess of her agency, as she explains: “I don’t deserve any credit for the speech, because it spoke itself, and I couldn’t help it” (W, 342). Christie’s speech makes use of a convention of U.S. public discourse in which the person speaking is understood as a cipher, a convention that went, in certain circumstances, by the name “genius.” The operations of genius are on full display, for instance, in J. B. Pond’s Eccentricities of Genius: Memories of Famous Men and Women of the Platform and Stage (1900). Pond, a lyceum organizer, repeatedly recollects acts of expression that overcome agency and identity. He recalls, for instance, that the abolitionist and suffragist Julia Ward

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Howe told him that she wrote the lyrics to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in a spontaneous burst, feeling herself to be their passive transcriber. She had heard a few Union soldiers singing the gruesome and repetitive “John Brown’s Body Lies A-Mouldering in the Grave” and thought that the tune deserved more stirring words. The next morning, as she recalls, she awoke “in the gray of the early dawn, and, to my astonishment, found that the wishedfor lines were arranging themselves in my brain. I hastily rose, saying to myself, ‘I shall lose this if I don’t write it down.’ Immediately I searched for the sheet of paper and an old stump of pen that I had had the night before, and began to scrawl the lines almost without looking. Having completed that, I lay down again and fell asleep, but not without feeling that something of importance had happened to me.”2 Howe experiences this act of composition as a break in self-continuity. Her words make her their passive object; they “happened to” her. Giving another example of the “eccentricity of genius,” Pond retells the women’s rights advocate Anna E. Dickinson’s account of her first—and entirely spontaneous—public speech. As she listened to a man at a Quaker meeting oppose granting women political rights, she jumped up without premeditation and replied with her own speech. She recalls, “I had no idea of speaking at all, and was as much astonished as anybody at what I did” (EG, 152). This was her entrance into the speaking mode that would define her performances. Alcott’s obsession with genius is everywhere evident in her work: in her depiction of Jo’s writing in Little Women (1868); in her stories of frustrated women artists, such as “A Modern Cinderella” (1860), “Psyche’s Art” (1868), and A Marble Woman (1865); in her depictions of masculine genius and its counterfeits in the long short story “The Freak of a Genius” (1866) and its gothic revision as A Modern Mephistopheles (anonymously published in 1877); and in her journals, where she struggles over how to describe her own capacities and aspirations. For critics such as Naomi Z. Sofer and Anne E. Boyd, Alcott returns to the idea of genius in order to thematize her own ambition in particular and the role of the woman artist in general. Sofer sees Alcott’s writing as an extended critique of genius, understood as a privileged “identity” closed to women in any and every circumstance: “Alcott’s anonymous and pseudonymous fiction and her own biography suggest that even for women who enjoy the privileges of access and education . . . genius is an intellectual identity that is both unavailable to and undesirable for women to occupy. For as Alcott understood, the identity of genius represents a masculine intellectual identity that women—of any class—do not have access to.”3

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Looking to Alcott’s journals and scrapbook, Boyd sees a more complex picture: that Alcott often claimed genius as her own but just as often expressed ambivalence about the ambition implied in the term. In Boyd’s account, “genius” designates a set of competing discourses about the identity of the artist, some of which “helped to create the possibility for women to envision themselves as potential geniuses,” while others denied women a recognized category to inhabit as artists.4 Alcott’s writing, then, exhibits the full range of tensions between the identity of the artist and the identity of the woman. Writing at odds with this approach, Gustavus Stadler sees genius in Alcott’s writing, and more generally in the public sphere, less as an available role than as a discursive formation central to the major problematics of U.S. culture in the mid-nineteenth century. Stadler discerns in Alcott’s fiction, primarily Little Women and “The Freak of a Genius,” a “relational model of genius” in which performative same-sex erotics take part in a “historical pattern linking sexuality and culture as discourses of the individual interior.” The “queerness” of genius in Alcott, then, marks the effect of culture in constituting selfhood, “the personal stakes of the individual’s relationship to culture” where culture regulates norms and marginality.5 Alcott’s Work, however, takes us to the point at which genius challenges constituted selfhood, as the subjective alterity of Christie’s speech attests. It also takes us past the self-evidence of “art” or “culture” as domains of genius and toward the construct of female genius as a figure for conceiving women’s citizenship beyond the models of political life that condition their marginality. Work opens up the broader context in which genius appears as something besides an identity or role. At its most strictly denotative, the term “genius” designated theories of the mind, intelligence, and creativity, and in this role it was a precursor to modern theories of psychology. As a matter of function, it produced cultural value and authority, and for this reason it became an object of contest over who could claim that value and authority and under what circumstances. Among the most visible of these contests was that over gender and genius, especially as philosophical positions hardened against women’s capacity for genius. But popular and literary tropes of women’s genius were still widespread throughout nineteenth-century U.S. culture despite such philosophical positions, and they occupied a special role in mediating women’s capacity for public and collective life. The trope of women’s genius could do this because the discourses of genius more generally generated, in tandem with their theories of mind, models of social and collective life distinct

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from those available within the political culture of liberalism. These models provided the means both to conceive of women’s public experience and to highlight the deficiencies of liberal political culture in conceiving democratic models of agency, consensus, and collectivity. Yet, as a figure for women’s capacity for public making, genius presents problems for interpretation. Like romantic genius more generally, the public formation of female genius assumes its authority insofar as it provides knowledge by spontaneous intuition rather than rational deliberation or calculated effort, even when intuitions turn out to be perfectly in keeping with standards of logic. This mode of knowledge also configures political agency as a paradox. The force and “rightness” of Christie’s words—and of Howe’s and Dickinson’s historical words—depend on the condition that the woman has no intention of writing or speaking and, moreover, does not experience the words she expresses as her own. Just as Christie’s speech speaks itself, Howe’s lines “arrange themselves,” and Dickinson is “astonished” to hear her own speech. At the same time genius produces a complementary paradox in its audience, whose ability to engage the genius’s form of knowledge is conditioned by its own attenuated state of agency. When Dickinson’s speech overcomes her sense of self-possession, it also overpowers her listeners; as Pond remembers, she “never failed to thrill and enthrall her audiences” (EG, 153). Likewise the women’s rights orator Mary A. Livermore “held her audience spell-bound” (EG, 157), and the orator Maude Ballington Booth possessed “magnetism” (EG, 177). Invaded and subverted by the alterity of genius, these women and their audiences are emphatically not rational republicans or possessive individuals imbued with some form of free agency, the ideal subjects of normative democratic theory. Both are moved out of their ordinary consciousness as their minds are invaded and subverted by the alterity of genius. What can we say about political speech so clearly severed from agency and consciousness? Given the cultural prohibitions on women’s public speaking and overt political involvement in the nineteenth century, it is tempting to see genius as a strategy of mitigation. If, for instance, Dickinson did not mean to speak, can she really be held responsible? Women channeling genius might appear to be sidestepping controversy over the propriety of speaking publicly and politically by not really speaking at all, or at least not speaking as themselves. Their availability to sudden inspirations might seem to retell the story of women’s essential passivity and partial agency, just as their spontaneity might appear to express their stereotypical impulsiveness. Women

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speaking politically through the convention of genius certainly resemble the trance speakers who, Anne Braude has argued, were permitted the platform because they channeled a content not their own, and who thereby created a public forum organized by the same qualities associated with women’s essential privacy—passivity, submissiveness, virtue, and compassion.6 To frame it this way, however, would be to miss how the construct of genius was at odds with the ideological distinction between public and private that required women to cloak their public ambitions in the mantle of their privacy. The political force and importance of female genius lay in its ability to constitute an epistemology, a mode of agency, and a form of social personhood distinct from other established forms and yet positioned among them in specifically critical and utopian ways. In its critical capacity, constructs of female genius exerted pressure on the central assumptions of liberal democratic culture. At its center nineteenth-century democratic discourse was structured by a seemingly endless series of polarities that function as exclusions—between public and private, interest and disinterest, particulars and the universal; between rational debate and emotive or subcompetent rhetorical styles; between valid political objectives and mere organic necessity; between people qualified to grant consent to governance and those deemed essentially incapable of consent (slaves, dependents, certain immigrants, and women).7 The figure of female genius challenged those structuring conditions of democracy, a challenge abetted by the fact that it was not itself a politically organized formation. For this reason we might construe it, to borrow and transform Pond’s term, as eccentric. In its most developed formulations, female genius not only establishes its own difference from normative political discourse but also provides hope for an eccentric democracy, capable of constituting collectivities and political subjects from positions outside of the antinomies that organize democratic forms and ideologies at the social center. It denominated an eccentric rhetorical space, symbolically available to women and imbued with a form of epistemological authority capable of transforming women’s deadening political alienation into their animating eccentricity. Alcott’s Work occupied this space, using it to push against a political culture that not only excluded women from the formal political level of the nation but has also blanketed women’s labor and activism under the sign of privacy. Regarding Work in light of broader constructions of female genius will show us how an unpremeditated speech derived apparently out of nowhere actually participated in a pattern of effort to forge a more just democracy that included women’s participation.

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Female Genius and U.S. Political Cultures It has become a critical commonplace that the definition of “genius” as it developed in the eighteenth century categorically excluded women.8 The literature of the eighteenth century, however, provides a more complex picture. From the early days of the republic, conceptions of female genius linked definitions of national political culture to women’s citizenship. These conceptions, though, were historically distinct. They initially formed under paradigms of the intellect vastly different from those that developed in the nineteenth century and still hold sway today. Female genius began its American career as an aspect of women’s ordinary human intellect, rather than as a distinct epistemology. Whereas “genius” would later come to define a qualitatively distinct cognitive style or capacity that set its bearer apart, through much of the eighteenth century “genius” meant “animating spirit” or “characteristic disposition”; “genius” could also indicate something as prosaic as “inclination.” At the same time, the concept of genius retained the supernatural aura of its older meaning as either an attendant guardian spirit or an evil spirit.9 This supernaturalism was key, paradoxically, to “genius’s” humanity—the illuminating light of genius vivified the other intellectual faculties, raising their functions from the mechanistic plane to that of the human. But while genius resided in the intellect as a vital principle, it was not in and of itself definitive of a person’s cognitive character. Rather, it functioned as a principle of the many faculties cultivated within a refined but in no way extraordinary mind. As Lorraine Daston reminds us, the eighteenth century understood intelligence to be a plural entity composed of what looks to us to be a stunning array of qualities—not only the Cartesian categories of reason, memory, and imagination but also many other qualities, including judgment, stamina, virtue, and quickness. The nineteenth century would leave faculty psychology behind and simplify the intellect under the conception of “general intelligence,” defined as abstract synthetic ability.10 In the eighteenth century, by contrast, plural intelligence was vitalized and humanized by a “genius” that signified a magnitude of power, rather than a coherently theorized species of thought. The Enlightenment discourse on the human intellect gendered intelligence, but in a manner distinct from the rigid binary that nineteenth-century science would instantiate. Within the conventions of European philosophies of mind that set the initial terms of U.S. conceptions, women’s intelligence occupied a lower order than did men’s. Following Aristotelian theories of intel-

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lect, philosophers considered women’s intelligence to be based in less valued attributes of the mind, such as precocity, fancy, and a memory for facts, while men’s intelligence was allied with abstract analytical ability, stamina, reason, and judgment.11 Judith Sergeant Murray therefore begins her 1790 call for equal female education by confirming that “the province of imagination hath long since been surrendered up to us,” and that “memory, I believe, must be allowed us in common.”12 Women’s excellence in the lower faculties of intelligence did not contradict the possibility that they had genius. Although women’s genius was thought to imbue lower orders of the hierarchy of intellectual faculties, it was genius nonetheless. As a value distributed across a vertical hierarchy of intellectual attributes, genius occupied what Thomas Laqueur has called the “one-sex” model of sexual difference, in which difference was understood to be a matter of rank rather than kind.13 It was thus conceivable that, given unusual gifts and a proper education, a few women might attain the upper reaches of intellectual accomplishment. Such women may have been considered “marvels” or “wonders,” as Daston has noted, but were not imagined to have deviated irreparably from the formation of their gender.14 As a speaker on behalf of the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia expressed it, educated women would overturn the idea that they were merely excellent memorizers and quick studies; they would “surprise the world with the meridian lustre of unrivalled genius, in the most intricate speculations.”15 The place that genius occupied in the cultivated female intellect becomes clear in an acrostic poem on the ideal “maid,” written about a graduating student, Ann Smith, by an unnamed fellow student at the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia and publicly presented at their commencement in 1794. Genius is but one facet of the “maid’s” excellence: A ccept sweet maid, the tribute friendship pays, N or blush to read the well-requited praise; N ature has fram’d thee, with a noble heart S weet sensibility, devoid of art: M ajestic graces in thy form appear; I n genius bright, in judgement sound and clear. T hus blest by nature, with a form so fair, H eav’n be thy guardian, and its laws thy care.16 Even though the poet credits “Nature” with framing the ideal maid, forming the poem from a student’s name literalizes (literally, as in “puts in letters”)

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the connection between the formal act of composition, which configures the student’s name into a metrical list of virtues, and the project of education, which composes the student’s mind as a set of complementary, mutually informing faculties of knowledge. The poem thus indicates not only the place of genius amid other capacities, but also the shaping role that formal knowledge and aesthetic refinement played in developing and organizing the mind. Whereas genius would later be construed as an assertive native ability that would shine forth no matter what level of education its possessor attained—or as an ability whose valued lay in its immunity to the banalizing effects of conventional education—eighteenth-century genius began, rather than ended, with “nature.”17 Among late eighteenth-century advocates of female education in the United States, the cultivation of female genius was more than a matter of self-culture; it was conceived as part of the project of republican citizenship. A 1795 celebratory commencement poem mapped the political terrain of women’s genius by claiming that despotic government squelched it: “Strange tyrant customs . . . dim’d [women’s] genius by its dark controul.” Republican education, by contrast, sought “T’illume their genius.”18 This poem figures women’s genius as a historical casualty of the social and political forms that preceded the recent political revolution; its liberation and cultivation signify the achievements of the republic. Developing women’s genius was necessary to forming a refined and virtuous citizenry, whose balanced and carefully composed ethos would link domestic order with a well-ordered nation.19 Moreover, educating women’s genius bound them to the formal structures of the nation and secured their “influence . . . in favor of our government and laws, as it were in their infancy.” Women’s inclination and ability to advocate for the political system that favored their education would serve as a “bulwark round our inestimable constitution.”20 This premium on women’s genius in the making—or constitution, as it were—of the new nation is in part why Clara Wieland’s intellectual character in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1797) serves to index the health of republican nationhood in the novel. Clara had been, for Henry Pleyel, a paragon of female republican virtue. “Not a sentiment you uttered, not a look you assumed, that were not, in my apprehension, fraught with the sublimities of rectitude and the illuminations of genius,” he spitefully tells her after he has come to believe she is carrying on a depraved love affair with Carwin.21 The seeming balance of her genius with her other attributes had provided the characterological basis for a new civil order; its vulnerability to derangement

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by what Clara calls “evil geniuses” demonstrates, in this antirevolutionary novel, the perils of grounding the new national warrant in refined minds or the compacts formed among them.22 Women’s genius thus functions in the republican era as a cipher for another prevalent sense of “genius” that meant the distinctive character of a nation, felt to express itself above and beyond its formal government or geographic materiality. Such meanings of “genius” were not markedly specialized or precise. Over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, genius became an object of intensive theorization, and new conceptions of it existed in tension with an emerging liberal political culture defined by a separation of public and private spheres and the autonomous individuality of its ideal political subject. The romantic revolution in aesthetics made “genius” a central term for its investigations into creativity and the place of art in forming collectivities, such as audiences, peoples, nations, and humanity. By becoming more fully specified, genius became a coherent enough concept to possess internal contradictions, and it became a central enough value to become an object of contest. Under romantic theories of creativity, genius came to indicate an exceptional kind of thought—spontaneous, original creativity—different in kind rather than magnitude from ordinary intelligence. The apparent singularity and autonomy of genius allied it with an emergent individualism.23 The genius seemed to stand free of social relations and to have a unique claim on its own productions, conditions, as Françoise Meltzer has noted, that tied genius to the liberal political formation of possessive individualism and the masculine subject it privileged.24 At the same time, however, romantic genius also cut powerfully against these trends. Where liberal politics idealized rationality driven by selfinterest, genius was theorized as an irrational force that fragmented individual selfhood. The productions of genius sprang from within their bearer not only as an organic realization of the self but also, paradoxically, as a subversion of the self. Genius fractured individuality, rising up from within the mind like an internal alien and moving out into the world on the momentum of what was imagined to be its universality and consequent irresistible persuasiveness.25 Genius’s universal and impersonal qualities are what often made it, for such continental theorists of genius as Kant and Schopenhauer, inimical to womanhood. Women’s ostensible orientation toward the personal and particular, coupled with their concrete and mimetic minds, barred them from the achievements of genius. But this gendering could take place only at another threshold of contradiction—the intuitive, instinctive qualities of

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genius were coded as feminine at the same moment that they were held to be nearly impossible for women to possess.26 With theories of genius, gender was highly polarized and essentialized and at the same time highly unstable. This paradoxical organization—autonomous but overtaken, individual but invaded, singular but universal, feminized but unambiguously masculine— made genius a disruptive and volatile formation of subjectivity, as capable of undermining dominant conceptions of gender and personhood as of expressing them. One effect of genius’s disruptions is that it easily escaped the limits put on it in the strictly philosophical discussion and became available to transformation, appropriation, and development. One of these developments was the figure—as in character and trope—of female genius. While philosophical and later medical discussions continued to define the universality of genius in opposition to the intellectual characteristics credited to women since Aristotle, popular and literary discourse still posited women of genius. These formulations were driven not by a static gendered opposition but by a dialectic that performed complicated mediating work for the category of femininity, not despite but because of the tension between women’s particularity and the abstract, impersonal universalism of genius. Through this dialectic, female genius in the first half of the nineteenth century asserted a mode of knowledge and presence whose staging of the relation between sexual difference and citizenship per se was much less direct than it had been in late eighteenthcentury writing. Where eighteenth-century female genius expressed the liberty and health of the nation, imagined as a continuity between cultivated minds and constitutional forms, mid-nineteenth-century models of female genius confounded the terms of a political order based on the distinction between public and private, men and women, and rationality and irrationality. Lydia Sigourney’s 1840 “Essay on the Genius of Mrs. Hemans” suggests how fully this was the case even in writing not overtly concerned with political life. In this essay Sigourney introduces an American edition of the collected works of Felicia Hemans, the wildly popular, prolific, and then recently deceased British poet. Sigourney garbs Hemans in the conventions of romantic genius. She narrates the first appearance of Hemans’s genius in “infantine indications,” rather than finding it cultivated by proper education or revealed in mature speculations.27 Whereas eighteenth-century female genius required careful education and democracy to free it from the obscurity in which ignorance and “tyranny” had wrapped it, Hemans’s genius is described not only to have emerged naturally but also to have educated itself by instinct: “the

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never-resting love of knowledge was her schoolmaster. . . . Such branches of knowledge as were congenial to her taste, she seemed to acquire, without the toil of investigation—in pastime, or instinctively” (“MH,” x–xi). Never resting and never toiling, genius accrues value and authority from its difference from leisure and labor alike, a condition that becomes crucial to Christie’s speech in Work. Hemans’s apparent effortlessness represents at the same time an attenuation of her personal agency, which is supplanted her by “congeniality”— literally a co- or joint “genius” with what she learns. As natural as Hemans’s genius may be to her, however, it is at the same time dissociated from her personality. Although her genius works by instinct, and thus seems to be anchored in her by nature, it is an internal alien, a familiar romantic echo of the older conception of genius as a possessing spirit and a staple, as we have seen, of the public speaking convention of female genius. Sigourney writes of Hemans’s genius as if it were an entity independent of her person, noting “the circumstances of its education” (“MH,” vii) and the “influence of Mrs. Hemans’s genius on her own character” (“MH,” xx). Sigourney frames Hemans as the trustee of genius rather than as someone who is “a genius”: “The possessor of this genius evinced both an innate consciousness of its powers, and a determination to devote them to their legitimate purposes. She held on her way, not in self-esteem, but in reverence for the loftiness of her vocation, and with a continually heightening gratitude for the entrusted treasure” (“MH,” xiv). Genius, then, is not Hemans’s own; it is a collective possession merely held and fostered by her. In other words, it is the opposite of private. For this reason Hemans’s trusteeship can establish, among other things, her personal disinterest in her own gifts. Her gift, that is, is not hers at all but everyone’s; her interest in its expression becomes a form of disinterest. The possession of genius pries the woman loose from conventional formations of gender that associate women with privacy and personality, from those that accuse them of elevating personal interest above collective or public good. Although Sigourney’s essay is not immediately oriented toward a political frame, the formation of gender she disturbs—that of the private woman characterized by personal interest—is precisely one used to establish women’s disqualification from public life and the franchise. Yet gender does not drop out of the equation. The dissociation of genius from its possessor—and its elevation to the level of a public trust—gains special significance in light of how Sigourney leagues Hemans’s genius with her femininity. Sigourney emphasizes, “Both critics and casual readers have united in pronouncing her poetry to be essentially feminine” (“MH,” xv).

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When Sigourney writes that the “genius of Mrs. Hemans was as pure and feminine in its impulses, as in its out-pourings” (“MH,” xix), she does more than defend Hemans against the charge of gender deviance to which women pursuing public careers were often vulnerable. By finding femininity to be channeled by the personally held but essentially impersonal category of “genius,” Sigourney moves femininity itself decisively beyond its status as a sign of privacy that retains or even augments its private aura when deployed in public as a point for collective identification. This movement is amplified by the manner in which genius destabilizes the boundary between ordinary, particular personhood and extraordinary or representative iconicity. As a genius, Hemans is at once markedly “peculiar” and perfectly representative. This is a relatively new paradox of genius in the nineteenth century. Eighteenth-century advocates of female education lamented that dismal educations made women’s genius rare, but they did not regard genius as an extraordinary possession, however supernaturally auratic it might be. Following romantic conventions of genius, however, Sigourney frames Hemans as different in kind from ordinary humanity. Young genius, Sigourney writes, always faces danger, “lest its impulses should be mistaken for waywardness, or its idioms accounted a strange language” (“MH,” viii). This extraordinariness of genius exposes another threshold of contradiction: genius was seen to inhere in an artist’s or thinker’s ability to apprehend in a representative or universal mode. Therefore, Hemans’s unusualness is her special access to universality; she possesses “the finer spirit of all knowledge” (“MH,” vii). At the same time that her extraordinariness is linked with the representative, it also, by its animation of an “essentially feminine” impulse, is linked with the absolutely conventional—the convention of the feminine, that is, which normatively tropes the particular rather than the human universal. Her genius, as framed by Sigourney, thus confounds antinomies between the particular and representative, personal and impersonal, interested and disinterested that have been seen to discursively map women’s marginality to political and civic concern. However much Sigourney may here reify gender, she does so in a manner that disturbs the positions and structures generated strictly out of a public/private divide. That disturbance could be mobilized to imagine a more direct political intervention.

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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,

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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

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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 at his table Christie saw the best and bravest men and women of our times” (W, 240). A rotating cast of characters gathers there for scientific, literary, philosophical, and political discussion: “In one corner a newly imported German . . . was hammering away upon some disputed point with

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a scientific Frenchman. . . . A prominent statesman was talking with a fugitive slave. . . . An old philosopher was calming the ardor of several rampant radicals” (W, 241), and so on. As a salon, Mr. Power’s home is a node in the cosmopolitan public sphere, where members meet on the basis of equality in order to debate and deliberate. At its worst in Work the home is a place of exploitative labor, and at its best, of activism, cooperative labor, and mutual care. At no point, however, does it assume the character of a private retreat, sentimentally available because segmented from the market on the one hand and politics on the other. Nor does it conform to the familiar model of domesticity as an ideology that can deploy its values in a political sphere that remains essentially distinct from it. Domesticity in Work assumes many forms, but each is characterized by its openness to the forces that flow through it. Home in Work looks something like the conception of home that the feminist political theorist Bonnie Honig calls for when she writes, “If home is to be a positive force in politics, it must itself be recast in coalitional terms as the site of necessary, nurturing, but also strategic, conflicted, and temporary alliances.”28 Honig is writing in opposition to a conception of home developed under the separate spheres ideology of the nineteenth century and whose power has been undiminished by the social and economic conditions of postmodernity, a conception of home figured as a stable ground of essential identities and an impenetrable refuge from the traumas of economic and political life. Under this conception of home, power relations are naturalized and thus become unavailable to political transformation. She calls on democratic theory to disrupt this work of naturalization: “To resignify home as a coalitional arrangement and to accept the impossibility of the conventional home’s promised safety from conflict, dilemmas, and difference is not to reject home but to recover it for the sake of an alternative, future practice of politics.”29 The complex network of homes in Work shows how much the home Honig asks us to imagine is not only a potential outcome of future theory and practice but also an object of historical recovery. The home in Work is poised on the brink of closure when Christie falls in love and considers marriage. Alcott explicitly alludes to separate spheres ideology when Christie starts to think “that home was woman’s sphere after all, and the perfect roasting of beef, brewing of tea, and concocting of delectable puddings, an end worth living for if masculine commendation rewarded the labor” (W, 223). This vision of “woman’s sphere,” however, is a back-formation of heterosexuality in Christie’s mind, and it never takes material shape. Her marriage becomes instead a performance of her public citi-

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zenship. When David Sterling, the man she intends to marry, enlists in the Civil War, she enlists as a nurse, and they marry in their uniforms. The legal and public consequences of marriage blend with the sentimental and private dimensions, as David’s pained explanation of his wish to marry shows: “‘As a married woman you will get on better, as my wife you will be allowed to come to me if I need you and as my’—he stopped there, for he could not add—‘as my widow you will have my pension to support you’” (W, 290). They never live together after their marriage—“their honeymoon was spent apart in camp and hospital” (W, 300)—but instead express their citizenship in parallel ways. Even the gendered distinction between her nursing and his fighting breaks down. The narrative emphasizes her unsentimental practical skills and courage in caring for injured bodies, and he receives his mortal wounds while taking on Christie’s feminine role as a nurse for a group of escaped slaves: “He fed and warmed ’em, comforted their poor scared souls, give what clothes we could find, buried the dead baby with his own hands, and nussed the other little creeters as if they were his own” (W, 311), as one of his men explains. Even if the novel refuses to counterpoise home life to citizenship or woman’s sphere to man’s, Christie’s recourse to the language of separate spheres— her longing to fulfill herself in the home understood as “woman’s sphere”—is still a symptom of something. It is a symptom of the power that liberal culture has to make women’s experiences read as private, a condition that makes it difficult to conceive and bring into being an intelligible public sphere that elevates working women out of their isolated personal and local experiences and into a collective political force. Working women in Work might not be private, but they are not public either. They sometimes work in isolation from each other, and they sometimes collaborate through activist networks that course through the home, but they do not come together to articulate their common interests, conceptualize their shared situation, or advocate for political change. While home might not be impermeable, it also is not fully “resignified,” in Honig’s terms, and perhaps without a collective public to recognize it, it remains incapable of resignification. The fragmentary, protopolitical quality of working women’s lives is mirrored by the highly episodic nature of the narrative, which breaks Christie’s working life across distinct spaces and distinct working identities.30 It is almost impossible to recognize, for instance, Christie’s actress and Christie’s seamstress as the same character. The eruption of Christie’s genius in the novel’s final chapter, however, literally speaks to this situation, exploiting her capacity for self-fracture and creating a selfrecognizing public movement from working women’s isolated experiences.

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In this moment Christie’s inspirational public speaking coordinates the fragmented experiences of working women into a feminist coalition, and it does so specifically in contrast to other models of public speaking that fail spectacularly. In the last chapter Christie attends the political meeting with which the discussion here began. When she goes, she has no intention of speaking, but plans, rather, to listen to the upper-class, educated women’s rights advocates who hold the platform. She finds, however, that their mode of political address is in a state of dysfunction. The speakers have come to organize and politicize working women, but each fails. These failures expose how the political rhetoric at the center of liberal democracy is inadequate to the task of facilitating the civic incorporation of women across the spectrums of class and race. The first speaker “deliver[s] a charming little essay on the strong-minded women of antiquity” that flies “over the heads of her audience” and “was like telling fairy tales to hungry children” (W, 330). She meets “with little favor from anxious seamstresses, type-setters, and shop girls, who said ungratefully among themselves, ‘That’s all very pretty, but I don’t see how it’s going to better wages among us now’” (W, 330–31). By summoning “antiquity,” the speaker apparently hopes to voice the universal, but what she conjures instead is her own cultural privilege and her auditors’ redoubled awareness of their immediate conditions. The second speaker produces another kind of problem entirely. Her speech stirs her listeners’ senses, turning them into a voracious mass whose political interpellation has been preempted by their sensory arousal: “Another eloquent sister gave them a political oration which fired the revolutionary blood in their veins, and made them eager to rush to the State-house en masse, and demand the ballot before one-half of them were quite clear what it meant” (W, 331). Alcott here alludes to long-standing debates about qualifications for the franchise. This fear of the moblike, corrupt feminine electorate recalls the conventional vision of the franchise as ideally limited to male citizens qualified to vote because of their ostensibly informed and disinterested mode of participation. Rather, however, than worrying the question of whether, and in what ways, women might meet such a standard, Alcott here posits the ability of a discursive situation to produce incompetent citizens. By activating the women’s embodied passion only, the speech blocks their politicization. They wish to rush bodily into the statehouse and demand the ballot only to gratify their fired blood. They do not yet know “what it means” to vote, although, the narrator implies, they could have this knowledge. The second speaker’s ill effects do not end there. Alluding again to de-

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bates over the cognitive state of the qualified voter, the narrator remarks that “the other half [of the listeners] were as unfit for [the ballot] as any ignorant Patrick bribed with a dollar and a sup of whiskey” (W, 331). Christie’s impressions repeat the anti-Irish position she casually takes at several moments in the novel, but here the Irishman stands for a particular problem of the franchise.31 The women listening to this speech become, that is, like the interested voter, who casts a vote for direct, personal gain rather than on behalf of a common good, determined from the heights of disinterested cognition. The “ignorant Patrick” to whom they are compared is an iconic thorn in the paw of liberal democracy. His poverty makes him bribable since he does not possess the economic independence on which disinterested civic rationality theoretically lies. Moreover he is doubly embodied as an ethnically marked subject and a drinker. His intrusive sensual and ethnic body casts him as inimical to freedom in the emerging ideology that linked democracy to an Anglo-Saxon capacity for self-abstraction.32 These essentialisms are simultaneously embraced and discarded here. Alcott’s condemnation of the second speaker’s effect on her audience gathers its imagery and its moral point from the normative construction of the ideal voter’s abstract embodiment and disinterested rationality. At the same time, however, this image of the bribed “Patrick” discloses the power relations that make him vulnerable to parties that wish to use him as an instrument; his poverty, lack of education, and unwillingness to venerate democratic principle all bear witness to his social and economic disenfranchisement, despite his civic incorporation. Insofar as his democratic incompetence is contingent upon the power relations that structure his position, the women in the audience are like him not essentially but conditionally. His example also shows the failure of liberal democracy to bring about meaningful equality in a classdivided society; universal manhood suffrage creates abstract equality at the polls—“one man, one vote”—without creating substantial social or economic equality. On its own, that is, formal inclusion in the franchise fails to politicize or put power into the hands of its subjects. Rather than sponsoring the women’s political conversion, then, the second speaker makes them alternately enflamed and instrumental. The third and final speaker who precedes Christie’s outbreak of genius also fails to properly constitute the working women as political subjects. While the second speaker fails because she turns the women into the opposite of liberal subjects, the third speaker fails because she appeals to them precisely as the ideal liberal voters—as if, that is, they are disinterested and abstract. “A

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third well-wisher quenched their ardor like a wet blanket, by reading reports of sundry labor reforms in foreign parts; most interesting, but made entirely futile by differences of climate, needs, and customs. She closed with a cheerful budget of statistics, giving the exact number of needle-women who had starved, gone mad, or committed suicide during the past year; the enormous profits wrung by capitalists from the blood and muscles of their employees; and the alarming increase in the cost of living” (W, 331). This speaker reports to the working women as if they have no experiential or concrete relation to the data she provides; she asks them to think about their own situations as if they are not actually in them. She relies on abstract analytical models— statistics, global data, economic trends—and ideologically metabolized interpretations of the sorts of hardship the women in the audience encounter. Unschooled in abstractions, the women can interpret the speech only literally and locally; to them, “immediate starvation seemed to be waiting at the door” (W, 331). They cannot manipulate or synthesize what they have just heard with other interpretive tools; instead they receive it passively, are overwhelmed, and lose any impetus to action: “the impressible creatures believed every word and saw no salvation anywhere” (W, 331). These speakers serve to demonstrate an impasse between the genteel lady reformers and the working women on whose behalf they ostensibly operate. This class gap, however, is merely one symptom of a larger set of democratic problems playing out in progressive women’s reform efforts. The speakers employ archives of reference, rhetorical styles, and analytical tools that place the women in an improper relation to democratic consent; the women are, in sequence, bewildered, aroused to violence, and alienated by abstractions. Although Alcott raises the specter of the intransigently bad citizen—the overly interested and ethnically marked “Patrick”—the women’s responses to the speakers are not flagged strictly as signs of their incapacity. Indeed, the narrator is preparing to describe the beginnings of their efficacious politicization. Instead what these speeches show is that forms of collectivity are always forged through the rhetorical and epistemological mediums in which any deliberation or collaboration could conceivably take shape and, moreover, across the differentials of position—class and education, to name the two most important to this scene—of the participants. Actors in a democratic context, this scene demonstrates, carry their bodies, histories, and sensuous and cognitive apparatuses into deliberative contexts where programs and collectivities are formed.33 Each speaker, “so earnest, so hopeful, and so unpractically benevolent” (W, 331), proceeds as if discourse can be transpar-

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ent and disembodied, while each at the same time relies on specific expert epistemologies and styles of engagement. In addition each in a different way stymies her audience’s access to the political process she advocates. Christie’s sudden “inspiration” intervenes. Listening, Christie feels the genesis of “a strong desire to bring the helpers and the helped into truer relations with each other” (W, 331). She rises and speaks spontaneously and under the pressure of compulsion: “a sudden uncontrollable impulse moved Christie to rise in her place and ask leave to speak” (W, 332). Like the historical Dickinson and Howe in my opening examples, Christie finds that “what she said she hardly knew: words came faster than she could utter them, thoughts pressed upon her” (W, 332). Her disavowal marks her speech as collective property, belonging to the movement she has entered and motivated by the situation, needs, and desires she shares with the other working women. Her lack of authorship shows her disinterestedness—she does not speak for personal gain but from an impulse to galvanize women across class. Her speech incorporates but also transcends, as it were, her particular personal history. Christie’s interests are her own here in the context of the myriad circumstances that ally her interests with those of other working women, but it is also as if the only way to speak disinterestedly is to not really be speaking herself. In tandem with the evacuation of her personal authorship, her speech materializes her body and experience. Her mediation of her own particular concern and the collective situation of working women is anchored in her body—her speech authorizes a form of democratic subjecthood that permits her to have her body and therefore access to the history of labor and experience written on it. This, in turn, makes her available as an object of corporeal identification for her listeners: “The women felt that this speaker was one of them; for the same lines were on her face that they saw on their own, her hands were no fine lady’s hands, her dress plainer than some of theirs, her speech simple enough for all to understand” (W, 333). Embedding her listeners in bodily history rather than in abstract statistical reckoning, she makes it possible for them to experience their shared bodily incorporation in the material and systemic conditions of their labor, and to make that experience the foundation of collective political action. By exposing their collective condition, she also performs cognitive work, exposing the systematic national economic reliance on the laboring bodies of women. Writing recently about this scene, Glenn Hendler sees Christie’s speech as an attempt to extend the sentimental novel’s logic of sympathy into a public

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social movement.34 While he is certainly right to see the continuities between the “sympathetic undertone” (W, 332) of Christie’s speech and the sympathetic exchanges that not only cement the bonds between members of Christie’s community but also motivate their activist work, the radical alterity of Christie’s speech—the condition that “it spoke itself ”—should give us pause. The speech is autonomous and impersonal, cut off from the particular person who feels with and for others. Christie’s seeming self-abnegation and lack of agency in giving her speech seal her into the sentimental mode for Hendler, and the rich context of sentimental culture that he builds around his reading of the scene compellingly shows Work’s pervasive commitment to the ideal of a sympathetic community. But until the novel’s last chapter, sympathetic identification has not been enough, or it has not been the right thing, to create a self-recognizing movement of working women. Christie’s speech is set many years after the rest of the novel’s action. In the intervening time, her personal practice of sympathy has not created a transformative scene of publicity. The home in work might be permeable to the problems and politics of the public sphere, but its space instantiates these in particular, face-to-face terms, making Christie and her friends behave in improvisational and reactive ways to the social problems that they have trouble comprehending in totality, beyond their personal experiences and individual observations. Creating a transformative public here requires not simply the familiar practice of sympathetic identification, but a form of thought and expression that defies the personal orientation of sympathy, just as it also moves beyond the ordinary boundaries of personhood and any straightforward operation of agency. Christie’s speech moves her into the realm of the magically metapersonal. Rather than galvanize sentimentality in the public sphere, it shifts into the register of genius. More particularly, Alcott turns in this scene to a transcendentalist formulation of genius as oriented toward concrete political goals, such as public activism and the vote. An early speech by Alcott’s father’s close friend Ralph Waldo Emerson provides perhaps the most useful gloss on Alcott’s deployment of this figure. Entitled simply “Genius” (1838), this speech articulates the concept of genius with democratic structures, figuring genius as both a route to democratic publicity and an implicit answer to the difficulties— pragmatic and conceptual—that plague the project of forming viable publics. Examining how Emerson’s “Genius” dramatizes the problem of democratic subjectivity and the public it might inhabit makes it possible to specify how the convention of female genius, and Alcott’s usage in particular, reshaped

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“genius” in order to politicize women outside of the terms provided by either domestic sentimentality or its constitutive opposite, liberal rationality.

Emersonian Genius and the Problem of Democratic Publicity Emerson was a successful enough adapter of romantic conceptions of genius for American culture that he seemed to be not only its chief advocate but also its national representative. Emerson’s development of the European discussion of genius fuels his theories of language, selfhood, and national belonging, and it propels many of his canonical essays, notably “The Artist,” “The Poet,” and “The Intellectual.” Some of the key passages of those essays were earlier delivered in “Genius.”35 While this speech shares a great deal with the more vividly remembered essays that developed from its seed material, “Genius” is distinguished by the way in which Emerson situates his formulation of genius within the concrete institutional practices of democracy, rather than, say, linking it to the creation of art and poetry. The literal scene of political deliberation that Emerson depicts here sets the terms for Christie’s emergent genius in Work. Emerson stresses those aspects of the romantic discourse on genius that would open it from the context of art to that of thought more generally and that would propose genius to be potentially available to all people. He echoes earlier Enlightenment formulations of genius as a spectacular aspect of ordinary intellect but with significant differences. In Emerson’s formulation, genius becomes a common human property not as ordinariness but as what we can only call its transcendent universality, its issuance, in his terms, from the shared transcendental soul: “It is, as it were, the voice of the Soul, of the Soul that made all men, uttered through a particular man; and so, as soon as it is apprehended it is accepted by every man as a voice proceeding from his own inmost self ” (“G,” 70). As Emerson unfurls this supernaturalism, he discloses psychological and democratic ramifications. Although he sometimes locates genius in iconic “great men”—Alexander the Great and Leonardo da Vinci, for instance—he more often finds it in the generic second person of his address, in the “you” in whom he expects already to recognize the experience of genius he describes: “To believe your own thought, —that is genius” (“G,” 77). This last declaration later appeared in a slightly extended version in the opening of “Self-Reliance” and was significant enough to Alcott that she cop-

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ied it into her scrapbook; she took, it seems, the second-person address at its word.36 The ownership that this “you” is posited to have over the thought, however, is significantly permeable, refusing the closures of private property. Even as the “you” believes the thought, it becomes something other than “your own thought” as the “you” thinks, “It is my own, and It is not my own” (“G,” 79). Emerson translates this simultaneous possession and dispossession from the supernaturalism of “the soul of all men” to a rhetoric of democracy: “Genius is always representative. . . . The man of genius apprises us not of his wealth but of the commonwealth” (“G,” 81). The way in which genius is “not my own” in this instance becomes its formal democratic fungibility. It mediates the fundamental problem of representative democracy—the problem of the citizen’s legislative representation—by closing, through its very ambiguity, the distance between one’s own thought and representative positions. At the same time, genius moves subjects past their privatizing interest in their property to the collective threshold of the commonwealth. Emerson dramatizes this genius in a concrete scene of democratic debate staged in Boston’s Faneuil Hall the night before citizens go to the polls. He opens his description of the meeting in the key of the grotesque. The assembled citizens are so grossly embodied that they cannot seem to form a body politic at all, but rather congeal in a “solid block of life”: Join the dark, irregular thickening groups that gather in the old house when fate hangs on the vote of the morrow. As the crowd grows and the hall fills behold that solid block of life; few old men: mostly young and middle aged, with shining heads and swoln veins. . . . The pinched, wedged, elbowed, sweltering assembly, as soon as the speaker loses their ear by the tameness of his harangue, feel sorely how ill-accommodated they are, and begin to forget all politics and patriotism, and attend only to themselves and the coarse outcries made all around them. Each man in turn is lifted off his feet as the press sways now this way, now that. They back, push, resist and fill the hall with cries of tumult. (“G,” 83) Each man in the meeting is dramatically isolated, locked within his own irritated sensorium and incapable of either the abstraction of “patriotism” or the discursive traffic of politics; the men “attend only to themselves.” At the same time, however, the voters are not individuated enough; each individual will is swamped and annihilated by the mass of bodies that sway, push, and cry.

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The mob’s tumult provides an inauspicious prologue to the men’s actions as voters the next day; they seem incapable even of the mob action that Alcott worries the working women in Work might stage when they are massified through sensation. Emerson’s embodied mob, however, transforms from a weltering mass absorbed in selfish concerns into an elevated unity when the genius stands and speaks: At last the chosen man rises, the soul of the people, in whose bosom beats audibly the common heart. With his first words he strikes a note which all know; his word goes to the right place; as he catches the light spirit of the occasion his voice alters, vibrates, pierces the private ear of every one; the mob quiets itself somehow, —every one being magnetized, —and the house hangs suspended on the lips of one man. Each man whilst he hears thinks he too can speak; and in the pauses of the orator bursts forth the splendid voice of four or five thousand men in full cry, the grandest sound in nature. (“G,” 83) A great deal transpires in this passage: the men in the hall enter a new experience of embodiment; their identity blurs with that of the speaker; and they raise their voices in assent in response to magnetizing power. Each of these transformations of the crowd is key to how agency is imagined to circulate through genius and needs to be set out in turn. Before the genius takes the podium, the men’s bodies isolate them in embodied discomfort. Rather than sweeping away the body, the speaker uses the faculties of his own body to transform the bodies of the men: not his writing or his words but his embodied “voice” pierces every “private ear,” tearing the film that has until this moment held each man within his private sensorium. The speaker’s body—his heart and voice—invites corporeal identification that turns the mob into a unified body, with voices raised. When the auditors assume the collective body of this trope, they lose their asocial absorption in their particular bodies. Emerson is describing, that is, not a disembodied public but rather an abstractly embodied one. The identification pictured here is not a personal or sympathetic identification with the speaker of “Genius.” The auditors do not mimic the speaker’s pain or love with their own feelings. They do not think he is a person like them or think of him as a person at all. Neither, however, do they leave themselves entirely behind as the speaker catches “the light spirit of the occasion.” Instead they enter an ambiguous state definitive not only of listening

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to genius but also of having it; in fact, listening to genius becomes a mode of having it. Each man “whilst he hears thinks he too can speak,” because the speaking genius has retrieved the listeners’ own thoughts, for which he has previously had insufficient regard: “In every work of genius, you recognize your own rejected thoughts. . . . Our own thoughts come back to us in unexpected majesty” (“G,” 77). The genius, that is, does not ventriloquize his listeners or imbue them with his own thoughts or cause them to feel as he does. The effect is explicitly not a mimetic one and not one of personal identification. What he says appeals to his listeners as absolutely true not because he has reproduced himself in them or, in a rational mode, caused them to identify their interests with his, but because he lays bare thoughts at which everyone has already spontaneously arrived. Through his articulation these thoughts come to be recognized as a common property—to have already been common property before he spoke. This drama of genius introduces, however, several complications— complications that Emerson openly flags with his metaphors as well as complications that we will need modern political theory to expose fully. The first complication has already been touched on: the collective will that Emerson frames here is possible only because of genius’s universality. Genius sublates difference. The array of possible differences erased through the simultaneous codiscovery of genius by the men in the crowd is unself-consciously minimized.37 The topos of the New England town meeting already populates the hall only with adult white men, whose difference is defined by the condition of isolated embodiment and a lightly drawn, unpoliticized class differential, as when the experience of having genius infuses “even the humblest hearer” (“G,” 83). The contours of this situation ensure that their specific identities as enfranchised white men can remain below the threshold of articulation. At the same time, however, Emerson avoids ascribing any content to the genius’s speech. This allows him to maintain the representativeness of the opinions voiced by the genius. If Emerson gave the speech content, it would immediately reveal itself to be composed of opinions drawn from a field of other possible and perhaps defensible opinions; the genius’s speech would lie exposed in its merely historical or contingent character. As Ernesto Laclau reminds us, the vacuity of the universal is precisely what lends it its viability as a democratic trope. “If democracy is possible,” Laclau writes, “it is because the universal has no necessary body and no necessary content; different groups, instead, compete between themselves to temporarily give to their particularisms a function of universal representation. Society generates a whole vocab-

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ulary of empty signifiers whose temporary signifieds are the result of political competition.”38 Even if what Laclau suggests is possible, if universality can sustain its separation from a necessary body and a necessary content, then this is not really what Emerson suggests when he proposes the representivity of genius. Emerson’s conception of genius eliminates the need for the competition and dialogue that Laclau’s concept of “universality” is meant to sustain. The speech depicted in Emerson’s “Genius” must be not only embraced but also invented by all (or at least all here imagined eligible to participate). This ideal of representative universality thus denies even the possibility of dissent or competing interest. As a force that extends across minds, genius leaves no dissension to be staged or negotiated and no way to conceptualize irreducible differences and irreconcilable aims, let alone give them political viability. Under Emerson’s conceptualization, genius produces a collectivity oriented toward the political formalism of the vote precisely by eliminating politics. A second complication emerges from Emerson’s paradoxical metaphorization of democratic genius as simultaneously the agent of freedom and a force of mind-control, a paradox staged also in Alcott’s formulation. The Emersonian genius holds his audience “magnetized”; he rules his audience by embodying its incapacitated desire: “The orator masters us by being our tongue. By simply saying what we would but cannot say, he tyrannises over our wills and affections” (“G,” 82). The auditors consent to the propositions expressed by the man of genius by surrendering their wills, rather than asserting them; the metaphor is specifically one of tyranny. How could this be a plausible expression of democratic community making? Such a way of tying liberty to tyranny has led Christopher Newfield to claim that Emerson advocates the “poetry of abandoned consent.”39 Such a concern, however, risks fetishizing the liberal notion of consent-asfreedom, at the expense of understanding the controversies that surrounded political subjectivity and discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Emerson’s moment, as in ours, consent was perceived to be a vexed matter. Early nineteenth-century debates about the proper modes of political and public address registered this difficulty. Emerson’s claim that the genius holds his auditors “magnetized” marks one particularly relevant location of contest. From its introduction in Paris in the 1780s, Anton Mesmer’s practice of “animal magnetism” sparked debates about the autonomy of the individual will and the relation of that will to democratic governance. Some French radicals saw socially transformative possibilities in Mesmer’s concept of an invisible fluid that connected all matter; other observers, including Ben-

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jamin Franklin, then the American ambassador to France, perceived animal magnetism to be a threat to self-governance, and thus also to social governance.40 After quieting for several decades, debates about animal magnetism revived in America and Europe in the 1830s.41 Emerson links animal magnetism to his own transcendental project in Nature (1836), where he proposes that magnetism evidences the interconnections between outward Nature and the human mind, that it demonstrates “[r]eason’s momentary grasps of the sceptre, the exertions of a power that exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous in-streaming causing power.”42 For Emerson, it seems, animal magnetism suggests the unleashed potential of the mind’s open relation to a world of mysterious forces. Emerson had company in this thought. As the historian Alison Winter has revealed, the discourse on animal magnetism in the nineteenth century became part of a broad set of inquiries into the nature of the will, human consciousness, and authority. Both scientific and popular interest in mesmerism indicated instabilities in conceptions of the self and its governance.43 Controversies over the meaning of mesmerism for democratic discourse erupted in a wider context of anxieties over the terms by which political agency was either asserted or denied. To take one important instance, by the time Emerson delivered “Genius,” the tradition of neoclassical rhetoric had been under attack as a coercive style of political speech since the late eighteenth century. Based on the fine style of carefully crafted, ornate speech, neoclassical rhetoric was thought to dazzle audiences with Ciceronian eloquence, swaying them not because it convinced their reason or, like Emerson’s ideal genius, unleashed their conviction, but because it seduced audiences with its aesthetic excellence. Critics worried that audiences submitted involuntarily to the positions that a stunning speaker advocated simply because their senses had been overcome by eloquence, just as the audience of working women is overcome in Work by one of the speeches that precedes Christie’s.44 If neoclassical rhetoric subdued reason and preempted real conviction, then rational deliberation, the norm of democratic speech that set its face against neoclassical rhetoric, presented its own set of problems. Even as rational discourse maintained its position as the most authoritative mode of American political discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, critics believed it to leave the will undermotivated for action. By abstracting interlocutors from their particular identities and interests, rational deliberation promoted what purported to be a common search for the truth. Antebellum defenders of rational argument, though, had a great deal of trou-

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ble demonstrating that disinterested truth actually engaged the convictions of even those who accepted most fully the positions developed through rational inquiry. This was in part the effect of Enlightenment psychology, which opposed reason to passion while allying passion with the will. Where passion interfered with reason by attaching subjects to their personal desires, rational discourse, by contrast, subordinated passion. Because the will was attached to the faculty of passion, the triumph of reason was seen to attenuate the will. It therefore became difficult to imagine reason on its own motivating the convictions of either ideal rational deliberators or the public they addressed. Rationality depleted the passion necessary to move democratic subjects from the activity of intellectual judgment to the state of profound conviction.45 Historians have usually seen Enlightenment rationality and the mesmeric fads of the 1780s and 1830s as expressing opposing conceptions of agency and personhood, with the Enlightenment tradition advocating conscious, willed, independent, and impartial forms of subjectivity and mesmerism expressing its feared other: the subjected will, the permeable mind, and extravagancies of affect. As we have seen, however, they both map aspects of the same problem: a crisis in formulating an account of how the will relates to properly political knowledge and action. As Jay Fliegelman has argued, eighteenth-century rhetoricians addressed this crisis by privileging the affect of the speaker, expressed through the bodily and vocal performance of sincerity. By the mid-eighteenth century rhetoricians “favored a purified rhetoric of persuasion broadly understood as the active art of moving and influencing the passions.”46 Speakers were encouraged to set aside both the high Ciceronian style, which seduced the senses, and rational argument, which was considered too detached to move men to action or enlist their sense of civic belonging. As John Quincy Adams explained in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory (1810), a speaker could use the “soft compulsion” of sympathetic voice and gesture to “‘charm’ consent.”47 This paradox of coerced consent was based in “the operations of sympathy, the faculty that puts individuals beyond themselves and their own self-interest into the realm of mutuality of feelings.”48 If Christie’s speech in Work had (somewhat anachronistically) followed the early nineteenth-century model, it would have limited its appeal to the sympathies. In doing so, however, it would not have represented a new rhetorical experiment in deploying sympathy as a medium for public speaking, as Hendler suggests; rather, it would have represented an extension of the dominant republican tradition of rhetoric. This, though, is not the primary model for Christie’s speech. Instead her

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speech appropriates and transforms Emerson’s response to the problematic relation between collectivity and consent. While eighteenth-century rhetoricians advocated the “soft compulsion” of feeling, Emerson theorizes a different subordination of personal agency that becomes, in effect, the condition of agency’s political expression. The genius magnetizes not by asserting his own will, personal influence, or feeling but by excavating a belief that his auditors experience retrospectively as having been already there, as having assumed the shape of conviction in some disregarded past moment now brought suddenly to consciousness. The subjects “tyrannized” by genius are thus given back their original insights, which they can recover only because these insights are not merely individual, but rather representative and therefore collective. The tyrannized subjects are thus made available to collectively held commitments that also express their character as passionate commitments, leading the men in the hall to raise their five thousand voices in unitary agreement. Democratic disinterest lies in genius’s triumph over merely personal will, which atomizes the electorate and sinks voters into their immediate bodies and concerns. It thus also vanquishes the privacy of conviction, realizing with great passion what Elaine Scarry has called the promise implied by the etymology of consent in con-sentir: “sentience across minds.”49 Emerson’s formulation clarifies Alcott’s revivification and transformation of genius in Work. Christie’s speech clearly echoes the scene Emerson imagines. Like the genius Emerson describes, Christie is surprised and spontaneous. Just as the Emersonian genius says, “It is my own, and, It is not my own” (“G,” 80), Christie has at once a sense of “self-possession” (W, 332) and the sense that the speech “spoke itself.” In addition, like Emerson’s democratic genius, Christie’s speech is positioned against other modes; as the narrator specifies, Christie speaks with a “simple eloquence that touches, persuades, and convinces better than logic, flattery, or oratory” (W, 332). She even speaks, moreover, with “magnetism” (W, 333). Alcott also amends Emerson’s conception of “Genius,” and therein lies her intervention in the project of framing discursive conditions that can facilitate women’s democratic incorporation. Whereas the men Emerson imagines in Faneuil Hall reconstruct their bodies as a figurative common “heart” and “voice,” Christie brings her listeners’ historical bodies, marked by their relation to labor, gender, and class, into the field of political representation. Christie also speaks a “universal language that all can understand,” but her universality takes no part in the neoplatonic “representativeness” that distinguishes Emerson’s model of genius. Christie’s “universal language” does not

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issue from her access to the “Soul of all women,” to paraphrase Emerson, but rather from her ability to recognize, represent, and mediate the different positions of identity and histories of experience that the women occupy. Through this work of mediation she draws needlewomen, typesetters, servants, intellectuals, activists, wives, and mothers into a collective identity capable of advocating for their civic betterment as women. Christie’s genius reconstructs, that is, “woman” as a political identity, realized in a coalition united by Christie’s ability to move among different discourses, experiences, knowledges, and bodies. Hearing and seeing her, the women in the audience find their common identity not only created but also authenticated; they see in Christie, finally, a “genuine woman” and feel that she “was one of them” (W, 333). This identification remains, however, a complexly social, rather than essential, one; the connections she forges rely on the work of mediation, not ontology. The activists who organized the meeting “begged [Christie] to come and speak again, saying they needed just such a mediator to bridge across the space that now divided them from those they wished to serve” (W, 334). Her genius replaces sublated difference with coordinated difference and activates, rather than tyrannizes over, her collaborators’ political will as she helps form “a loving league of sisters, old and young, black and white, rich and poor, each ready to do her part to hasten the coming of the happy end” (W, 343). In her speech universality indeed becomes the “receding horizon resulting from the expansion of an indefinite chain of equivalent demands” that Ernesto Laclau hopes for. Alcott supplies Christie’s speech in paraphrase. Her “universal language” may be “without necessary content or a necessary body,” but her work of mediation gives it here a particular content and a particular body, staged in relation to a universalized principle that permits the women’s entrance into political discourse—allows them, that is, to elevate their atomized pain into collective action. Her spontaneous speech forges connections between the women’s lived experiences of labor and the universalizing principle not of sympathetic identification but of “justice as a right” (W, 333). Her political genius then becomes general among the collectivity she has forged. As Christie speaks to the women, she provides an example, as the narrator says, to “inspire them” (W, 333). What they will do with that inspiration is left to the future. Within the compass of Work, Christie’s newfound genius grounds what we might call, following Nancy Frazer, a subaltern counterpublic sphere. In Frazer’s wellknown formulation, a counterpublic sphere provides an activist remedy to

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the normative exclusions of the dominant public sphere. If the dominant public sphere is based on certain discursive protocols (reasonable exchange, sanctioned political topics, and privileged forms of speech) and on certain bodies (white male bodies that seem to lose their specificity in their apparent universality), then a counterpublic provides a point of retreat where an excluded or stigmatized group can formulate its resistance and work out its discourse. A counterpublic, then, generates an eccentric political formation, a site of both exchange and insurgency conducted outside the political center. Christie’s inspirational speech transforms the pro-suffrage meeting she attends into such a counterpublic. While she sits through the speeches, the women are divided by their different discourses, their different histories, and their different cognitive styles. The speech she gives—the speech that overtakes her—bridges these differences and founds a common discourse and political impetus. As Frazer emphasizes, however, the ultimate progressive value of a counterpublic lies in its intention to use its new insights, language, and collective energy to return to and transform the dominant public sphere.50 Christie embraces such a possibility when she tells her activist friends, “We all need much preparation for the good time that is coming to us, and can get it best by trying to know and help, love and educate one another,—as we do here” (W, 343). What they “do here,” she hopes, they will also do “there,” in the civic arena that will one day fully incorporate women as citizens. Her counterpublic, in other words, aspires to abandon its eccentricity, to move back to and alter the center—to become, that is, centrally important. Rather than failing to live up to the priorities and protocols of liberal democracy or attempting to make a public out of private values, Christie’s genius aspires toward a new political world in which particular bodies, desires, and experiences fuel rather than obstruct political subjectivity. Her political optimism and aspiration require us to rethink and remodulate some of the master categories that have thus far organized our critical interpretations of women’s relationship to discourses of democracy during the period of hottest contention over women’s formal political rights, from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth century. Our understanding of women’s political identities and languages in that era has thus far tended to be dominated by the framework of separate spheres. Although it has long since been acknowledged, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick put it in 1990, that the model of separate spheres has proved most useful for the “deconstructive deformations” it permits, rather than as a phenomenologically accurate description of men’s and women’s cultural locations, it has still been the case that women’s

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civic presence discovered through such deconstructions has tended to look as if it were made out of women’s private identities.51 This tendency is in part an artifact of women’s nineteenth-century reformist argument, which advocated women’s enfranchisement and increased social prestige both on the basis of women’s natural equality of rights and on the foundation of the unique contributions they would bring to the nation through their special nature.52 Such deployments of the language of public and private had tactical advantages in the mid- to late nineteenth century. The ability, however, of separate spheres discourse to reproduce itself in our critical vocabulary fosters an analytical impasse.53 By continuing to condition our critical categories, the separate spheres paradigm—perhaps especially when it is offered in a state of dialectic or rupture—occludes from our view discursive possibilities constructed eccentrically, against or outside of this paradigm’s organizing distinctions. These possibilities are vital to recover, both for the sake of historicism and to broaden our conceptions of political creativity. If the female geniuses of nineteenth-century political speech look to us like bad political objects— women whose attenuated agency reiterates their inscription in privacy and augments their incapacity for meaningful political participation—it may be in part because the “good time that is coming to us” that Christie predicts has been indefinitely deferred under a political culture in which nominally universal formal equality mutes, rather than mediates, the discursive and bodily differences that magnetizing female genius is imagined to coordinate. Given the deferral of the “good time,” we have even better reason to look more deeply into the intertwined histories of agency and rhetoric, subjectivity and collectivity to disclose the protests and alternatives that have been left along the way.

Chapter 2

Genius and the Demise of Radical Publics in Henry James’s The Bostonians

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LCOTT’S Work opens up a context where conceptions of female genius sustained a discourse on women’s citizenship, one that served as an alternative to the more familiar models provided by liberal political culture, sentimentality, and even the nineteenth-century woman movement’s own difference-based models. What lent the female genius discourse its vibrancy was in part its ability to imagine women’s participation in a democratic culture in ways that enlisted and at the same time transcended their conventionally gendered identities. As a construct, however, female genius was not only a means for figuring women’s political participation; it also responded to long-recognized difficulties characteristic of the democratic project—how to coordinate particular with universal claims, how to form consensus from disparate opinions, and how to compel collectivity without violating liberty. That is to say, the figure of the female genius did not simply provide a way for women to enter the public while leaving the construct of gender untransformed. Instead it framed a response to problems structurally inherent to the process of forming a democratic culture built on the model of separate spheres. Part of the difficulty in making this argument, however, lies in how counterintuitive it is to see female genius as a political discourse at all. How could such qualities as passivity, intuitiveness, originality, irrationality, speech without agency, and attenuated states of consciousness—all central to conceptions of genius—be viable for imaging collective political life, which requires, as we might believe, assertiveness, rational thought, agentive action, and full presence of mind? How could female genius, which seems to belong to an antiquated moment of aesthetic theory yoked to nineteenth-century conventions

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of bourgeois gender, have such a critical and activist function? Moreover, how is it possible that such a widely disseminated discourse for exploring women’s relation to public and political life could be so illegible to our twenty-firstcentury eye? The discussion that follows assays these questions by tracking, in one particular instance, the terms by which the political content of female genius became counterintuitive. That instance will be Henry James’s 1886 novel, The Bostonians, a satire on the woman movement and other nineteenth-century reformist initiatives. The novel’s satire turns on the problems posed by what the other characters keep calling the heroine’s “genius.” Many readers, including those of great sophistication, have seen James in this novel as being engaged in a form of reactionary cultural reportage, criticizing new tendencies of his age—activism for women’s rights, the monstrous growth of publicity, the decline of privacy—as they are embodied in the scandalous fraud of the female lecturer who claims to speak through inspiration. What we need to understand, however, is less the past for which James seems to long, since that past has the character of a fantasy, than the emergent formations he both heralds and helps to create. The completeness of his satire on female genius in the early parts of The Bostonians makes it difficult for us to realize that he does not expose the sham of inspired speaking in the novel so much as frame the mid-nineteenth-century conventions of female genius in the anachronistic fin de siècle terms by which it assumes the character of a scam. At the same time, The Bostonians does not lament the decline of privacy as much as help to create historically new and unprecedentedly large domains of privacy; or rather, it enlarges and reformulates privacy precisely through lamenting its historical decline under the sign of female genius. The Bostonians thus promotes new definitions for privacy and new formations of gender in the name of reviving the old ones. Under these new definitions, applied retroactively to the mid-nineteenth century, the political female genius loses her critical function and intelligibility as a figure for democratic community. In The Bostonians this anachronism has the effect of reducing the possibilities not only of women’s publicness but also of the public sphere in general. At the same time, the novel also struggles, in surprising and productive ways, with the problems that arise from these reductions. If female genius is a target of critique in The Bostonians, it is also the object of ambitious revision. Female genius is framed as a sham in the early sections of the novel; in the later sections it is reformulated as the authenticating psychology of female

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heterosexual desire. Through the heterosexual romance plot of the novel, that is, James resituates female genius when Verena, the inspired orator, reveals her authentic genius for love. In The Bostonians, however, female genius is not only a feature of plot; it is also, and fundamentally, a principle of style. At the level of style and literary conception, The Bostonians implicitly struggles with female genius not as it is embodied in character, but rather as it exists as the principle of narrative craft that James had theorized just a year earlier in “The Art of Fiction.” Viewing these transactions with female genius in The Bostonians and its composition, we can track how female genius lost a portion of its legibility as a resource for conceiving of women’s citizenship. More important, we also can discern how that loss took part in a larger reorganization, in which resources were contracted for sustaining public life in the United States toward the end of the nineteenth century.

Verena’s Genius The Bostonians tells the story of the struggle between two cousins—the northern woman’s rights activist Olive Chancellor and the southern reactionary Basil Ransom—for possession of Verena Tarrant, a phenomenal public speaker with roots in New England radical culture. Olive wants to develop Verena as a speaker for woman’s rights, and for most of the novel this is what she does. Basil wants to marry Verena and consign her to private life, and in the last moments of the novel this is what he starts to do. The novel presents Verena in the mold of the female genius orator that had widespread currency in reformist culture, but in The Bostonians, Verena’s “genius” is parodied in two contradictory ways: it is depicted on the one hand as a superficial matter of public cliché and on the other as a truly effective force that echoes the romantic 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

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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). Verena is not the only person called a genius in the novel; to be sure, the prevalence of the word among radical reformers flags the suspicion that the novel is preparing to shower on it. But the term sticks in a particular way to Verena, primarily because she embodies the figure of the female genius orator that, as we observed in the case of Alcott’s Work, sustained a model of women’s political speech that was inherently critical of the ideological conditions that grounded women’s civic exclusion. The trope of female genius was used to reveal some of the ways that liberalism militated against women’s civic incorporation, and at the same time, it provided a means to imagine alternative, if fragile and informal, modes of political collectivity that could include women. The figure of genius did this by organizing dialectics: between the particular and the universal, the personal and the impersonal, the individual experience and the collective one. The genius orator was supposed to lift her auditors out of their merely private sensory experience and into a collective body and mind by spontaneously expressing a thought—a “representative” thought—that listeners realized was also their own. Through its representative utterance, genius was imagined to touch a place where the personal and the collective could be seamlessly reconciled. While liberalism, by contrast, tended to abstract its subjects from their particularities and bodies, a condition that has proved famously impossible to meet for women and other subjects marked by difference, the genius trope promised to create collectivity by appealing to an individual conviction that turns out to be already a shared conviction.3 Verena follows this model in parodic form. When Verena gives her first speech in the novel, her father, Selah Tarrant, theatrically frames her performance by announcing, in James’s paraphrase, that he and Verena “took no credit” for her speech: “It was some power outside—it seemed to flow through her” (B, 80); or, as Verena announces before the crowd, “It isn’t me, mother” (B, 79). Her speech is, as she and her father both claim, “thoroughly impersonal” (B, 79). According to their account, Verena advocates “the liberation of her sex from every sort of bondage” not because she wants to (although, indeed, she claims that she wants to) but because “the voice that spoke from her lips seemed to want to take that form. It didn’t seem as if it could take any other. She let it come out just as it would—she didn’t pretend to have any

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control” (B, 80). The novel puts such characterizations into explicit dialogue with disputes over women’s citizenship. In the historical context of genius oration, for instance, the trope of “no control” often functioned to establish the speaker’s disinterest, the condition that the speaker could embrace collective rather than merely private motives. Such a production of disinterest provided an alternative to the liberal ideal of disinterest as rationality. In antisuffrage argument, women’s supposed inability to be truly disinterested was often cited as one reason among many for denying them the vote. Rather than comprehending problems on a social scale or subordinating their personal interests to the higher claims of justice, women were said to think about only the people around them, the needs of their own children, and the interests of their households. Women according to this conception were partial, particular, and self-interested, rather than impartial, universal, and disinterested.4 James alludes to this line of argument when he has Olive reflect before Verena takes the stage that “people said that women were vain, that they were personal, that they were interested!” (B, 65) and again when Basil accuses women of “always meaning, yourselves, something personal, and always thinking it is meant by others!” (B, 327). In opposition to this stereotype, the female speaker who has “no control” and speaks with a voice that is not her own cannot be said to be acting personally or interestedly. Moreover, the claim that the speech emanates from a mysterious source beyond the speaker’s own person confers on it a more-thanhuman authority. These are formulations of disinterested impersonality that the genius trope opened up in the context of radical reform movements. James, however, closes them down satirically in their moments of articulation in The Bostonians. Selah Tarrant is the primary mouthpiece of Verena’s disinterested impersonality, which already suggests that she is spoken through by him in particular, rather than by a transpersonal, transcendental force. More to the point, his history as a fraudulent spiritualist and shady salesman establishes his self-interest, as does his desire to make as much money off Verena’s gift as possible: “Disinterestedness, too, was incompatible with receipts; and receipts were what Selah Tarrant was, in his own parlance, after” (B, 121). Selah’s and Verena’s repetitions of the tropes of “impersonality” and “no control,” moreover, flag their status as tropes, or rather as clichés. When Verena firsts visits Olive, she again asserts, “Oh, it isn’t me, you know; it’s something outside!” (B, 100). Even Olive, already infatuated with Verena, is given pause: “She tossed this off lightly, as if she were in the habit of saying it, and Olive won-

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dered whether it were a sincere disclaimer or only a phrase of the lips” (B, 100–101). If assertions that an impersonal force invades the genius are supposed to prove that the speaker is spontaneous, uncalculating, and in the act of channeling a force bigger than mere individual human consciousness or intention, then the conventional quality of these assertions, here driven home by James’s repetition, undercuts these claims, revealing them to be tricks of the trade. When Olive takes over Verena’s career, Verena stops using these tropes to describe her public performances. James makes clear, however, that Verena actually does possess tremendous power, and her power moves her audience in something like the way a female orator’s genius is supposed to do. During Verena’s first speech in the novel, “the whole audience” falls “under the charm” (B, 84). The magical aura of Verena’s “charm” recalls the ability of the genius to “magnetize” her audience. In addition, just as genius is supposed to lift its auditors from their differences and unite them irresistibly, Verena later speaks “as if she wished to resolve [her audience] into a single sentient personality, seemed to say that the only thing in life she cared for was to put the truth into a form that would render conviction irresistible” (B, 265). She succeeds: “She had indeed—it was manifest—reduced the company to unanimity” (B, 265). She also follows her precedents not only in performing genius but also in advocating it. For all the ills of society, Verena says in her speech at Mrs. Burrage’s later in the novel, “the precious sovereign remedy, of which society insanely deprives itself [is] the genius, the intelligence, the inspiration of women” (B, 267). Without women’s genius, she forecasts, “the public life of the world will move in the same barren, mechanical vicious circle” (B, 267). Women’s genius, she promises, constitutes a principle of world transformation that can push “public life” out of its deadness and repetition, giving it new direction and a new originality of thought. The effects of Verena’s gift on “public life,” however, are far less salutary and even less structurally transformative. Here, for instance, is the form that her audience’s unanimity takes: “their attention was anything but languid; they smiled back at her when she smiled; they were noiseless, motionless when she was solemn; and it was evident that the entertainment which Mrs Burrage had had the happy thought of offering to her friends would be memorable in the annals of the Wednesday Club” (B, 265). Members of the audience mimic her bodily performance, copying Verena rather than feeling their own geniuses galvanized. They also experience the feelings she incites as part of the culture of entertainment, rather than as the prompting of politi-

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cal conviction. They become a public insofar as they indulge these feelings together, gathering to feel them and to witness them as a crowd phenomenon; but they experience no common purpose beyond that of wishing to hear her speak again. Even this unanimity is fragile. Under nineteenth-century conventions of the genius orator, the genius’s ability to stage an appeal at once personal and universal releases her audience members from their confinement in their own sensoriums, bodies, and isolated thoughts, creating a unity that, ideally, still respects her listeners’ diversity. Verena’s gift, by contrast, attaches her listeners to their desiring bodies; it settles them in those bodies and separates those bodies from each other by virtue of the antagonism they must feel against all other claimants on Verena. When Olive first listens to Verena, her body comes alive: “Her keen eye sparkled, there was a flush on her matronly cheek” (B, 88). Rather than feeling a collective interest with her fellow listeners, Olive withdraws into the solitude of her desire; when Basil salutes her with a social commonplace, “Olive made no answer; her head remained averted, she bored the carpet with her conscious eyes” (B, 88). While Basil might retain a better hold on social niceties, he also is gripped by his desiring body as he listens to Verena: “all he could feel was that to his starved senses she irresistibly appealed” (B, 85). Her appeal to his senses makes him feel set apart, addressed as if he alone is her object, as if he “now was particularly spoken to” (B, 265). Rather than making him feel personally embraced by a transcendent idea, this sensuous feeling makes him selfish, just as it makes everyone selfish. Basil realizes this keenly when, after Verena’s speech at the Burrages’ home, he sees her on the arm of Henry Burrage, one of her suitors. Basil has decided that he is in love with Verena and wants to marry her, end her career, and keep her at home. Henry too is in love with Verena but plans to press his suit by furthering her career with his money and social connections. Hearing Henry declaim that Verena will triumph as a public speaker, Basil reflects that Henry “was so pleased himself, and so safe in his conviction, that it didn’t matter to him what any one else thought; which was, after all, just Basil Ransom’s own state of mind” (B, 271). The men’s identical “state of mind” is, paradoxically, their opposition—they are unanimously selfish in their wish to possess Verena and disregard the thoughts of others. If, then, Verena possesses the power of reducing “the company to unanimity,” this unanimity is not a collective conviction but rather a unanimous opposition, an agreement in the common desire to possess Verena personally and enjoy her appeal to the senses.

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Verena’s ability to arouse erotic interest sponsors her ability to arouse financial interest. Both erotic and financial desires bind subjects to their interests in the novel, and Verena produces one from the other. Basil expresses the connection between Verena’s erotic appeal and its monetary value: “Who wouldn’t pay half a dollar for such an hour as he had passed at Mrs Burrage’s? The sort of thing she was able to do, to say, was an article for which there was more and more demand” (B, 314). From her first moment in the novel to the last, Verena is the object of financial speculation, breeding competing economic interests.5 This linkage between erotic interest and economic interest reaches its apex in Olive. Olive’s desire assimilates Verena to the status of property. Indeed, Olive’s case, like Basil’s, shows desire to be a means of producing property in persons. When Verena first visits Olive’s house, Olive looks her up and down: “it was with this quick survey, omitting nothing, that Olive took possession of her” (B, 100). While Olive might also like to possess Verena erotically, she certainly does possess her economically. Once Olive takes possession, she saturates Verena with economic value, buying her from her parents and contracting her out on the lecture circuit. The novel stages the conflation of erotic and economic interests in Verena explicitly as a problem for citizenship. As we have seen, the novel thematizes the antisuffrage accusation that women were too self-interested to be good, disinterested citizens, as when Olive protests early in the novel that “people said that women were vain, that they were personal, that they were interested!” (B, 65). Whatever Olive’s capacities at the novel’s outset, her possessive passion for Verena makes people say this about her; for example, Mrs. Burrage remarks, “‘I dare say you don’t like the idea of [Verena] marrying at all; it would break up a friendship which is so full of interest’ (Olive wondered for a moment whether she had been going to say ‘so full of profit’) ‘for you’” (B, 301). Olive’s silent query suggests complications within the concept of “interest”—it can designate the stereotype of women’s organic orientation toward their personal interests or, alternately, the property interests (the “profit”) that the ideal citizen is supposed to possess in order to have a stake in the nation but that also gives him the economic independence that liberal theory associates with disinterested judgment. In activating personal and property interests at once, however, Verena encloses Olive in interest, a situation that damages Olive’s claim to be working for a more just democracy. As the narrator observes, “It was nothing new to Verena that if the great striving of Olive’s life was for justice she yet sometimes failed to arrive at it in particular cases” (B, 292). The narrator amplifies this point with a lethal understate-

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ment: “some discredit has possibly been thrown upon [Olive’s] impartiality” (B, 294). Verena makes Olive partial, particular, and interested; Olive cannot love Verena and sustain her philosophical commitment to democratic impartiality at the same time. For Basil, by contrast, it is no tragedy to find that it is Verena’s gift to attach her listeners to their sensoriums, desire, and interest rather than to a collective purpose. Indeed for Basil, this is the whole point of Verena. As a reactionary, misogynist southerner, Basil seems poised in the novel as the ideological polar opposite of Olive’s northern feminism. Yet for all his selfconsciously reactionary politics and erotics, Basil is distinguished from the rest of Verena’s admirers not only by his political difference but also by his ability to give a name to the forms of interest attached to Verena: “privacy.” As he thinks when he hears her speak at Mrs. Burrage’s, Verena “was meant for something divinely different [than public speaking]—for privacy, for him, for love” (B, 269). Verena’s special genius, then, seems to inhere in her ability to proliferate privacy in the form of interests, erotic and financial, that flood a mass society and preempt exactly the kinds of publicity that female genius historically had been seen to facilitate.

Genius and the New Privacy To say that female genius proliferates public privacy is, however, only to give a new angle to what has long been the canonical critical gloss of The Bostonians. For recent criticism of The Bostonians, Verena’s personal appeal and performance express James’s protest against, in Philip Fisher’s words, “the magnification of personality” under conditions of mass publicity in the late nineteenth century.6 Ian F. A. Bell has argued that her performance shows the ways in which the culture of publicity “disarranges” the relation between public and private, projecting the selfishness of the “personal” into the public realm.7 Such readings place The Bostonians firmly within the terms set by some of our most compelling accounts of the modern decline of the public sphere. Jürgen Habermas conceptualized the public sphere as a rational, discursive space between the state and the realm of private interest that arose in the late eighteenth century but has since collapsed under the pressures of a commodified media culture that extrudes its private, commercial interest into any space the public might occupy.8 His work sets the terms for understanding the public as an Eden lost through private intrusions.

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James’s plans for the novel would align it with this way of seeing privacy as historically bleeding into public life, though his explicit concern is more for the annihilation of privacy than for the damage to the public sphere. James conceived the novel as an account of privacy’s destruction through the invasion of the mass press; that is, he depicts privacy being destroyed through the process of flooding the public. Thus, in insisting that Verena is meant for “privacy,” Basil imagines her to be destined for a cultural space that James thinks is being destroyed. James, as he recorded in his notebook, projected that The Bostonians would depict “the impudent invasion of privacy—the extinction of all conception of privacy, etc.” by the invasion of the mass press.9 As James planned in his notebook, the journalist Matthias Pardon is the main vehicle of this point, as when he bursts into Olive’s home uninvited and hectors her: he asked for “revelations of the vie intime of his victims with the bland confidence of a fashionable physician inquiring about symptoms” (B, 155). James promotes his satire on the invasion and destruction of privacy as a critique of new and evolving tendencies in American life—on the expanding press, new design ideas, new manners, and the growing culture of advertising and spectacle. His original title for The Bostonians, “The Newness,” emphasized his conception of the novel as a barometer of recent developments in “our social conditions.”10 Beyond The Bostonians and throughout his long career, James’s protests against the modern destruction of privacy by the press are woven generously through his critical writings.11 Taking their cue from James’s emphasis on newness, many critics have argued that The Bostonians indexes shifting relations between the categories of the public and the private in the late nineteenth century, especially as those relations are distorted from their conventional arrangement by some new pressure, such as the rise of mass publicity or the activism of the woman movement.12 Such claims, that is, essentially repeat the substance of James’s own preliminary sketch of the novel, often with rich historical attention to the culture of publicity that James so loathed and sometimes in the service of developing the critical picture of the privatized public sphere. What such readings of The Bostonians cannot illuminate, and what tracking James’s improvisations on the female genius theme will allow us to see, is the novel’s historical revisionism—the way it redefines privacy in both historical and contemporary terms so that female genius comes to look like privacy extruded, rather than like a public-making mode. The Bostonians, in other words, not only stages the collapse of the private sphere into the public

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but also apprehends as private—and therefore as dangerous to the public— the mode of genius that had historically served to create scenes of public life. The trope of female genius centers the novel’s revisionism, but the project of redefining previously public modes as inherently private extends in many directions in the novel, encompassing the free love movement, communitarian living, and even such ordinary aspects of public culture as the discussion of social and economic conditions. The effect of this revisionism is to create a picture of the American national past as a time of secure boundaries between public and private, masculine and feminine spheres. In doing so, the novel depletes the history of publicity, draining it of resources that have sustained vibrant, progressive, and resistant publics. Recent critical writing that tracks James’s protests against modern conditions tend to reproduce the novel’s revisionism without seeing the history of public culture that the novel occludes. Philip Fisher, for instance, argues that the novel “struggle[s] with the psychological and social consequences of the new power” wielded by a new culture of “conspicuousness” staged in a “centralized, national space of appearance.” As part of this struggle, James (among others) attempts a “profound regrounding of privacy” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.13 But how is it possible to retrieve the categories that thrived under archaic conditions of power? Recovered from its state of violation, such a regrounded privacy necessarily reflects both its history of damage and the efforts to reconstitute it, meaning that privacy in the hands of those who reconstitute it will be a new thing. Fisher’s architectural example of regrounded privacy, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, suggests as much. Unlike the American homes that James believes to exhibit themselves and project their owners’ publicity, the Robie House, in Fisher’s words, “protect[s] inner life”: “It refuses to address the street, to announce the family within, to be their social face or at least the outer face of their prestige or wealth. . . . The observer is mainly aware of an inner life that is self-contained and has no need of observers, visitors, or admirers, an inner life that is rich, mysterious, and detailed.”14 Regrounded privacy, then, does not follow from rebuilding the secluded antebellum manor house, with its protective gardens and internally differentiated public and private rooms. It consists, rather, in modernism, a conspicuously new form that architecturally constructs “privacy” in a way that it never has been constructed before and that flaunts that privacy to an observer who seems at once superfluous and necessary. Indeed, in light of the Robie House, the antebellum manor looks, retrospectively, like a permeable and public place; its portico, large entry hall, front parlor, dining room, and

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servants’ hall all suggest not only its function as a staging ground for “society” but also its entanglements with the larger community of the neighborhood and the sphere of labor.15 The “regrounded” privacy of the Robie House is less a return than a fresh departure. In a similar way, if James is charting something “new,” then he is also creating something new. James and other intellectuals in the late nineteenth century helped to consolidate a new conception of privacy, one that was a back-formation of their belief that privacy was being violated and destroyed by a modern culture of exhibition. Across a range of discourses—most notably in the law but also in such areas as popular ideologies of romance— privacy was redefined and enlarged. Modern privacy included distinct and often competing ideals. Privacy meant, as it still does, the interests of private property as opposed to the disinterested discourse of the public sphere or the domain of the state. In the realm of domestic relations, though, privacy moved away from an older model grounded in the law of property and toward a new conception of privacy as the personal, the sexual, and the realm of feeling.16 This redefinition brought into the domain of privacy languages, topics, ideas, and feelings that had not been there before, at least not in such a definitive way. This is one reason why the trope of female genius can serve James’s interest in documenting privacy’s destruction. Where political radicals used female genius to stage a dialectic between a personal appeal and impersonal universality, a collapse of inner and outer that produces democratic collectivity, in The Bostonians that dialectic cannot complete itself. The personal and interior experience that genius reconciles with public consensus can easily look, after privacy’s regrounding, like something that must not be made visible and cannot be legitimately publicized. Regrounding privacy thus has a cost; it takes away a means for imagining public life. For this reason The Bostonians might serve us less as a literally accurate account either of privacy’s destruction or of “the historical transformation of the public sphere in all of its complex and contradictory guises” and more productively as a register of how struggles over the boundary between public and private—motivated by pressures including mass publicity, the woman movement, and the consolidation of U.S. nationality following the Civil War—caused the loss of certain possibilities from conceptions of public life.17 We can see this loss most clearly not in the novel’s engagement with “the new” but in its historical consciousness. The Bostonians is a historical novel that looks back not only to the relatively recent 1870s in which it is set but further back to the 1840s and 1850s, when radical transcendentalist and abolitionist

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circles developed the ideas, conventions, and modes of activism that come in for such lethal satire in the novel.18 In the antebellum period, especially in the Northeast, the breakdown of republican models of citizenship and the rise of capitalist social organization sparked radical social and intellectual experiments conducted by those critical of older models of social life and wary of the new.19 Radicals and reformers devised alternative sexual arrangements and communistic economic systems; they created political cultures suffused with discourses on sexuality, desire, and sentiment; they experimented politically with altered states of consciousness, such as those made accessible through hypnotism, spiritualist trance speaking, and of course genius. When The Bostonians looks back on these forms of radicalism, however, it sees them through the reconstructed definition of privacy that, retrospectively, seems to encompass them. Midand late-century radicalisms, then, are characterized in The Bostonians not as viable modes for the public but as instances of privacy’s destruction—or, as a genealogy, as it were, of privacy’s destruction. James thus sees privacy to be menaced not only by the late nineteenth century’s mass culture of exhibition but also by the mid-century radical movements that articulated critiques of the work that “privacy” did to enforce the subordination of women and perpetuate the socially atomizing effects of a growing market economy. It is under these conditions that the appeal of female genius comes to look plausibly private.

Sexual Politics and the Redefinition of Privacy In keeping with the terms of privacy’s modernity, The Bostonians alludes to and contains two radical movements dedicated to utopian understandings of how personal feeling, sex, and economics might construct collective life: Oneida Perfectionism and the free love movement. In the eyes of these radical movements, resources coded as private in The Bostonians functioned as the raw materials of collectivity, at least at some moments and in some ways. By alluding to and discrediting these movements, The Bostonians participates in the work of negating their public legitimacy, and in so doing, the novel helps to narrow the possible languages for collective life. Yet by opening the door to them, even in this disavowing manner, The Bostonians also lets them in and entertains them, sharpening the novel’s recognition of the difficulty, rather than the imperative, of fixing the boundary between private life and

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public life. It is in response to this difficulty, ultimately, that Verena’s “genius” will be redefined in the last third of the novel. Both Oneida Perfectionism and free love slide into the novel under heavy mantles of irony and through the mediating minds of characters not involved in their practices. Selah Tarrant’s experience at a place called Cayuga in the novel almost certainly refers to the Oneida Community, a sexually radical, communistic society founded by John Humphrey Noyes in the 1840s but dissolved by the early 1880s. Even recent critics see Selah’s time in Cayuga as a sign and symptom of his charlatanism which is, of course, the way it is portrayed in the novel.20 To see him this way, however, is merely to repeat the novel’s conflation of sexual radicalism with moral corruption. We might better see James’s understanding of Cayuga as a charlatan’s activity in another way, as an interpretation of sexual radicalism. Selah’s time at Cayuga is narrated from the perspective of his wife Mrs. Tarrant, who regretfully recalls that he had “been for a while a member of the celebrated Cayuga community, where there were no wives, or no husbands, or something of that sort (Mrs Tarrant could never remember)” (B, 93). Whatever Mrs. Tarrant knows or does not know, James certainly knew quite a bit more. James’s father, Henry James Sr., had been deeply interested in the sexual innovations of American communistic associations; he translated Victor Hennequin’s Les Amours au phalanstère (Love in the Phalanstery) in 1848 and later visited the Brooklyn branch of the Oneida Perfectionist community.21 After receiving harsh criticism in the press, James Sr. halted his advocacy for alternative sexual organizations, but he was embroiled in philosophical controversies about sexual ethics and the legal forms of marriage throughout his long public career. James Jr. later expressed his own entirely appalled opinion of Oneida in his 1875 review of Charles Nordhoff ’s encyclopedic Communistic Societies of America, which features a long chapter on Oneida. It is striking, then, that James evokes Oneida only to suppress it by embedding it in Mrs. Tarrant’s inconceivably ill-informed mind. If Mrs. Tarrant really cannot remember whether “there were no wives, or no husbands,” she is wrong on both counts. There was an abundance of wives and husbands at Oneida; every man was the husband to every woman and every woman was the wife to every man, or as James put it in his review, “these ladies and gentlemen are all indifferently and interchangeably each other’s husbands and wives.”22 While critics of Oneida often interpreted this arrangement as one of promiscuity, Noyes understood group marriage as both an alternative

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to the oppressive conditions of monogamous marriage and a solution to the very problem that James depicts through other characters’ responses to Verena: that erotic desire produces property in persons and antisocial privacy. The Oneida system of heterosexual pantagamy was intended to thwart the privacy-making tendencies of sexual desire by providing desire with a more social institutional form. As John Humphrey Noyes conceived the erotic project of the community, group marriage would replace the “I-spirit” with the “we-spirit”; he proclaimed that Oneidans must love each other “not in pairs, as in the world, but en masse.”23 Oneida group marriage had a theological basis in Noyes’s interpretation of the gospel’s assertion that no marriage existed in heaven, but in its articulation it operated as a protest against what Noyes perceived to be the atomizing effects of private property and marriage in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. Just as private property divided citizens against each other, Noyes believed, marriage and erotic possessiveness destroyed the possibility of collective life. Noyes advised: “The first thing to be done in exchanging the fashion of the world for that of the Community is to put off entirely the marriage spirit, which claims private property in love. Civilized amativeness is as unselfish in respect to love-property as it is in respect to any other.”24 Marriage reduced women to the status of chattel by giving a man the legal “liberty to sleep habitually with a woman, liberty to please himself alone in his dealings with her, liberty to expose her to child-bearing without care or consultation.”25 But while marriage “in the world” gave institutional form to these rights, it was exclusive desire that menaced social life. Oneidans were forbidden to form exclusive erotic attachments and were censured even for favoring one erotic partner over another. As Louis J. Kern has phrased it, Oneidan pantagamy sought to “depersonalize love, to make it social rather than individual.”26 This principle extended to nonsexual forms of attachment—to the love of children and to personal preferences in everyday social interaction. Writing about Oneida group marriage, James recoiled: “morally and socially it strikes us as simply hideous.”27 But rather than seeing Oneida group marriage as a perverse violation of the normative order, as he might easily have done, he sees it to be typical of the general trend of American life. Using language that clearly anticipates his prospectus for The Bostonians, James complained of Oneida that “the whole scene is an attempt to organize and glorify the detestable tendency toward the complete effacement of privacy in life and thought everywhere so rampant with us nowadays.”28 It was, to be sure, the Oneidans’ purpose to destroy what were from their perspec-

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tive emergent conceptions of privacy by socializing property, “amativeness,” friendship, and parenthood. That is, their destruction of privacy was accomplished by elevating it to the level of the social by expanding it beyond the boundaries of isolated pairs and by making the affects, sensations, properties, and interests of the private into principles of collectivity. The Oneidans’ project serves in The Bostonians as a metaphor for the massification of privacy enabled by Verena’s desire-inducing gift and realized in the commodification of her image and performance. The Oneidans’ attempt to “organize” the “effacement of privacy” foretells not only Selah Tarrant’s desire to get himself into the newspapers and to showcase his daughter but also Olive’s accession of Verena to the promotional machinery of the lecture circuit. Just as an Oneidan was called on to sacrifice “special love” to the socialized erotics of the community, the end of The Bostonians finds Olive “struggling and yielding, making every sacrifice of taste for the sake of the largest hearing, and conforming herself to a great popular system” (B, 415). In James’s formulation, the difference between the associationist communism of mid-nineteenth-century American radicals and the mass culture of turn-ofthe-century advertisement and celebrity journalism dissolves; sexuality takes the form of private self-interest. The second repressed radicalism in The Bostonians is free love, which bubbles to the surface when Olive asks Verena what she thinks about marriage and Verena responds, “I prefer free unions” (B, 105). Hearing this answer, “Olive held her breath an instant; such an idea was so disagreeable to her,” not for political or ethical reasons but because “she didn’t like the ‘atmosphere’ of circles in which such institutions were called into question” (B, 105). Olive’s discomfort with the “atmosphere” reflects her general class disdain for the tastes and manners of the reforming circles she enters, and it is also consistent with the by-and-large conservative sexual politics adopted by the woman movement in the last decades of the nineteenth century. At the same time, however, Olive’s aversion to talk of “free unions” marks her refusal to think: “that particular reform she did not propose to consider” (B, 105). In Olive’s act of refusal, the novel creates a negative space, obliquely comparing Olive to others who do have reformist views about marriage. Since the novel forces us to observe this negative space, we would do well to ask what exactly it is that Olive refuses to consider. In the antebellum United States free-love ideologues constituted a diverse and loosely organized movement, realized in a literary culture of newsletters, tracts, and books and in a range of alternative sexual practices and sometimes

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communities, both formal and informal. Allied with the spiritualist movement and influenced by an emerging feminism, free lovers developed a critique of marriage. They argued that it held women in bondage as property, subjected them to coercive sex and involuntary childbearing, and debased sexual expression in general by tying it to the legal institution of marriage. Within legal marriage, they claimed, sex might be practiced by rote or by force but not necessarily as an expression of love or the transcendental affinities advocated in particular by the earliest free-love advocates. Drawing on Garrisonian abolitionist rhetoric, free-love advocates compared marriage to chattel slavery; at other moments they called marriage a form of prostitution. Some free lovers also saw desire without proper sentiment as a means of converting human beings into property, a concern that The Bostonians clearly shares. For free lovers, women’s commodification in marriage functioned as a sign of their coercion; according to free lovers, marriage perpetuated patriarchal “tyranny” by orchestrating women’s inability either to refuse sex or to consent to it in any meaningful way, since their sexual availability was inscribed in the law of marriage.29 Claiming that marriage obviated women’s consent and assimilated them to the status of property, free lovers refused to allow the family to appear either as an unproblematic space of love or in its conventional liberal guise as the domain of natural power relations from which autonomous subjects emerge to participate in civic life.30 Instead marriage looked to them like an institution whose ability to create conditions of subordination and coercion depended on artificial laws and customs. They proposed to disband or radically alter these laws and customs in favor of basing sexual relations entirely on mutual love or “spiritual affinity.” They believed these qualities to be detached from the institutional structures that made marriage so oppressive, and to be, moreover, incapable of producing hierarchical relationships or the instrumental ethos of the market.31 In Olive and Verena’s era, free-love radicals fought to keep alive a public discourse of sexuality at a time when romantic eroticism was increasingly accepted for the contractually sealed realm of marriage but remained proscribed elsewhere. By using such tactics as “obscene speech” and attempting to investigate sexuality with candor, free lovers sustained an alternative public discourse on sexuality, ethics, class, and sexual exploitation; or rather, they sustained it until they were censored or thrown into jail.32 Comstock laws in the late nineteenth century criminalized the publication and distribution of free-love discourse, not only when it made self-conscious use of officially

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“obscene” words but also when it advocated birth control or noninstitutional erotic arrangements.33 If in the radical 1840s and 1850s free-love discourse had politicized the family, then after the 1870s the legal boundary between public and private, in its new place, was etched more deeply when free-love discourse was ruled “obscene” rather than political. A movement that had previously enjoyed a measure of viability as a public, political one now became intelligible in a new way, as a criminal violation of decency. Free love’s new level of official “obscenity” relied on a historical irony: the veneration of personal feeling that free lovers had helped to develop and had deployed against institutional marriage had reached a new threshold of institutional legitimation in new definitions of privacy. Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s famous assertion of the “right to privacy” in an 1890 Harvard Law Review article marked the juridical emergence of personal privacy, grounded in the sanctity of feelings, into law and theory. Their defense of the “right to be let alone,” to be shielded from intrusions by the press, hinged not on the private property rights that had previously defined the laws of domestic relations but on a conception of the personal, sentimental injury that one might suffer from intrusion.34 Like James, Warren and Brandeis claimed that their defense of the right to privacy was necessitated by the growth of the mass press, which they saw impinging on a privacy that had existed in secure seclusion until the rise of newspapers. Yet it is also clear, as many historians of privacy have noted, that they were inventing a right to privacy that was nowhere articulated in the Constitution or common law, and that this invention reflected shifts in the conception of privacy in bourgeois culture at large.35 Rather than simply being invaded, privacy was being redefined, brought into being as a new domain that became intelligible through the very act of its violation. When Warren and Brandeis defended “a general right to privacy for thoughts, emotions, and sensations,” they reinvented and formalized privacy as precisely this.36 In doing so, they put sentiment and sexuality in opposition to public culture. Rather than simply shielding these from the public, the new conception of privacy prohibited them from the public.

The Public Depleted As noted, critics have tended to see James as a defender of privacy who, like Warren and Brandeis, imagines privacy to be a long-venerated condition that is now subject to new outside pressures.37 In some ways this is an accu-

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rate account of the critique of the mass press and the orator’s platform in The Bostonians. But taken alone, it misses the ways in which the novel inverts this problem: this novel also shows how the definition of privacy as the inviolate realm of personal feeling functions to clear the public sphere of the topics, sensations, and affects that are newly equated with privacy. The right not to be invaded, “to be let alone,” produces its mirror image: the prohibition on going public and the delimitation of what can count as public discourse. We have already seen how James defines Verena’s genius as an ability to create private attachments, and that when he does so, he critiques mid-century radicalism under a new standard of privacy. At the same time, however, the privacy of her genius points toward another and more complicated problem: that there is nothing left that can count as the public. In struggling with this problem, The Bostonians exhibits the anxiety that its own commitments to defending privacy might threaten the project of forming a functioning public sphere. Olive’s feminism and Basil Ransom’s career both exemplify this problem. In Olive’s case, Verena’s ability to inspire personal and sensual attachments grounds the novel’s annihilation of feminist ideology. For some recent readers of The Bostonians, Olive’s attachment to Verena has held the promise of progressive sexual politics, despite James’s characterization of Olive within the discourse of “morbid” same-sex desire.38 Yet if the narrative allows sympathetic readings of Olive as a suffering subject of desire, then at the same time that desire becomes the means by which the novel depoliticizes the woman movement. Olive’s desire usurps the space of political discourse, binding her to her needs rather than opening her up to a community of common political purpose. At those moments when the ideology of late-century feminism erupts into the narrative, James swiftly diverts attention to Olive’s understanding of her own desire and being, rather than any analysis of social, cultural, or political relations. In short, James gives Olive nothing resembling a political take on “the woman question.”39 Indeed, by suppressing politics at precisely the moments when we might expect them to emerge, the narrative seems to beg the question of what it would take to produce something legibly political. For instance, the narrator remarks about Olive’s take on marriage, “Olive had no views about the marriage-tie except that she should hate it for herself ” (B, 105). Her antipathy to marriage signals the active presence of her desire for something else, her “immense desire to know intimately some very poor girl” (B, 62) that finds its object in Verena. At the same time that her antipathy to marriage indicates desire, however, it also marks her disengagement from the

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issues and debates that constituted woman’s rights discourse. In the narrator’s phrase, “Olive Chancellor was unmarried by every implication of her being” (B, 47); that is to say, she has an ontology, not a political position. Compare Olive’s ontological shiver of disgust to how the free lover Julia Branch opposed marriage in the resolution she offered at a radical convention in 1858: “Resolved, That the slavery and degradation of woman proceed from the institution of marriage; that by the marriage contract, she loses control of her name, her person, her property, her labor, her affections, her children, and her freedom.”40 Branch is talking about how the delineation of marriage as privacy constitutes a political act that dispossesses women of rights and status. She refuses, that is, to think of privacy as apolitical. Olive instead seems not only to have never engaged woman’s rights discourse about marriage but also to be incapable of choosing her own opinion on the marriage question. She is, then, radically unfree. Her take on marriage contains none of the contingency necessary for politics, a realm in which ideas and positions must be capable of transformation. Without contingency there are no politics but only fate—or determinism. Olive’s analytical blankness covers the entire issue of the woman question. Olive complains of “the suffering of women” (B, 105), “the unhappiness of women” (B, 153), and “so many ages of wrong” (B, 192) without ever specifying in any way these conditions as social circumstances. The closest she gets is to label as “one of their most sacred formulas” (B, 160) Verena’s encapsulation of their program: “Producing a pressure that shall be irresistible. Causing certain laws to be repealed by Congress and by the State legislatures, and others to be enacted” (B, 159). What laws? Caused how? A contemporary reviewer of The Bostonians for the suffragist Woman’s Journal understood this vagueness to be a strategic suppression on James’s part: “The book is evidently intended as a tremendous satire on the whole ‘woman question,’ though we believe no direct allusion whatever is made to women’s suffrage. . . . We nowhere find any bill of particulars as to the causes of martyrdom and tyranny under which women are at present suffering, and we do not recollect that any specific demands are made whereby this terrible condition of things shall be ameliorated; we hear a great deal about the great ‘cause’ for which all are laboring, but exactly what the ‘cause’ is, does not seem apparent.”41 The main effect of Verena’s genius on Olive is to create a desire that fills the space where politics might be but is not. Basil Ransom promises, but fails, to offer an alternative to this problem. Basil sets himself up as the satirist of the decline of public culture, which he

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claims has lost its rigor and seriousness, primarily through women’s participation. He complains: “The whole generation is womanized; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don’t soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been” (B, 327). He couches his complaint in the language of gendered separate spheres. His remedy for the “womanized” age, as he flirtatiously puts it to Verena, is “to keep you at home and have a better time with you there than ever” (B, 328). His plan for the public is to take women out of it. What will occupy the public when he does so? Basil implies that women’s evacuation will open the field to serious exchange, difficult discriminations, and unvarnished truth. He claims to be an advocate of the rational and deliberative public sphere, as he suggests to Olive early in the novel. After Olive invites him to come to a radical meeting, she tries to withdraw her invitation, telling him that “if you are not in sympathy, perhaps you had better not come” (B, 50). Basil replies, “If, as you say, there is to be a discussion, there will be different sides, and of course one can’t sympathize with both” (B, 50). The point of political discussion is not to massage sympathy, he implies, but to articulate differentiated opinions—perhaps to deliberate toward a point but not to begin with sympathetic consensus. When actually asked to participate in a political discussion, however, he refuses. The reason for his demurral is that he interprets a topic that would seem to meet his criteria for rigorous public debate as, instead, inviolably private. At the meeting Basil is introduced to Mrs. Farrinder, the scheduled speaker of the evening. She has refused to go on, however, for reasons Basil would ostensibly approve of: she sees the audience as too sympathetic. As she says, “I must have unfriendly elements—I like to win them over” (B, 71). She holds to the agonistic principles that Basil proclaims, and she pursues these when she turns to Basil and asks him “to give the company some account of the social and political condition of the South” (B, 75). Yet he refuses; he experiences the question as an invasion of his privacy: “He had a passionate tenderness for his own country, and a sense of intimate connexion with it which would have made it as impossible for him to take a roomful of Northern fanatics into his confidence as to read aloud his mother’s or his mistress’s letters” (B, 75). It is not just Verena’s genius that threatens to flood the sphere of public debate with private feeling; nor is it even all women. It is, rather, “the

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social and political condition of the South” that has assumed, through Basil’s emotional investment, the privacy of maternal domesticity and romantic love. Basil refuses to engage Mrs. Farrinder because his country produces feelings he can only understand as intimate. His “passionate tenderness for his own country” dictates that the South must be removed from the scene of public conflict and cherished privately. Thus given that any topic that inspires feeling takes on the aura of privacy, it is in no way clear what Basil’s new, sanitized public will contain. His one contribution to public discourse is his article for the Rational Review. James does not present the text of this article, but Basil lets Verena know that it articulates the same opinions he had expressed to her: his opinion that the age is “womanized”; that the current public discourse is “canting” and “hysterical”; and that women are “inferior” for public purposes but delightful for private ones. His method, like James’s, is satirical; he does not say what should occupy the public, beyond mourning the loss of a “masculine tone,” but rather declares what must be expunged. The only thing that the public can rightfully contain, it seems, is its founding gesture of exclusion. The redefinition of privacy has left nothing else to occupy it.

Genius and the Privacy of the Unconscious Self In James’s satire on political culture, these problems become intractable; no viable public sphere emerges. In the novel’s narrative of Verena’s genius, however, they are translated and resolved in psychological terms. The domain of thought becomes in the novel the space in which privacy’s publication can be understood and stemmed. Privacy is removed from the public, ultimately, by James’s reconstruction of Verena’s genius in the novel’s last chapters, where it is transformed into the template for the psychology of feminine heterosexual love. Verena seems to hope, at one point, that she might attain privacy in her own thoughts. Early in his pursuit of Verena, Basil goes to visit her at her parents’ home in Cambridge, guessing that he will be able to avoid Olive’s disapproval and supervision there. He enjoins Verena to secrecy, primarily because he wants to interfere with the confidence between the two women. Verena agrees because she is agreeable, and she knows what a scene she will have with Olive if she reveals her visit. But although this secrecy accomplishes Basil’s objectives, it also serves purposes of Verena’s own that have nothing to do

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with Basil’s motives. Her secret becomes a boundary, her buffer from Olive’s coercive intimacy as well as from the collective interests she serves. She keeps her secret, that is, because it is “the only secret she had in the world—the only thing that was all her own” (B, 286–87). Her secret establishes privacy on a restricted scale in two senses: it is shielded from view, and it is private property in an individual, rather than a social, sense. Moreover, like the privacy Warren and Brandeis define as a right, Verena’s new privacy is marked by its fragility, its vulnerability to invasion: “the moment her secret was threatened it became dearer to her” (B, 287).42 This formulation of the discrete privacy of the secret is, however, quickly eroded in the novel, not only because Verena capitulates to Olive’s constant insistence that she and Verena “divide everything” (B, 296) but also because thoughts turn out to be universally impossible to keep secret. Characters are constantly discovering that their thoughts and motives have been discerned, exposed without their consent or volition. Mrs. Luna, for instance, discovers the “secret” that Verena had invited Basil to her speech in New York. As Basil sits with Mrs. Luna during the speech, “The result of something that silently passed between them was to make her say, abruptly: ‘Mr Ransom, my sister never sent you an invitation to this place. Didn’t it come from Verena Tarrant?’” (B, 262). Similarly, when Mrs. Burrage tries to negotiate Olive’s permission for her son to court Verena, Olive finds that Mrs. Burrage uncannily discerns every one of her fears and secret reflections. It pains Olive to find that Mrs. Burrage hits “near the mark” (B, 308) of her unexpressed fear. It troubles her even more when Mrs. Burrage expresses Olive’s desire for Verena to make a hit in New York: “That was what Olive wanted, and yet it seemed a mockery to hear Mrs Burrage say it” (B, 309). Mindreading takes a more congenial form when Verena and Basil gather around Miss Birdseye as she is dying. Miss Birdseye, seemingly the only character incapable of reading thoughts, believes Basil to be converted to the “cause” of women. Verena and Basil conspire telepathically to preserve her ignorance: “His eyes met Verena’s as she looked up at him from her place at Miss Birdseye’s feet, and he saw she was following his thought, throwing herself into it, and trying to communicate to him a wish” (B, 386–87). Exchanges such as these happen in intimate contexts where bodily cues abet the invasion of secrets. At the disembodied level of imagined national community, though, Basil entertains a more abstract and social sense of shared thought when he reflects, “I have an idea that my convictions exist in a vague, unformulated state in the minds of a great many of my fellow-citizens” (B, 323).

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What we might describe as the problem of thought’s socialization is, it turns out, one of the primary problems posed by Verena’s speeches. If Verena’s trance style of genius oration signified politically in the New England radical culture of the mid-nineteenth century, by the time James wrote The Bostonians it had begun to become intelligible in new ways within the rising discourse of psychology. William James, for one, theorized the style of speaking that Verena exhibits to be a mild form of secondary personality: “Inspirational speaking, playing on musical instruments, etc., also belong to the relatively lower phases of possession, in which the normal self is not excluded from conscious participation in the performance, though their initiative seems to come from elsewhere.”43 Thus, while Verena’s early claim that her speech “is not me” but “some power outside” that “seemed to flow through her” (B, 80) tropes the discourse on genius, it also alludes to the new psychological category of the secondary personality. To be more precise, it alludes to how the meanings of “genius” and “inspiration” were being taken over by psychology. In keeping with this transition, Verena’s speech fits William James’s description not only in its apparent alterity to Verena’s usual personality (at least in the early sections of the novel) but also in its content. William James remarked: “One curious thing about trance-utterances is their generic similarity in different individuals. . . . if [the speaker] ventures on higher intellectual flights, he abounds in a curiously vague optimistic philosophy-and-water, in which phrases about spirit, harmony, beauty, law, progression, development, etc., keep recurring” (P, 394). Verena’s discourse is clearly of this variety, as when she prophesizes that women will “all join hands, and lift up their voices above the brutal uproar of the world, in which it is so hard for the plea of mercy or of justice, the moan of weakness and suffering, to be heard. We should quench it, we should make it still, and the sound of our lips would become the voice of universal peace” (B, 86). William James admits to being entirely puzzled by the “generic similarity” of inspirational speeches. He observes, “It seems exactly as if one author composed more than half of the trance-messages, no matter by whom they are uttered” (P, 394). He is bewildered not by fractured selves per se but by the consistency among their secondary manifestations. He can only speculate as to why speeches should resemble each other. He suggests that this generic quality might stem from an inherent and characteristic openness in the mind: “Whether all sub-conscious selves are peculiarly susceptible to a certain stratum of the Zeitgeist, and get their inspiration from it, I know

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not; but this is obviously the case with the secondary selves which become ‘developed’ in spiritualist circles” (P, 394). The “sub-conscious” has no protection from invasion; the Zeitgeist—or we could call it the genius of the age—penetrates its precincts. This is true not only for someone like Verena, whose contact with “spiritualist circles” can be definitively traced, but also for everyone else. William James can only scratch his head over this: “But the odd thing is that persons unexposed to spiritualist traditions will so often act in the same way when they become entranced. . . . I have no theory to publish of these cases, several of which I have personally seen” (P, 394). Thought here has swelled beyond the category of the person so that it can no longer be claimed as a private experience to be defended from outside forces; it is itself an outside force. This principle of the invaded mind becomes, paradoxically, the means by which Verena’s genius is reconstructed so that it no longer channels the undifferentiated zeitgeist but instead channels romantic heterosexuality. Basil seduces Verena by invading her mind: “he had projected a new light into Verena’s mind, and made the idea of giving herself to a man more agreeable to her than that of giving herself to a movement” (B, 377). With this projection, Basil gives her the idea that she really wants a man; but he also gives her something else: the conception of herself as a split subject. In this case the split is between her conventional imitativeness, the opposite of genius, and her originality, the grounding condition of genius. Internalizing Basil’s idea makes her believe that although her political commitments are strictly imitative, she has an authentic self and original thoughts beneath them. He tells her, “You ought to know that your connexion with all these rantings and ravings is the most unreal, accidental, illusory thing in the world. You think you care about them, but you don’t at all. They were imposed upon you by circumstances. . . . It isn’t you, the least in the world” (B, 330). In at least this last point she has already agreed with him by saying that her gift “isn’t me.” What is new to her, however, is the idea that she has a self as yet unknown to herself. This is not only her real self but also an entity defined by its capacity for romantic love. If ideas are contagious, then Verena has caught one from Basil that requires her to understand herself in a new way. Basil’s case that she has a real self, defined by a real desire, underneath the language and ideas she has absorbed from her atmosphere, acts as a performative utterance, creating the condition it names; as the narrator later remarks, “these words, the most effective and penetrating he had uttered, had sunk into her soul and worked and fermented there” (B, 374). Basil’s words exploit Verena’s susceptibility

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(which is a heightened instance of the susceptibility of all minds), but the idea they introduce transforms her psychological terrain. By positing a real self and a false self, these words establish the boundaries they describe: between circumstantial and authentic, surface and depth, conscious and subconscious. These new boundaries spring up in Verena’s mind, just as if someone had erected dividing walls in one of the American houses that James later complains suffers from “diffused vagueness of separation between apartments,”44 Her “essence” might still be, as the narrator had said, to “give herself away,” but now she has given herself away to a new principle of selfhood that will stop her from giving herself away to everyone. Verena’s love for Basil troubles her universal availability, precipitating a conflict between “her desire to keep on pleasing others” and “a force she had never felt before [that] was pushing her to please herself ” (B, 376). If Verena had spurred privatizing desires in others—had filled the space of the public with desires that bound their subjects to selfishness rather than to social purpose—she now has her own privatizing desire that ultimately takes her out of circulation. With this reconstruction, Verena’s love absorbs the space and tropes of genius, assimilating its public-making logic to another scene, that of romantic heterosexual desire. The narrative makes this translation of genius to the sphere of romantic love pointed. Basil proposes it when he tells her that she has “immense ability, but not in the line in which you most try to have it. In a very different line, Miss Tarrant! Ability is no word for it; it’s genius!” (B, 331). That is, he means that her genius is not for public speaking but “for privacy, for him, for love” (B, 269). Basil is always a compromised and partial source on Verena’s authenticity, so we might consider Verena’s reconstruction to have been completed only when the narrator begins to assert the contrast between her imitations and her original genius for love. Where, as the narrator says, Verena’s political ideas and plans spring merely from her heightened vulnerability to the “contagion of example,” her love has come to operate like an original inspiration: “a sentiment springing up from within had easily breathed a chill upon” the ideas she absorbed from her circle (B, 397). Verena’s reconstituted genius defines her originality as her love so completely that Basil’s implantation of this idea is retrospectively forgotten, both by Verena and by the narrator. Verena’s new originality transplants not only the split structure but also the attenuated agency of genius to the sphere of romantic love. It has long been an aspect of the trope of romantic genius that creativity takes an artist or speaker unaware, and therefore that a poet cannot help but write and an

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activist cannot help but stand, take the podium, and speak. This helplessness bleached their personal identity and self-interest from their utterances. The sense of compulsion fortified their claims to disinterested truth and universality that were tied, in ways both reductive and complex, to the mandates of collective aesthetic or democratic life. Verena’s genius for love echoes and transforms this structure. Verena experiences her love for Basil as an inner compulsion, beyond her control or remedy. As she tells Olive early in her courtship with Basil, “I like him, I can’t help it” (B, 366). She can admit this, but what Verena does not yet know is that she has already chosen Basil. She claims, and believes, that although she is drawn to Basil, she is going to face down her attraction so that she can reconstitute her political commitments on a higher plane of renunciation. Olive, however, perceives that Verena is “not sincere” (B, 367) in her attempts to reasonably sort out her political and personal allegiances, but “[Olive] would have admitted that that treachery was as yet unwitting, that Verena deceived herself first of all, thinking she really wished to be saved” (B, 367). Basil too can see that her conscious and entirely good-faith intentions are split from and ultimately flooded by her “real” and compelling desire. Her sudden silence after one of his declarations “told him that she was afraid of him, that she had ceased to trust herself, that the way he had read her nature was the right way (she was tremendously open to attack, she was meant for love, she was meant for him)” (B, 358). When Verena agrees that she loves him—enjoys the pleasure of that love—her explanation is again, as she leaves the Music Hall in his grip at the end of the novel, “I can’t help it” (B, 431). In both free love and mainstream middle-class discourses on love in the nineteenth century, romantic love was figured as an “ungovernable force”; its anarchism expressed both its authenticity and its alterity to institutions of the law and property.45 With Verena’s compulsion to love, however, we see a new development; it is not simply that her love cannot be governed but that it constitutes her spontaneous originality, the real desire that foils her will and reason. Her attempt to subjugate her love to the movement crumbles under the force of this desire. The migration of genius’s originality and resistless compulsion to the sphere of love foreshadows what the historian Pamela Haag has identified as one of the major innovations of romantic heterosexuality in the early twentieth century: the bifurcation of the female erotic self. As Haag argues, although popular sexual ideology in the early twentieth century United States granted that women possessed sexual desire, sexual self-sovereignty did not follow

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from this premise, as it had for free lovers. Instead it “posited a bifurcated female self, whose sexuality belonged to the elusive subconscious rather than to the proprietary, rational female self capable of claiming and acting upon desires.”46 The delimited sphere of privacy that Verena’s genius for love defines will be based not simply on her desire but on the condition that her desire has been constructed as both unruly and irresistible, needing Basil’s clear vision and control to actualize itself. Verena is secured from the promiscuous public not by Basil’s taking possession of her but by her losing possession of herself. Verena enters a state of privacy when Basil “reads” and channels her affect in the directions she could not fully know it should go. In this modified form, then, “genius” provides the template for the emerging meanings of female heterosexual love: that it will constitute women’s desire as beyond their control; that it will attach that desire to personal authenticity; and that it will locate its sphere in a private life newly defined by a heterosexual couple whose hierarchy is structured as a psychological necessity rather than a relation of property or status. Indeed, as Haag suggests, this new psychological structure took over the work of subordinating and privatizing women at the very moment when the legal and social conventions that used to do that work were eroding significantly. The political point of the reconstruction of genius in terms of heterosexual female psychology is driven home by the title of the speech that Verena was supposed to give at the Music Hall but never does because she “can’t help” going away with Basil. Her speech was called “A Woman’s Reason,” and although its content is never specified, it might easily be imagined as a rebuttal to the conventional argument that women are cognitively unqualified for the vote because they are deficient in the capacity for reason, on which the franchise was theoretically grounded by the 1840s.47 But while the title of the speech suggests the efforts of the women’s movement to embrace a rational-discursive model of citizenship, it also does the opposite: it encodes and amplifies the psychological structure that motivates the exit of Verena and the trope of female genius more generally from the public sphere. The title plausibly refers to a novel by James’s close friend William Dean Howells. Titled identically to Verena’s speech, A Woman’s Reason (1884) is a marriage comedy based on the premise that a woman’s attempt to reason about her choices blocks her self-realization in romantic heterosexuality.48 The heroine of the novel rejects a marriage proposal because she sees no way that she and her suitor could support themselves financially: “I argued it all out, —and it’s a perfect chain of logic.”49 The real reason she re-

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fuses to marry him, though, is not because of the impediments she discovers when she moves through her “chain of logic,” but because she sees her ability to think reasonably about their union as itself a sign that she could not possibly really love him. As she explains: “If I had felt towards him in that way [if she had loved him], I should never have thought of any—any—prudential considerations” (WR, 13). When she tells him this, he takes her at her word and sails across the globe, leaving her to wallow in the knowledge that she cannot quite articulate to herself, that she really does love him. Her secret hope—secret from herself—had been that he would immediately “come over to Rye Beach to combat and trample on her reasons” (WR, 18), just as Basil comes to Marmion and tramples on Verena’s reasons. She wants to be liberated from reason, sees reason as a roadblock to her authentic personal self, but she needs him to orchestrate this liberty. At the same time her reason is a perversity of reason, a set of pretenses erected by her alienation from her own desire. A “woman’s reason,” then, is not her claim on rational citizenship but a marker of her self-incoherence, her inability to frame her own consent to either marriage or citizenship and thus her need to have her desire recognized and channeled by the man who reads her nature “the right way.” So while Verena does not deliver “A Woman’s Reason,” she lives it; her self-incoherence has found its home in romantic heterosexuality, even if, as the narrator lets us know, that home will be one of sorrow. A “woman’s reason,” then, is really her genius for self-incoherence. In the ambiguous last turn of The Bostonians, however, James takes his thumb ever so slightly off the windpipe of the political figure of “female genius.” As Basil hustles the weeping Verena from the hall, James opens up a narrow space for Olive to assume the mantle of genius. As the cloaked Verena departs, Olive, “as if with a sudden inspiration, . . . rushed to the approach to the platform” (B, 431). Inside the hall, out of the narrative’s line of sight but within Basil’s hearing, Olive takes the podium. The possibility of her success has not been ruled out, though all we know for sure is that the audience has consented not to riot, and perhaps will listen to her hypothetical inspiration. Narrated obliquely, Olive’s spontaneous public performance casts a faint but optimistic light, especially given the speed with which the privacy that Basil had promised would flow radiantly from Verena’s person sours: she leaves the novel in tears that “were not the last she was destined to shed” (B, 433). Where the novel gives Verena’s ambiguous “genius” its form as contained privacy, Olive’s “inspiration” has been violently displaced from her bodily desire. James leaves at least a chance that Olive’s possible “inspiration” will initiate

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a public moment, and the narrator, whose penetrating eye has had such a reconstructive effect on “female genius,” refrains from casting his dangerous gaze too closely on her efforts.

The “Woman of Genius” and the Art of Fiction In Verena’s psychological plot in The Bostonians, female genius is repurposed so that it stems the leakage of privacy into the public and gives Basil a secure zone of authority over her desire. This is not the only way, though, that Henry James understood female genius in the mid-1880s, or even the only way he uses the conceit in The Bostonians. In 1884, the year spent writing The Bostonians, James also published his manifesto “The Art of Fiction.” Here female genius arises in another guise, as the principle of composition through which fictional worlds can be deduced from particular details. In this essay James is dissecting—and demolishing—an essay of the same title by Walter Besant. Among other things, Besant had cautioned aspiring literary authors to write from experience, by which he seems to have meant that they should avoid writing about any mode of life or character not experienced fully and directly. As Besant admonishes, “a young lady brought up in a quiet country village should avoid descriptions of garrison life,” and “a writer whose friends and personal experiences belong to the lower middleclass should carefully avoid introducing his characters into society.”50 Alert to Besant’s class condescension, James protests, “That remark about the lower middle-class writer and his knowing his place is rather chilling.” We might also say something similar, as James later does, about the “young lady” from the country. As the invidious distinctions in Besant’s complaint about these two imaginary writers suggest, his problem is not simply that of authors writing outside of experience. He has an underlying assumption about whose perspective will be limited, about who will be barred from a more universal perspective. It seems no accident that his examples are not of a bourgeois writer considering the lower classes (Dickens?) or of a man writing about women, which would probably constitute most of the novels Besant could conceivably have called to mind. Rather, he is implicitly claiming that the limits of gender, class, and provinciality bar the writer’s mind from the broad, comprehensive perspective. Such writers must produce, that is, a minor literature. This is “their place.” James knows what force might wrench them from this place: female ge-

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nius. He recalls, “I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me that she was much commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth.” She was neither a French Protestant nor young, so how did she get this impression, if not by the sort of experience that Besant means? She got it, according to James, through an inductive faculty of imagination, the ability to extrapolate a whole world from the perception of a few details. He continues: “once, in Paris . . . [she] passed an open door, where, in the household of a Pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture.” From such a brief encounter she “produced a reality.” She could do this not because the part inevitably implies the whole but because of her genius: “Above all, however, she was blessed with the faculty which when you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for the artist is a much greater source of strength than any accident of residence or of place in the social scale.” She had, as James writes, a mind that was “imaginative”; “it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.” James suggests that a “man of genius” might do much the same thing, but the discourse of gender here is strong; he traces the implications of genius through conceits of femininity as the woman of genius promises to redeem the village lady that Besant had defamed: “The young lady living in the village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about the military.” Her genius saves her from her feminine and provincial particularity, places her into the position of the universal subject. The Bostonians puts this principle of genius in action. James intended The Bostonians to “illustrate some of my own artistic conventions,” such as those developed recently in “The Art of Fiction.”51 His plan for the novel exhibits the inductive logic he associated with the “woman of genius,” deriving a whole from a part. Indeed, the initial conception turns on this logic in a couple of ways. In his plan James answers the problem of nationality through a close regionalism: “The whole thing as local, as American, as possible, as full of Boston: an attempt to show that I can write an American story.”52 America is derived from Boston, as French Protestantism is derived from a glance. The national metonymy, however, does not end there. Gender has a special force, whereby women become strikingly representative: “At any rate, the subject is very national, very typical. I wished to write a very American tale very characteristic of our social conditions, and I asked myself what was the most salient and peculiar point in our social life. The answer was: the situation of women,

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the decline of the sentiment of sex, the agitation on their behalf.”53 America, that is, can be characterized not by trying to encompass its dizzying diversity and expanse—not, say, in the mode of Whitman—but by identifying a peculiarity that can imply the whole. Of course, it is possible to argue with James’s contention that women’s situation is the most salient and peculiar point in national life; certainly, the situation of African Americans after Reconstruction, the growing labor movement, the frontier, and any number of other possibilities come to mind.54 What is crucial here, though, is less the rank he gives this problem than his conviction that the nation can be extrapolated from one movement as seen in one city, and that, moreover, women’s situation, or the situation of the particular white, northern, activist women of the novel, could be something besides a sideshow to collective life, could be central to envisioning national distinctiveness.55 In this sense, some women’s genius, as in their characteristic condition rather than their intellectual gifts, signifies the nation. This is where James’s most pervasive reworking of the female genius trope lies. While Verena’s genius fails to complete the dialectic between particulars and universals, parts and wholes, that defined the democratic potential of the female genius trope, that capacity is displaced to female genius as a narrative principle and national metonymy. Bostonians are both “local” and “national”; women are both “peculiar” and “American.” It was precisely in this inductive logic of the woman of genius, however, that James’s novel failed, both in the eyes of critics and, ultimately, in the eyes of James himself. As one critic complained in his Atlantic Monthly review of The Bostonians, “The astounding array of particulars invites one to pause and see if [James] cannot abstract the generals.”56 Over and over critics complained that The Bostonians was tedious, that it piled detail upon detail and added up to nothing, that, in the words of another reviewer, “in no sense is it a novel—hardly even a story. It is a series of sketches, with the very slightest possible thread of cohesion.”57 If the sketches do not come together as a narrative whole, then his depictions of the women’s movement and of Boston are similarly fragmented. In the words of the Atlantic Monthly critic: “We have intimated that the book is not in the least a contribution to the study of the woman question, so called. It is rather a study of the particular woman question in this book.”58 As a disdainful reviewer in the Boston Evening Traveler put it, “he has looked on all this boiling, bubbling, seething cauldron of miscellaneous activities that have their origin and centre in Boston.”59 This woman question is not the woman question is not the nation; this set of mis-

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cellaneous activities is not Boston is not the nation. He got an inch but did not take an ell. James agreed, writing to his brother William James that he was himself “more conscious than any reader can be of the redundancy of the book in the way of descriptive psychology, etc. . . . I have overdone it.”60 While The Bostonians was appearing serially, James had rebuffed some criticism from William James by writing to him, “The story is, I think, the best fiction I have written.”61 Fourteen months later, though, he agreed with his critics that the novel was tedious in parts, a tedium that resulted from the flood of detail: “All the middle part is too diffuse and insistent—far too describing and explaining and expatiating. The whole thing is too long and dawdling.”62 The reason, as James sees it, is that he lacked the ability to derive a complete experience from a few perceptions that he ascribed to the woman of genius in “The Art of Fiction.” As he understands it, the flaws of The Bostonians “came from the fact (partly) that I had the sense of knowing terribly little about the kind of life I had attempted to describe—and felt a constant pressure to make the picture substantial by thinking it out—pencilling and ‘shading.’”63 He admits that he had “seen too little of the whole business treated of.” His visual metaphor here implicitly recalls and differentiates James from his essay’s “woman of genius,” whose “glimpse made a picture.” At the same time, and in the same letter, he backs away from his original plan for the novel as an exercise in national metonymy. Whereas he planned “an American story” that was “full of Boston” and a “national” story centered on “the situation of women,” in retrospect he denies these inductive intentions. Responding to criticism from real-life Bostonians who thought that he had slandered the city and the woman movement, he explained: “Let me also say that if I have displeased people, as I hear, by calling the book The Bostonians—this was done wholly without invidious intension.” His intention, rather, was to particularize: “I hadn’t a dream of generalizing—and thought the title simple and handy, and meant only to designate Olive and Verena by it, as they appeared to the mind of Ransom, the southerner and outsider, looking at them from New York.”64 The characters, now, are atomized by personal identity, location, and perspective. They recall, in a way, the atomized listeners to Verena’s speeches, locked within their desires and persons and therefore made unavailable to any abstractions of the social or political. One of James’s critics thought she knew what to call the novel’s devotion to particulars: “feminization.” Writing for the Contemporary Review, Julia Wedgwood praised Basil Ransom in order to damn James. In her view, “the

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most earnest, and . . . we will add the most valuable, page in the ‘Bostonians,’ is devoted to a protest against what he calls ‘the damnable feminization of the age.’ How strikingly a latent touch of conscience accentuates this protest! Mr. James is the greatest sinner in this ‘feminization’ that fiction can produce.”65 The substance of this sin, according to Wedgwood, is a disordered relation between detail and picture. She castigates James’s “tiny brush, his perpetual stippling, his touching and retouching every line”—that is, what she sees as his obsessive attention to detail, which obscures the larger picture. He is the miniaturist, rather than the master. Wedgwood’s association of James with the feminine because of his entrapment in detail comes right out of the history of gendered intelligence, in which men were granted synthetic and abstract powers while women were thought to apprehend and remember the little things, without any ability to place them securely within a larger order. This vision of ordinary feminine intellect served broad purposes in justifying everything from women’s exclusion from higher education to their exclusion from full citizenship, since their supposed inability to think in broad, abstract terms threatened to make it difficult for them to think about justice or the national interest. It is remarkable that such a complaint about feminization should come from a critic who also deplores James’s devastation of the woman movement. James’s politics make Wedgwood cringe: “we sit helpless while he insults our deepest convictions.” Thus, while she disputes the gendered terms of political inclusion, she leaves intact the gendered logic of the public sphere, in which a debilitating incapacity for generalization is a feminine quality. Yet the remedy for this problem, at least in James’s thwarted hopes, is also “feminized”—the “woman of genius.” These feminine codings escape the conceptual apparatus of both writers and remain at the level of embedded assumption rather than explicit conceptualization. Wedgwood argues for the woman movement while coding bad style as feminine, while James argues against the women’s movement while coding good style as feminine. In both cases there seems to be no connection between how each writer values “the feminine” and what each is willing to advocate for women. In both cases, however, they also show how fully gender came in the late nineteenth century to embody the perceived liberal democratic problem of reconciling particulars and universals, and moreover, how gender could do this in a way that was both pervasive and difficult to make conceptually intelligible. That is, because this problem is specifically encoded in gender, it cannot, at least in this moment, become itself available to critique. The assumption that parts should imply wholes,

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that particularities should reveal themselves to be manifestations of a transcendent universal, cannot be itself examined or challenged. James and Wedgwood leave this problem for turn-of-the-twenty-first-century political theory, where we struggle with it still.

Chapter 3

Trilby: Double Personality, Intellectual Property, and Mass Genius

I

N 1894 George Du Maurier’s novel Trilby set off a craze. The novel tells the story of a laundress and Parisian artist’s model, Trilby, who befriends three young English painters, becoming at once their collective sweetheart and unpaid servant. After circumstances separate her from them, she becomes allied with Svengali, a musician and Hungarian Jew, under whose hypnosis she attains “world-wide colossal celebrity” as a singer.1 Issues of Harper’s Monthly carrying the serial version of Trilby sold out rapidly, and a full year later the book form of the novel claimed the top spot on the first-ever best-seller list, even though the list debuted five months after the novel’s publication.2 In the United States the Trilby “boom,” as the book’s vogue was known in the aftermath of the economic “bust” year that had preceded its appearance, extended well beyond the book and its sales. The official theatrical version of Trilby played in twenty-four U.S. productions at once in 1896 and became a smash hit in Britain as well, where it enjoyed a popular run and was staged annually for fourteen years after its debut.3 Far more rampant, however, were unofficial and unlicensed appropriations of the novel. One philanthropic organization staged a benefit featuring tableaux vivants based on the novel’s illustrations, and several others staged concerts built around the songs that Trilby sings in the novel.4 The Trilby boom exploded even more conspicuously across popular and commercial domains of culture. A dime museum paraded “Twenty Trilbys” and had visitors “vote on the handsomest.” Circus performers appeared as Trilby and Svengali; one performer appeared “nightly in Trilby costume, riding bareback (not barefoot) around the tan-bark to the snapping of ringmaster Svengali’s whip” (TRP, 25). In a similar spirit, parodic and burlesque versions of the book

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and play sprang up from all corners, with such titles as Frilby: An Operatic Burlesque, Drilby Re-versed, and Thrilby: A Shocker in One Scene and Several Spasms.5 In addition, in an age before the system of commodity tie-ups fully rationalized the consumer potential of a branded narrative, small businesses helped themselves to Trilby’s currency: several shoe manufacturers promoted Trilby-inspired shoes; a caterer offered ice creams “in the shape of a model of Trilby’s ever-famous foot”; and more grotesquely, a Philadelphia firm reportedly offered the “Trilby Sausage” in the same shape, with the cannibalistic promise that “they melt in your mouth” (TRP, 26). Perhaps the Trilby boom’s most exceptional production, however, was its metadiscourse on publicity. Trilby was soon famous for being famous, and the boom itself was as big a topic as the novel.6 As one theater critic remarked, “Now no book, possibly, has ever had exactly the peculiar vogue of the history of the poor, well-meaning laundress of the Quartier Latin. We now even have Trilby pies!”7 The Critic, a weekly literary magazine, ran a regular column documenting Trilby-related news, events, objects, debates, and texts. Its editors ultimately compiled the column contents into the book Trilbyana: The Rise and Progress of a Popular Novel. Flipping through this volume today suggests nothing so much as the spectacle of mass culture becoming conscious of itself—of its complex intertextuality, its intrication with capital, and its ability to work endless, mercurial variations on a theme as it propels Trilby across genres, modes of performance, and levels of culture. Tracking the cultural movement of Trilby in the mid-1890s must have been like seeing a radioactive dye illuminate the circulatory system of the body on an X-ray today. Trilby’s visible circulation exposed the workings, the routes, and the blockages within an intricately woven set of systems that conditioned life as people were coming to know it. Most Trilby watchers expressed a kind of amused awe at the mass-cultural pathways made clear by the novel’s reception, but for Henry James, the Trilby boom revealed the nightmarish power of mass publicity. Du Maurier’s close friend, James gave the novel’s wild popularity partial credit for Du Maurier’s death in 1896. Recollecting the harried two years after Trilby’s publication, James lamented, “To see much of [Du Maurier] at this time was to receive the impression of assisting at an unsurpassable example of what publicity organized in the perfection to which our age has brought it can do and can undo.”8 If in The Bostonians James resisted the power of mass publicity by redefining female genius in terms of a split female consciousness destined for privacy and love, then the Trilby boom must have looked to James like mass publicity’s revenge.

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In its orchestration of an ambiguous female genius in the context of publicity, Trilby takes us beyond the question of women’s state citizenship and the domain of intentional publics and toward the varieties of subjectivity, desire, and collectivity structured by mass publicity. Writing about the forms of mass publicity and the subjectivities they produce, Michael Warner has suggested their compensatory function. Because, as he writes, the “bourgeois public sphere has been structured from the outset by a logic of abstraction that provides a privilege for unmarked identities: the male, the white, the middle-class, the normal,” it has conventionally guaranteed that “difference will be enunciated as mere positivity, an ineluctable limit imposed by the particularities of the body.” This condition placed privileged subjects in a “relation of bad faith with their own positivity”—with, that is, their bodies and particularities—while “minoritized subjects had few strategies open to them, but one was to carry their unrecuperated positivity into consumption.”9 The possible political significance of that “positivity,” and its relation to the public dimension of mass culture, varies widely from context to context, as Warner reminds us. Trilby and its reception opens up both utopian and dystopian potentials of mass publicity, primarily by complicating the conception of originary genius and therefore the new conception of intellectual property that becomes one of the novel’s primary contexts. An American best-seller written by a British author born in France, Trilby was published under the International Copyright Act of 1891, which fully protected the works of foreign authors in the United States for the first time. Like other copyright law, it grounded the ownership of intellectual property in the singular identity of its creator, establishing the work’s legal originality. Such a way of understanding proprietorship expresses, as Foucault has famously claimed, an ideology of authorship that promotes the “individualization” of discourses, knowledges, and fictions in the service of their circulation in a system of private property.10 In the novel, though, such a notion of singular originality is confounded, primarily through the splitting and doubling of genius in the figure of Trilby. When Trilby becomes an operatic diva whom other characters call a “genius,” she also becomes a subject internally split between her apparent waking and hypnotized personalities. Externally she is coupled with Svengali, without whom she cannot sing. As a genius, then, she is doubly doubled—divided into what would have been intelligible in the era as a double personality and joined into a highly ambiguous collaboration. The novel makes it impossible to ground Trilby’s

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“genius” in a singular person or coherent identity. As a singer who seems to be more than, less than, and other than a singular personality, Trilby provides no sure grounding for intellectual property; her performances stage a disruption of the concept of originality as it had developed through a historical set of interchanges between law and aesthetic theory. The novel’s diverse and frenzied reception amplified this disruption, turning Trilby’s internal fragmentation and external pairing with Svengali into an allegory for the irresistible intertextuality of mass culture. In Trilby’s reception, the novel’s content looks at certain moments to be a social rather than an individual possession, one that circulates through its commodity forms but is not at every moment reducible to them. Where the novel itself thematizes Trilby’s challenge to coherent identity, to individualized originality, and to legal and aesthetic conceptions of intellectual property, the novel’s reception and the metadiscourse on publicity that sprang up around it inflated that challenge, seeing in mass culture the potential for innovative but sometimes disturbing routes of circulation for both subjectivities and fictions. In its emphasis on originality’s crisis within turn-of-the-century mass culture, this chapter charts a turn in my larger discussion of the political possibilities that were orchestrated under the sign of the female genius’s self-incoherence. As we saw in Chapter 1, the nineteenth-century convention of the female genius orator appropriated the genius’s ability to mediate particularity and universality in order to create protofeminist interventions into a public sphere riven by debates over the roles of rationality and disembodiment in the proper constitution of a public and its subjects. Chapter 2 considered how that political work was muted through a progressive association between feminine self-incoherence and heterosexualized privacy. In the wake of this failure to construct viable imaginary alternatives to the liberal public sphere, the incoherence of “genius” migrates, through the Trilby boom, to the domain of mass publicity, where it maps some of the territory of that mass publicity and indicates crucial problems attendant on its constructions of subjectivity. This migration had to do in a direct way with the literary friendship between Henry James and Du Maurier: the plot of Trilby was passed back and forth between them as a sort of gift, and the story’s tale of an ambiguous female genius in the context of the culture of publicity takes up the obsessions of The Bostonians and other works by James in an obvious way. What is persistently striking in Trilby and its reception, though, is the excitement caused by the challenges its reconstructions of genius make to singular individuality and secure intellectual property. In Trilby and its boom,

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multiplied and conjoined personalities signal the existence of differences usually excluded from the domain of representable selves, blocked, in Warner’s terms, by their “positivity.” In particular, Trilby’s split and doubled “genius” shows how “originality,” as it was imagined before her celebrity, was based on a concept of identity achieved through historical relationships of power and domination that were grounded in discourses of bodily difference, including those of labor, gender, and nationality. By troubling these repressions, Trilby and its boom allow us to track one means by which the compensatory function of mass culture is permitted to operate. But they also put the limits of this compensatory function into stark relief. Examining the improvisations on originality expressed in Trilby and the boom will show us, as Henry James predicted, what publicity “can do and can undo.”

Genius and the Labor of Art With an astonishing prescience, Du Maurier’s manipulation of the tropes of original genius in Trilby serves as an anticipatory allegory of the discourse on originality that ultimately surrounded the novel. Within the novel “original genius” is both fetishized and undermined in a narrative in which identity forms and aesthetic legitimacy are produced through arduous pedagogies of refinement. By displaying these processes, the novel denaturalizes its characters’ intelligible identities and, consequently, the artistic “genius” that the singular personality of the artist grounds. The novel’s intricate play on the construct of genius in turn gives point to debates over the originality and proprietary status of Trilby that dominated the novel’s public reception. The first half of the novel centers on Parisian bohemian life in the 1850s. In a loose-jointed narrative, it depicts the growing friendship between three young English painters and Trilby, who has lived her life in the Latin Quarter. Despite making her living as an artist’s model and having had a short but well-known string of lovers, Trilby charms the painters with her seemingly indestructible innocence and devoted affection. Of the three young painters, who go by the nicknames Little Billee, Taffy, and the Laird, Little Billee is singled out for his “true genius” (T, 9). He has an abundance of ability—“a quickness, a keenness, a delicacy of perception, in matters of form and colour, a mysterious facility and felicity of execution, a sense of all that was sweet and beautiful in nature, and a ready power of expressing it” (T, 9)—but what defines his genius is his originality. While his two friends imitate other painters,

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Little Billee “didn’t interest himself very warmly in other people’s pictures” (T, 10), even those of old masters. He does not need to because rather than copying, he originates. As the narrator observes, Little Billee is “absolutely original” and “uninfluenced by any school, ancient or modern”; he constitutes “a law unto himself, and a law-giver unto many others” (T, 219). His paintings imprint his distinct self on the canvas: “The lightest and most careless of his pencil strokes had a precision that was inimitable, and a charm that specially belonged to him, and was easy to recognize at a glance” (T, 77). His paintings, that is, speak their originality not only by giving law but also by attesting to their origin in the person of Little Billee. Little Billee’s original genius enmeshes him in what modern criticism regards as the ideological function of authorship, which, as Foucault has put it, serves a system of property and marks the moment when discourses become “goods caught up in a circuit of ownership.”11 The figure of the author—and by extension the artist—hides the social quality of what it defines as “intellectual property,” grounding it in a single human origin that possesses the sovereign rights to own, circulate, alienate, and profit from it. More broadly, the figure of the genius author produces individuality and commerce as mutually affirming phenomena. Historians of copyright, such as Mark Rose, Martha Woodmansee, and Jane Gaines, have concretely examined Foucault’s theoretical insights about individuation and property.12 As their work demonstrates, the concept of “the author,” in its function as a marker of property, has a complex aesthetic and legal genealogy that relies fundamentally on a concept of originality that draws from both romantic aesthetics and Lockean notions of self-proprietorship. The romantic notion of the proprietary author, Gaines writes, developed in apparent opposition to the market. Romanticism attempted to resist the pressures of commodification by seeing the work of art as an expression of the author’s unique personality, which it held to be immune to commodification. As Gaines explains, “The strategy of the Romantics was to project the ‘humanness’ of the creative subject (which they perceived to be under attack) onto the works themselves.”13 But the distinctive humanness invested in the work of art became the means to commodification, rather than a point of resistance. In public debates and legal proceedings about copyright infringement, the concept of the creator’s imprinted personality was conjoined with the Lockean concept of property in the person and the labor of that self-owning person’s hand. As Gaines points out, this conjunction was hardly inevitable, even given a certain formal similarity between the romantic claim that the artist is ex-

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pressed in the art and the Lockean claim that the laborer transforms nature into wealth by mixing his substance with it. These two models came together slowly and cleaved together unevenly, as public commentators and judges in copyright cases filtered aesthetic claims about the author’s distinct humanity as expressed in a work into their analyses of laws governing the ownership of property.14 With this conjunction we see the public dimension of the aesthetic object fully subordinated to its function as private property. Authorial originality becomes a “claim to ownership in a work”; the originator gains a right to own and alienate his or her work in the market, and more important, the author’s originality becomes the underlying justification for all subsequent copyright holders to own and profit from the work. The concept of the author lubricates the market as the author’s ownership, based in the singular individual’s originality, is transferred to people and corporate entities who justify their right to ownership and profit by reference to the author whose initial rights have created theirs. This development, as Foucault explains, allowed the author to function not only as a principle of profit but also as a “principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.”15 In other words, the copyright, or right to copy, is not only a right but also a prohibition, one that curbs the ability of anyone else to appropriate or transform anything legally intelligible as some aspect of the substance of a work. In Trilby, Little Billee seems in many ways to realize this principle perfectly. He is completely “original,” creating entirely from himself and appearing not to draw from the conventions, paintings, and texts around him. His works proclaim his origination of them, and thus his ownership, by incorporating his particular “charm,” as “recognizable at a glance” as is his face. This individual personality determines the movement of his work in a closed network of exchange. As the narrator reports, when Little Billee debuted his most famous painting, “it was sold three times over on the morning of the private view, the third time for a thousand pounds—just five times for what he got for it himself,” and it “sold only last year at Christie’s (more than thirtysix years after it was painted) for three thousand pounds” (T, 208). The narrator summons the market to prove Little Billee’s genius, but in doing so proves the essential market function of genius as a principle of private property. Trilby’s entry into the studio, however, poses a challenge to the individualization of art, a challenge first worked out in relation to the lesser painters.

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A lifelong habitué of both the street and the studio, Trilby exceeds the three sheltered painters in knowledge of Parisian life and art. Moreover, as an artist’s model, she is something of an artist herself, whose poses and props, as we learn, are her own creations. As she grows close to the three English painters, she puts her knowledge and creativity at their service, but the conditions under which they permit this also require her to be defined in terms of labor, class, and gender, simultaneously as a servant and a sweetheart, rather than as a collaborator in art. She begins her relationship with them, however, by asserting her own aesthetic authority. On her first appearance in the novel, she offers her knowledge freely, immediately criticizing Taffy’s work in progress, a “realist” piece depicting a ragpicker: “‘That chiffoinnier’s basket isn’t hitched high enough,’ she remarked. ‘How could he tap his pick against the rim and make the rag fall into it if it’s hitched only half-way up his back? And he’s got the wrong sabots, and the wrong lantern; it’s all wrong’” (T, 24). Throughout the novel Taffy’s realism is treated with gentle irony: instead of attempting to follow the realist injunction to study and transparently represent a reality, Taffy bases his paintings on clichéd and conventionalized realist motifs, such as the suicidal seamstress and the ragpicker. In contrast to Little Billee, who “looked at Taffy’s realisms (for Taffy was a realist) in silence” (T, 10), Trilby intervenes, measuring his painting against the aesthetic ambitions he proclaims. Trilby’s criticisms, however, will not be tolerated. Taffy replies indignantly to her criticism: “‘Dear me!’ said Taffy, turning very red; ‘you seem to know a lot about it. It’s a pity you don’t paint, yourself ’” (T, 24). His response installs a hierarchical distinction between the knowledge of a painter and that of a laborer, a distinction not necessarily validated by his realist commitments. Trilby allows his distinction between artists and laborers to determine her conduct and speech. Having been rebuked for inappropriately speaking up, she cultivates her position in the three artists’ studio through self-censorship: “She knew when to talk and when to laugh and when to hold her tongue” (T, 89). She also vigilantly monitors the men’s responses to her: “The slightest look of gravity or boredom on one of those three faces, and she made herself scarce at once” (T, 87). As she submits her expressivity to their pleasure, she also undertakes the labor that facilitates the men’s painting. Before they meet Trilby, the painters do their own cooking and housekeeping, activities associated with the men’s temporary bohemianism. When Trilby arrives on the scene, however, they discover that “she was a better saladist than Taffy, a better cook than the Laird,

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a better caterer than Little Billee” (T, 90). When the three men performed these household tasks, they were not hierarchized by class or gender but signified a blissful masculine domesticity and cheerful bohemian cooperation. Although Trilby has lived her entire life in the bohemian Latin Quarter, her entrance into their lives instates a conventional division of labor by class and gender, as she assumes the work that was undoubtedly performed by female servants in the men’s conventional English homes. She meets no rebuke when she runs out to “fetch the food and cook it, and lay the cloth, and even make the salad” (T, 89–90), as she did when she offered criticism of Taffy’s painting. The illustration that accompanies this scene, drawn by Du Maurier and published in both the Harper’s serialization and the subsequent book form of Trilby, makes a fine counterpoint to the narrator’s claim that “on these occasions her tremulous happiness was so immense that it would be quite pathetic to see” (T, 90). In the illustration Trilby stands rather forlornly as she works over the stove in the foreground, while the men turn their backs to her and her labor as they paint their canvases. She is dressed like a female servant, rather than in the masculine clothing that she wore when she first entered their studio. Archly titled “Cuisine Bourgeoise en Bohème,,” the illustration shows the disintegration of bohemian myths of artistic production in the novel. While bohemia is usually understood as a classless social form, if only provisionally and contingently so, the illustration shows how a classed and gendered division of labor allows the labor of art to happen. Freed from the tasks of daily life maintenance (“she darned their socks and mended their clothes, and got all their washing done properly and cheaply” [T, 88]), the men have more time to paint.16 Trilby provides them not only with the time to paint, but also with the images to paint. She modeled for each of the three paintings shown in the illustration, and she also gathered and crafted the props: “She procured stuffs for them at cost price, as it seemed, and made them into draperies and female garments of any kind that was wanted, and sat in them” (T, 72). By gathering materials and posing, Trilby prevents the sort of errors she criticized in Taffy’s earlier paintings. She does not have to tell them that they got it “all wrong”; they get it all right because she gets it all right. But although she uses props and her body to represent the subjects the men want to paint, her work of representation never seems to count as collaboration in the making of highly valued art. To be sure, conceptualizing her as a creative contributor to the paintings would disturb the particular sign of “genius” under which Little Billee, at least, paints. As Françoise Meltzer has argued, “the essentialism un-

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derlying the romantic notion of author rests on the collective exploitation of many for the sake of the illusion of the singular genius, a living figuration of the sovereignty of the subject.”17 To believe that Little Billee is “absolutely original,” it is necessary to forget not only that Trilby’s housework frees him to paint, but also that what he is painting is a copy of a representation created by Trilby when she assembled the props and posed her body. This is not the only kind of forgetting at work here. In the service of differentiating her domestic labor from artistic genius, Trilby’s identity becomes an object of revision, accomplished by a manipulation of memory. The novel persistently asserts Little Billee’s genius but also complicates individual originality by showing the process by which Trilby’s collaboration in his work is coded as service and support, hidden within her status as a sweetheart and a laborer. At the same time, it complicates individuality by showing a complementary process by which Trilby moves from being a highly plural and hybridized subject to being a coherent individual one. If individual identity lies at the basis of the market trope of genius, the novel reconstructs originality not only by suggesting an ambivalently figured social, rather than individual, quality to “works of genius” but also by fissuring individuality itself. Trilby enters their studio as a wildly plural gender, national, and class subject. She is dressed in a combination of men’s and women’s clothing, “clad in the grey overcoat of a French infantry soldier, continued netherwards by a short striped petticoat” (T, 14). She reminds everyone of a boy and indeed makes the narrator long for one with her “voice so rich and deep and full as almost to suggest an incipient tenore robusto; and one felt instinctively that it was a real pity she wasn’t a boy, she would have made such a jolly one” (T, 16). Primarily, though, she confounds the gender binary with a “portentous voice of great volume, and that might almost have belonged to any sex (even an angel’s)” (T, 14). The idiomatic oddity of “any sex” rather than “either sex” already conforms to the novel’s overall pattern of showing doubleness (of genius, of identity, of gender) to be, like individuality, a reduction of even richer pluralities. Like Little Billee with his “almost girlish purity of mind” (T, 9), she suggests not the confusion of two genders so much as the possible taxonomy of many genders. In terms of class she is also all over the map: she is an artists’ model and a grisette but, as Little Billee speculates, also “quite a lady” (T, 25). Her speech holds multiple national inflections, as she addresses the painters “in English, with an accent half Scotch and certain French intonations” (T, 16). Within the novel Trilby’s hybrid speech functions as a residue of history. In

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particular, her family history encodes the history of internal British colonialism. Trilby’s father was a genteel but dissolute Anglican minister from Dublin whose Irish name, Patrick O’Farrell, goes so far as to start with the name of the patron saint of Ireland, alluding to one of England’s longest-standing relations of imperial domination. The history of Trilby’s mother even more obviously records the intimate violence of empire and the subsumption of different populations into “Englishness.” A “most beautiful Highland lassie of low degree” (T, 52) and an expatriate barmaid in Paris, she owes her parentage directly to English military presence in Scotland, as Trilby explains: “Her mother was the daughter of a boatman on Loch Ness . . . but her father was the Honourable Colonel Desmond. He was related to all sorts of great people in England and Ireland. He behaved very badly to my grandmother and to poor mamma—his own daughter! deserted them both!” (T, 401). The asymmetrical relationship of Trilby’s maternal grandparents condenses the history of internal English colonial domination in Trilby’s genealogy. Her only claim to ethnic “Englishness” is her maternal grandfather, whose exploitation of her maternal grandmother Trilby directly links to his military status and, by extension, to the history of military and imperial relations between England and its subject territories. The character of the Laird, in a more subtle way, makes the same point; his name and accent announce his Scottishness, while the narrative exhibits the extent to which the discourses of empire conflated “Britishness” and “Englishness” by constantly including him in the collectivity of “the three English painters.”18 In a more explicit way, Trilby’s hybridity has a historical and political function. However charming, her combination of features is no mere celebratory combination of disparate elements; it displays dominations staged on the grounds of gender, class, and colonialism. Trilby’s integration into the studio as a laborer rather than an artist, however, is accompanied by the development of her “Englishness” and femininity.19 The three painters, in essence, train her to become English at the expense of the memory of her hybrid nationality. The first step in this training is to reduce her plural nationality to two modalities, English and French. After Trilby enmeshes herself in the household and daily lives of the three painters, the narrator paints a very different portrait of national and gender hybridity in her speech than he did at her introduction, noting that “Trilby speaking English and Trilby speaking French were two different beings. Trilby’s English was more or less that of her father, a highly-educated man” (T, 92). The narrator’s account of her English has changed from his earlier claim that she speaks English with an “accent half Scotch and certain French intona-

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tions.” Her mother’s Scottish accent disappears from the narrator’s account of Trilby’s use of English, and her French becomes the repository of what gets excluded from her cleansed and contingently coherent English personality: “Trilby’s French was that of the Quartier Latin—droll, slangy, piquant, quaint, picturesque—quite the reverse of ungainly, but in which there was scarcely a turn of phrase that would not stamp the speaker as being hopelessly, emphatically ‘no lady!’” (T, 92). At this narrative juncture the split alignment of Trilby’s class, gender, and national status (French versus English) is presented as if it had been fully formed from her first entrance into the three painters’ studio. Splitting her in two, that is, produces a narrative amnesia about the hybridized identity that characterized her introduction. Her doubleness represents a reduction and management of her rich plurality of possible subject positions marked by multiple differences. At this point the narrative appears completely complicit with this reduction and the depoliticization it sponsors. The “different being” who is “Trilby speaking English” grows under the pedagogy of the three English painters, and her French personality withers away. Trilby herself pursues this pedagogy energetically: “In the first place, [the painters] were English, and she loved to hear her mother-tongue and speak it” (T, 86). Her metaphor here reveals the structure of forgetting that is at work in the cultivation of her Englishness. The figure of speech “mothertongue” becomes a revisionist history, substituting “English” for Trilby’s Highland Scots mother. In essence, her mother is forgotten as her mother tongue develops. A strategic amnesia detaches Trilby from aspects of selfhood that stand between her and the “different being” she becomes. Trilby attests to the manner in which this forgetting produces the effect of subjectivity when she declares in a letter to Taffy, “You have changed me into another person—you and Sandy [the Laird] and Little Billee” (T, 193). Through Trilby’s reduction from a hybrid figure to a double one, the novel’s reorganization of genius becomes affixed to contemporary psychology. In terms intelligible to the late nineteenth-century reading public, Trilby becomes a “double consciousness” or “double personality.” As Ian Hacking documents, double consciousness was consolidated as a medical diagnosis in the mid- and late nineteenth century, a development that originated in Euro-American medical thinking but which had a certain popular appeal as a subject. Memory, as Hacking relates, became integral to the concept of doubling after the French physician Eugène Azam’s famous 1875 case of Felida X, which was covered not only in French professional journals but also in the general press in England and Europe.20 Under the model of double per-

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sonality, discrete memories in a single body became associated with discrete personalities. In the United States, William James adopted this conception; as James explains, “Alterations of memory are either losses or false recollections. In either case, the me is changed.”21 Following from this premise, James explains double personality: “The phenomenon of alternating personality in its simplest phases seems based on lapses of memory.”22 Each personality, that is, becomes discrete by losing the memory of the other. In the case of Trilby in the first part of the novel, her double personality—the Trilby speaking French and the Trilby speaking English—already constitutes a kind of memory loss, where her doubleness takes the place of her complex hybridity and her French half absorbs her disruptive elements. The growing dominance, then, of her English personality accomplishes the “forgetting” of her French side. Her doubleness is the paradoxical route to full individuation.23 The first half of Trilby, then, charts how the individuation of the subject operates across the overlapping fields of artistic production, the market, historical knowledge, and the subject. The concept of originality as a means for securing property in intellectual or artistic works and establishing their ownership depends on a certain clear and discernible point of origin in an individual human subject. The genealogy of the identity in Trilby suggests how fully that subjectivity’s intelligibility and coherence rely on the subordination of the fields of difference—national, ethnic, sexual, gendered, and classed. Trilby’s education in the studio demonstrates a process of refinement through which aspects of her initially plural and seemingly chaotic subjectivity are segmented away from her through a process of linguistic compartmentalization and a simultaneously psychological (for her) and narrative (for us) process of forgetting. Her education exposes the means by which both she and the men achieve simplified identities. In addition, while her identity has no clear purpose and destination beyond its function in their small community (the men wonder what will happen to her after they leave Paris now that they have transformed her from the polymorphous and resourceful character she used to be into an honorary English maiden), Little Billee can deploy himself as an English genius and the genesis of Englishness, whose paintings, “essentially English,” achieve their national representativity through their origin in his coherent and unmarked personality. Training Trilby secures the boundaries of the individual subject as the primary unit of any originary economy. Yet even as they refine Trilby’s personality into two sides and then repress the unruly one to produce her English self, she retains an aura of latent plurality, expressed most eloquently in her quaint euphemism for nude model-

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ing, which she calls posing “in the altogether,” or, as she explains, “l’ensemble, you know—head, hands, and feet—everything” (T, 17). When she poses in “the altogether,” she exposes not only her body but also a hint of her multiplicity, with her various parts all displayed at once as a collection rather than a simplified coherence. She appears as a challenge to the concept of the singular personality not only in this moment but also throughout the narrative. She constantly generates, as the narrator notes, “new incarnation[s] of Trilbyness” (T, 92), so much so that a contemporary critic of the novel’s illustrations complained that “hardly two of Du Maurier’s drawings look like the same woman” (“TP,” 578). Such an ability to appear in new forms, Nina Auerbach has argued, constitutes Trilby’s true gift: “her seemingly boundless capacity for mutability” and “her power of metamorphosis” constitute her mode of creativity.24 In opposition to singular individuality, Trilby’s multiplicity takes over the tropological territory of originality. Where Little Billee’s originality is established by the novel’s expository prose, Trilby’s becomes a performative and figurative embodiment of originality expressed as both plurality and imitation. She forecasts this when she embodies representations on the model throne for her three friends, and she realizes it when she poses for an art class as Ingres’s “La Source.” She embodies the source or origin, but she does so, with characteristic complexity, by copying a painting and providing an occasion for a multitude of painters to copy her. Perhaps it was her ability to be singularly multiple and an imitative origin that impresses Svengali when he first meets the hybrid and plural Trilby and declares her an “original”: “En v’la une orichinale” (T, 25). It will be his mobilization of Trilby’s multiple self that expresses originality’s complex social nature.

Double Consciousness, Collaboration, and the Mass Audience In the second half of the novel Trilby again embodies the metaphor of the source as she sings on a Paris stage. Her voice is “a clear, purling, crystal stream that gurgles and foams and bubbles along over sunlit stones; a wonder, a world’s delight!” (T, 318). The woman onstage embodies the trope of genius, pouring forth without “a sign of effort, of difficulty overcome” (T, 318). Once again Trilby’s embodiment of genius threatens Little Billee’s hold on the category, this time not by exposing the institutions, collaborations,

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and distribution of labor that facilitate the artist’s apparent self-sufficiency, but by disrupting protocols governing the consumption of highly valued art and, more important, by pluralizing the subjectivity of the artist in ways that release aspects of identity repressed in Trilby in the studio scenes. In the novel’s second half the three painters, Trilby, and Svengali all converge on Paris after five years of pursuing separate courses. Trilby and Little Billee had fallen in love, but Little Billee’s family had broken off the affair. Little Billee suffered a nervous breakdown but recovered to become one of the most celebrated painters in England. Taffy and the Laird continued their minor painting careers but have left behind their bohemian lives and drifted into “quite decent society” (T, 216). When they arrive in Paris, they find, to their astonishment, that Trilby has become La Svengali, the extraordinary singer of whom they have heard rumors from every quarter. They are shocked to find her allied with Svengali, whom she has always despised and who is now her conductor and apparently (but not really) her husband. They are even more shocked to find that she can sing, since her singing efforts in their studio had revealed a voice that while “so immense that it seemed to come from all round,” gave the impression that “she could never once have deviated into tune” (T, 22). In Paris, however, she can sing with a power and artistry never before equaled by another singer. When she later comes to England, Svengali dies suddenly at the beginning of her performance, and Trilby immediately loses her ability to sing and, moreover, has no memory of her career. She wastes away and dies a long, lingering, sentimental death, as does Little Billee. Not until twenty years later in the narrative, and many pages later in the coda of the novel, is the mystery of her ability explained. It turns out that after she left Little Billee, she fell into a nervous depression and turned to Svengali for help. Although caring for her in a way she unswervingly characterizes as “kind,” he hypnotized her regularly and taught her hypnotized self to sing. Within the novel La Svengali’s performance devastates the “authorship” of musical composers even more completely than her posing did Little Billee’s originary claims on his paintings. La Svengali’s performance takes over the composer’s work, not only making it her own but also making a mockery of the composer’s claims to ownership. During a rhapsodic description of La Svengali’s rendition of Chopin’s “Impromptu,” the narrator pauses to concede that “Chopin, it is true, may have meant something quite different” (T, 318). The “Impromptu,” whose name already implies spontaneous composition rather than faithfulness to a score, detaches from its origins in Chopin. La Svengali usurps Chopin’s proprietorship of the “Impromptu.” Her perfor-

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mance seems to ask, the narrator notes, “See! what does the composer count for?” (T, 310). The most visible and melodramatically saturated space of authorship’s ambiguation, however, is in the fragmented person of Trilby and in her relation to Svengali. It becomes impossible to tell who—Trilby or Svengali—produces the music. As a minor character, Gecko, finally explains, “There were two Trilbys. There was the Trilby you knew, who could not sing one single note in tune,” and there was “an unconscious Trilby of marble, who could produce wonderful sounds” (T, 440, 441, emphasis in original). This sort of splitting of Trilby might not pose any problem for an originary economy grounded in the individual artist if we could fully believe Gecko’s representation of the two Trilbys. Gecko claims that Trilby the singer was a mere cipher: “That Trilby was just a singing-machine—an organ to play upon—an instrument of music . . . just the unconscious voice that Svengali sang with” (T, 441). Gecko’s metaphors remove Trilby from collaboration, just as the painters did in the studio. Gecko’s manner of excising Trilby from the originary economy, though, is far from satisfying. The novel, on its own terms and in conjunction with contemporary expert and popular discourses on hypnotism and double consciousness, muddies the division Gecko asserts between the Trilby the painters knew and Trilby the “singing machine.” Most recent critics of the novel read Svengali’s hypnosis of Trilby as a complete usurpation of her will and personality.25 The novel gives some basis for this. Characters who have met La Svengali after a performance describe her as an automaton who can speak only a few stock phrases in Svengali’s primary language, German: “all she can say is ‘ja wohl’ or ‘doch,’ or ‘nein,’ or ‘soh!’ not a word of English or French or Italian” (T, 248). The third-party view of her, however, is contravened at other points. Elsewhere, La Svengali exhibits more complex agentive and collaborative behavior. She possesses autonomous speech and in French, the language of the identity she learned to forget as she cultivated her Englishness. In Trilby’s dying moments, for instance, she becomes La Svengali when she sees a photograph of Svengali. Imagining herself onstage, she begins to speak: “Encore une fois? bon! je veux bien! avec la voix blanche alors, n’est-ce pas?” (T, 417). Translated in full, she says, “Once again? Very well, I would certainly like to. With a pure voice, like that? And then sink down to the middle register. And not too quick at the beginning! Give the beat clearly, Svengali—so that I can see it well—for it’s night already! That’s it! Come on Gecko, give me my

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note!”26 Her speech here suggests collaboration and participation, rather than mechanical passivity. She expresses her pleasure (“I would certainly like to”) and directs Svengali and Gecko (“Give the beat clearly,” “Come on Gecko, give me my note”).27 In a more troubling scene, she disputes with Svengali. During a rehearsal Svengali becomes frustrated with her performance and strikes her knuckles with his baton. Not only is her performance incompletely under his control, but so are her actions and speech: “and she fell on her knees, weeping and crying out: ‘Oh! oh! Svengali! ne me battez pas, mon ami—je fais tout ce que je peux!’” (T, 357). Translated into English, she says, “don’t hit me, my friend, I’m doing all I can!”28 Her response, which Gecko witnesses, belies his claim that Svengali could “make her do whatever he liked. . . . you might have run a red-hot needle into her and she would not have felt it” (T, 441, ellipsis in original). As pathetic as her plea might be, it proves that she can make a plea on her own behalf and against the actions of Svengali, and that she can own her effort: “je fais tout ce que je peux!” Trilby’s activity and self-assertion in her altered state resonate with contemporary medical models of how agency operated under conditions of hypnosis-induced double personality. A great deal of ambiguity flourished around the question of the hypnotized subject’s agency—did a hypnotized person operate as a cipher or was a degree of autonomous agency preserved in trance states?29 Unable to resolve such questions, turn-of-the-century mental science instead kept them alive. Through their interlinked models of double personality, hypnotism, and other altered states, physicians and scientists conceived of the mind as complex, porous, and mutable, a conception that channeled anxieties about individual agency but also provided a new vocabulary for human mental action beyond any unproblematic understandings of self-determination and conscious agency. Summarizing developments in French, British, and American psychology, William James’s interpretation of the operation of suggestion on hypnotized persons puts it in terms that would preserve Trilby as a collaborator in the production of her performance: “It is unfair, however, to say that in these cases the subject is a pure puppet with no spontaneity. His spontaneity is certainly not in abeyance so far as things go which are harmoniously associated with the suggestion given him. He takes his text from the operator; but he may amplify and develop it enormously as he acts it out.”30 According to this model, suggestion exerts nothing like a totalizing control; it emerges instead as an analogue to a script or musical score, which the actor, singer, or musician transforms through performance. James’s model would reinstate the per-

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former as the mediating term that Gecko erases when he likens Trilby to a mere instrument. From the perspective being developed here, however, what is most striking about mesmerism in these later scenes is not how Trilby cannot remember La Svengali, but how La Svengali remembers aspects of Trilby’s personality that were “forgotten” in the early studio scenes. During and after her stint as La Svengali, Trilby recovers her ability to speak French. She speaks most of her lines as La Svengali in French, and when Trilby reunites with the English painters after Svengali’s death, she mixes her languages as she did before they groomed her, suggesting how incompletely the English side they cultivated had taken hold: “Ah! j’aime tant ca—c’est le ciel! I wonder I’ve got a word of English left!” (T, 371). La Svengali, it would seem, reanimates unruly aspects of Trilby that were subjected to amnesia in the studio section of the novel, and on their return they express her resentment toward her old friends. When, for instance, Little Billee sees Svengali and La Svengali in the street, he “caught Svengali’s eye, and saw him speak to [Trilby]. She turned her head and looked at him standing there—they both did. Little Billee bowed. She stared at him with a cold stare of disdain, and cut him dead—so did Svengali. And as they passed he heard them both snigger—she with a little high-pitched flippant snigger worthy of a London barmaid” (T, 341). The convention of the “cut,” Karen Halttunen explains, functioned to secure the boundaries of polite society.31 Cutting protected hereditary polite elites from social incursion by the rising commercial classes, who began to equal or surpass them in wealth. Monsieur and Madame Svengali display their wealth vulgarly enough here: “he with his broad-brimmed felt sombrero over his long black curls, wrapped in costly furs, smoking his big cigar of the Havana. By his side La Svengali—also in sables” (T, 339–40). They appear to be exactly the sort of people the cut was invented to insult: people who display their wealth in an obvious bid for status but who have not mastered the refined display of elites who take their status for granted. To turn “the cut” on Little Billee, however, is not only to pilfer elite ritual for their own satisfaction; it is also to put the solidity of identity into question. A cut, in other words, paradoxically recognizes the recipient as unrecognizable. The paradox redounds on the cutter, as well, who experiences an altered consciousness, as William James notes when he likens the “cut” to a trance state of suggestion that causes “an active counting out and positive exclusion of certain objects. It is as when one ‘cuts’ an acquaintance.” In such an occur-

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rence, James continues, “the ignored elements are preserved in a split-off portion of the subjects’ consciousness which can be tapped in certain ways, and made to give an account of itself.”32 The sniggering part of Trilby responds to the “ignored element” of Little Billee, and lest that sniggering part be entirely confused with Svengali’s will, it sounds “worthy of a London barmaid.” That is, Trilby’s laugh reanimates the memory of her mother, the lower-class, Scotch-English barmaid. The split-off portion of Trilby’s consciousness preserves her mother’s vocal legacy and turns it on Little Billee. Trilby makes explicit the relationship between cutting and her fragmented self when Little Billee asks her waking personality to account for the cut: “You’re dreaming, dear Little Billee—you’re taking me for somebody else; and as for my cutting you—why, I’d sooner cut myself—into little pieces!” (374). Indeed, her fragmentation precedes the cut and allows her to be both herself and “somebody else.”33 Observing this preservation is not the same as celebrating Svengali’s hypnosis of Trilby. His mesmeric power violates her in some obvious ways: it abrogates her control over her body; it disturbs her own project of self-making; and it exploits her vocal labor. The coexistence of repressive and liberating forces at work in the character of Svengali surely accounts for the split reception of the character, both in the 1890s’ response to the novel and in recent criticism. In the mid-1890s some saw Svengali as a sympathetic character, the real tragic hero of Trilby, while others saw him as an unmitigated monster.34 The former reading gained ground in the theatrical version of Trilby, which made him smarter, funnier, and more central to the action, and in the 1931 U.S. film version, in which John Barrymore played Svengali with a hammy grandeur, lingering over the pathos of his knowledge that his control over Trilby created only a “factitious” love for him in her.35 Recent critical readings are also split between seeing Svengali as a sympathetic character and as an undiluted anti-Semitic stereotype.36 Sarah Gracombe persuasively locates such split readings in Du Maurier’s construction of Svengali, which she claims expresses a broader British ambivalence about the figure of the Jew in the 1890s: the hope that the Jew promised to inject a needed dose of culture into a stultifying English provincialism but also the fear of his threat to the racial and cultural integrity of the nation. As persuasive as this account is, we might also look to the profound, structural ambivalences present in the genius discourse that this novel both subverts and exploits. So far we have seen the novel to assail the function of the genius trope in individualizing art and fiction, but the concept of genius

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also operates in the opposite fashion, undermining individualization. As we saw in Chapter 1’s discussion of genius and public speaking, genius ambiguates proprietorship, as in Emerson’s formulation: “It is my own, and It is not my own.”37 A work of genius, by this account, appears to its maker to be both intimately owned and completely alien. In addition, the Euro-American context of the 1890s opens yet another threshold of contradiction in the genius trope, one defined by the increasing association between genius and degeneration. The anti-Semitic characterization of Svengali in Trilby places him firmly within the discourse on degeneration, not only by lingering over his weak body but also by giving him such personality traits as megalomania, greed, a propensity for dirtiness, and especially genius. As a symptom of degeneration, however, genius exhibited an ambivalent structure, as defined in the psychobiological rhetoric of Cesare Lombroso’s famous book, The Man of Genius (1889; English translation, 1891). Like Max Nordau, Lombroso defined genius as a variety of degeneration; yet he also saw that degeneration to act in the service of evolution. The genius, according to an economy of equilibrium, slides backward in some areas in order to move forward in others; as Lombroso put it, “the phenomena of atavistic retrogression do not always indicate true degradation, but . . . very often they are simply a compensation for considerable development and progress accomplished in other areas.”38 Svengali realizes this principle. His musical genius is so powerful that “there was nothing so humble, so base even, but what his magic could transform it into the rarest beauty without altering a note” (T, 57). His genius achieves this by destroying the rest of his personality: “Whatever of heart or conscience— pity, love, tenderness, manliness, courage, reverence, charity—endowed him at his birth had been swallowed up by this one faculty, and nothing of them was left for the common uses of life” (T, 57). In the service of development in one area, everything else withers. Trilby, as well, can be located on this temporal scale, though her genius appears less costly. As Lawrence Birken notes, Victorian science associated evolution with differentiation; as organisms evolved, they became progressively more differentiated. This principle interlocked with Victorian sexual ideology, so that the extreme differentiation of men and women in bourgeois culture was seen to express the height of human evolution.39 In this light Trilby’s hybrid state looks like primitiveness and her differentiation to English femininity looks like evolution. Svengali’s hypnosis of her, then, undoes this evolutionary work. Indeed, in her incarnation as La Svengali she exhibits several of the signs of degeneration that Lombroso links with genius: somnam-

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bulism, inspiration, double personality, and amnesia.40 His hypnosis sets in motion a kind of degeneration, reanimating parts of her that were subject to forgetting in the process of refinement. By that same token, La Svengali’s singing hypnotizes the members of her audience, who “fall beneath the spell” (T, 310) of her voice, in turn releasing suppressed elements of their personalities and sliding temporally backward. Witness, for instance, her effect on Little Billee. As Little Billee developed as an artist, he lost intellectual and emotional abilities that interfered with his singular genius. When he woke one morning after a drunken night out with his friends, he noticed that he had lost his ability to remember past sensations and emotions with absolute clarity. Later, after Trilby leaves him and he suffers his nervous breakdown, he discovers that he has lost his ability to love. When he falls under the spell of La Svengali’s voice, however, “something melted in his brain, and all his long-lost power of loving came back with a rush” (T, 309). Recovering his lost faculties, he discovers that “he was himself again at last, after five years, and wide awake; and he owed it all to Trilby” (T, 322). Likewise the entire audience feels returned to plentitudinous selfhood; as the narrator observes, when listening to La Svengali, “the dream of it all came over you for a second or two—a revelation of some impossible golden age—priceless—never to be forgotten” (T, 308). Her effect might be intelligible in psychoanalytic terms as a return to the plentitude of the maternal body, as when the narrator notes that her voice is “like a broad heavenly smile of universal motherhood turned into sound” (T, 308). As a maternal cipher, La Svengali’s song resurrects the body, its needs, the undifferentiated psyche of the infant, and the sense of abundance inherent in the infant’s anteriority to mature, socialized subjectivity, with its self-alienation and necessarily repressive structure. Yet at the same time that La Svengali’s voice offers the fullness of “universal motherhood,” it also encodes the political genealogy associated with Trilby’s own particular mother. The release of suppressed faculties, then, restores not only what we might think of as the universal substance of the subject that is lost through the inevitably necessary process of psychological development, but also histories, knowledge, experiences, and capacities that are lost through the refinement of identity into its major categories. The release of these repressed or dissociated fragments of subjectivity in Trilby does not open up a recognizably political horizon, where their claims might be articulated, asserted, and fought for. Rather, Trilby’s galvanization of dissociated elements plays itself out in a kind of spontaneous and unmediated

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culture of consumption in which her listeners drink her in and rain goods upon her. Early in her career, a count hears her singing on the street and brings her home to entertain his friends: “all the fellows went mad and gave her their watches and diamond studs and gold scarf-pins. . . . I was as mad as the rest” (T, 250), a witness reports, shocked at his own self-abandonment. A German composer similarly reports seeing her at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, where the women went mad, pulled off their diamonds and pearls and gave them to La Svengali (T, 249). Her audience is robbed of its thrift, its self-containment, as it spontaneously pours out wealth without the mediations of the money economy or the intervening hand of corporate tie-ups. Amid this frenzy, the “thrift with discourses and money,” the privileged moment of individualization that Foucault locates in the figure of the genius, breaks down before the genius of La Svengali. If it breaks down within the novel as a consequence of the multiplicity of the character of Trilby, in the novel’s reception it did so because it turned out that metamorphic properties of the text of Trilby outstripped even those of the novel’s heroine.

Trilby as Intellectual Property The problems that the narrative of Trilby raises for the concept of originality and its function in securing intellectual property were amplified in the novel’s public reception, where the text’s status as property was in conflict with some of the appropriative and improvisational uses that were being made of it. These conflicts display a profound tension between the institution of private property and what we might perceive as some of the more communal and utopian dimensions of a mass culture that distributes texts and discourses widely and cannot predetermine the uses and misuses to which they are put. Contests over Trilby’s status as property, as secured by its origination in the person of George Du Maurier, expose how aesthetics were helping to define the territory of struggle over the proprietary constitution and destiny of mass culture. In a straightforward and legally secured way, Trilby was a piece of private property. Before serialization Harper and Brothers bought the rights to the novel from Du Maurier for ten thousand dollars, an acquisition made practical only a couple of years earlier by the passage of the 1891 copyright law that protected exclusive copyrights on the works of foreign authors.41 The new law caused a major shift in the U.S. publishing industry. Before the law British

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and other foreign works were widely pirated. By allowing major publishing houses to secure the rights to such works, the new law drove cheap publishers out of business, and the popular fiction market quickly fell under the control of the few major firms.42 When Trilby’s astronomical sales proved that Du Maurier had made a grave mistake in selling his book outright, Harper and Brothers made the technically unnecessary but calculated decision to pay him royalties on each copy of the novel sold after January 1895 and to cut him in for a portion of the profits on the theatrical adaptation of the novel. These actions minimized the damage to their reputation that might have come from seeming to profit extravagantly on a book whose elderly and fragile author had received a relative pittance.43 But as much as granting Du Maurier more money than his initial contract allowed may have promoted the reputation of Harper and Brothers as a fairdealing institution, and as much as it may have actually expressed the company’s intention to deal fairly, it also protected the theoretical underpinnings of the publisher’s own property stake in Trilby. Because intellectual property law ties together ownership and originality, the author becomes the point of reference for a work’s status as property. Although Harper and Brothers bought the right to copy the work, the company’s right was still based in Du Maurier’s original proprietorship of his own creation; thus, avoiding the appearance of having cheated Du Maurier out of his profits symbolically reinforced the publisher’s claim to ownership by paying fair respect to Du Maurier’s right and thereby proclaiming its own legitimate right to profit from Trilby. Once again the “author” emerges as a relevant category because, as Paul Edelman has put it, “the relations of production will demand it.”44 Yet the market extension of Trilby also undermined the individual authorship on which it was based. Harper and Brothers licensed Paul M. Potter to adapt the novel for the stage. Dramatizing the novel increased the publisher’s yield from its property in Trilby, but the mere fact of such an adaptation raised questions about the conjunction of originality, conventionally located in a singular author, and ownership. When Trilby is adapted into a play, is it still Trilby and is Du Maurier still its author? In a conventional move one reviewer remarked of the novel, “It is a book that could have been written only by an artist—and illustrated only by the author; it is a book, moreover, in which the man and the style are one” (TRP, 3). This reviewer claimed that Trilby the novel bears witness to its origin in Du Maurier by expressing “the man,” just as Little Billee’s pencil strokes possess “a charm that specially belonged to him” (T, 77). The theatrical adaptation of the novel, however, dis-

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turbed any such transparent identity between man and aesthetic artifact, in the first instance because the play has at least one other author, Paul M. Potter. The breakage between originality and property in the adaptation of Trilby was noted by the theater critic for Godey’s magazine. Agreeing with several other reviewers that the play was better than the book (and therefore intelligibly a different artifact than the book), this critic highlighted both the role of originality in establishing property and the way in which adaptation vexes the issue of originality: “it must not be forgotten, that without Mr. Du Maurier’s novel, Mr. Potter’s play would never have existed. The treasurer of the company has not forgotten this, for Mr. Du Maurier gets the lion’s share of the royalties. And yet the play is hardly more than half his” (“TP,” 571). As the originator of Trilby, Du Maurier got “the lion’s share”; but to what extent did he originate the play? Apparently the answer is, to a very small extent. The critic catalogs how the play differs in plot, characterization, philosophy, and dialogue from the novel; Potter “skimmed the cream off the book, and added an undeniably potent liquor of his own brewing” (“TP,” 571). Svengali’s role, in particular, has changed. While Svengali is a mere “black background” in the novel, “Mr. Potter has pivoted his whole play on Svengali, an archfiend so well constructed that for the time being the audience shivers” (“TP,” 572). Potter has even “given Svengali a dry wit and caustic cleverness at repartee that he lacks in the book” (“TP,” 573). Potter, moreover, seems not only to have imparted his own originality to the play but also to have saved it from the novel’s lack of originality. By changing the manner in which Trilby’s romance with Little Billee is terminated, Potter “relieves the scene of much of its too close resemblance to ‘Camille’” (“TP,” 574). Potter’s own originality, underrecognized in the proprietary status of the play, reveals a flaw in Du Maurier’s claim to the property of Trilby. For this reason among others, the Godey’s critic credits the play to Potter’s “genius”: “Mr. Potter’s skill in realizing the play so strong from a book so undramatic, bears the hall-mark of real genius” (“TP,” 578). The reviewer, however, does not simply replace one compromised author with an original genius; he pluralizes the originary genius of the play, noting that “without actors most happily selected and most ably endowed, the play could not have been the immense success that it is” (“TP,” 578). The play, then, originates not only in Potter’s unique contribution to Du Maurier’s less-than-original text but also in the acts associated with the play’s production—the choosing of the cast—and in the actors who author their performances of Potter’s versions of Du Maurier’s characters. The critic singles out Svengali’s actor Wilton Lack-

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aye, who “has brought such genius to bear on the creation that he has lifted both himself and Svengali to a high and permanent place in stage history” (“TP,” 578). Later that same year the famous British actor Beerbohm Tree copied these acts of “originality” when he bought the British dramatic rights and expanded the role of Svengali, which he played himself, even further.45 If theorists of authorship have emphasized the ways in which the concept of the original author is an effect of relations of production, then in the reception and transmutations of Trilby we see a countertrend: the relations of production ambiguate originality, even in the very act of asserting it. The profits to be made from a play, both from box office receipts and from increased sales of the novel as a result of the play, require a dramatist, a director, and a cast. All of these become intelligible as “authors” not only of the play but also of the expanding text of Trilby, which exists now no longer as a novel whose boundaries are clearly marked but as a play, a set of performances, the public discussion of the permutations of Trilby, and more broadly as an intertextual mass phenomenon. Trilby’s origins and dimensions become volatile, rather than settled, a tendency that is increased by Trilby’s status as intellectual property and the profit to be made from its circulation. Unauthorized appropriations of the novel and the play threatened the proprietary basis of Trilby even more fully, prompting Harper and Brothers to sue to defend their copyright. These legal struggles verified their ownership of the work, grounded in Du Maurier’s authorship, but produced a public spectacle of originality ambiguated. The Critic, for instance, reported that Harper and Brothers threatened to sue a photographer, Elmer Chickering, who sold to magazines pictures he took of a performance of Potter’s Trilby in Boston. The grounds of their complaint was that “as the characters were made up after du Maurier’s drawings, they should regard the sale of any such pictures as an infringement of their copyright” (TRP, 10). The objection by Harper and Brothers was based on the fact that the play incorporated tableaux vivants of illustrations from the book; the play “copied” illustrations, and Chickering created unlicensed copies of those copies by photographing the posed actors. As the Critic reported, “To this Mr. Chickering disagreed, on the ground that the photographs were not copies of any drawings, but of actual scenes on the stage, which any man might sketch” (TRP, 10). Recent case law had secured the photographer’s proprietary right regarding the photographs he produced through a similar analogy between photography and handmade images; using this analogy Chickering asserts himself as an author, rather than a copyist.46

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The arguments of both Harper and Brothers and Chickering are ultimately based in the ideology of authorship, but the fact that they are in conflict reveals the extent to which new technologies, transformations of a text, and the mass culture so eager to circulate Trilby exerted pressure on that very ideology’s proprietary claims. The settlement of Chickering’s conflict with Harper and Brothers further demonstrates this point. Even under the threat of a suit, newspapers were so hungry for photographs of the play that Chickering went ahead and published 160 of them; at the same time the play’s producer “was apparently willing to receive the advertisement their publication would ensure” (TRP, 10). The fait accompli of the photographs’ sale and the obvious interest in publicity by Harper and Brothers thus amounted to a profit motive that trumped the proprietary question. If the proprietary claim by Harper and Brothers was confounded in the novel’s reception, then in the general trend of Trilby’s massification, Du Maurier’s authorship also became a progressively more vexed issue, and one that became the object of public discussion and scrutiny. Trilby, that is, designated a cultural space in which “originality” was questioned, ambiguated, asserted, and contested. When Harper and Brothers sued a Denver theater company for producing an unlicensed version of Trilby, for example, the theater company responded with a recrimination; they claimed that “the book entitled ‘Trilby’ was not originated, invented or written by Du Maurier” (TRP, 10) and that Harper and Brothers therefore had no property right involving it. As reported in the Critic, which reprinted a newspaper account (its own ambiguous practice of originality, sparked by the Trilby craze), the members of the Denver Lyceum Stock company “assert that the title and book of ‘Trilby’ were first published in France in 1820, and afterwards translated and published in English in 1847, and that the title and book have been common property for seventy-five years” (TRP, 10). The theater company lost its suit, which was based on the fact that a French writer named Charles Nodier had published a version of a Scottish fairy tale under the title “Trilby, le Lutin d’Argail” in 1822. As a columnist for the Critic wryly noted, Nodier’s tale “has just one thing in common with du Maurier’s book—the first word of its title.” A U.S. district court judge concurred when he ruled that the theater company had “infringed on the rights of Harper & Bros., and others” (TRP, 10). While Harper and Brothers secured their property right, however, the case revealed that Du Maurier had, in fact, taken the name of his title character from Nodier and, moreover, that Nodier’s tale was, as Nodier wrote, “derived from a preface or note to one of the romances of Sir Walter Scott”

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(TRP, 38).47 This chain of borrowing became part of the public discourse on Trilby and originality; it sparked the republication of Nodier’s tale and encouraged readers and commentators to see a connection between the texts. As one commentator in the Boston Evening Transcript stated the case, “Du Maurier’s ‘Trilby’ is curiously prefigured, in part at least, by Nodier’s. . . . As you go on with Nodier’s story, you love his Trilby more and more, as you do du Maurier’s. . . . You feel a sort of enchantment over you like the hypnotism that you are under in du Maurier’s strange book” (TRP, 38–39). This reader goes beyond listing similarities to suggest that Du Maurier’s book incorporates Nodier’s in a deep way: “It is conceivable that the image of the Frenchman’s haunting fairy dwelt with [Du Maurier] until he resolved to reincarnate the adorable elf in the body of a girl as adorable” (TRP, 39). The interest in the sources of Trilby—in Trilby’s origins—extended in several directions; as another letter reprinted in the Critic remarked, “there seems to be a mania for hunting up the sources of the inspiration of certain authors” (TRP, 41). It was well known that Du Maurier borrowed the name of Little Billee from a ballad by that name written by William Makepeace Thackeray, who was Du Maurier’s friend and mentor at Punch. Du Maurier makes a point of acknowledging this borrowing in the text of the novel by repeating lines from the ballad and, at one point, having Little Billee actually sing it (T, 165). Both this borrowing and that of Trilby’s name ambiguated Du Maurier’s originality enough that defenses of it began to appear. Writing about Trilby’s name, the Boston Evening Transcript clarified that Nodier’s text “is a prefiguring merely, and not a direct suggestion. Whatever du Maurier’s ‘Trilby’ lacks, it isn’t originality!” (TRP, 39). Similarly, writing about “Little Billee,” another correspondent with the Critic warns that “[i]t would be sheer nonsense, of course, to urge against the famous novelist any charge of unacknowledged borrowing in a matter so entirely trivial.” He goes on, though, to suggest that Du Maurier’s debt to Thackeray is really rather significant; Du Maurier “has caught from the great immortal the note of much that is best in his book” (TRP, 35). What, then, is the status of originality? When mourning Du Maurier’s death, Henry James had lamented the damage that the novel’s mass-cultural life had done to his friend, and when he did so, he troped Du Maurier as “La Source”: “What I see certainly is that no such violence of publicity can leave untroubled and unadulterated the sources of the production in which it may have found a pretext.”48 However much the Trilby boom may have had a violent effect on the person of Du Maurier, it also seems that its major action

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was to destroy not only Trilby’s source but also the concept of Trilby’s origin in a single and human source. Publicity’s violence, that is, was directed toward original authorship. The simultaneous assertions of Trilby’s originality and its intertextuality encouraged a new definition of “original genius.” A contributor to the Critic, for instance, wrote that in the “search for sources” for Trilby, “[t]he point is merely a curious one of origins, a little siccatine botanizing, so to speak, on the folia disjecta that have been wonderfully spun by du Maurier’s genius into a fabric of grace and beauty so rare as is this ‘Trilby’” (TRP, 35). Du Maurier’s genius, then, is to turn the folia disjecta, the “scattered pages,” of textual culture into something new, something that maybe is not a book at all but a “fabric” that exceeds the boundaries of the novel’s discrete content. Du Maurier is original insofar as he reuses and re-creates, a premise that, taken to its limit, makes it possible to imagine that his “originality” does not constitute a property claim so much as it does a model for the ways in which unlicensed theater companies, performers, advertisers, parodists, and even readers who improvised their own private riffs on Du Maurier’s book and its reception texts were making their own fabrics from the scattered pages of Trilby. They were engaging, that is, in what Foucault hoped for—the “free circulation, free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.” At the same time the obsessive interest in Du Maurier’s sources and in disputed proprietary claims did more than provide the opportunity to display Trilby’s intertextuality and consider Du Maurier’s indebtedness to other writers; it also served to make Trilby actually more intertextual, because its readership was oriented toward seeing intertextuality and, more important, because the “text”—or “fabric”—of Trilby as a cultural event now included Nodier’s “Trilby,” Thackeray’s “Little Billee,” Potter’s Trilby, Lackaye’s Svengali, Chickering’s photographs, the parodies, the Critic’s volume Trilbyana, the debates about originality, and all other sites of the novel’s reception and reconception. This enlarged text lays claim to a collectivity of authors, none of whom can legally or conventionally lay claim to it. In light of this, the boom created a discourse about the problem of originality and ownership, one that did not go so far as to theorize its own field of possibility but which, at least, showed how the relation between individual originality and property was being put under pressure in a mass culture that reached a vast sea of readers and also created both economic and emotional motives for appropriation. While that pressure may have been most visible in

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profit-motivated disputes over proprietorship that usually ended in the validation of the Harper and Brothers copyright, the obsessive discourse about ownership and its complexities that followed in its wake formed a basis— however fragile, untheorized, and legally irrelevant—for conceiving a social and flexible understanding of “originality” and thus also of a work’s availability to new versions and new uses.

Publicity and the Perils of Double Consciousness At the same time that they opened up these socially utopian possibilities, the forces of appropriation at work in Trilby’s reception carried more troubling implications. In the context of Trilby’s publicity, the doubled consciousness that restores lost faculties, lost memory, and lost knowledge revealed complications. At the point where the concept of the divided mind, so central to Trilby, met mass culture, the flexibility surrounding authorship gave way to an unsettling possibility—that rather than providing a medium of fluid, collective authorship open to the spontaneity of all, publicity, with all of its staked economic interest, has the ability to speak through its subjects by exploiting the mind’s vulnerability to self-dissociation and invasion.49 This danger became apparent when Trilby emerged as an object of dispute not only on the legal plane but also on the psychological plane. Trilby’s origin story is one about intellectual property’s secure association with an identifiable originator. The narrative of Trilby’s genesis that Du Maurier offered the American magazine-reading public rehearses a model of creative individuality that the novel renders archaic. Du Maurier explained to McClure’s magazine that before beginning to write the novel, he offered the plot of Trilby to Henry James, who refused it: “But James would not take it; he said it was too valuable a present, and that I must write the story myself.”50 One point of this story is that the two men display remarkable agency and control where the ownership and transmission of intellectual property are concerned. James’s refusal shimmers with the ethical confidence that there is a special value inherent in the relationship between an individual and his ideas that would be compromised by sharing. James is also utterly confident that he can refuse someone else’s idea, a confidence that the character Trilby certainly would not share and that was becoming increasingly shaky in the late nineteenth century more generally. Trilby’s plot resists transmission for reasons grounded in a vital connection between an idea and its originator.

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The fact that Du Maurier originated the plot obligates him and only him to bring it to fruition: “I must write the story myself.” That a popular magazine such as McClure’s functions as the venue for Du Maurier’s nostalgic recollection of intellectual property returned to its rightful owner, however, gains a certain ironic dimension in light of the problems that mass cultural forms were creating for the idea of a subject’s relation to intellectual property. An April 1895 letter to the Critic, for example, suggests how the psychological discourse on altered states of consciousness, so stunningly portrayed in Trilby, had begun to inflect popular understandings of authorship. A reader offers “students of the occult” an account of “Unconscious Cerebration,” which, as it happens, centers on Trilby. Mimetically, Trilby tends to recur in narratives anxious about the origination and ownership of ideas.51 The reader explains: “I had for some time been planning a short essay on the fads of the day, having in mind the ‘Trilby’ fad, the Napoleon fad, the bicycle fad and so forth. . . . I therefore sat down one day with a clear conscience and wrote what I considered an original and telling article on the subject.”52 This writer, Constance Goddard DuBois, takes care to note that she was not appropriating anyone else’s ideas and that her ideas were “original.” The day after DuBois sent her article “to one of our best monthlies,” however, she bought the June edition of Harper’s and, “turning by chance to the Editor’s Study, I read to my amazed chagrin what would seem to be a parody of my article, a rank plagiarism of my ideas.”53 Fully aware, however, that the published article must have been written before she wrote her piece, DuBois recalls that when visiting a friend she began leafing through the June Harper’s: “Being full of another subject which absorbed me at the time, I took up the magazine and turned its pages casually. . . . Immediately laying it down again, I returned to the former subject of conversation. Now, it is necessary to believe that, without the slightest consciousness of the fact, I had read enough of Mr. Warner’s article to absorb its main idea at a glance, and later on to reproduce it in perfect honesty as my own.”54 While Henry James could consciously refuse a proffered idea, DuBois, in a moment of distraction, essentially absorbs an article and reproduces it as her own. Her confession precisely describes a psychological process that so interested her contemporaries—unconscious mental activity, performed in a dissociated mental state. It is Trilby’s own mode and apparently is widespread. The conception of this sort of mental activity relied on new theories of the mind. The term “unconscious cerebration,” with which either DuBois or the editors of the Critic titled her letter, was of relatively recent vintage, having

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been coined by a physician in 1853 and rapidly taken up for diagnostic and metaphorical purposes inside and outside of his profession.55 The idea that subjects can be unconscious is, of course, much older, but the idea that some mental processes at least resembling those conducted during consciousness could proceed beneath the threshold of consciousness was new. During the commission of her unconscious plagiarism, DuBois claims that she was “full of another subject which absorbed me at the time.” In other words, she was distracted. Distraction, according to the late nineteenthcentury psychologist Alfred Binet, is an ideal state of mind from which to create or access an alternative consciousness. Binet’s method was to have a subject read or be engaged in conversation with a third party, and then “profiting by the state of distraction thus produced, one has only to approach from behind and pronounce some words in a low voice to place himself in relation with the unconscious person. The sentence is not heard by the principal personality, whose mind is elsewhere, but the unconscious person hears it and acts upon it.”56 Once summoned, the “unconscious person” could be cultivated and eventually could participate in autonomous and alert conversation with the psychologist, proving to Binet that the alternative consciousness can attain the status of a fully functional consciousness and not merely a mechanistic manifestation of habit or instinct. The split in consciousness that DuBois developed through distraction is of the kind that Binet and William James thought could be shaped into a second personality with independent thoughts, responses, and memories.57 The late nineteenth-century understanding of subjects’ tendency to split during states of distraction gains new point when we consider how the urban landscape and the sensory experience of mass culture more generally vie for the attention of their subjects. The omnipresence of advertisement, the increase of distracting stimuli, and the proliferation of written materials that accompanied the massification of the press meant that texts of all sorts might float through a reader’s sphere of consciousness, in whatever state of attentiveness or distraction. The intersection between the modern experience of mass publicity and pre-Freudian ideas of altered consciousness opens up the troubling prospect that the mind’s capacity for splitting and self-dissociation makes it possible for subjects not only to unconsciously channel the material that constantly assaults their attentions but, like Constance DuBois, also to mistake that material for their own “originality.” “Originality” becomes, then, the space in which the subject confuses herself with the matter and messages of commodified publicity.

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By this point it should not be surprising that Trilby foresees such a possibility. When Trilby first appears onstage as La Svengali, she has “her thick light brown hair tied behind and flowing all down her back to nearly her knees, like those ladies in hair-dressers’ shops who sit with their backs to the plate-glass window to advertise the merits of some particular hair-wash” (T, 304). She again embodies “La Source,” but this time the message “flowing” from her is to buy a shampoo. Allusions to Trilby in advertisements after the novel’s publication attempted to replicate this effect. At the same time, the parodies that sprang up in the wake of the novel and Paul M. Potter’s play open another window into the perceived connection between Trilby and advertisement. In one such parody, “Frilby: An Operatic Burlesque,” Trilby channels a famous advertisement when Svengali hypnotizes her; instead of singing, or even laughing like a barmaid, she intones, “Have you used Pear’s soap?”58 Thematically her question plays on Svengali’s aversion to bathing, given anti-Semitic significance by his contrast to the hyper-clean Englishmen in the novel and its derivatives. What is striking, however, is not how this joke echoes jokes about Svengali’s dirtiness in the novel and play but the implicit logic of substitution that it assumes. Here, without any need for explanation, Trilby acts as the conduit of advertising; the arrest of her waking personality allows advertising to flow from her as if it were her own invention. No mere blip on the map of parody, the identity between unconscious “originality” and advertising plays out in The True Tale of Trilby Tersely Told, an illustrated advertising pamphlet for Bromo-Seltzer published by Emerson Drug Company in 1895. Referring to the moment in the novel when Svengali hypnotizes Trilby in order to alleviate her headache, this short verse retelling of Trilby depicts the heroine as an unwise consumer: Had she spurned Svengali’s offer When her headache made her sick, And just taken Bromo-Seltzer, ’Twould have cured her just as quick.59 Bromo-Seltzer recommends itself not as the remedy that will keep at bay the threat of an overwhelming and appropriative figure such as Svengali, but as an ersatz Svengali that gives the consumer the powerful benefits of a Svengali without the unpleasant side effects, such as depending on Svengali’s being alive to sustain one’s fame and “power and fervor” (True, 7). The problem

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with Svengali, according to this pamphlet, is not that he gains complete control over Trilby; True Tale describes his relation to Trilby as one that augments her power: “for years he has sustained her” (True, 7). The problem, rather, is that his control is contingent. A corporate rather than a biological entity, Bromo-Seltzer, unlike Svengali, will live indefinitely (indeed, one could buy some today). The pamphlet furthers Bromo-Seltzer’s substitutability for Svengali by offering a sheet-music deal. From precisely the kinds of songs Trilby performs as the apotheosis of genius in the novel, a “selection of 54 popular songs with accompaniments, for Piano and Organ,” customers can choose “any two pieces of the above music,” which “will be sent to any address upon receipt of a two-cent stamp and a wrapper from a ten cent bottle of bromo-seltzer” (True, 15). The more Bromo-Seltzer the consumer buys, the greater her musical repertoire: “Should you desire four pieces, send two stamps and two wrappers, and so on” (True, 15). By so easily and thoroughly substituting Bromo-Seltzer for Svengali, the ad implies that “genius” in the novel was “commodity culture” all along. To be a female genius, in the wake of Trilby, is to speak advertisements with the conviction that they are one’s own originality. Through this association “genius” situates thought, expression, and desire in the realm of property in a new way. It becomes impossible to differentiate “original expression” from the discursive properties that are the lifeblood of the commodified culture of publicity. By absorbing not only the unconscious mind’s association with creativity but also its ability to disturb the concept of intellectual property, the plural consciousness functions not to make authorship collective but to channel the collective discourses of advertising. Originality’s ambiguation provokes erotic cathexes onto the commodity and its discourses that, unconsciously plagiarized, seem like the organic products of the self. If the reception of Trilby discovered the possibility of intersubjective collaborations, malleable texts, and freely circulated discourses, it did so within a nexus that stood ready to preempt these possibilities, absorbing their utopia. Mass publicity shows its ability not to kill the “author” but to proliferate itself through and as the form of authorship, whose ambiguation invites the crowd, like Trilby’s listeners, to feel returned to themselves and to spend.

Chapter 4

Mary Hunter Austin: Genius, Variation, and the Identity Politics of Innovation

I

N Mary Hunter Austin’s A Woman of Genius (1912), the heroine, Olivia Lattimore, reaches a turning point in her relationship with her lover. She is an acclaimed actress, but he wants her to leave the stage, marry him, and become the stepmother to his two daughters. Explaining why she cannot do this, she tells him that she is “two things, a woman and a genius.”1 What could she mean by this? At first glance the fight she is having with him looks almost fatiguingly familiar—marriage and motherhood versus career, privacy versus publicity. The fact that she is trying to decide whether to continue her work onstage or retire into marital domesticity gives ample motivation for reading her odd explanation entirely within these oppositions. Janis Stout, for instance, has called A Woman of Genius Austin’s “most consistently feminist novel” because when it grapples with “the conflict between female independence and romantic satisfaction,” it ultimately sides with independence.2 But Olivia has nothing to say here about whether or not she wants to be independent or whether she values stage acting as work, wage earning, or pleasure. Instead her concern is with categories of being, her perception that she is “two things” that are in a dynamic temporal relation. Had he married her early in life, she tells her lover, she “would have been glad . . . to have kept your house and borne your children” (WOG, 270). This is now no longer “possible”; she “can’t go through with it,” she explains, because “for me the woman has been swamped in the genius. Oh, I don’t say that I’m not a better actress for having tried so long to be merely a woman, for being able even now, to know all that you mean when you say ‘woman’” (WOG, 270). Her struggle here is not only with the logistical or ideological choice between work and domesticity but also with the identity form of “woman” and with

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what the category of “genius” does to it. She begins with the premise that “woman” describes her but incompletely: she is both a woman and a genius. Genius shows the extent to which “woman” can be less than a totalizing category. She moves, however, to construing “woman” not only as something she could be, “merely,” but also as something he says, a category that means something to him (“all that you mean when you say ‘woman’”): namely, that she would “see to it that [his children] brushed their teeth and had hair ribbons to match their clothes” (WOG, 270), which is to say, since she refuses to do these things, that she is not at all what he means when he says “woman.” In foregrounding the categorical issues in this way, Austin’s novel takes part in a larger cultural controversy in which the definition of “woman” and the consequent worlds “women” might inhabit reached expression through emergent models of genius. This controversy was propelled by and at points oriented toward the struggle for women’s access to the vote, for the primary reason that exclusion from the vote gave traumatic salience to “woman” as a category of identity. While hardly an accident, women’s historical exclusion from the vote in the eighteenth century had not been rooted in gender as a monolithic or determining category. Enlightenment-era democratic theorists and architects alike did not have to intentionally exclude women from political membership because they never thought to include them; women were disenfranchised for the same reason that servants, laborers, children, and landless men were: because they were dependents. But the struggle for women’s vote, like other struggles to expand their civil and political rights, made gender coalesce as a category. Arguments both for and against women’s rights from the mid-nineteenth century on were grounded in theories about women’s nature; indeed, it is possible to argue that women got a nature— got to be “women” in the modern sense—in the course of these and related debates.3 Women’s particularity assumed many well-known and familiar facets—orientation toward domesticity and child rearing, emotionalism, intuitiveness, fragility, compassion, and so on—that became over the course of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth (indeed, today) the objects of scientific proof, in addition to being items of philosophical premise and social common sense. Among these many characteristics, women’s ostensible lack of genius assumed particular prominence in the first decades of the twentieth century for two convergent reasons. The first was that genius had become the province of science as much as aesthetics. Drawing heavily on romantic formulations of genius as a kind of exceptionality that was associated with assorted pa-

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thologies (madness, alcoholism, and tuberculosis, to name a few), scientists across the disciplines recast the exceptionality of genius in new terms, as a technical, rather than a figurative, type of deviation. In biological terms, genius was an anomalous variation of the human species; in terms of William James’s psychology, it was a deviation from habitual kinds of thinking; and for population statisticians, genius was an extreme deviation from the average. The development of scientifically evidenced theories of genius gave it pronounced utility for shoring up the conception of gender as an immutable biological fact. At the same time, genius, in its new form as deviation or variability, achieved a special connection to both aesthetic and democratic culture, to the extent that these cultures were imagined to thrive on change and progress but to stagnate under conditions of repetition, imitation, and conservation. Women’s categorical identity was scientifically grounded in their lack of variability and therefore genius, which in turn accounted not only for their irremediable difference but also their necessary marginality to cultural and political innovation. Feminists, including Austin, disputed these ideas as sexual science but embraced the transformative models of culture, politics, and identity formulated through the trope of genius. Austin and other defenders of the existence of female genius saw women to possess transformable identities and therefore to offer as yet unknown and untapped resources for cultural and political innovation. These are the terms that connect Austin’s body of work on genius to the issue of women’s citizenship, that connect, to put it concretely, the novel A Woman of Genius to Austin’s suffrage advocacy and her 1918 citizenship guide for the newly enfranchised women of New York, The Young Woman Citizen. In this moment the struggle for the franchise put a premium on the category of “woman” and trapped feminist debate in the pull between arguments for women’s rights based on women’s ostensible difference from men and those based on their ostensible sameness to them. Feminist conceptions of genius, however, offered ways of complicating identity with an ideal of self-difference—of variability—that Austin’s work galvanized, primarily by using it to radicalize identity as an object of political struggle. By doing so, the discourse on genius in Austin’s work and in the discursive public sphere at large expressed an underlying ideal of democracy and democracy’s culture as transformative domains, where identities and desires could be renegotiated, catalyzed, and brought to life in myriad ways. Though not explicitly or coherently theorized as such, the discourse on genius offered a medium for thinking about, and struggling over, the constitution of political subjectivities

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and models of democracy, and in ways not entirely constrained by particular political goals, such as the vote. If this sounds exactly like something that twenty-first-century critics might like most to hear about early twentieth-century feminism, it is because conceptions of political innovation and the transformability of identity categories such as gender have become central to our own political and theoretical projects. Innovation and transformability define the prospects for progressive political worlds and disrupt the naturalization of identity, and thus the social order conventionally seen to derive from it. Think, for instance, of Hannah Arendt’s definition of politics as a zone of action, where citizens achieve transformation through action and speech, against which she poised the realm of “necessity,” dedicated to reproducing life and tied to the nonnegotiable needs of the body.4 Arendt’s theory has posed problems for feminism, given that the realm of necessity was occupied not only by labor in general but also by women and women’s historical activities in particular. The political theorist Bonnie Honig, however, reinvigorates Arendt’s work for feminism by arguing that it provides a way to understand gender as a transformable “performative production” available to politics.5 We might think as well of the interdisciplinary revolution in thought inaugurated by Judith Butler’s work, in which she not only denaturalized sexual identity categories by seeing them as matters of reiterative performance, but also wrote with eloquence about the project of making the norms that govern gender into “collective sites of continuous political labor.”6 At certain moments the feminist discourse on women’s genius in the early twentieth century offers something like this possibility, given that it seeks to disrupt fixed scientific and popular models of gender. Feminist discussions of female genius rendered female identity as a flexible, malleable construct, one open to intentional innovation in both individual and collective terms. But contests over genius and gender in this era also do something other than harmonize unproblematically with the relatively recent hopes attached to transformational identity. They open up a partial political history of the idea of innovation. The background they provide displays fully how conceptions of innovation and transformability could be used for regressive as well as progressive agendas, for exclusive as well as inclusive formulations of collective political and cultural life. The historical valuation of transformable identity and transformative political life originated in ideological developments that privileged European and Euro-American men as forces of innovation, capable of both conceptual invention as cultural beings and self-abstraction

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and deliberative transformation as political beings. Against such transformability, inert ontologies were defined for women and racial and ethnic others, who were framed as primitive, imitative, culturally stagnant, and biologically atavistic. When early twentieth-century feminists apprehended the political power of innovation as a concept, then, they also attempted to grasp an existing position of privilege, a trend suggesting that our own critical fascination with transformation, performance, and denaturalization needs to scrutinize its historical roots in a privileged and exclusionary construction of political subjectivity. The ultimate drift of the discourse on genius in Austin’s work provides material for initiating this kind of scrutiny. In addition to attaching utopian potential to female genius, Austin’s work exposes how conceptions of genius could serve racialist models of U.S. culture, where the essentialisms of gender were displaced to those of race, a process that was fully complete by the time Austin published her self-help series, Everyman’s Genius, in 1923. The rigidification of race that accompanied the feminist construction—what we must now identify as a white and middle-class feminist construction—of genius blossomed from several intersecting trends. The most obvious was that the achievement of women’s suffrage relieved some of the categorical pressure on gender, making the issue of whether women constituted a coherent political subjectivity an open question rather than a political necessity.7 In Austin’s work in particular, the calcification of race was made possible by the biographical fact that, even given her advocacy for Native Americans in the Southwest, she was politically staked in feminist deconstructions of gender but not in those of race. More generally, though, the science of genius, from which Austin increasingly borrowed in idiosyncratic ways, translated romantic notions of the “genius of a people” into literal hereditary and genetic terms, often organized into racial branches or groupings. In the European discussion, these groupings sometimes yielded finely granulated subtypes of national genius, as in, for instance, Havelock Ellis’s Study of British Genius (1904), which breaks Britishness down first to the historical national groups subsumed into Great Britain—Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and English—and then into regions within each of these.8 Within the United States, however, the discussion revolved more around the consolidation of northern European whiteness as the primary mode of national belonging, and consequently ethnicity and blackness were marked either by a lack of genius or by types of genius distinct from the primary national resource of creative ingenuity. Genius thus served as yet another area for the scientific

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taxonomy of human racial types and therefore the expression of ideologies of race. In historically particular ways, new conceptions of racialized genius intersected with emergent therapeutic models of selfhood and the capitalist economy they often troped. In illuminating such intersections, Austin’s work ultimately exposes the dangers of an insufficiently theorized embrace of innovation and transformation as subjective and political desiderata. That is, her work shows not only the ultimate conceptual limits to the feminist discourse on genius but also the troublesome history integral to the critical valuation of innovation.

Genius and “The Woman Question” A Woman of Genius presents Olivia’s first-person narrative, a Künstlerroman written within the conventions of early twentieth-century autobiography and an obvious precedent for Austin’s later autobiography, Earth’s Horizon (1932). Olivia grows up in a small midwestern town where she is hemmed in by convention and marries early, only to be physically and psychologically debilitated by two difficult pregnancies and the loss of both children. Her performances in amateur theater and later with a down-at-its-heels traveling company confirm her lifelong sense that she has “genius.” After her husband’s sudden death, Olivia is left impoverished and moves to Chicago to make a career on the stage. She struggles, nearly freezing and starving, until an actor of genius recognizes her gift and puts her in touch with a manager who launches her career as a renowned tragic actress. At the height of her fame, she has a failed love affair with a man who wants her to leave the stage. She also wakes up to political activism under the tutelage of her suffragist sister. She marches in support of women’s suffrage and writes her memoir in the feminist hope of finding “ways of making things easier for women who must tread my path of work and loneliness” (WOG, 290). Olivia’s commitments reflect Austin’s own growing involvement with organized feminism and suffrage in the 1910s, when she joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association, lectured and wrote in support of women’s right to vote, and immersed herself in Greenwich Village radical and intellectual circles. Even given this parallel between Olivia’s political consciousness and Austin’s, however, the novel’s explicit engagement with suffragism and women’s rights activism is minimal, suggested at the margins of the narrative and not incorporated into the action of Olivia’s life. The novel’s advocacy lies, rather,

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in its entry into the larger cultural conversation about gender and genius, a conversation in which genius played several interlinked roles: as a marker of sexual difference, as an index of social opportunity, and as a principle of variable identity. On the count of sexual difference, Olivia’s claim to genius at all constitutes part of what William Allen White, writing about A Woman of Genius twenty years after its publication, called the book’s “rather militant feminism in the days when American women were seeking the ballot.”9 In this context the issue of whether or not women were capable of possessing genius at all became key to arguments over what kind of beings women were and what that ontology might have to do with the feminist struggle for women’s full civic and cultural incorporation. As one feminist writer on the “woman question” aptly put it in 1913, “Strange difficulties have been raised on all sides concerning the occurrence of genius among women.”10 In both the popular and scholarly idioms of antifeminism, the stock question “where is your Shakespeare?,” or some variant thereof, functioned as a ready response to feminists’ claims for women’s equality. Feminists felt compelled to answer as if this were not a rhetorical question. As Sylvia Kopald noted a few years later in “Where Are the Women Geniuses?,” her article for the Nation, “Wise feminists today are concentrating their forces upon this theory ”11 Even though genius concerns exceptionality, the theory that women were incapable of it was used to establish essential and insurmountable sexual difference. The theory of women’s incapacity for genius emerged at the intersection of several different conversations. Crossing the generic, methodological, and conceptual boundaries of the sciences, aesthetic philosophy, and the “commonsense” conventions of gender, participants nonetheless concurred that the archives of history and the contemporary context evidenced a much greater number of men than women acclaimed to be geniuses. Why would this observation matter so much? Given that women’s rights advocates in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries struggled for the urgent necessities of citizenship and human value—livable wages, rights to property, reformed marriage laws, protection from violence, fuller cultural inclusion, votes, and basic civil rights—it might seem odd that the issue of women’s capacity for “genius” could register as remotely important. But it did, because the issue went to the core ambiguities that defined sexual difference in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Controversies over women’s status stationed genius in a historically specific moment of debate over nature or nurture. For some, the apparent scarcity of female geniuses begged the question of eternal and insurmountable sexual difference, under-

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stood as either a moral or a biological problem. For others, it implied the need for sociological analyses of the cultural factors that produced this condition. Both of these positions stood on a shifting conceptual ground where at stake were the constitution of the human being and human availability to the constant newness, and action required by a convincingly democratic political and social life. For those who wanted to argue that “women” could be understood to constitute a coherent, eternal category immutably opposed to “men,” the concept of genius had particular polemical utility. The reason for this was that the romantic heritage had conferred on genius an ideological ahistoricism that made it seem to burst ex nihilo into the mind and into the scene of culture without preparation or precedent. In this formulation, “genius” derives its power from instinct rather than learning; it springs spontaneously through a person rather than being transmitted to that person culturally. Genius ruptures convention; it is thought to realize itself through its opposition to social strictures or material deprivation. This quality made genius a trope for radical social innovation in mid- and late nineteenth-century political discourse.12 In early twentieth-century contests over gender, however, the opposition between the spontaneity of genius and the continuity of social context was summoned to naturalize women’s marginality as cultural producers and public participants. Genius, in other words, became a quality that rendered social context irrelevant. As Francis Galton, the British eugenicist and cousin of Charles Darwin, put it in his paradigm-setting Hereditary Genius (1869), “Social hindrances cannot impede men of high ability.”13 Men of genius destroy obstacles on the path to eminence, and by this logic, if women do not display genius, they must have none. As Cesare Lombroso wrote in The Man of Genius, “if there had been in women a really great ability in politics, science, &c., it would have shown itself in overcoming the difficulties opposed to it.”14 This sort of argument had enough staying power that a writer for the Yale Review could warm it over a generation and a half later: “The whole history of art proves that genius has always made its own opportunities, though homes and hearts smash in that making.”15 While women’s exclusion from skilled labor or professions requiring training might be explained by reference to their patently inferior educations, their absence from the fields of genius could not be, since genius was defined as a spontaneous, untutored achievement accomplished against the pressure of convention. Thus, Havelock Ellis, dismissing the possibility that systemic misogyny was the reason that he could think of so few female geniuses, asserted that “[i]n the sphere of

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genius, men have to contend with just as many obstacles as women” and that women’s incapacity for genius was a condition “which no higher education can eradicate.”16 As a capacity figured to be outside and in opposition to the culture it sustained, genius functioned as an ideal category through which to assert women’s essential difference. What mattered in this discussion, though, was not only the assertion of essential difference but also the form: new scientific models of genius construed essential difference as a biological fact. To be sure, in arguing that women could not possess genius, scientists rehearsed long-standing conceptions of gendered intelligence, but with an important difference. As discussed in the first chapter of this book, debates on women’s intellect have a history as long as Western philosophy; Aristotle’s distinctions between men’s capacity for abstract, logical reasoning and women’s competence in memory and quick learning (because they were more pliable) set the basic terms for European and later American discussions of the sexed intellect.17 Sexual intellectual difference before the late eighteenth century, however, was more a matter of degree and relative competence than one of species kind, in keeping with what Thomas Laqueur has called the premodern one-sex model, in which women were understood to be “lesser men” rather than people whose gender was opposite from and complementary to men’s.18 While philosophers, perhaps most notably Kant, drew upon the classical characterization of women as apt learners but poor abstract thinkers to claim their incapacity for romantic genius, this philosophical claim did not reach the level of an immutable biological imperative.19 Women’s “genius” existed more as a moral question than an ontological one. The eighteenthcentury British moralist Hannah More, for instance, deplored, rather than disputed, women’s tendency toward genius. Urging that women had a moral duty to forswear genius, she argued that “the most highly endowed women” are bound to fulfill their duties, which are “wholesome for the minds of the most enlightened” as they tend to “the casting down of those ‘high imaginations’ which women of genius are too much tempted to indulge.”20 That is to say, women’s genius constituted an immoral indulgence, a violation of social and divine, rather than organic, imperatives. By the late nineteenth century, following the development of science for over a century, the category of genius had been assimilated to a larger discourse on human diversity that operated according to the logic of species. As the science historian Nancy Leys Stepan has observed: “Starting with the founders of modern biology and anthropology . . . scientists began to apply

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to human beings a zoological concept of species and varieties. The ‘human’ (or humaine) became transformed through scientific investigation into ‘the human species’ and its zoological variations.”21 Scientific classification framed these “zoological variations” as unchangeable aspects of an organism’s being, rather than characteristics malleable to moral or scholastic education. This is the model of the human species that allowed Havelock Ellis, to take but one example, to declare confidently that his work investigated “the natural characters and predispositions which will always inevitably influence the sexual allotment of human activities.”22 It was, he argued, a “zoological fact” that genius “in nearly every department is, undeniably, of more frequent occurrence among men.”23 Echoing this claim, a doctor writing to the New York Times in 1915 claimed that “it is a biological law of nature that bars women from original and epoch-making achievement.”24 Genius then assumed a place within the biological category of secondary sex characteristics. As Alexander Goldenweiser, a prominent anthropologist and former student of Franz Boas, phrased it in the Nation, “it becomes a priori probable that this difference between man and woman constitutes a remote sex characteristic.”25 A woman with genius in these terms is a biological sexual aberration, not a moral trespasser. Feminists, by contrast and not surprisingly, rejected the decontextualizing effect of “genius” and the claims of biological intellectual difference that scientific ideas of genius grounded. Instead they tended to regard both the debate about “female genius” and the apparent scarcity of acknowledged female geniuses as evidence against the culture. They sought to expose and castigate the social factors that would militate against the development and recognition of genius in women. Virginia Woolf did so most famously (and most beautifully) in A Room of One’s Own, but chapters on the socially abnegated genius of women had already become standard in feminist investigations into women’s status. Feminists mounted defenses of women’s raw capacity for genius by summoning examples of original genius in women, disputing scientific data and methodology, and providing sociological analyses of the conditions of women’s lives, noting in particular women’s inferior educations, the demoralizing effects of their subalternity, and their entrapment within the endless round of drudgery that comprised domestic and maternal life. The sociologist Lester Ward, for instance, claimed that no one could argue against women’s capacity for genius until institutions of learning “be opened to woman as freely to man.”26 The suffragist Anna Garlin Spencer likewise emphasized that “nobody can know” whether or not women are capable of

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genius “unless women in general shall have equal opportunity with men in education, in vocational choice, and in social welcome of their best intellectual work for a number of generations,” and she particularly emphasized the longitudinal effects of social exclusion.27 Spencer also condemned the politics of the cultural archive, noting that women “have suffered hasty eclipse for want of adequate mention in the permanent records,” just as she lamented the gendered division of labor, making the common argument that women have been “so submerged by child-bearing and its duties” that they “leave all their poems and stories unwritten.”28 Drawing on the new vocabulary of psychology, another feminist argued in 1925 that women were damaged in their genius because they had internalized a “destructive belief in their own inferiority.”29 In one apt distillation, a feminist contributor to the Nation asserted that “the female geniuses may have been missing not because of an inherent lack in the make-up of the sex, but because of the oppressive, restrictive cultural conditions under which women have been forced to live.”30 Such arguments suffered from a kind of evidentiary disadvantage; their evidence is what is missing. The historical archives are incomplete, the poems are unwritten, and with a few scattered exceptions (most usually George Sand, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and later Madame Curie), the female geniuses are missing. The most they can say for sure about women of genius is that they are unsure, that “nobody can know” whether women have it or, in Lester Ward’s words, that women’s capacity for genius “remains an open question.”31 In A Woman of Genius, Olivia might not know what genius is, but she could not be more certain that she has it—or it her. In a manner, Olivia’s narrative confirms the decontextualizing effect of genius exploited by antifeminists. Her “genius” both drives her and gives her the means to escape household drudgery and other people’s conceptions of her social inferiority, and she succeeds with only the meager training provided by her elocution lessons. Her life, as a romanticist might hope, is what she calls “a breach in the social fabric” (WOG, 6). Yet Olivia’s compulsion to transgress social opposition does not make social conditions fall away in irrelevance; rather, it gives her social knowledge and thus the substance of her narrative. Her genius operates to contextualize rather than decontextualize. As she asks a friend, “how can we find out how the world is made except by falling afoul of it?” (WOG, 291). As a “genius,” she assumes a privileged perspective on the conditions she has had to surmount because in surmounting them she has had to notice them as obstacles.

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The obstacles she faces have explicitly to do with how gender organizes not only material resources and public access but also the ability to imagine possible futures. Olivia’s narrative takes pains to document moments when she discovers the gender codes that limit her capacities for self- and worldmaking because she “runs afoul” of them. Olivia recalls, for instance, that after her father died, her mother idolized her brother, cherishing him as her representative in a world denied to her and elevating his whims to the level of law. While venerating Olivia’s brother, Mrs. Lattimore withholds emotional, financial, and informational resources from her daughter. She reproduces Olivia’s civic abjection (that of all women) by withholding her inheritance because, as she tells her daughter, “Girls get theirs when they are married” (WOG, 47). Olivia wants the money, a small pittance really, as “evidence of my taking rank with my brother as a personage” (WOG, 47–48). It is a “coming of age” (WOG, 47) token denied her in a culture where she cannot come of age, as her mother reminds her by asking, “what in the world would the child do with all that money?” (WOG, 47). She gets the money, as “a concession to my forwardness” (WOG, 48), but her mother denudes it of its symbolism by asking her brother’s permission before turning it over. In retrospect, she considers this a fight conducted by and for her genius, contending that “that was the way the Powers took to provide against the complete submergence of the actress in the young lady, for . . . a portion of it [the money] went to the only technical training I ever had” (WOG, 48). She faces a similar version of enforced scarcity when she later finds that her closest friends refuse to invest money in her career because, as one of them explains, “There’s nothing turns men against a woman so much as to have her always thinking about money” (WOG, 184). Olivia’s path to eminence is impeded by unequal social and economic conditions erected, as she says, “on the ground of sex” (WOG, 47). Fifteen years later Austin continued to put this idea at the core of her feminism, writing in an autobiographical piece for the Nation, “I found plenty of reasons for being a feminist in the injustices and impositions endured by women under the general idea of their intellectual inferiority to men.”32 For Austin and other middle-class feminists, the rhetorical act of asserting female genius constituted much more than a bid to occupy an elite category. It functioned, rather, in two more broadly conceived ways: as an argument with the reification of sexual difference in scientific terms and as an acid test that revealed the inequalities organized by gender. Those inequalities had concrete material forms—more limited access to capital, to education, to social standing—but also operated as obstacles to imagining a future that did not

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simply reproduce the present. Exposing them as socially arbitrary was the first step toward ameliorating them.

Genius and Variation The scientific model of genius against which feminists argued did more than reify gender as an immutable biological fact and reinforce the gendering distribution of resources. As a “sex characteristic” definitive of maleness in scientific models, genius had far different implications than did many other sex-linked characteristics, such as facial hair, or even purely intellectual characteristics associated with maleness, such as rationality, and not simply because genius implied venerated abilities. Scientific models linked the innovative capacity definitive of genius to a larger characteristic of male bodies: the tendency toward variation. The scientific model of genius as an expression of an organic variational tendency had its conceptual roots in romanticism, which saw genius as a self-contradicting exceptionality—the genius was exceptionally universal—and associated genius with extremes of thought, feeling, and personality. Late nineteenth-century science recast this exceptionality as biological anomalousness, psychological changeability, and statistical deviation.33 Genius in these terms originated in a male capacity for self-difference—variable bodies differed from each other and, through time, from themselves. In its biological form, this argument that male bodies were more variable than those of females had its most influential expression in Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). There, Darwin proposed that male organisms of all species tended to vary in their characteristics more than female bodies did.34 Biological science understood “variation” in terms of unforeseeable individual mutation. In the biological model, variation is one of the hazards attending the reproduction of living things. The vast majority of variations can be expected to be disasters, producing damaged or inviable organisms. Yet at the same time, mutation is the basic condition of evolution. Some mutations turn out to confer advantages; they increase an organism’s chances of survival and reproduction and thus pass into the stream of species characteristics. As Havelock Ellis explained, “the greater variability of men, while it produces many brilliant and startling phenomena, also produces a greater proportion of worthless or even harmful deviations.”35 In the binary opposition of sexuality, “the male is the agent of

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variation; the female is the agent of type conservation,” repeating her body in the next generation.36 This model figured males as the driving forces of biological evolution; their tendency to mutation, to be new and different from themselves, was seen to push the process of evolution forward (even as it produced a great and unavoidable number of maladaptive variations). Analogously, masculine biological variation was imagined to be the origin of cultural and social variation and therefore innovation. As Kopald discerned in her feminist article for the Nation, “great social significance is attached to the comparative variability of the sexes, especially in mental achievement  . . . variation had become an advantage and the basis and hope of all progress.”37 For Havelock Ellis, the biological novelty of genius created cultural innovation, allowing him to see an organic basis for the “great men” theory of cultural progress: “in the greater variational tendency of man we are in the presence of a fact that has social and practical consequences of the widest significance, a fact which has affected the whole of our human civilisation. . . . we have to recognise that the existence of the exceptional men who have largely created the lines of our progress is based on natural law.”38 The psychology of William James, which had both scientific authority and wide popular dissemination, had a different model for expressing the variations of genius based on his conception of the neurological mechanisms of the mind, rather than on an evolutionary paradigm. His theory, though, also distinguished between men’s capacity for transformation and women’s stasis, repeating the familiar biological formations of the gendered mind. James saw genius as a force that countermanded one of the major tendencies of the mind: habit. While James saw habit as an often useful mental mechanism that spared the mind effort over unimportant daily tasks and thus freed it for deep thinking, he also saw habit as potentially stultifying because it locked the mind into set patterns of thought. As he writes in his Principles of Psychology: “Hardly any one of us can make new heads easily when fresh experiences come. Most of us grow more and more enslaved to the stock conceptions with which we have once become familiar, and less and less capable of assimilating impressions in any but the old ways.”39 The exception to this general trend is genius: “Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way” (P, 110). In opposition to the repetitions of habit, genius is transformative. It changes the subject—it makes “new heads”—in light of “fresh experiences.” Like biologists, James saw women as essentially less capable than men of these kinds of transformations. James thought that women’s incapacity

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stemmed from what he perceived to be their precocity, the condition that they reach the peak of maturity ahead of men. As he writes of “a young woman of twenty”: “Her likes and dislikes are formed; her opinions, to a great extent, the same that they will be through life. Her character is, in fact, finished in its essentials” (P, 368–69). She is unlikely, that is, to “make new heads”; she becomes “enslaved to stock perceptions” at the very brink of adulthood. By contrast, the character of “a boy of twenty . . . is still gelatinous, uncertain what shape to assume” (P, 369). Such early inchoateness signals his intellectual superiority: “But this absence of prompt tendency in his brain to set into particular modes is the very condition which insures that it shall ultimately become so much more efficient than the woman’s.” James settles intellectual gender difference on the claim that “the masculine brain deals with new and complex matter” in a manner “which the feminine method . . . as it performs within its limits, can vainly hope to cope with” (P, 369). Statistical science devised an analogous model of variation as the rock bottom of intellectual gender dimorphism, this one oriented toward the representation of populations and heritable traits, rather than on the anomalies of Ellis’s biology or the tendencies of James’s mechanistic psychology. Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius first recast the inquiry into genius in terms of statistics. Drawing on the work of the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet, who first transferred the method of statistics from the study of astronomy to that of populations, Galton argued that the mental capacity of a population could be mapped onto a bell curve, in the same manner that had been applied to height, cranial circumference, and other physical qualities. The bell curve provided a new model for understanding differential qualities in human populations. Genius, a stubbornly ineffable quality under romantic paradigms, gained a fixed definition—a spot on the bell curve, a precursor to its modern status as an IQ number—and a reliable rate of probability. Moreover, Galton established that extremely high ability, like extremely low ability, was a deviation from the norm, rather than either the highest rung in a hierarchy of ability or a spontaneous eruption. On the bell curve of statistics, men’s characteristics showed a greater range of deviation from the average and a relatively high level of activity on both the upper and lower margins of the curve. By contrast, as Sylvia Kopald summarized the antifeminist argument, “female intelligence will cluster far more about its average than male.”40 Women, that is, were more average with respect to each other than were men with respect to each other. For Galton, the genius’s deviation was an unambiguously good thing; he

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saw it as a welcome salvation from mediocrity and an argument for natural aristocracy—as the bedrock of his eugenic vision. Within the larger statistical discourse that took hold in the physical and social sciences, however, deviation quickly came to signify deviance, pathology, degeneration, and danger. The “average man” set the new standard for health and well-being. As Ian Hacking documents, before the invention of the concept of the average man, the opposite of health was sickness; this binary was displaced by a new opposition that defined pathology as a deviation from the average, rather than as the absence of healthiness.41 Under the statistical paradigm, genius was linked with renewed vigor to illness and disease, deviation and deviance. The same was true in evolutionary biological discourse. As one writer explained in Current Literature, “Nature . . . hates the genius, just as she hates all variations from the normal when those variations go to an extreme.”42 The Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso perhaps most famously forged the comparison between the qualities of “genius” and the symptoms of mental illness, calling genius “one of the teratological forms of the human mind, a form of insanity.”43 This way of approaching the definition of “genius” was controversial; other writers and scientists disagreed, venerating genius in both romantic and scientific terms. It nevertheless struck a chord, though, with the larger cultural valuation of averageness and suspicion of deviation and was a major theme in discussions of genius. Given the dramas of degeneration and morbidity associated with genius and other deviations, we might expect that women’s “averageness” would have argued for them in some way. Women’s supposed relative safety from the dangers of deviation, mutation, insanity, and degeneration could have been used to establish their competence for civic or national life, even if it had had the deleterious effects of solidifying sexual difference as a statistical and biological fact and, even worse, shoring up the animosity directed so lethally at “deviants” of all kinds. Women’s “averageness” might have given them the appearance of the most representative of people, given the new representivity associated with the average. It could even have implied that social and democratic importance should be accorded to them. But this was emphatically not the case. In both the scientific and social idiom of sexual difference, women’s “averageness” was their deviation, their unexceptionality, their freakishness, by the same logic that the capacity to vary, to be other than average, became through its association with maleness a human norm. As Mary Austin framed the problem in her autobiography, “there was a human norm and it was the average man. Whatever in woman differed from this norm was

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a female weakness, of intelligence, of character, of physique.”44 Women’s “averageness” thus defined their difference from the representative and implicitly male human being and, more to the point, from the comprehensive humanity and progressive force thought to be actualized by men. Organic masculinity perpetuated human self-difference; the difference of women from men was their self-sameness. While male bodies varied across the spectrum of human possibility and blossomed into new kinds, women’s bodies repeated themselves without variation. Women’s lack of the pathology—and gift—of variation described their cultural location, or rather their location outside of culture. While men’s abnormality and difference from each other and their prior selves were thought to move culture progressively forward, women were imagined to be locked in stasis. As Lombroso put it when explaining women’s lack of genius: “Women have often stood in the way of progressive movements. Like children, they are notoriously misoneistic; they preserve ancient habits and customs and religions. In America there are tribes in which women keep alive ancient languages which the men have lost; in Sardinia, Sicily, and some remote valleys of Umbria, many ancient prejudices and pagan rites, perhaps of a prehistoric character—superstitious cures, for instance—are preserved by women.”45 Ellis repeated this point for a wider Anglo-American audience: “From an organic standpoint, therefore, women represent the more stable and conservative element in evolution.  .  .  . In various parts of the world anthropologists have found reason to suppose that the primitive racial elements in the population are more distinctly preserved by the women than by the men.”46 Women’s sameness in their organic and cultural conservativeness is more important here than their cultural or racial differences from each other, even though, at the same time, they become the ideal representatives of these differences since they display their pristine forms. Paradoxically, that is, women under this model are generically the same because they display racial and ethnic differences so well. As the body goes, so goes the mind: “On the psychic side women are more inclined than men to preserve ancient customs and ancient methods of thought.”47 This is to say that culture in and from the minds of women is hardly culture at all; it is as unchanging and repetitive as their bodies, merely an emanation of their inert embodiment that reiterates itself endlessly without ever entering historical time or cultural change. Such a picture of women as conservative and unchangeable biological entities had profound implications for women’s imaginable political iden-

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tity.48 Not only did it confirm the principle of sexual difference as such—and therefore provide persistent obstruction to the success of equality-based arguments—but it also unified the category of woman within the unchanging body it imagined. Joan Scott has observed that the bipolar sexual distinction between men and women suppresses differences within each category and thereby produces gendered identities as monoliths.49 In conceptions of genius grounded in the theory of variation, however, men are defined by infinite internal differences, and only the category of “woman” becomes univocal and unchanging, even as it is racially particular, not as the “eternal feminine” but as a kind of zoological entity. Figured in this way, women are immune to the transformative dimensions of politics. Women are defined as living a condition in which they can be only what they already are and think only what they have already thought, and both their being and their thought are known in advance. Their “difference” is thus not only the different interests and different identities that they might politicize (as advocates of social housekeeping hoped) but more devastatingly, their inability to politicize, because they cannot innovate new conceptions or selves. Feminists understood the ramifications of this position and resisted it. Arguing that women could be geniuses did not simply amount to claiming that women could be “as good as men,” that they could reach the highest levels of cultural prestige. Instead the argument for women’s genius was an argument for plurality rather than uniformity, changeability rather than stasis. One feminist tactic was to claim that women’s invariability was an effect of social coercion. Defending the possibility for women’s genius, the feminist Anna Garlin Spencer, for instance, observed that compulsory and conventional domesticity operates “to suppress in wholesale fashion, and at the outset, all troublesome ‘variations’ in women”; she deplores “the universal social pressure on women to be all alike, and do the same things, and to be content with identical restrictions.”50 The suppression of variation, in this argument, suppresses women’s ability to innovate in the world. An argument for women’s variability, then, was also an argument for, as Floyd Dell declared in the title of his feminist book, “women as world builders.”51 Feminist writing developed the point that women presented a force of varied innovation. The feminist movement embraced Otis Tufton Mason’s Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture, in which he argues that women invented almost every domain of human culture, from design and manufacture to social organization and attitudes. When a woman makes a change in a natural object, Mason claims, she initiates three levels of innovation: that of the artwork; “that of herself in

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the practice of it”; and that “of the universal or public appreciation of art, of what might be called the racial or tribal imagination.”52 Others saw political activity as the galvanizing force of female variation and therefore genius. As one feminist argued, “the woman’s movement heralds the awakening of the imagination of woman,” realized in the “social creativeness” of the prison reformer Katherine Davis and that of the settlement house movement’s driving force, Jane Addams. What these accounts have in common is a vision of political and cultural value based on imagination understood as the capacity for difference—as self-difference and innovation. In the words of the French writer Jean Finot, translated into English and published in the United States in 1913: “Woman is potentially the equal of man. She has no occasion to imitate him, for she, too, has the gift of originality, the gift of invention and discovery. Having again entered public life, she will not always follow man. She will be skilful enough to find ways to outstrip him. She will even go so far as to discover new paths to salvation.”53 Women’s ability to be different, not simply from men but also from their prior selves and from any predecessor, warrants their social and political value. Instead of reiterating itself as an unchanging identity in public, the category of “woman” becomes a field of change and upheaval. Indeed, under these conditions the evidentiary disadvantage about the existence of female genius becomes a political asset; the fact that the form and existence of female genius remain “an open question” (in Lester Ward’s words) becomes itself an occasion for creativity at the levels of identity and social life. Under the sign of “genius,” women’s identity begins to become neither something that needs to disappear in the nimbus of abstraction nor a unified “difference” that can validate itself only by asserting its special values. Instead “woman” and “women” can be undertaken as creative political projects, scenes of struggle rather than acquiescence, and transformation rather than stasis. The narrative of A Woman of Genius enters this struggle by using the trope of genius in order to contest conceptions of women’s essential sameness, self-repetitiveness, and irresistible ontology. Olivia protests a social order in which the conventions of womanhood operate to “make us over into replicas” (WOG, 282). The primary representative of repetitive womanhood in her story is her childhood friend Pauline. We are meant to see, though, that Pauline’s invariability and repetition of femininity are her choice, rather than her irresistible species being. As Olivia reflects, “I doubt now if Pauline ever had an idea or permitted herself a behaviour which was not conditioned by the pattern she had set for herself ” (WOG, 154). Olivia sometimes envies Pauline

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and other women like her, as when, for instance, she imagines the satisfaction of giving herself over to romantic love, of living in a state of sustained worldly ignorance and protection, and of motherhood, even though her own experiences and observations have shown her that womanhood is not necessarily lived in this way. She desires, that is, the state of completeness and self-unity that would come from the conviction that she is totalized under the category of woman. At the same time, though, she undermines the biological and statistical models of women’s sameness by drawing her metaphors of conventional womanhood from the social arena that obsesses her, the stage. As she says of Pauline, “I was so constantly amazed by the celerity and sureness with which she seized on just the attitude or opinion which suited best with the part she had cast herself for as the perfect wife and mother” (WOG, 154). In a sort of eerie anticipation of our own modern theoretical concerns, she calls being a conventional woman, here and elsewhere, a performance. In calling it a performance she has no intention of demeaning it. When, for example, she explains to her lover that she cannot help his children with their hair ribbons, she refuses to trivialize the activity, seeing it rather as an important source of sustenance for its beneficiaries; she tells him, “It is important. . . . I remember to this day the effect on me of my hair ribbons” (WOG, 270, ellipsis hers). She sees performative womanhood as a potentially nourishing and socially valuable modality of action. She makes it clear, however, that such a possibility is consumed by the deleterious work that womanhood now does. What ultimately disturbs her about performative womanhood as it is practiced is that it perpetuates a misogynistic social order that misrepresents itself as nature. She notices, for instance, that Pauline stages “the scene à faire of Henry’s homecoming, made every day to seem the one event for which the household waited, for which, indeed, it took its excuse for being” (WOG, 154). Instead of asserting the importance of life-sustaining activities, Pauline dramatizes their marginality, their vassalage to Henry’s life outside. Domesticity is thus separated from the activities of the world and given what Olivia calls its “complete want of relativity to the purpose of the play or the rest of the company” (WOG, 154). Pauline receives her husband as a natural and social superior, staging his reward and right in her sexuality; she dresses in “one of those garments admirably contrived between the smartness of evening dress and the intimacy of a negligee, in which Evanston ladies of that period were wont to receive their lords” (WOG, 154). Pauline’s performance is both intimate and conventional; its aura of intimacy, moreover, flows from its disavowal of its conventionality. The commodity

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culture of the “garment,” shared by all the Evanston ladies, implies a collectivity that realizes itself in its own effacement. The Evanston ladies live a shared culture that cannot recognize itself as shared. They dramatize privacy, staging their disconnection from each other, their sequestration in privacy, their difference from the economy and the public. They eroticize their subordination to their husbands, rendering a social fact as a natural and intimate fact. The condition that Pauline’s womanliness is a performance might well have made it possible for womanliness to be infinitely plastic, to do some other work besides marking the inert privacy of the home, the family, sexuality, and women themselves, except that domestic womanhood looks like itself only if it seems to be not a performance but a mode of unchanging being. This is how Pauline lives it. This is the attitude Olivia’s lover also wishes her to take, what he means when he says “woman.” Properly performed, domestic femininity would have excluded the possibility of the genius that her lover ultimately finds so inconvenient. In contrast to the performative replication of womanhood, Olivia engages in another mode of performance in which genius offers a resource of selfdifference. Genius, Olivia claims, is a principle of nonidentity: “if I know anything of genius it is wholly extraneous, derived, impersonal, flowing through and by” (WOG, 4). She is its cipher; it is a “revitalizing fluid of which I was for the moment the vase, the cup” (WOG, 6). These are ancient and familiar tropes of genius as a possession, but here they are given new point by Olivia’s protest against the social replication of women as identical and unvarying. In one obvious sense, Olivia intends the image of the “vase, the cup” to diminish her; her point is that in calling herself a genius, she is establishing not the value of herself, per se, but the value of what she holds. At the same time, however, she marks herself not simply as empty but as a space of pure potentiality. In this she distinguishes herself from her friend Sarah, also a successful actress, who always comes away from a performance “as though she had come back from a full meal, with a sense of things accomplished, but I—I came hungry—always!  .  .  . my soul baffled and aching with incompletion” (WOG, 218). Sarah’s “fullness” makes her stage acting yet another instance of invariability. Olivia notes that “Sarah was always wonderful in what I call the static parts, parts all of one mood and consistency” (WOG, 218). This is why Olivia must reach for the statistical idiom when she describes Sarah’s success with parts that are “well within the average taste” (WOG, 218, emphasis mine)—that is, both conventional and undeviating. Olivia’s incompleteness, by contrast, allows her to be constantly varied.

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Her main principle of self-variation—the raw material for her genius—she calls “experience,” invoking a term closely associated with Jamesian psychology and developed in particular ways in Austin’s evolving theories of genius. Recall, for instance, William James’s lament that the habitual mind cannot “make new heads easily when fresh experiences come,” as opposed to the genius, who has “the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.” Austin, who claimed in her autobiography to “have read practically everything that James has written,” embraces this idea, without assimilating (or even acknowledging) James’s contention that women lose their capacity to “make new heads” early in life.54 In Everyman’s Genius, Austin’s guide for cultivating genius, Austin describes the “talent for experiencing” as an indispensable part of the “genius impulse”; it amounts to the “talent for entering into things outside yourself.”55 In A Woman of Genius, the figure moves in the opposite direction, though its effect is the same; “experience” is the means by which things outside yourself enter you. When, for instance, Olivia falls into an artistic rut in her early adulthood, she explains, employing her figure of the “cup”: “I had emptied my cup of its froth of youth, and as yet nothing had touched the profounder experience from which it should be fed and filled again” (WOG, 152). And yet it will; her emptiness is always the opportunity to be filled and transformed, and experience will provide the necessary resources. Experience for Austin, as it should be clear by now, is not a category used to secure the authentic identity of women, as recent feminist scholars such as Joan W. Scott and Teresa de Lauretis have argued that it became for secondwave feminist theory in the 1970s.56 “Experience” here signifies not what Olivia really is, or what women really are, but what allows her to be always other than she is. As she says, the “flux of experience” constitutes “the reservoir from which . . . I drew the authority for how Lady Macbeth must have felt, about to do a murder, from which if I had had a taste for it, I might have drawn with like assurance the necessity of the square of the hypothenuse [sic] to equal the squares of the other two sides” (WOG, 9). “Experience” provides her the material with which to enlarge and transform herself, to become both an agent and a subject of variation. But where does this capacity for change become a political project? That is, if the association between women and ontological inertia underwrites their marginality to political agency, then in what sense does the self-variation of “genius” facilitate their political capacities? One answer lies in Olivia’s conception of stage performance. Her selftransformations in turn transform her audiences. As she says, “I was full and evanescing of the joy of creation”; she feels “the working of the living organ-

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ism we should have been, transmitting supernal energies of emotion to the audience, who by the very communicating act became part of us” (WOG, 109). Olivia thus imagines a scene of collective life vastly different from the formal political franchise or the network of self-interested contract makers and exchangers who had come to dominate postbellum visions of democracy, freedom, and proper citizenship. However much stage performance figures the capacity to transform through experience in this novel, literature functions for Austin as the main mechanism of democratic change, as her work on women’s citizenship and literature demonstrates.

Experience, Literature, and Political Community In Austin’s theory of genius, literary communication takes precedence as the conduit by which experience, and therefore genius, becomes collective and potentially political. This transfer of collective genius from performance to literature may have to do with Austin’s commitment to literary writing. Although she wrote several plays and took part in the “Little Theatre” movement of the 1910s, she saw literary writing as the main venue for her creative genius. The transfer also, though, likely involves the different capacities of theater and literature. As a means of convening a public sphere extended over time and vast stretches of national space, live theater has limits based in its strengths. Stage performance thrives on its liveness, the fact that every instance of it is unique, happening in a particular time and place and before an audience. Literature, by contrast, can extend over vast stretches of space and time, and in Austin’s thinking, it becomes the primary means for distributing “experience” and transforming women’s political identities according to the logic of genius. Austin developed this model of literature as experience, and therefore a collective principle of variation and collaboration at once, in The Young Woman Citizen (1918), her citizenship guide for the newly enfranchised women of New York State. Here, Austin advocates narrative fiction as a means for disseminating and absorbing experience; she argues that “a good novel that can be entered into as an experience is worth a year of such social experiment as is open to the average private citizen.”57 Without a “good novel,” the average private citizen stagnates on her own slim, individual resources for experience. A good novel, however, introduces a principle of newness, bringing the alterity of experience to bear upon the “private citizen” and thus pushing her

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out of her privacy and her averageness at the same time. Austin regrets that the American literary public prefers, in general, to reabsorb experience and opinion that reinforce its complacency: “It is unfortunate that in America we have generally cut ourselves off from the use of the novel as an aid to social extension, by declining to like any sort of fiction that does not take its color from our own point of view” (YWC, 63). Like Pauline Mills, who never has a thought outside of the pattern she has set for herself, the reading public longs to have its opinions and identities reiterated. As Austin argues in The Young Woman Citizen, however, American literature could push women beyond their repetition of “womanhood” by enmeshing them in “the rapid intake and response indispensable to their success as coefficients of a democratic culture,” so long as “the true approach to it from women is neither as women nor as critics, but as participators in the collective experience of which the particular mode of poetry or fiction is the individual expression.”58 Six years in advance of The Young Woman Citizen, A Woman of Genius seeks to produce this model of democratic literary culture. Calling herself a “specialist in human experience” (WOG, 291), Olivia has let her experience push her into new modalities of thought and action. In writing about them, she makes them available; her readers can have the experience her narrative condenses. In addition she hopes that her narrative will embolden other women to write, speak, protest, and otherwise circulate their own “human experience[s].” Articulating this hope, Olivia’s friend says of her autobiography, “‘It is the fact of your telling, whether they believe you or not, of your not being ashamed to tell, that is going to help them,’ she insists, ‘At any rate, it will help other women speak out what they think, unashamed’” (WOG, 290). In other words, Olivia’s autobiography aspires to found a sphere of discourse in which “experience” and thought circulate, in which women’s identities are iterated, transformed, and augmented and therefore pushed past mimetic identity. Olivia charts this possibility of generic transgression as a sort of work in progress. Her narrative documents its own work as an agent for the politicization of sexuality and the body, and credits itself with contributing to a political and discursive sphere of experience in which the gender, sexuality, reproduction, and the body become available to politics. Her early life is traumatized by the lack of such a political-discursive sphere. In her early adulthood, Olivia finds herself sucked into the mimetic life of “women.” Her marriage happens to her when she is drawn along on an inertial tide of expectations. She has neither sexual desire for her husband nor enough knowledge about herself or the world to choose another course. From the distance of

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adulthood, she wonders how she might have been better prepared, “supposing a medium of communication had been established between my mother and me” (WOG, 69). The absence of a communicative medium between Olivia and her mother partakes of a larger absence, that of social and public media. Terrified of bearing children too early in her marriage, Olivia goes to her mother to learn about contraception. Without a language for sexuality to use with her mother, Olivia tells her readers, “You must imagine for yourself . . . how inarticulate the whole business was” (WOG, 75). Her mother responds with outraged repression: “Olivia, I’ll not hear of such things!” (WOG, 75) before she relents and admits, “‘I’m sorry, daughter’—she hesitated—‘I can’t help you. I don’t know . . . I never knew myself ’” (WOG, 75, ellipsis in original). Olivia’s isolation with her question becomes her isolation in her body. She gets pregnant immediately and sinks into her debilitated body. She recalls herself as “wretchedly, depressingly ill” and “cowering away from the kitchen sights and smells, or gasping up out of ingulfing nausea” (WOG, 77). She suffers two disastrous pregnancies because this too is part of the reiterative lives of women that are perpetuated by public silence about their bodies. Her mother drives this point home when she prescribes a remedy for Olivia’s dying baby with the inauspicious assurance, “Well, I ought to know, I’ve buried five” (WOG, 79). Olivia comes to realize that she reproduced these traumas because silence about sexuality and the body has made reproduction immune to political resistance and social change. In the small-town world of her young adulthood, women communicate sexual and bodily knowledge under duress and by secret routes. Beneath the official sociability of the town, “there was another world which underlay all this, coloured and occasioned it, sicklied over with futility; it was a world all of the care and expectancy of children overshadowed by the recurrent monthly dread, crept about by whispers, heretical but persistent, of methods of circumventing it, of a secret practice of things openly condemned” (WOG, 126). The secretive circuit provides information distorted by shame and confusion; women may talk about their “experiences” and absorb the “experiences” of others, but this culture of experience, shaped by taboo and secrecy, constantly fails to become an arena of transformation. For this reason Olivia celebrates the early twentieth-century emergence of a public discourse, however muted and subject to censorship at the national level, on birth control and infant care. She fetishizes that discourse’s scientific authority, even as her narrative implicitly disputes the authoritative science of sexual difference; yet as

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much as she appreciates its aura of expertise, she values it most highly for its public character. Reflecting back on her dead infant from the perspective of her better-informed middle age, she seethes, “To this day I cannot come across any notices of the more competent methods for the care of delicate children, without a remembering pang” (WOG, 80). Her grief for her lost child fuses with her longheld grief over another loss (or rather an absence), that of a public available to the discussion of sexuality, reproduction, and the body. Such a public would belie the supposed inevitability that surrounds bodily and natural processes, making innovation, resistance, and politics possible. Austin reiterated this point years later, in an autobiographical essay giving the background of her feminism and touching on her traumatic experience of marriage and motherhood, what she calls “the incredible private tragedy which had come to me for lack of a public remedy.”59 Olivia’s narrative represents a contribution to building the public as a zone of remedy. She is a character who writes in order to help bring into being the self-expanding, public traffic in discourses about the body and reproduction that she missed in her own early adulthood, and that Austin missed in hers. She also writes about work, hunger, romance, and economics. By doing so, she performatively argues for the capacity of an emergent public—composed of exchanged talk, written narratives, protest parades, and the franchise—to reformulate women’s identities, disinterring the category of “woman” from its inertial and artificially coherent condition of privacy and freeing it to a transformative sphere where identity becomes pluralized and malleable to politics. The human comprehensiveness of genius becomes, in Olivia’s phrase, a “Shining Destiny” (WOG, 290).

“Women,” Citizenship, and Genius Where, though, does this nimbus of political possibility meet the feminist movement or the formal dimensions of state citizenship? The franchise itself hovers on the horizons of A Woman of Genius, appearing as an explicit topic only when Olivia marches in the suffrage parade. As she recalls the parade, her emphasis steers clear of the obvious issues of civic incorporation and the debates surrounding it and back toward her theme of experience; the parade, she writes, “set gates wide for me on fields of new, inspiring experience” (WOG, 290). Why treat the suffrage movement so obliquely? One possible clue lies in Austin’s recollection of the years she spent in New York during

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the time she wrote A Woman of Genius and had her most intensive contact with the feminist movement. Austin situates organized feminism within the controversy on variability, claiming that political feminism during the pressured battle for the vote limited women’s ability to vary. She recalls: “All this time I was giving interviews on Suffrage and related subjects. I did not talk a great deal; talking on Suffrage bored me. There were always women who made a point of pulling me back, of correcting me and setting me right. I was weary of being pulled into standardized arguments, although I knew well enough that there was a great deal of reason for keeping the public on the beaten track, for going over and over it, for rubbing it in.”60 Austin here perhaps underplays her volume of “talk”; as she admits, she went on several suffrage speaking tours, collaborated on a pro-suffrage essay, and worked with Alice Paul’s Woman’s Political Union for a time. Her point here, though, is not about her commitment to suffrage per se but rather her discontent—her boredom—with a reiterative and “standardized” sphere of discourse, bent by necessity on repeating itself without variation. Austin feels herself to be constantly “pulled back” from her deviations of argument, pressured to add her voice to a coercively univocal and selfrepeating discourse of identity politics. Feminism thus becomes one of the sites where the cohesiveness and unchangingness of women is produced, as Austin’s complaint about Charlotte Perkins Gilman makes clear: “Everything she wrote was in the same key. She lectured interestingly, but invariably.”61 This problem was not a matter of Gilman’s personality but rather of the institutional calcification of feminism, which Austin thought destroyed women’s political force by limiting variation and thus genius. Writing in 1923, Austin reflected: “Feminists generally are confessing themselves disappointed with the results, in the field of national influences, of their amazingly efficient organizations. Is it not, perhaps, that the very efficiency of such organizations tends to inhibit the expression of the fortunate variations of women’s genius, and let nothing through into the thought stream but the capacity for efficient organization?”62 Organizations, that is, reproduce themselves, their positions, and the identities they represent in unvarying molds. They install a rigid formalism of identity politics, against which Austin counterpoises genius as a principle of flux and antiformalist innovation. In light of this critique, and of the struggle against compulsory motherhood and reiterative femininity in A Woman of Genius, the pro-suffrage pamphlet that Austin cowrote with the suffragist Anne Martin and published in 1914 creates an interpretive puzzle. Composed especially “with reference

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to Nevada and other Western states,” the pamphlet prosecutes what are easily recognized, in Austin’s later terms, as “standardized arguments,” familiar from the suffrage movement. In it Austin and Martin dispute, for instance, the typical antisuffrage argument that women should be denied the vote because they cannot fight in wars abroad or use physical force to maintain civil order at home; they do this by offering the equally typical (though also thoroughly debatable) pro-suffrage argument that modern democracy rests on “social consent” rather than force.63 They also make the familiar “social housekeeping” argument that since much of women’s traditional domestic work of caring for home and children has been expropriated to consumer culture and the state, women need the vote in order to get their traditional work done; they note that “today the greater part of all the activities upon which the successful bringing up of a family depends are carried on outside the home” (SG, 5–6). Even if Austin and Martin repeat familiar arguments because they realize, as Austin later explained, that “there was a great deal of reason for keeping the public on the beaten track,” their pamphlet does more than simply stay strategically on message. In it, they embrace the idea that men are forces of transformation while women perpetuate sameness, offering the distinction between men’s innovation and women’s conservatism as a theory of gender differential citizenship. They write: “True maleness is the exercise of initiative, exploration, experimentation, the breaking of new lands, the extension of the frontiers of thought. Man under modern conditions has so overloaded himself with women’s work of conservation that he can scarcely do his own” (SG, 6). In its emphasis on the West, the pamphlet conflates new thinking with land acquisition, so that the processes of the male mind and geographic national expansion become one and the same. Empire and invention, that is, dovetail in genius. At the same time that the West becomes the theater of newness, it also enables a return to the social and economic past. Where women already have the vote in the West, Austin and Martin write, they have reinstated a natural “primitive division of labor” (SG, 9). Rather than threatening the political relations of gender, voting women have made the franchise serve an eternal gender difference and complementarity: “Women using the vote are merely carrying on their natural functions of conservation of health and life and are, therefore, an invaluable constructive and complementary force in the world’s work” (SG, 14). In language echoing both pro- and antisuffragists, Austin and Martin claim that “the chief business of women is mothering,” but they frame mothering less as an emotional attitude or group of activities than

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as a cognitive style, what they call “the conservative mother-thought” (SG, 5, 8). The “genius” that Austin and Martin imagine here is women’s “known genius for pacification,” which they root in women’s primary commitments to continuity in and through motherhood (SG, 7). Conceivably, the contradiction between Austin’s arguments in her prosuffrage pamphlet and her promotion of women’s variability and innovation elsewhere could be explained politically and biographically. Austin’s coauthor, Anne Martin, was a more experienced suffrage advocate and may have had a stronger hand in crafting the pamphlet’s argument, though a locution such as “mother-thought” is typical of Austin’s manner of forming compound nouns. In a moment when women’s suffrage was still unachieved, Austin may have also been making the argument she thought most likely to succeed—that is, one that appealed to deeply held essentialisms about women’s uniformly maternal identity, nurturing social role, and cognitive conservatism—rather than engaging the topic on her own idiosyncratic terms, a possibility supported by her later autobiographical recollections. Yet the pamphlet’s commitment to thinking of citizenship in terms of cognitive style and contribution goes far beyond the call of tactical feminist pandering, which would require defining women’s citizenship only as an extension of bourgeois domesticity, not as a conservative mode of thought, counterbalancing masculine innovation. Austin’s contradiction here of her position on women’s potential variability and creativity reflects the contradiction at the basis of struggles for women’s citizenship, a contradiction that required gender as an identity form and at the same time was impeded by that requirement. The excess to political exigency in their construction of “conservative mother-thought” reflects a broad and historically long-lived contradiction between identity as a basis for democratic legibility, on the one hand, and transformation as a democratic goal, on the other. In the constitutional democracy of the United States, identity historically had a central but disavowed role in creating political subjectivity. The included political subject and bearer of rights was ostensibly abstract and universal but actually was a very particular subject, the property-holding white adult male. In various struggles for citizenship—for landless or poor white men, for African American men, for immigrants, for Native Americans, and for women, among others—claimants for rights had to confront the contradiction that the identity of citizenship was both particular and disavowed, a condition that blocked their attempt to possess an ostensibly, but not actually, universal form with the impediment of their own discordant particularities.

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Because women were excluded categorically, according to their identity, they were constituted categorically and constrained to make their case in categorical terms. But since the place of identity at the core of political subjectivity was fundamentally disavowed, their categorical claims always looked suspect. This was even more the case because democracy ideally functions as a transformative set of exchanges, in which ideas and thus the people that hold them change through the processes of deliberation, contest, and collaboration. The problem plaguing women’s political identity at the cusp of suffrage was this: in order to attain the franchise, women had to mobilize under a coherent identity (votes, that is, for “women” as legible subjects), but those same conditions of legibility reduced them to particularity and stasis. Stretched on the rack of this contradiction, Austin’s advocacy for the vote in particular embraced sameness and conservation, the “standardization” she later deplores. Writing more generally about women as cultural citizens, though, rather than as voters, she advocates for the self-variation of genius. Austin brought together these two modalities of citizenship, cultural and state participation, in The Young Woman Citizen, and by seeing the vote as but one means of women’s citizenship, along with writing, discussion, and advocacy, her conception overcomes the reification of women’s identity in terms of “conservative mother-thought.” The book pursues an extended meditation on the dynamism between women’s “experience” and originality, seeing their energy as producing a politically live flux of identity. According to Austin, women’s incipient originality as voters stems, in part, from their prior exclusion from the vote. Women’s originality is their experience, heretofore excluded from the franchise: “reinforcement of the franchise by the woman vote can only be in the degree that women bring new lights out of their especial experience to illuminate the problem of the whole” (YWC, 17). Women’s “especial experience” includes their conventional, rather than natural, orientation toward domesticity: “The most hopeful thing that she can offer at this hour of terrific change and uncertainty is the age-long practice of family life with its hourly need of adaptation to growth and change of outlook. This is the woman’s gift which she must put across into the world’s thinking by every known political expedient” (YWC, 176). Austin argues that, in contrast to the conventional association of the home and its routines of bodily care and repetitive drudgery with the inert realm of necessity, the home provides a scene of constant change. She counters the manner in which scientists such as Ellis, Lombroso, and William James encoded the political-philosophical idea of women’s domesticity in the idiom of the biological sciences. Where scientists asserted that women’s sup-

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posed incapacity for change and innovation grounded their biological role as mothers, Austin appropriates the language of evolutionary science and insists that “family life” motivates constant “adaptation.” In addition to claiming that women’s experience already has schooled them in the transformative and progressive capabilities definitive of political life, Austin argues that women’s experience is constituted by contests over the boundaries of political life, by the history of conflict including women’s struggle not only for but also with American democracy. Women have a political cohesion derived not from a shared organic or metaphysical ontology but from their common experience of exclusion and their politicization of that condition. As she writes, “Men and women both are disposed to give to the age-long continuance of custom the finality of natural law, and to warm up their political left-overs under fine names of consistency and loyalty. But woman, because of the freshness of her experience in sluicing out the accumulated sex prejudice of centuries, is under a special obligation to impose on political progress no drag out of her own past” (YWC, 37). In contrast to an essential or biological category, “woman” here emerges as a political entity forged through the struggle against “the accumulated sex prejudice” that came to carry the authority of “natural law.” Women’s expertise in fighting the constitutive binaries of political life underwrites their innovative political drive. According to The Young Woman Citizen, the democratic significance of women’s incorporation as full citizens derives from this struggle, from its history and also from the continuing cultural debate about women’s identities and their possible contributions. Austin proposes that “if the young woman citizen is to begin where she is, at the turn of the spiral that admits her to be statistically equally important with men, she must also begin with what she is” (YWC, 16, emphasis in original). But what is she? Apparently the young woman citizen does not know, and this is why: “For so many centuries man’s intelligence was the only kind of intelligence that was heard from, [so] that we are still inclined to judge any intelligence that shows itself, by the masculine standard. . . . Unconsciously this age-long habit so colors all our thinking, that the first thing that the young woman citizen must ask herself is, whether she is coming to her new obligation as another, less experienced man, or whether she has anything to contribute as a woman” (YWC, 16). Austin contends that “society finds itself involved in habits not easily broken” (YWC, 18) and that these become “woven into the texture of law” (YWC, 70) and thus reiterate themselves in the unthought mechanisms of the franchise, the state, and social custom.

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In light of these habits, the question of what the young woman citizen is constitutes an invitation to pursue what Austin frames here as an open-ended inquiry, dedicated more to the process of grappling with whether enfranchised women have anything to contribute as women than to specifying either that they do or of what their contribution would consist. Austin suggests that identities are perpetuated by acts of repetition—the “habit” of judging, thinking, or participating in a certain way. Women, by falling into these habits, are thus in danger of participating as men if they perform the repetitions that have formed the calcified customs of citizenship under manhood suffrage. The process of questioning what women’s contribution could or should be—or even whether they, as women, have a specific contribution to make— disrupts the repetitive motions of habit that threaten to produce the woman citizen as an imitator who unconsciously repeats the participatory gestures of the “masculine standard”: “This is what women have to stand on squarely; not their ability to see the world as men see it, but the importance and the validity of their seeing it some other way” (YWC, 19). This “other way” is left significantly open, even as she slips into the singular “woman.” Austin here frames women’s difference as a topic for inquiry and debate, rather than as a known quantity. But women also have their own habit: “it is the woman habit to think of the next thing, which enables women to keep their opinions in a continuous state of mobilization without any suspicion of inconsistency” (YWC, 19). The repetition that constitutes their identity is to repeat their movement beyond any prior thought. The Jamesian term for this ability, as we have seen, was “genius,” what he called the “faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.” This habit of innovation allies women with live democracy, constantly reinvented rather than repeated: “The social impulse is creative, like the impulse of architecture and music; it moves always to build and rebuild” (YWC, 70). Indeed, Austin suggests that this liveness is definitive of democracy. “Democracy,” she claims, “is no place for the timid soul who cannot bear the high discriminations of genius,” the thinking that moves the social forward (YWC, 71). Moving women into democracy means defending—insisting on—their genius, their originality and mobility of thought. Austin observes, however, that feminist arguments in support of the existence of female genius have not yet gone far enough; women of genius have not yet been regarded as “true centers of illumination” (YWC, 41). Rather, women identified as geniuses have been seen as exceptions and ornaments, each one “a mere peacock tail to the movement of emancipation” (YWC, 41). In opposition to this, she urges an understanding of women of genius as “neither mimics nor angels”

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(YWC, 42), neither copying nor transcending existing democratic modes but powering them from within: “The whole theory of a democratized society is that it gives increasing room for the multiplication of these natural energizing centers” (YWC, 41). If romantic democratic genius worked by forging an absorptive unity, the multiplication of energizing centers that Austin calls for here figures democracy as complex, multiple, and operating through persons never stabilized in themselves and always engaged in projects of self-enlargement, communication, and social change. As a book, The Young Woman Citizen is a template for such inquiry, debate, and unhabitual perception. While most citizenship guides devised for newly enfranchised women set out the rules of elections, the technicalities of districting, and the minutiae of the state bureaucracy, Austin’s citizenship guide is a loosely structured tour through her reflections on a collection of issues stalking through the public sphere: relations with Mexico, the living conditions of immigrant families, the rules governing business practices, the problems vexing urban milk distribution, and the role of literature in shaping the opinions of a deliberative citizenry (as we have seen), to name just a few. The Young Woman Citizen is designed to provide points of departure for conversation. In the spirit of such conversations, the Womans Press issued a discussion outline to accompany Austin’s guide. The outline encourages women to enter dialogic scenes of inquiry, listening and talking with each other. It asks them not only to express their opinions but also to conceptualize their discussions as a form of incipient democracy that transforms their personal opinions into social discourse: “‘Government by discussion’ is rightly regarded as a necessary stage on the road to political democracy.”64 This, then, is one set of possibilities held open by the figure of the woman of genius. The figure refutes the sameness of women, the conventional stereotype that had assumed the solid logic of species. The woman of genius’s capacity for variety and self-difference moves in A Woman of Genius from an individually held gift to a socially distributed one, available to all by means of a sphere of communication through which women’s identities and social horizons become perpetual creative projects. Olivia’s genius gives her command over resources of both criticism and innovation. She attains a perspective from which to assess the forces that falsely unify women under the sign of womanhood, and she launches a narrative project intended to proliferate the cultural spaces in which women’s self-difference and political creativity flourish. With her narrative she anticipates the discursive political project of The Young Woman Citizen and the edict of Everyman’s Genius

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that the function of a work of art is to “mediate experience and distribute its benefits.”65

“Everyman’s” Racial Genius and the Nation By the time Austin wrote Everyman’s Genius, her understanding of experience had taken a new direction: it had absorbed the species logic and rhetoric of the biological sciences. In this absorption we can chart how the democratic promise of female genius collapses. As the title of Everyman’s Genius suggests, Austin drops “women” as a category of analysis and concern in this work and sets herself against the model of genius as extremity and variation, in pursuit of a model of the human stated grammatically as the masculine universal. As her discussion advances, it quickly takes on definitive racial dimensions. She contends, contra Ellis and Lombroso, that genius is “the normal human possession, from which the individual is dispossessed by maladventures or birth or rearing” (EG, 4). “It is probable,” she writes, “that the genius—that is to say, the man with full use of himself—is the normal type” (EG, 251). Rather than appearing at the extreme limit of the bell curve’s distribution, genius “is one of the most widely distributed human traits” (EG, 23). In A Woman of Genius and The Young Woman Citizen, Austin had figured genius as a means of accessing and distributing experience; discourse and media played key roles in the cultural dissemination and political uses of genius. In these works Austin had imagined experience as shared and shareable, but in Everyman’s Genius, even though she claims that art functions to “mediate experience and distribute its benefits,” she invests the concept of experience and the resultant force of genius primarily in racialized bodies incapable of cultural or even successful chromosomal traffic across racial divisions. In Everyman’s Genius, Austin redefines “genius” as “the accumulated emotional and conceptual experience of the race, expressing itself through the individual as the ‘race mind’” (EG, 23). Here “racial experience” indicates the distinct historical experiences of distinct races, understood in organic species terms.66 Austin’s definition of “race” fuses cultural history and bodies: “Race: A group of people having a common blood stream and societal relation, who have subjected themselves to a common environment and a common experience long enough to take on reactive capacities such as are the recognized index of their association” (EG, introduction, unnumbered). Experience, then, is accreted in the body. There is some mystery to its

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organic basis; Austin admits, “We do not know just how experience becomes incorporated in the psychic inheritance” (EG, 28), and yet she hypothesizes that the “racial experience” that constitutes the “resources of a given genius” largely comes “by way of the germ plasm, in forty-eight groups; that they are derived in mathematical proportions from both parental bloods streams, according to a Mendelian law” (EG, 116). Each person has access to “the ancestral experience which is carried by his particular chromosomes” (EG, 116). This is a theory not only of possession but also of dispossession. As she writes, “Nobody has done definitive work in this problem of the limitation of genius by racial type, but my own studies, which are by no means final, indicate that genius never crosses the bloodstream” (EG, 42). For this reason, Austin writes, Native Americans can never learn musical harmony, which she claims is a European element of music, and “a Jew or a Serb or a Slav, however much Americanism his immediate-self may take on, when he begins to draw upon his deep-self will find himself able to reach only the experience of his racial past” (EG, 44). They can be, that is, only what they have been before and are stuck forever producing the same material from the same source, as do women in Ellis’s formulation. No such problem, however, burdens whiteness, what Austin calls America’s dominant racial “stream” (a stream of blood and experience conflated). Racial whiteness commands the resources of variation: “Fortunately, the so-called Nordic, or Anglo-Saxon, stream of experience, which has so far dominated in American expression, is extremely rich and varied” (EG, 40). White bodies, according to Austin, carry varied experience in their “germ plasm.” This absorption of experience into race was justified by Austin’s reading of race scientists such as Ellsworth Huntington, whose book on “racial evolution” she describes in her annotated bibliography as a “study of racial genius as influenced by environmental factors and social relations. Modern and interesting” (EG, 362). Huntington uses the term “genius” sparingly, reserving it for his geographic maps of the distribution of eminent persons around the globe.67 His evolutionary narrative of the races nevertheless provides the link between “experience” and “racial inheritance.” As he writes, “in the course of time, perhaps a very long time, each environment and each occupation tends to make its people slightly different from those in other environments and other occupations.”68 This happens because physical and social environments “select certain kinds of character for preservation or destruction and thus cause certain kinds of mental characteristics to become a permanent part of the racial inheritance.”69 The “racial inheritance,” then, represents accumu-

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lated experiences, or selective evolutionary processes that have occurred in response to cultural and environmental conditions. Huntington argues that the “Nordics” have reached the heights of civilization because they underwent the brutal selective pressures of the Ice Age and then, radically improved, had a chance to flourish socially in the temperate period that followed; their experiences, in a word, made them organically what they are. Seen within an evolutionary perspective, then, experience underwrites biological ontology. “Racial experience” is accumulated in the genes as each generation lives and dies in response to the myriad pressures on it. In Austin’s interpretation of racial science, everyone has “genius” because everyone has a race: “it is impossible for the individual not to have access to the residue of racial experience” (EG, 119). This is to say, for Austin, that everyone has an organic racial body: “genius is no more nor less than the facile use of inheritable racial experience, as natural as the circulation of the blood” (EG, 132). If Olivia had hoped to open the sphere of writing to women’s experience, then in Everyman’s Genius the process of forging a collectivity is massively problematized. Every person partakes of a collective racial experience by virtue of having a body that registers it. How, then, could a collectivity that does not already and organically exist be forged? Austin registers this problem as one of national culture. The geniusmythos of European romanticism linked the individual, race, and nation by reference to a single imagined (and supernaturalized) origin. American culture, population, and politics troubled this easy association, and yet emerging models of national belonging after World War I sought to solve this problem. Writing about new conceptions of “collective national identity” in the 1920s, Walter Benn Michaels traces a shift from civic and assimilationist models of American identity to nativist family metaphors for the nation, claiming that “[i]nsofar as the family becomes the site of national identity, nationality becomes an effect of racial identity.”70 This shift constituted a “nativist project of racializing America.”71 What Austin’s writing on genius allows us to see, however, is a space of intrication between family and economic metaphors, in which each is necessary for constituting Americanness and crucially reliant on the other. In Everyman’s Genius economic metaphors replace the medial tropes of narrative, performance, and discussion that played such prominent roles in A Woman of Genius and The Young Woman Citizen; from these economic metaphors, national identity is achieved from the raw material of racial identity, rather than seeming to flow from it naturally. From Austin’s genealogical association of genius with “racial inheritance”

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(the inheritance of experience), economic metaphors proliferate. A person’s storehouse of racial experience and immediate consciousness “constitute the capital upon which the individual lives” (EG, 26). Later she notes that “the capital on which the creative worker adventures is his whole native endowment of health, intelligence, talent, genius, temperament, and information” (EG, 96). Although she sometimes describes genius as “the facile use of inheritable racial experience, as natural as the circulation of the blood,” she most often sees the use of “inheritance” as an economic rather than a natural circulation, requiring strategic planning and market calculation as much as a beating heart does. As she notes to her reader, “It is assumed that you have already taken stock of yourself and know in what direction it is most profitable to direct your creative energies” (EG, 258). (For those who have not taken stock, Austin offers meditative techniques to jog the “deep-self ” into delivering the “racial inheritance.”) Austin writes early on in Everyman’s Genius that she wants to focus attention away from “the completed genius product” and toward “the way it works” (EG, introduction and 22, emphasis hers). Her emphasis on process rather than product might seem to signal a resistance to the commodity fetish, just as her claim that she offers her guidebook “as a corrective to the mechanization of creative processes” might hint at sympathy for industrial laborers, or at least a critique of capitalist modes of production. Yet her metaphors slide past production and into the world of high finance, where capital seems to produce itself. Even when she figures the creative self as a factory, she imagines the factory in terms of the means of production and capital investment rather than labor: “The creative worker in any field is his own plant, the management and all the works” (EG, 96). This metaphor permits her to describe creative work as an activity without work: “to be a genius means to have the use of racial material without the trouble of acquiring it by conscious effort on your own account” (EG, 45). The romantic conception had bequeathed the idea that genius was spontaneous and effortless; Austin, however, transforms that idea fundamentally when she embeds it in a vision of capital’s self-generation without reference to a sphere of production. The creative process, then, inheres in the ability to use capital: “we are pledged to a definition of genius as the capacity of the individual to make use of the racial material” (EG, 35). The purpose of her guide is to teach everyone how to recover or access that capital. Drawing on recent refinements in theories of mind, developed by psychoanalysis and widely popularized in American culture, Austin grounds genius in the normative operations of a psyche split between conscious and

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unconscious levels. Though her ideas have clear disciplinary precedents, her terminology is idiosyncratic and mystical. The place of something like the conscious level of the psyche is occupied by the “immediate self,” which contains the “sum of psychic experience since birth, or as long before birth as sensory consciousness begins to manifest” (EG, introduction, unnumbered). Beneath it lies a “subconscious” level that Austin calls the “deep self,” comprising a reservoir of experience that the individual has not actually had—the individual’s “racial experience.” “Genius,” she asserts, is the “free, untutored play of the racial inheritance into the immediate life of the individual” (EG, introduction, unnumbered). The better part of her book is dedicated to techniques of prayer and meditation intended to facilitate this “untutored play” and inspired by medieval Christian mysticism, Eastern philosophy, Paiute ritual, and such recent popular works on accessing a subconscious level of mind as Emile Coué’s Self-Mastery through Conscious Autosuggestion (most famous for its mantra “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better”).72 By advocating meditation and autosuggestion as means to access one’s psychic capital, Austin is clearly working within the tradition that Jackson Lears has described as a “new style of therapy based not on the assumption of psychic scarcity but on a new faith in psychic abundance.” Replacing older models of therapy based on preserving psychic resources through rest and self-control, the new therapies of the mind-cure movement promoted means of “tapping into the unconscious as a wellspring of psychic strength.”73 Developments in the discourse on genius participate in the shift that Lears describes. Noting in 1886 the supposed tendency of geniuses to beget nongeniuses, for instance, a physician explained that the genius “needs and uses up the silently accumulated capital of generations of the family stock; the natural result after him, therefore, is commonly mediocrity or degeneracy.”74 Similarly emphasizing scarcity, Cesare Lombroso spells out why genius produces “atavistic retrogression” in an individual: “Just as giants pay a heavy ransom for their stature in sterility . . . so the giants of thought expiate their intellectual force in degeneration and psychoses.”75 By the early twentieth century, though, the closed and finite somatic economy had largely disappeared from discussions of genius. One of Austin’s sources, Thomas Troward, held that the “Creative Process . . . can only be conceived as limitless.”76 Austin advanced this same principle in a much more explicit idiom of capitalism. For Lears, the importance of the new models of psychic abundance lies in their expression of a “growing capitalist cultural hegemony”; imagined somatic economies (and the cures designed to right them) mirrored the new

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economic theories that optimistically embraced the possibility that capital would grow endlessly and ultimately enrich the many.77 Austin’s writing on genius, however, shows us something besides the simple repetition of economic theories in figures for the mind and body. Capitalism, in its corporate-managerial guise, comes to solve a problem—the problem of how race transforms itself into nation. Austin notes that America suffers from a marked lack of coordination among its “resources” of “racial inheritance,” personal talents, and “environmental endowment, such as education, social background, class and caste” (EG, 35). As a result, genius is racial without being national; she writes: “In a long settled and racially unified country, all these resources can be thought of as presenting certain type relationships, which in their turn give rise to traditional ways of accommodation, producing a fairly unified effect, called the genius of the race. But in the United States no such unification either of the impulse or the effect is possible. We have no lack of American geniuses, but as yet no strongly characterized American genius” (EG, 35–36). Austin frames the project of “American genius” as a problem of management: “It is in the hope that, by informing ourselves of the genius process and the relations of genius to its resources, a habit of rapid and successful coordination may be established, that these studies have been undertaken” (EG, 36). The nationalization of “racial material” is here figured as centralized control, modeled on the theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, despite Austin’s claim to fight the “mechanization of creative processes.” In true Jamesian form, Austin insists that “habit plays a minor part. If too much depended upon, it may become absolutely stultifying” (EG, 91). She specifies, moreover, that “the important thing is to establish habit as responsive rather than automatic” (EG, 220), by which she means that each person should engineer his or her habits, as did “such notable geniuses as Anatole France and Joseph Conrad,” who exerted “their own steady and long sustained control over the rhythm of intake and outflow” (EG, 221). Such systems engineers of creativity occupy the ideal position from which “to administer our gifts so that the most is made of them with the minimum of effort” (EG, 55). If the figure of production disappeared from Austin’s account of the creation of a work of art (which depends on using capital) it reemerges here: management produces nation out of races; racial geniuses, properly coordinated, become the “American genius.” The consolidation of individual, race, and nation is imagined not as a result of common origin (and thus a common being), but rather as the end product of a highly organized economic relation. At the same time that economic relations nationalize race,

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race provides a hedge against the abstractions of the economy. One’s capital is always within one’s self, obtained genetically. It can be used but never used up. It is also one’s “inheritance” that expresses continuity with predecessors and a common racial group, understood to be both biologically and socially at one. The experience of “using” capital thus becomes the experience of selfcontact, social integration, and the reinforcement of the category of race. Austin presaged this development in A Woman of Genius, and revisiting this novel clarifies the racial and economic nexus that undergirds the woman of genius’s splendid self-variation—an inherent element of the woman of genius’s narrative that becomes manifest only in Austin’s later work. When Olivia tries to find money to start her career because, as she says, “I’d need to be capitalized to do anything” (WOG, 182), she goes to Pauline and Henry Mills on the basis of a “lifelong friendship” founded on their common origin in a small midwestern town. After they refuse her plea, an experienced actor (a “genius” himself) recommends her to Morris Polatkin, telling her that “Polatkin is a speculator; he speculates in ability” (WOG, 207). When she meets Polatkin, she thinks, “I do not know why I hadn’t been prepared by the name for his being a Jew, nor for the sudden shifting of the ground of our meeting which that fact made for me” (WOG, 209). That shift is that their meeting is not to be tinged with the “personal expectation” she had almost unconsciously brought to the occasion. She bristles to find him “looking at [her] with an irritating impersonality” as he subjects her to an alienating financial “appraisement” (WOG, 210). She finds that she “couldn’t stand being handed about this way like a female chattel” (WOG, 211). She also realizes that she “couldn’t have arrived at the faintest approach” to theatrical success without his help. Both accepting and protesting their economic relation, she notes that her contract with him “brought him in the end about three hundred per cent on the money he advanced [her], but [she] never begrudged him” (WOG, 211). While she may not have begrudged the money, she certainly resents the ability of the racial alien to commodify her; indeed, cross-racial interaction is precisely what allows their economic relationship to be experienced as commodification. After she reaches the height of her success, she confronts Pauline Mills about her refusal to capitalize her: “Have you any idea, Pauline, what it means to have a man invest money in you? . . . a man like Polatkin. I was his property, a horse he had entered for a race. He had a stake in me” (WOG, 279, ellipsis in original). Pauline mistakenly thinks that “it means” that Olivia is Polatkin’s mistress, but this is not the case. What it means is

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that being capitalized by “a Jew,” a “man like Polatkin,” transforms her into property. Money from her “lifelong” friends and racial fellows would have had no such effect; their failure to capitalize her proves their relation to be an “intimacy that never succeeded in being intimate” (WOG, 286). Her intimacy with the Millses is presumed, although it fails; it preexists the social relationship in which it “never succeeded” in being itself. The economic degradation that comes with being capitalized by the racial other, however, provokes endless nativist anxiety. She remembers: “I used to go out to his house at One Hundred and Twenty-Seventh Street to spend an hour with Mrs. Polatkin and the several little replicas of himself, of whom, in spite of their tendency to run mostly to nose and forehead, he was exceedingly proud” (WOG, 217). Rather than assimilating, Polatkin replicates himself in his grotesquely racialized children—he obtrudes his repetitive racial body in America. Moreover, the latent menace in this is that he outbreeds Olivia, whose two infants die. If racial ideology saturates Olivia’s successful move into the world of economic transaction, it is only to prove that the concept of race serves to make capitalism properly intimate, nonalienating, and safe from abstraction. Olivia’s degradation (and symbolic sterilization) by the racial other shows us what should have happened: the Millses should have capitalized her; their social and racial affinity with her would have made her move into the economy also a move back into the racial family. Olivia’s alienating contract prefigures the way in which the concept of genius comes to put capitalism and racialist discourse in a mutually accommodating relation. Managerial capitalism makes a nation out of race by coordinating “racial material” otherwise frittered away. Race gives capitalism a comforting familial scale (one’s “inheritance”) and the stamp of nature (the germ stuff). This new relation marks the disappearance of a discourse on democracy and identity. At certain moments in A Woman of Genius and The Young Woman Citizen, “genius” mediates experience so that it belongs to everyone collectively. Over and against the privacy of Olivia’s marriage, her genius drives what she calls her “desperate need of the social function” (WOG, 88). She transforms her audiences, making her experiences theirs, making their experiences collective. She promises to do the same for women with her narrative and implies an invitation for others to write. The Young Woman Citizen complemented this project by imagining women’s entrance into a public sphere enlivened by a flux of experience and mediated by discussion, literature, and the vote. Both of these instances responded to a deeply paradoxical scientific discourse on genius and human variability, in which men’s

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ostensible variability explained their culturally progressive, innovative, and politically able natures and in which women’s supposed invariability suggested their suitability for the apparently eternal and unchanging tasks of motherhood. Under this model, women represented a hazard to politics and imaginative culture, where their intransigence threatened to stall the transformative aspects of these spheres. By arguing for women’s “genius,” Austin and other feminists were arguing for more than equal regard, resources, rights, and education, though they also demanded these. The discourse advocating female genius implicitly advanced an open and changeable model of identity and a correspondingly transformative public domain. Insofar as the terms of this line of argument were determined by the disciplines of biology, psychology, statistics, and ethnology to which feminists responded, however, they led inexorably back to organicist claims about identity. The premise, for instance, that men are organically variable ultimately binds men to the sphere of biological necessity—their ability to innovate is simply their inescapable nature, like their propensity toward color blindness (a biological “anomaly” often compared to genius by Havelock Ellis). This paradox made it possible for scientists and cultural commentators to argue simultaneously that male geniuses were zoological degenerates who should be contained because they exerted a dangerous influence on everything they touched and that women should be contained (politically and socially) because they had no genius. The general connection between genius and biological determinism underwrote the shift through which genius went from being a collective political property to a private racial property. Rather than belonging to “everyone,” genius always had to belong to someone, this population rather than that. It thus comes not to signify the innovation of identities and a shared social reality; genius simply reiterates “inheritance” in the present. In other words, it comes to produce the problem it was invoked to solve. At the same time, it sponsors a nostalgic optimism about capitalist economic relations, troping them as the operation of a deserved family inheritance and a secure group affiliation. The economy takes the place of other possible spheres of social innovation and is, moreover, entirely under one’s control. The pages of Austin’s Everyman’s Genius are thick with the techniques of psychological self-management—autosuggestion, “auto-prayer,” meditation, and incantation. The social and political stakes of genius come down to a person in a room alone, meditating on herself as the cipher for her race and the architect of well-coordinated nationality. Austin’s work and the larger discussion of genius, sexual difference, and

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citizenship it inhabited give us insight into the history of transformative innovation as a political conceit. Within these contexts genius figured innovation at the level of identity and political vision. But it was also an invidious conceit. Indeed, as my discussion shows, it was politically valuable to the struggle for women’s rights for precisely this reason. Innovative genius was associated with a comprehensive humanity available only to some human beings, originally to white men of means and, in the feminist advocacy of female genius, to implicitly white women of means. The transformative capacity of innovation was always imagined to be poised against counterforces of status, conservation, and in some models primitivity. At the same time innovation grounded a conception of culture as property, belonging to some—the innovators—rather than others. To apprehend this history in no way implies that innovation as a political ideal, or aspiration for identity forms, should be cast onto the trash heap of ideological bad faith. To be sure, it would be difficult to imagine progressive political projects without it. But just as an implicit and particular standard plagues the history of the idea of universality, it also plagues that of transformative innovation; and just as universality has required an ongoing project of retheorization in order to recapture its value for egalitarian democracy, so now does innovation require this effort. As the next chapter shows, Jessie Fauset’s fiction and criticism initiated a subtle satire of the female genius trope in the context of the Harlem Renaissance, a satire that provides further motivation for such an effort.

Chapter 5

Imitation as Circulation: Racial Genius and the Problem of National Culture in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s There Is Confusion

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ESSIE Redmon Fauset has a problem: she is not a great novelist. In this she, of course, has much company, but her nongreatness has been an exemplary case. For some of Fauset’s Harlem Renaissance contemporaries, she failed to be great because her sensibility and aesthetic alike were too conventional. To take perhaps the most notable instance, Benjamin Brawley, an educator, literary scholar, and contributor to the major periodicals of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote of her novels, “No one of these books is a great novel.”1 As Deborah McDowell has shown in her discussion of Fauset’s feminism, more recent critics have developed the aesthetic critique of Fauset’s writing into condemnations of her conventional racial and sexual politics, as embodied in her militantly respectable, self-determining bourgeois characters and conservative marital narrative conclusions.2 More broadly, for even some of Fauset’s relatively recent feminist critics, Fauset’s ostensible failure is that she imitates rather than innovates; as Hazel Carby has written, Fauset “adapted but did not transcend the form of the romance.”3 In what is in many ways an extension of this tradition of critical response, Fauset’s seeming failures have sometimes provided the means of her recuperation, grounding critical rescue missions that seek her success in her lapses. Jane Kuenz’s illuminating reading of There Is Confusion, for instance, sees explicit criticism of the contradictory representational demands placed on the “New Negro woman” in Fauset’s ostensible formal flaws, in her “tooabrupt character reversals and need to replace motivation and action with set speeches,” which, through their very awkwardness, “mark the point at which the text’s internal contradictions overlap with and threaten to give voice to

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those contradictions general in the culture and, in this instance, in New Negro gender and racial ideology in particular.”4 It seems that whether they see merit in Fauset’s work despite its formal flaws or redefine her “flaws” as satirical interventions into conventional novelistic form, Fauset’s most rigorous and thorough-going feminist advocates have had to wrestle with her critical reputation as a novelist who is not great, and they have understood the question of her value to revolve around whether or not her novels are demonstrably innovative in some way, rather than imitative.5 Yet it is surely apparent in There Is Confusion that “greatness” is legible most clearly not as its author’s aspiration but as the novel’s topic, and moreover that the novel assails “greatness” with the heavy irony of critique, achieved not only by thematizing imitation but also by elevating it to the level of technique. At the risk of exposing Fauset to accusations of another failure (that is, her failure to persuade critics either to notice or to embrace her critique of “greatness” as an analytical category), I want to reorient the discussion of her first novel away from the apparent problems posed by either her aesthetic merit or her generic conventionality and toward her intervention into a discourse, both contemporary and historical to her writing, on the stakes of “greatness” for African American cultural production. Key to this discourse were speculations about the sources and contours of racial “genius.” Examining this discourse allows us to see how Fauset disputes the cultural logics of genius, replacing an ethos of originality with one of imitation. This was a bold and contentious move to make within the controversies over race and genius in the early twentieth century. In doing so, she redefines the terms by which U.S. national culture might be understood as the terrain of African American participation. In particular, she displaces a proprietary concept of culture based in originality, recommending in its place a practice of cultural imitation that fosters cultural memory, collaboration, and a new, politically promising reimaging of universality. In embracing imitation, There Is Confusion struggles with certain problems—both historically long-standing and emergent in her cultural moment—posed by the discourse on genius when it serves as a political resource, particularly those problems bound up with that discourse’s part in the history of racial categorization. As the discussion in previous chapters has shown, the discourse on genius provided a means for negotiating incoherencies between historically specific constructions of women’s identities and those of public life, making it a key figurative location for contests over women’s conceivable modes of public presence. One of the main reasons that the genius trope could operate in

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this way was its ability to mediate the major structural polarities of liberal democracy—between public and private, consent and coercion, individuality and collectivity, and abstract rationality and embodiment, for instance—in ways not immediately reducible to the typical gendering of those binaries. Yet at every moment, and with increasing rigidity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these possibilities were tied up with the role that ideas of genius played in efforts to taxonomize the varieties of human kinds, including most prominently national, racial, and gendered kinds. Indeed, the tension between these two possibilities—between the inscription of type and the transcendence of type—is a definitive tension constitutive of concepts of genius, and one of the reasons they could be used to make identity seem natural and inexorable and, alternatively, social and provisional. Chapter 4 charts these two trends in relation to the suffrage movement: while opponents of women’s suffrage argued that a lack of genius defined women’s essential difference from men and particular cognitive incapacity for democratic participation, pro-suffrage advocates used the genius trope to dispute conventional forms of gendered identity. Mary Austin’s fiction, citizenship handbook, and writing on genius made her a key figure in this debate. Austin expanded the ideas of her feminist allies by using the genius trope to conceive of a feminist politics dedicated to innovating both identities and the shared political life they could enter. Yet, as the achievement of women’s suffrage eased some of the overt categorical pressure on gender, Austin’s work embraced a model of genius dedicated to taxonomizing essential types of persons, especially racial and ethnic types. She then not only participated in the long-standing association between genius and racial classification but also rendered racial and ethnic differences as biological facts, in keeping with the scientific models from which she drew. Written in the immediate aftermath of women’s suffrage (although without an explicit concern for that event), Jessie Fauset’s satire in There Is Confusion seizes on contemporary conceptions of genius and exposes the problems they pose for arguments on behalf of African American national cultural membership. If the racial reification of genius marked a limit to the political viability of the discourse on genius in the politics of gender, that same reification became an integral part of appeals to genius by African American intellectuals during the Harlem Renaissance. Fauset’s novel enters into the terrain of cultural politics with a profound suspicion of how “genius,” and its worldly cognate “greatness,” constructs both cultural membership and historical memory. There Is Confusion describes in particular how beliefs in the value

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of transcendent individuality (the mode of “greatness”) and originality (that of “genius”) efface the material conditions of African American history. Even more important, Fauset’s novel resists the tendency of the genius discourses to construct national membership in exclusive proprietary terms.

The Greatness Genre and Antiracist Writing When Joanna Marshall, the principal heroine of There Is Confusion, auditions for a part in “The Dance of Nations,” she meets finally with success after a long struggle. In response to her performance, “the Board applauded. ‘Oh, but that’s great, that’s genius,’ cried Miss Phelps.”6 Joanna certainly cannot help but be gratified, having trained all of her life to be a great performer and having been before this moment refused audition after audition because she is black. But what, precisely, does this praise mean? Up until this point, and indeed for the rest of the novel, There Is Confusion conceptualizes “greatness” and its primary determining condition, “genius,” as conventions with evident ideological effects. The novel opens with Joanna crawling onto her father’s lap and demanding a “story ’bout somebody great, Daddy. Great like I’m going to be when I get to be a big girl” (TIC, 9). Her question already implies the status of greatness as a narrative convention rather than an inherent condition; greatness is a matter of story and ritual. Her father knows this convention well, having been obsessed by it himself as a young child. Born a slave but now a wealthy caterer, Joel Marshall grew up studying the narrative conventions of greatness: “At night the little boy in the tiny half-story room in that tiny house in Virginia picked out the stories of Napoleon, Lincoln and Garrison, all white men, it is true; but Lincoln had been poor and Napoleon unknown and yet they had risen to the highest possible state. At least he could rise to comparative fame” (TIC, 10). Greatness, as Joel envisions it, is an utterly empty category, as his yoking of Lincoln and Garrison with Napoleon suggests. When he studies their lives, or those of Toussaint L’Ouverture and Frederick Douglass, he brings away not a sense of historical or political specificity but rather a sense of how greatness, as a narrative convention, will permit him to inscribe himself: “he knew if he could but burst his bonds he, too, could write his name in glory” (TIC, 10). It does not matter what Lincoln, Garrison, Napoleon, Douglass, or L’Ouverture did or thought; what matters is only that they have fame and can be narrativized within certain conventional parameters that emphasize the ultimate irrelevance of such obstacles as poverty, political disenfranchisement, and institutional racism.

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For this reason the emptiness of “greatness” conditions its ideological work. As Marjorie Garber has written, “the ideology of greatness . . . claims, precisely, to transcend ideological concerns and to locate the timeless and enduring.”7 Joel’s reading raises the specters of history, struggle, and power only to establish their ultimate irrelevance. The significance of Douglass is not that he fought slavery but that slavery did not stop him from becoming famous (for fighting slavery). While great figures seem to transcend their contexts, Joel’s bitter and nagging regret is that the life he is actually living refuses to no longer be his context. He has to work to take care of his mother and uses his savings to build a thriving business, frustrating his desire to be ahistorical and self-transcending. Joanna becomes a cipher for her father’s narrativity and then for his ambition. Beth A. McCoy reads this patrilineal infusion of ambition to be Fauset’s knowing critique of the patriarchal structuring of ideas of greatness; Joanna’s eventual struggles against misogyny and racism and ultimate abdication of ambition suggest the covert gendering of the ideology of greatness.8 But while Joanna’s withdrawal from ambition does tell us some important things about the inexorable operations of race and gender in U.S. public culture, it does so within the particular history of African American “greatness” narratives. In order to apprehend fully Fauset’s critique of greatness, we have to see it more fully against the background of those texts. Greatness, that is, possesses a prized place not only in the perpetuation of patriarchal culture but also within the archives of an African American uplift tradition that was sometimes clearly critical of patriarchal models of authority. The African American greatness genre, unlike its white analogue, typically featured women prominently, even when the titles equated the word “men” with “human.” William Wells Brown’s The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863), for instance, includes entries about Phillis Wheatley, Frances Ellen Watkins, and Charlotte N. Forten. Even earlier, in 1827, a short biographical catalog of eminent African Americans published in the Abolition Intelligencer and reprinted in the African American newspaper Freedom’s Journal included Wheatley (the ubiquitous entry) and Belinda, a woman “brought from Africa at age twelve” to be a slave in Massachusetts for forty years before she addressed the state legislature with “an eloquent petition for the freedom of herself and her daughter.”9 These early works often cited Abbé Gregoire, the French cleric whose condemnation of slavery relied in part on an argument for the humanity and merit of black people, a necessary response to defenses of slavery built on disparaging the humanity of Africans and African Americans.10 In Gregoire’s work and

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in the abolitionist work that built on it—and, indeed, in the racialist work to which they responded—black women had a uniquely representative function, through which, unlike their white counterparts, they were seen to be as representative of their race as black men were. Books contemporary with Joanna’s youth, such as J. W. Gibson’s The Colored American from Slavery to Honorable Citizenship (1902), similarly display women, as did books of the greatness genre written during the period of the Harlem Renaissance.11 Indeed, books exclusively on African American women formed their own branch of the genre—books such as Frances Elizabeth Hoggan’s American Negro Women during Their First 50 Years of Freedom (1913), Munroe Alphus Majors’s Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities (1893), and Benjamin Brawley’s Women of Achievement (1919).12 In There Is Confusion, Joanna spends enough of her youth reading such books that it becomes a sort of family joke, as her brother Philip recalls, “‘I can see her now flat on her tummy reading the life of some exemplary female.’ ‘Notable women of color,’ laughed Joanna” (TIC, 72). The presence of women in the African American eminence genre reflects their structural positioning in relation to both juridically enforced patriarchal kinship structures and the ideology of separate spheres. As W. E. B. Du Bois emphasized again and again in his writing on women’s rights in the Crisis (for which, of course, Fauset was the literary editor) and in The Gift of Black Folk, black women were routinely denied the protections of privacy and thus, in their glaring publicity as property and labor, developed capacities for public activity as workers, activists, and social forces. According to Du Bois, black women’s racially determined exile from the privileges of privacy, however much it was designed to exploit their labor and sexuality, made African American culture the proving ground of sexual equality and women’s talents for public participation.13 Moreover, the patriarchal organization of property positions Joanna and other characters in There Is Confusion in racially specified ways that make Joanna’s receipt of her father’s ambition more complicated and less allied with patriarchal gendering than in a white context. Slavery ensured that Joanna’s grandfather had no patriarchal legacy of property to pass on to Joanna’s father, who spends his youth working with his mother to support “a father broken and sickened by slavery” (TIC, 10). The family history of Joanna’s love interest, Peter Bye, shows even more fully the ways in which U.S. patriarchy operates not simply to ensure masculine privilege but also to perpetuate white men’s control over black men’s labor. Peter knows that his great-grandfather Joshua’s extraordinary agricul-

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tural skill built the fortune of the white Bye family, but he learns only in the last pages of the novel that the white Bye patriarch was also Joshua’s father and thus Peter’s own ancestor. The legitimate kinship relations of patriarchy, of course, define not only who gets the family money but also who does not. The black Byes are both robbed of their labor and disinherited as kin; patriliny reveals its character as a structural relation of racial privilege and economic organization. Patriliny also reveals its own flaw: the incoherence of its attempt to naturalize and thereby justify property relations in the idiom of kinship. As if to drive home this point, Fauset makes Peter the subject of a privileged matriliny. On his mother’s side, Peter is descended from a free black family founded when two white sisters ran away with two of their father’s slaves and their descendants were “automatically rendered free by the fact that a white woman had married a black man” (TIC, 37). The law dictating that children follow the condition of the mother, a law that secured white men’s sexual access to enslaved women without endangering their patriarchal consolidation of property through their legitimate white families, here functions as a loophole, allowing the two white sisters to bypass their father’s consent and to pass on their free status—their own legacy—to their children.14 Fauset goes to some lengths to establish that both African American eminence and legacy are gendered in complex ways, at least in their historical possibilities. What is troubling, then, is not that Joanna has adopted something from her father but that that something is a nothing. She longs to be great, but it does not matter for what. When she discovered she could sing, she “knew at once that the road to glory was stretching out before her” (TIC, 15), but it could have been any route, and as it turns out, it will be dancing rather than singing that makes her famous. She later rejoices that her brother and her fiancé are both on the road too, her brother as a civil rights activist and her fiancé as a doctor, but again, any greatness would do. Greatness is only an empty sign of itself, a condition that makes it need endless reassertion. As she tells Peter, “They’ll have on the bill-board: ‘Joanna Marshall, the famous artist’” (TIC, 45). The imagined billboard creates her fame by publicizing her, but it must also announce her fame in words. The performative utterance is wrapped inside a redundantly constantive one. This redundancy links the billboard to the greatness genre more broadly. Books produced within the “great men and great women” convention both create and announce greatness between their covers. They also repeat the claim of greatness endlessly, and, it seems, Joanna reads them endlessly. How many books does Joanna read on “exemplary” and “notable” black women

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and how many times does she read them over if, as her brother says, she was always reading them? While we have no way of knowing, we can speculate about the reason behind the continuousness. She probably reads them over and over for the same reason that the greatness genre was repeated over and over in African American periodicals and books, listing the same exemplary people (with, of course, some variation according to date and topic): because the greatness genre was in a constant state of failure in its primary projects of arguing for equality, advocating for national inclusion, and creating historical memory. Joanna’s ultimate abdication of greatness in favor of “happiness” and marriage with Peter has been the novel’s primary problem for feminist scholars, some of whom see it as an expression of Fauset’s bourgeois conservatism and some of whom see it as an indictment of the institutionalized racism and sexism that obstruct Joanna’s desire to be great and therefore pressure her back into heteronormative seclusion. Without necessarily resolving this debate in these terms, I want to suggest that Fauset is concerned not only with the fact that greatness is either undesirable or unavailable for women but also with its status as a generic construct that organizes the issue of national cultural membership in ideological ways. “Greatness,” that is, is not equivalent to the public or the world of action and achievement broadly understood; rather, it constitutes a particular construct of public presence that this novel puts under critique.15 The African American greatness genre is an activist form. Its main impetus is to correct the invisibility of African Americans in historical narratives and contemporary representations of the nation. Some examples include a paragraph or two on the ancient achievements of the Ethiopians and Egyptians, meant to refute the dominant U.S. narrative that slavery saved Africans from savagery and brought a primitive people into historical time. William Wells Brown, to take but one mid-nineteenth-century instance, asks his readers to compare the advanced civilizations in northern Africa two thousand years ago to the primitive state of the Britons in that era, making much of Roman assessments of British slaves as uneducable and inherently inferior.16 His point, at the historical moment of emancipation, is not to argue for literal reversal of terms but to suggest the historical dynamism of both race and racial status, to locate status in material conditions rather than biology while also showing the tendency of ruling classes to naturalize their power via arguments of natural superiority and right. The impulses toward collective cultural possession in the greatness genre, moreover, are undercut by its narrative techniques of individualization. Most

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works in the greatness genre are broken down into small chapters, each headed by a person’s name and comprised of biography and sometimes assessment. The impetus is once again corrective—to create an archive of African American cultural memory in a national context overwhelmingly hostile to its expression. In its rescue, though, of particular persons from obscurity, the genre individualizes history. As a formal rhetoric of the individual, the greatness genre was hardly alone. As Foucault reminds us, and as we have seen throughout the chapters of this book, the nineteenth century developed multiple institutions, from the novel and biography to, of course, authorship itself, that individualized knowledge in the service of certain ideological models of historical causality and discourse production.17 In Foucault’s examples, though, there is a clean fit between the trope of the individual and the ideological effect; authorship, that is, serves its purpose in individualizing fiction. In the case of the African American greatness genre, however, there is a tension between, on the one hand, telling the story of an exemplary individual and, on the other, documenting structurally determined brutality and exploitation. The story of each person—of Wheatley or Benjamin Banneker or Harriet Tubman—documents the conditions of oppression: kidnap, slavery, particular episodes of cruelty at the hands of slave owners, beatings, poverty, hunger, prejudice, and always the groundings of oppression in law and social practice. The genre recovers African American subjects for history and documents their material and political positions. The almost numbing repetition of similar trials cumulatively establishes the ordinariness of violence and suffering, the uniform effect of the social and juridical construction of the category of race. However, the greatness genre, unlike the slave narrative, practices a merciless discursive thrift. The great person’s trials become “trials” that will be left predictably and triumphantly behind within a page or at most two. Because achievement and success are the genre’s topics, poverty will always fail to crush, beatings will fail to demoralize, and racist editors will fail to still the pen. This, for Joanna, constitutes the genre’s seductive power. When she selected her own reading as a child, “always her choice of subject was of some one who had overcome obstacles and so stood out beyond his fellows” (TIC, 13–14). The ability of individuals to triumph over circumstances testifies to the ultimate irrelevance of circumstances, even as their horrors are recounted. Joanna’s ambition reflects this contradiction. When, in their youth, Peter tells Joanna that “colored people don’t get a chance” to be famous, she dishes him a précis of the greatness genre: “‘Colored people,’ Joanna quoted from her ex-

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tensive reading, ‘can do everything that anybody else can do. They’ve already done it. . . . They’ve been kings and queens and poets and teachers and doctors and everything. I’m going to be the one colored person who sings best in these days, and I never, never, never mean to let color interfere with anything I really want to do’’’ (TIC, 45). Joanna is making an equality argument (a point we will return to soon). She also indulges the trope of individuation, singling herself out as the “one colored person,” refusing a collective struggle in favor of her individual triumph as someone whose will has the power to prevent “color” from interfering. Yet she also makes collective claims for her art, quoting her dance instructor, who was echoing James Weldon Johnson’s words from his essay on greatness: “He says that I’ve got a great future. That if there’s anything that will break down prejudice it will be equality or perhaps even superiority on the part of colored people in the arts. And I agree with him” (TIC, 97).18 So which is it: is “color,” and the systems of domination it organizes, irrelevant, or is it her main focus? Are barriers nugatory, or are they the object of struggle? Joanna, mirroring the greatness genre, simultaneously asserts and denies the importance of material and cultural conditions, just as she asserts and denies collective identification. Joanna’s career is both in spite of ordinary African Americans (she proclaims, “at least I won’t be ordinary” [TIC, 14] and “I can’t stand stupid, common people” [TIC, 46]) and on their behalf (she wants to “break down prejudice”). Fauset makes elaborate display of these contradictions. As a formal critique, There Is Confusion suggests the analytical impasse embedded in the greatness genre, its inability to make intelligible the complexity of circumstances behind its individualized examples of transcendent greatness. Moreover the novel links that analytical impasse to an impasse in feeling. Joanna’s quest for greatness “influenced adversely and warped her sympathies” (TIC, 20), isolating her and leading her to occasional cruel acts of exclusion or disregard. Her lack of sympathy incapacitates her for communal participation, as when she sings in a local black church and ignores her audience, seeing past them and into an imagined future of glory with another, bigger, and therefore better audience. Her story shows how the greatness narrative obstructs two major modalities of struggle: analysis and collective feeling. Despite all of her reading (because of all of her reading), she neither understands the historical roots of African American collectivity nor participates in the contemporary community of common purpose. Just as it thematizes the problems of “greatness,” There Is Confusion also

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responds, by negation, in strictly formal terms to the greatness genre and its implications for thinking or forming the social. The centrality of Joanna’s story in the novel is rivaled by the narratives of Peter Bye and the workingclass striver Maggie Ellersley, both of which are intertwined, but not identical, with hers at every moment. Subsidiary characters, such as Vera Manning, who goes from using her ability to pass for white to get a good office job to using that ability to serve as a spy in the South and fight lynching, enact parallel narratives that decenter Joanna’s story while also amplifying its major themes. The characters are individuated but entwined. Their main project in the novel is to discover more and more about their circumstances, economic legacies, historical positioning, and national membership. The impersonal construction of the novel’s title suggests the extent to which we are discouraged from reading this as the story of a singular exemplary person. When Maggie Ellersley gives up her quest for respectability through marriage and determines to become “as great a success in business” (TIC, 289) as her mentor, Joanna’s father, “greatness” is downgraded to a mere qualitative adjective, signaling her desire for economic self-sufficiency.

Genius Tropes and the Properties of National Culture There Is Confusion’s satire on greatness is fueled by its intervention into one of the major tropes of the greatness genre, “genius.” Even the most cursory glance into the print culture of the Harlem Renaissance shows an abiding interest in asserting African and African American genius, as found in literary writings but also in all of the arts and sciences. We could understand the pervasiveness of the black genius trope as part of the general project of promoting African American art and literature during the 1920s, where claims of genius might function as a sort of advertisement for literature. David Levering Lewis’s canonical When Harlem Was in Vogue has accustomed us to seeing the progressive, antiracist potential that Harlem intellectuals saw in supporting African American achievement in the arts; or, as Lewis phrased the point in his recent preface to the book, “the Renaissance began as a somewhat forced phenomenon—a cultural nationalism of the parlor—institutionally encouraged and constrained by the leaders of the Civil Rights Establishment for the paramount purpose of improving race relations in a time of extreme national reaction to, and annulment of, economic gains won by African-Americans during the First World War.”19 As Lewis’s rich documentation of the Harlem

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Renaissance demonstrates, African American artists and intellectuals of the 1920s made a habit of claiming, as did James Weldon Johnson in “Essay on the Negro’s Creative Genius,” “The status of the Negro in the United States is more a question of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions. And nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.”20 Lewis’s formulation of Renaissance aspirations has for some opened the way for criticism of the Renaissance as a project of artistic promotion that was constrained by the limits—and perhaps futility—of seeking stature primarily in elite fields of cultural production directly relevant only to a slim fraction of the U.S. population. What I am suggesting here, though, is that these aspirations cannot be understood if we construe “the arts” as an autonomous sphere of culture. Instead we need to observe a broad discursive and historical field, stretching from Enlightenment contests over race through their twentieth-century counterparts. These contests were distributed across specialized disciplines such as ethnography, statistics, and medicine, as well as the mass-circulated print culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Within them the trope of “genius” supplied a distinctive logic of cultural membership that specified the issue of “intellectual parity” in highly specialized ways. The category of genius organized race not only along the gradient of racial rank but also according to a version of national cultural membership that understood legitimate belonging to spring very particularly from the capacity for originality and to be sustained, moreover, by an economy of culture based in that capacity. By intervening in the Harlem Renaissance’s discussion of genius, Fauset undermines the logic of citizenship organized around originality and proposes a logic of imitation in its place. When Harlem Renaissance writers such as Johnson turned to the trope of genius, they entered into a long-standing controversy about racial intellectual capacity that grew out of the Enlightenment project of taxonomizing and ranking the “types” or “varieties” of humankind. Like the parallel and intersecting discourse on the gender of intellectual capacity, the discourse on racial intellect had its historical genesis in the Enlightenment’s revolutionary formulation of equality. Once political theorists and the growing tradition of democratic political order vanquished feudal conceptions of rank and enshrined conceptions of equality, democratic orders were left with the problem of how to defend or even understand some obvious, and from the new political order’s perspective desirable, political inequalities. One major means

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of defending those inequalities—the very differently constituted political inequalities of white women or slaves, for instance—was to propose that they were innate, rather than social or political. So the theorization of civic equality went hand in glove with the elaboration of innate inequality, often by the same thinkers.21 Yet while the racial science of the Enlightenment calibrated racial difference across a range of intellectual faculties and attributes—think of Jefferson’s method of not only “comparing [blacks and whites] by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination” but also ranking them according to such qualities as beauty, passion, and odor—the postromantic discussion centralized the issue around the emergent category of genius.22 Moreover, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. has argued, a figure such as Phillis Wheatley stood in the spotlight of controversies over race and equality because literary writing served as a sign of reason and thus humanity for the Enlightenment.23 It was not reason or writing, however, but the spontaneous, exceptional, and irrational capacity for “genius” that defined later, postromantic controversies over capacity. As one contributor to the African American Freedom’s Journal proclaimed, “After such specimens as the world has had of African genius and worth, let all the advocates for African inferiority and slavery be silent.”24 As The Colored American asked in 1837: “We are sometimes told, indeed, with an air of scorn, of the intellectual inferiority of the black man. . . . But where will you find minds of larger dimensions, brighter coruscations of genius, bolder explosions of intellect, than in the colored race?”25 Here as in so many instances, accusations of inferiority of mind are not disputed merely by asserting intellectual equality between ordinary black people and white people but by claiming genius. Why should this be so? On the face of it there might seem to be a strange sort of overkill in battling accusations of inferiority by asserting genius. After all, not even the most strident advocates of slavery or white supremacy claimed that all white people were geniuses or that a white man needed to be a genius to have his liberty. Unlike such categories as “reason” or “writing,” however, “genius” created a proprietary relation to culture based in the concept of originality. As noted in Chapter 3, Françoise Meltzer, writing about the construct of individual genius, argues that artistic originality follows the Lockean logic of possessive individualism, whereby a person has a natural right to the “work of his own hand” and, moreover, has his political inclusion in a state defined by the ownership of property legitimated in that right. This logic of ownership distinguished the “genius” model from an earlier, prero-

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mantic aesthetic valuation of imitation. At various points in this book I have argued with Meltzer’s claim that genius could be seen in terms of coherent individuality, given its association with split states of consciousness and collective forms of thought.26 Yet, if the discourse on racial genius does not necessarily show originality to support a possessive individualism of culture, it does allow us to see a possessive racialism, in which a race’s supposed ability to originate culture legitimates that race’s ownership of culture and therefore the absolute exclusion of other races from claims to that culture. For this exclusion to be possible, genius and race needed to be fully equated within the reifying fields of statistics and population biology. As we saw in Chapter 4, scientists such as Francis Galton, Cesare Lombroso, and Havelock Ellis redescribed “genius” in both statistical and evolutionary terms. They resituated genius’s romantic tropes of extreme states of consciousness and innovation in terms of statistical variation—the genius as the deviation from the average—and biological variation—the genius as a biological anomaly. Understood in these terms, genius became a productive point for the reification of race and biological inheritance. The seminal work in this line, still cited in the literature on intelligence through the 1960s, was Galton’s Hereditary Genius, first published in 1869. In it Galton argued, and supported with statistics, that genius follows certain family lines and that it was inherited in a limited, traceable, biological way. Methodologically he identified genius entirely with eminence and then demonstrated that almost all of the eminent people in Great Britain were from a relatively small group of families at the top of the social, political, and economic hierarchy. Documenting that powerful people tend to have powerful children, Galton claimed that genius was a legacy that could even be augmented through selective breeding, a proposition in keeping with Galton’s founding of eugenics and also one that justified social hierarchies in biological terms. In population statistics genius measured differences not only within a population (between the British prime minister and the British man who shined his shoes) but also between populations—between the different races of Britain (the Scots, the Welsh, the Anglo-Saxons, and so forth) and, of course, between the races of Britain and the rest of the world.27 Hereditary Genius thus constituted an argument not only for the ruling class’s right to power but also for Anglo-Saxon global hegemony as an inexorable biological fact.28 When Galton “compare[s] the negro race with the Anglo-Saxon,” he concludes that “the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own.”29 Such a clear exercise in tautology—proving

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that the people at the top are the people at the top—met with criticism from the beginning. Yet even though Galton’s critics disputed his claim that public eminence was equivalent to genius, they echoed his idea that genius was a racial property. For instance, Charles Horton Cooley systematically criticized Galton’s focus on fame but affirmed the racial quality of genius; he concluded that “to produce geniuses is a function of race, to allot fame is a function of history.”30 Writing in the 1910s and 1920s, racial scientists such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard solidified Galton’s linkage of genius and race and specified that linkage in order to argue against political forms based on equality. As Grant puts it in The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History: “The great lesson of the science of race is the immutability of somatological or bodily characters, with which is closely associated the immutability of psychical predispositions and impulses. This continuity of inheritance has a most important bearing on the theory of democracy and still more upon that of socialism, for it naturally tends to reduce the relative importance of environment.”31 For Grant, “race” is both “immutable” and at the same time the only actual source of social or cultural change, a paradox facilitated by the function of race as a cipher for genius. Grant posits change to be a matter of genius and genius as a matter of race; in Grant’s formulation, “To utilize and adapt to human needs the forces and the raw materials of nature, to invent new processes, to establish new principles, and to elucidate and unravel the laws that control the universe call for genius” (PGR, 98). Reorienting Galton’s idea of inheritance even more fully toward the concept of race, Grant specifies that “this something which we call ‘genius’ is not a matter of family, but of stock or strain, and is inherited in precisely the same manner as are the purely physical characters” (PGR, 98). That “something” could be augmented through educational opportunity is a point on which he does not dwell; instead he insists that “it is race, always race, that produces genius” (PGR, 98). Lothrop Stoddard echoes this point in his The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy when he too nominates “genius” to be the force of progress and social resolution: “It is clean, virile, genius-bearing blood, streaming down the ages through the unerring action of heredity, which, in anything like a favorable environment, will multiply itself, solve our problems, and sweep us on to higher and nobler destinies.”32 To say that Grant and Stoddard and other such writers exclude African Americans from their model of genius-impelled historical progress is to grossly understate the case. Their project is to establish social hierarchies

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of race and ethnicity as biological facts and, quite specifically, to argue that political changes favoring equality would crash disastrously against the immovable rock of “heredity.” This project requires race to be defined as a biologically inexorable category designating nearly absolute physiological and cultural differences, indicating that nonwhite races cannot be assimilated either physically or culturally (since these two are absolutely inseparable) into the white countries of Europe and the United States. Their claim, however, is not merely that black people are inexorably unequal to white people because they do not possess genius. Rather, their arguments turn on the originality of genius and the proprietary relation to culture that originality grounds. As Stoddard argues: “Although the white race displays sustained constructive power to an unrivalled degree, particularly in its Nordic branches, the brown and yellow peoples have contributed greatly to the civilization of the world and have profoundly influenced human progress. The negro, on the contrary, has contributed virtually nothing. . . . The originating powers of the European and the Asiatic are not in him” (RTC, 91–92). Stoddard and Grant offer as scientific fact the stereotypes that blacks are imitators, but here the stereotype gets its political force from its place in a discussion of racial genius. They draw on a romantic definition of genius as originality, as opposed to imitation, as in Grant’s statement of the formula: “To imitate or to adopt what others have invented is not genius but mimicry” (PGR, 98). Such a definition comprehends culture as the emanation of distinct and individual acts of original invention. Culture in this view consists of sudden leaps rather than continuities, and these leaps establish racial property. The accusation of imitativeness was leveled against women across races as well, but to a very different effect. In both instances the accusation of imitativeness served to establish absolute difference (either gender difference or racial difference) and to justify political subordination. But while women’s supposed imitativeness and lack of original genius were argued to account for their exclusion from privileged domains of cultural and aesthetic production on biological rather than social grounds, these were also used to firm up their cultural and racial membership, as well as their relation to history. In Madison Grant’s words: “Women in all human races, as the females among all mammals, tend to exhibit the older, more generalized and primitive traits of the past of the race. The male in his individual development indicates the direction in which the race is tending under the influence of variation and selection” (PGR, 27). Women’s cultural imitativeness, like their biological

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atavism, acted as a cultural preservative. As Havelock Ellis observed, just as women looked like racial primitives (“In various parts of the world anthropologists have found reason to suppose that the primitive racial elements in a population are more distinctly preserved by the women than the men”), they kept ancient cultural elements alive through their endless imitations (“On the psychic side women are more inclined than men to preserve ancient customs and ancient methods of thought”).33 They supposedly did this because they did not have the genius that would allow them to come up with new ideas rather than repeat the old. In the case of race, however, imitativeness signified an exile from history and contemporary cultural estrangement. Stoddard launches his discussion of black imitativeness by asserting, “To begin with, black peoples have no historic past” (RTC, 91). He claims that “never having evolved civilizations of their own, they are practically devoid of [an] accumulated mass of beliefs, thoughts, and experiences” (RTC, 91). The possessive language here is no accident; in having no culture of “their own,” blacks do not “own” culture. According to Stoddard, their incapacity for originality gives them a merely temporary and surface relation to modern culture: “Such progress as certain negro groups have made has been due to external pressure and has never long outlived that pressure’s removal, for the negro, when left to himself, as in Haiti and Liberia, rapidly reverts to his ancestral ways” (RTC, 100). Stoddard’s model of “civilization” here is profoundly economic. According to his line of argument, black people merely borrow culture but can never really own it; and they cannot have a legitimate claim on U.S. culture because they copy rather than originate: “The negro is a facile, even eager, imitator; but there he stops. He adopts; but he does not adapt, assimilate, and give forth creatively again” (RTC, 100–101). The charge that Africans and their diasporic descendants lacked genius, then, did not gain its full force by proving a general kind of intellectual inferiority. Rather, the charge grounded a proprietary model of culture that troped black people as cultural debtors, borrowers, and thieves whose “imitations” proved they had no legitimate membership in the sphere of either U.S. national culture or the cosmopolitan and international culture in which the United States was figured as a privileged participant. Given the pervasiveness and cultural authority behind this kind of delegitimation, it comes as no surprise that African American writers, with particular intensity in the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance, responded to the scientific refutation of black genius with assertions of black genius that were key to their political claims. Like the racially invidious scientific refutation

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of black genius, their claims on behalf of it were not simply equality claims, though they were also necessarily equality-based in a legal and social field where the fight for equality was a stark necessity. Claims to genius orchestrated arguments about cultural membership, political inclusion, and legitimacy, all within controversies about essence and the meaning of race. African American critics such as Benjamin Brawley, James Weldon Johnson, William Stanley Braithwaite, Alain Locke, and in particularly complex ways W. E. B. Du Bois thus disputed the position that Africans and African Americans lacked original genius. In doing so, however, they by and large supported the underlying contention that the possession of original genius could distill racial essence and tell us something about a race’s claims to cultural and political belonging. In other words, they more or less affirmed the racially proprietary claims encoded in the concept of original genius. For some writers, the racial property generated by original genius took very concrete biological forms. In The Negro Genius: A New Appraisal of the American Negro in Literature and the Fine Arts, for instance, Benjamin Brawley argues “that every race has its peculiar genius and that, as far as we can at present judge, the Negro, with all his manual labor, is destined to reach its greatest heights in the field of the artistic.”34 This peculiar genius is a matter of “temperament, and that of the Negro has been shown to be pre-eminently imaginative and sensuous. It is subjective too, so that in general Negro authors and composers have been better in poetry and music than in the novel and the drama.”35 Albert C. Barnes, one of the white contributors to Alain Locke’s The New Negro, sounded a similar note when he attempted to define the distinctive quality of “Negro genius”: “The most important element to be considered is the psychological complexion of the Negro as he inherited it from his primitive ancestors and which he maintains to this day. The outstanding characteristics are his tremendous emotional endowment, his luxuriant and free imagination and a truly great power of individual expression.”36 Barnes’s trope of “inheritance” is here ambiguous, echoing the biological uses of the term that were then being elaborated under the concept of eugenics but, with its emphasis on “psychological complexion,” opening the door to a more culturalist meaning, whereby psychological dispositions are fostered by one generation in the next. Yet, if his allusion to “primitive ancestors” calls to mind the manner in which constructs of the primitive encased the discussion on black cultures and people, his trope of “inheritance” also allies racial culture once again with the logic of property. Brawley, by contrast, absolutely refuted the primitivist association; in

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his words, “about one thing we must be clear: we emphasize no connection between primitive African art and that of the Negro in America today.”37 If the art was not primitive, though, the genius was unambiguously biological. Disputing “some men in the nineteenth century” who saw black achievement to result primarily from an “infusion of white blood,” Brawley argues that “we may now affirm that such distinction as the Negro has won in the arts is due primarily to the black rather than the mixed element of the race. People of mixed blood have given us the college presidents, the administrators, the Government employees; but the blacks are the singers and seers. . . . In other words, the mixed element in the race may represent the Negro’s talent, but it is upon the black element that he must rely for his genius.”38 Using a discourse of blood absent from his earliest versions of this essay, Brawley figures “genius” as a biological inheritance, as a eugenicist might. His radicalism lies in privileging a source—the black body—that Francis Galton would never have dreamed of valuing. For other writers, such as William Stanley Braithwaite and James Weldon Johnson, the racialization of genius presented a problem to be negotiated, and that problem inhered in an unstable tension between the particularity of race and the universality of genius. This was a problem that white racial scientists writing about white geniuses dispensed with easily enough. Sometimes they did so by assuming an equation between whiteness and universality so complete that it never needed articulation. At other times they made the evolutionary-biological argument that the unique environmental pressures on a particular racial group—usually referring to either the Nordics or the AngloSaxons—selected for qualities called “variability” or “creative intelligence” in biological works. These terms, however, functioned as codes for “universality,” insofar as they denoted a broad-ranging biological capacity to be any and all things a human being could be.39 If it was a disadvantage to the sciences that their terminology was less stirring than the sweeping terms of philosophy and romanticism, they at least had the compensations provided by their authoritative command of the “facts” of the case. For African American writers on genius, however, race could never be transparent or unmarked; nor would they want it to be since that transparency was the exact form of white privilege, coded as universal humanness but organizing specific dominations, that they were working to combat. Yet at the same time, the position of the universal subject, who could function as the bearer of rights and the legitimate full social member, also functioned as an obvious and strategic object of desire.

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It is an easy thing, given our current, well-earned suspicions of “universality,” to see in the desire for universality either false consciousness or bald strategy, particularly when it migrates from the aesthetic field to the democratic. Indeed, there was a clear strategic value for African Americans, as for white women and other disenfranchised groups, in identifying themselves with the universal, since it put them under the umbrella category of people worthy of possessing the inalienable rights and inclusive civic status seemingly promised by the founding documents of political democracy. But to understand the identification with the universal only in these strategic terms is to miss the power of its appeal. Identification with universality promises a kind of personal dignity and collective wholeness. It promises as well that the contradictions between particular political desires will be resolved in democracy’s universal domain, sometimes figured specifically in terms of the state and at others in terms of a sort of civic unity that exceeds the merely formal and political mechanisms of the state. Certainly it is difficult to imagine any kind of collectivity without some recourse to a universal basis of coherence; this is one of the persistent problems of democratic theory in a postuniversalist intellectual world.40 In some obvious ways, universality stages the dream of wholeness typical of nineteenth-century Christian American narratives of the hereafter, but in the here and now. As such, it offers some of the same strictly imaginary compensations for the everyday toils and suffering of working and living in any particular way. At the same time, though, it functions as a promise that can always be deployed critically and politically against the inequalities and injustices of the here and now. More important, its sweeping and transcendent quality offers to attach subjects to something larger than their own particular lives and characteristics, a mysticism that can bend in either utopian or distinctly dystopian directions but which does important work in linking desire, personhood, and polity. Perhaps for this reason, one of the leading abolitionist journals called itself The Genius of Universal Emancipation. In the context of Harlem Renaissance literary criticism, we can observe the political flux of desire encoded in what reveals itself to be the problem of genius’s representivity. William Stanley Braithwaite, writing as did Barnes in The New Negro, envisioned the tension between race and universality in a contradictory field of aesthetic subject formation. Summing up Charles W. Chesnutt’s career, for instance, he laments, “But after all Mr. Chestnutt [sic] is a story-teller of genius transformed by racial earnestness into the novelist of talent.”41 In other

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words, Braithwaite sees Chesnutt’s specific intention to enter the combat over race to have plucked him from the transcendent heights of universal genius and entangled him in the merely local and particular political battles of his hour. Chesnutt’s “race,” then, is the opposite of his genius, not its substance. Braithwaite sees the tension between race and genius as defining the current aesthetic moment as well. Noting that Georgia Johnson, who “has voiced in true poetic spirit the lyric cry of Negro womanhood,” also, and of course, “lapses into the sentimental and the platitudinous,” Braithwaite looks to other poets: “Anne Spencer, more sophisticated, more cryptic but also more universal, reveals quite another aspect of poetic genius. Indeed, it is interesting to notice how to-day Negro poets waver between the racial and the universal notes. Claude McKay, the poet who leads his generation, is a genius meshed in this dilemma.”42 Braithwaite’s description of the “dilemma” is more of a symptom of the contradiction between race and universality than its analysis. Georgia Johnson is praised as the “true poetic spirit of Negro womanhood,” but the gendered terms of his condemnation of her sentimentality and platitudinousness suggest how difficult it might be for her to appear at once as a particular identity form and, at the same time, its transcendence. Similarly, when he writes of “Negro poetic expression,” he calls both for racial particularity, insofar as the poetic expression must be intelligibly “Negro,” and the transcendence of racial particularity: “that spirit and power of beauty that flowers above any and all men’s harming.”43 One way to manage this tension between race and universality was by reference to a concept designed to function as a domain of universality where differences both in identity and opinion could be resolved: that of the nation.44 Yet even this ground opened up vistas of contradiction, a condition perhaps unsurprising given the ways in which nationality typically fails to resolve fully the contradictions it is summoned to manage. In his “Essay on the Negro’s Creative Genius,” which serves as the introduction to his anthology of African American poetry, James Weldon Johnson formulates a dialectic, rather than a contrast, between racial distinctiveness and universality, synthesizing these two on the ground of the nation. Johnson writes, “This power of the Negro to suck up the national spirit from the soil and create something artistic and original, which, at the same time, possesses the note of universal appeal, is due to a remarkable racial gift of adaptability; it is more than adaptability, it is a transfusive quality.” This gift of “adaptability” is racial insofar as it belongs to “the Negro” but is universal insofar as it acts as a cipher—or, as his metaphor would have it, as a siphon—for the “national spirit.” At the same

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time, its racial quality is also its universal quality, the attribute that allows it to transcend the nation: “And the Negro has exercised this transfusive quality not only here in America, where the race lives in large numbers, but in European countries, where the number has been almost infinitesimal.”45 Race is at one moment the particular position and at another the universal position, just as the nation is in one sentence the universal domain and at another merely one particular nationalism among others. Johnson solves the polar pulls between the nation and the race by fully assimilating the former to the latter: “I make here what may appear to be a more startling statement by saying that the Negro has already proved the possession of these powers by being the creator of the only things artistic that have yet sprung from American soil and been universally acknowledged as distinctive American products.”46 Johnson reverses the white-supremacist argument that African Americans are not really members of the cultural nation, and thus are not entitled to the benefits of the political nation, because they have not made any American culture by claiming that they have made all of American culture, understood as a “distinct” entity, “universally acknowledged.” The space of the universal is a receding one, moving away from the abstractions of race and nation and into an unmarked domain of opinion, something like a disembodied, citational public sphere. What that public sphere registers is American culture as a form of property. Thus, even if the nation raises as many problems as it is invoked to solve—or even if it raises exactly the same problems as it is invoked to solve—it operates, like “genius” in the writings of both racist and antiracists writers, according to a cultural logic of origins and originality. Writers such as Grant and Stoddard claimed that African Americans had no genius because they were imitative rather than original and that, moreover, imitativeness evidenced cultural estrangement based in borrowing, rather than membership based in the generation and therefore legitimate ownership of culture. Some Harlem Renaissance intellectuals, while disputing the charge of imitativeness, endorsed the underlying connection between originality and ownership. African American original genius, they argued, established proprietary claims to culture—understood simultaneously in American national, cosmopolitan, and historical terms—and by extension to full cultural and civic membership. In Du Bois’s large and various body of writing on culture, the genius trope often allowed him to hold race, nation, and culture in a productive flux that managed to elude the biological reifications of race as blood and, at the same time, to avoid evaporating the category of race in the field of culture. As Eric

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Sundquist explains: “Finding neither a sound basis for a scientific definition of race nor a cultural-historical explanation that was not virtually openended, Du Bois returned again and again to quasi-mystic notions such as ‘genius,’ ‘strivings,’ and ‘common memory.’” According to Sundquist, the German philosophical sense of genius as Volksgeist allowed Du Bois to argue for black contributions to American national culture and, at the same time, for a coherent transnational Pan-African culture.47 The concept of genius, particularly in The Souls of Black Folk, allowed Du Bois also to figure a kind of futurity, the actualization of African American capacity that would be made possible by full cultural equality; he writes of the “striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.”48 However, if such a deployment of the genius trope invited his readers into what Sundquist calls a “broad, exhilarating” project of forging collectivity through culture, then in The Gift of Black Folk (1924), which appeared the same year as Fauset’s There Is Confusion, Du Bois refigures his trope in ways that address two problems posed by the genius concept: its connotation of exceptionality and its proprietary logic. In seeming contradiction of his occasional messianic rhetoric and emphasis on the cultural work of an elite “Talented Tenth,” Du Bois opens The Gift of Black Folk with praise for “the humble builders” of America: “For the glory of the world is the possibilities of the commonplace and America is America even because it shows, as never before, the power of the common, ordinary, unlovely man” (GBF, 33). Regarding ordinary Americans as nation builders means here disregarding the idea that cultural contribution emerges exclusively by way of exceptional, original genius. It also means revealing how the discourses of white originary genius have defined black Americans as biological waste products, rather than economic and cultural forces of creativity; as Du Bois writes: “This is real democracy and not that vain and eternal striving to regard the world as the abiding place of exceptional genius with great black wastes of hereditary idiots” (GBF, 33). Du Bois’s major commitment in his writings about nationality and culture had always been to argue for the centrality of African American culture to American culture, an urgent and to this day incomplete project. In The Gift of Black Folk, he makes perhaps his most systematic and comprehensive survey of African American contributions to such diverse and vital areas as manual labor, soldiering, democratic theory, gender construction, suffrage politics, national affect, song, and aesthetic achievement in literature and the arts. Here once again, though, belonging is an economic prospect; African

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Americans deserve national membership—are already central and inalienable members—because they originated and contributed central elements of national culture. Du Bois transfigures this transaction, however, by invoking two linked meanings of the “gift”: as an endowment of capacity and as a form of economic exchange. The Gift of Black Folk was published the same year as Marcel Mauss’s The Gift. Mauss’s work is an anthropological study that theorized gift exchange as a means of social cohesion in “primitive” societies. Exchanging gifts, Mauss argues, is competitive and constitutive of power relations, but it also circulates objects in a nonalienated economy in which the identity of the giver clings to the gift and the memories of repeated exchanges form the history of the community. Like Mauss, Du Bois proposes the gift as a mode of memory and connection. Du Bois imagines his exposition of the gift as a riposte to those “who would forget” the African American labor—physical, intellectual, artistic, and political—that shaped the nation. His conception of contribution, here as in much of his writing, also moves beyond the historical, geographic, and cultural boundaries of the United States, extending to a historically deep and culturally cosmopolitan Pan-Africanism, as when he tracks black influence on ancient Egyptian art, “Semitic civilization,” and classical Spanish painting (GBF, 287).49 In this formulation, however, we can perceive several problems. If the gift constitutes, as a matter of its structure, a conduit of cultural memory, then why does it require a book to make that memory intelligible? Another problem pertains more urgently to the category of the gift as something rendered in the spirit of reciprocity and consent: what are the consequences of figuring the compelled toil of slaves, or less starkly, the songs they developed to voice their resistance, as gifts? We can perceive, moreover, another problem; despite his often moving and radically feminist chapter on African American women, Du Bois genders national culture within a masculine genealogy of begetting: “We who know may not forget but must forever spread the splendid sordid truth that out of the most lowly and persecuted of men, Man made America” (GBF, 33). It is into these problems—those of historical memory, compulsion, and the gender of cultural transmission—as well as into the broader issues associated with the proprietary model of culture that Fauset’s novel enters.

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Refusing Gifts and Elevating Imitation There Is Confusion evinces deep suspicion of the gift economy. In Peter Bye’s family history, the conceit of the gift masks a history of exploitation. The operations of white patriarchy cut Peter’s great-grandfather Joshua, who was the biological son of his mother’s legal owner, out of a stake in the family fortune that his agricultural acumen created. This plot also makes another point when it unfolds a thematics of the gift. Joshua Bye’s main contribution to his white father’s orchard might best be understood as a kind of intellectual property flowing naturally from his person: “a born agriculturalist, he had an uncanny knowledge of planting, of grafting, of fertilizing” (TIC, 24). From this knowledge—Joshua’s gift for agriculture—the white Byes grew rich enough to pass on their wealth for generations. Peter’s family suppresses the biological connection to the white Byes but passes on the knowledge that the white Byes drew their wealth from Joshua. In the last scene of the novel, an aged Meriwether Bye, the last surviving member of the white Bye family, arrives at Peter and Joanna’s doorstep. Meriwether offers to make Peter and Joanna’s son his heir. In response to Peter’s skepticism, Meriwether declares that “he is my heir” (TIC, 295) and reveals the biological connection between the white and black Bye families. Although Meriwether is willing to acknowledge a kinship-based claim in private, Peter knows to ask, “If you made my son your heir . . . would you be willing to publish to the world that you were doing it because [he] was your blood relation—no matter how distant—or would this be the gift of an eccentric philanthropist?” (TIC, 296). The conceit of the gift, Peter recognizes, would serve as a cover, obscuring the history of sexual and economic exploitation. Peter thus rejects Meriwether’s offer: “‘I don’t want your gifts,’ said Peter gently, ‘nor does my son want them—neither your money nor the acknowledgement of your blood. They come too late’” (TIC, 297). By figuring his rejection in terms of the gift, Peter directs attention away from the basis on which Meriwether might think that Peter’s son has a claim— the basis of blood—and toward the economic relation between the black Byes and the white Byes. To be sure, the novel by this time has already made the point that the U.S. national debt to African Americans is based in a relation of economic exploitation that far exceeds any claim that could be made in terms of kinship. When Peter meets with Meriwether Bye’s grandson (also named Meriwether) in France, the two men discuss exactly this issue. The younger Meriwether tells Peter that he has been looking for the black Byes so that he

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can compensate them when he inherits his fortune: “It seemed to me a monstrous thing to have our family and our fortune—for my grandfather is still a very rich man—reared on the backs of those other Byes” (TIC, 242). Neither man knows that they are cousins, and when Peter reflects (incorrectly) that they are not related, the younger Meriwether emphasizes that kinship has no bearing on his debt to the black Byes, or to white Americans’ debts more generally to black Americans: “But sometimes it seems to me that just because those black Byes and thousands of others like them had no [legal kinship] claim, that they had every claim” (TIC, 243). Compensation here addresses the fact that the system of slavery delegitimized African Americans’ claims to the value of their own labor and to the spoils of inheritance. Restitution, then, must be not only for labor and the wealth it created but also for the juridical wound of delegitimation. This is exactly the condition that Meriwether’s gift would obscure; it would return the money while hiding both the economic and moral debts incurred by the institution of slavery. The gift in There Is Confusion, then, works in exactly the opposite way that Du Bois proposes the gift should work in The Gift of Black Folk. While Du Bois tropes the gift in order to bring African American contributions and history into the realm of collective national memory, the act of bestowing a gift in Fauset’s novel has precisely the opposite function: it serves as the means by which amnesia is perpetuated. We might, following Jacques Derrida’s critique of Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, consider that Fauset has exposed a formal property of the gift. Derrida argues that gifts could never forge a community of memory based on an economy of reciprocity, because the expectation of reciprocity creates a traffic in goods indistinguishable from ordinary modes of exchange, such as commerce: “For there to be a gift, it is necessary that the donee not give back.” Not only that, but “it is necessary at the limit, that he not recognize the gift as gift. If he recognizes it as a gift, if the gift appears to him as such . . . this simple recognition suffices to annul the gift. Why? Because it gives back, in the place, let us say, of the thing itself, a symbolic equivalent.”50 The gift, then, constitutes a sort of formal difficulty; it cannot appear as itself and still be itself. Such might actually be Du Bois’s insight; by making African American “gifts” to U.S. cultural and economic life “appear as such,” he exposes the set of economic and social relations that surround them. He thus establishes not simply a legitimacy claim based on cultural proprietorship, but a debt that flows from the economic relation of exchange. In refiguring the slave’s labor as a gift, he replaces the identification between the slave and the master’s property

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with a relation of exchange that appoints the slave to a subject position and makes the slave a creditor. Yet the magic of the gift economy is its ability not to be seen, to return to Derrida’s phrase, “at the limit.” The gift system, as Mauss describes it, runs on irrationality, rather than on the economy of equivalence, which is why it is still the custom to take price tags off of exchanged gifts so that they do not reveal their abstract equivalence in terms of money. The intervals between exchanges and the incomparable quality of exchanged gifts mystify their relation to property, and this, according to Mauss, is what permits them to function as a social relation rather than merely as a commercial relation. For this reason, appearing as a gift is the means of amnesia—the pretense of a social relation that masks an economic one—in There Is Confusion. The novel sees the necessity of making debt explicit, so that when the younger Meriwether tells Peter that his family owes its wealth to slave labor, Peter responds, “I like to hear you acknowledge your indebtedness” (TIC, 246). The other “gift” in this novel is, of course, Joanna’s “genius,” what her dancing instructor calls her “great gift” (TIC, 147). Peter’s rejection of Meriwether’s “gift” and insistence on white debt tends to shore up his proprietary claims to U.S. national culture; as he says, “I don’t want to leave America. It’s mine, my people helped make it” (TIC, 182). Joanna’s gift plot—her “genius” plot—takes another direction; her mode of creativity challenges the concept of proprietary originality and the legitimacy claims it founds, specifically on the highly problematized ground of national culture. We might then see this novel simultaneously acknowledging the debts created by slavery and insisting that those debts be seen in term of economic and political relations of power. At the same time, however, the novel detaches the issues of national membership and legitimacy from these points. It struggles instead to see membership and legitimacy as possible in the absence of proprietary claims. The characters who recruit Joanna to the stage seem to have internalized the ambient discourse on racial genius. When a board member at an audition calls Joanna’s performance “genius,” she means the two apparently contradictory things that the antiracist discourse on black genius also asserted: that Joanna’s work transcends race and that Joanna’s work embodies racial essence. This contradiction is highly embroidered by the performance that Joanna is auditioning to join, a pageantlike spectacle known as “The Dance of Nations” and staged in the jingoistic fervor of World War I. Joanna has been invited to join the cast because race does not matter to art, as the producer who invites her to audition tells her: “‘You know,’ she went on vigorously, ‘art to my eye is

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art, and there’s no sense in letting a foolish prejudice interfere with it’” (TIC, 227). She has also been invited for the opposite reason, because race matters to art. As the producer explains, she wants to cast Joanna as black America because “I figured that your way was the right way . . . because you were colored” (TIC, 227). How can Joanna’s race be both irrelevant and central? The answer, it seems, turns on the issue of U.S. national representivity. Describing “The Dance of Nations,” the producer reports that they “have one woman to represent France, another England, etc.; we aren’t featuring Germany or any of her allies” (TIC, 226). While most nations have one representative dancer, America is a special case: “When it came to America we had to have two or three dances represented, one for the white element, one for the black and one for the red” (TIC, 226). There is a great deal that we do not discover about the conceptualization of this dance: whether non-European nations, beyond the United States, are represented; why they chose nations as the objects of representation; why dance is the nation’s privileged expression; why only America is seen as nationally multiple; and, if America is multiple, why other conceivable American dances—Chinese or Mexican, for instance—play no part in national representivity. Yet it is abundantly clear here that race, rather than some other imaginable identity form, represents the crucial fragmentation of nationality; or perhaps this might be better understood as the multiplication of nationality. Under these conditions, we witness a certain reification of race as culture, which is what allows the producer to choose Joanna to be black America “because you were colored,” even though Joanna has spent her life training in the classical European tradition under a French instructor. At the same time, however, this national multiplicity promises, at least at this point, to deplete whiteness of its universality; whiteness here fails to operate metonymically as a sign for the nation. We see as well that this becomes the point at which art fails to transcend race. The dancer representing America refuses to perform black America and possibly is incapable of doing so, a crucial ambiguity here. There is something so troubling about this failure to the producer that her language disintegrates when she tries to explain to Joanna: “‘Well, she’s all right as a white American, or as a red one, but when it comes to the colored American, she simply lays down on her job.’ Miss Sharples’ eloquence drowned her sense of grammar” (TIC, 226–27).51 While the producer of the show casts Joanna according to what we would now call an essentialist model of race, the context that Fauset builds around

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Joanna’s performance of “The Dance of Nations” upsets the viability of such a notion by refusing to materialize the paradox-bearing “Negro genius” that had such complex currency for other Harlem Renaissance writers. Instead of exemplifying originality with pretensions to either universality or racial essence, Joanna asserts a logic of cultural production as imitation. Throughout the novel Joanna is presented not as an original genius but as a skilled imitator. Searching for her own route to artistic superiority as a child, for instance, Joanna hears a great singer at church and decides to imitate her, declaring, “I can sing like you . . . and I can remember the tune of most of that hymn you sang this morning” (TIC, 5). To be sure, imitation is her mode in all things. As the narrator notes, Joanna “could dance any step however intricate if she saw it once” (TIC, 18), and as another character tells her, “Really, Jan, you ought to go on the stage as an impersonator, I don’t believe you could be beat” (TIC, 50). Joanna, then, fulfills the stereotype of imitation that the ethnographic discourse on original genius used to distinguish Anglo-Saxon male originality as the source of white cultural proprietorship. But where ethnography linked imitation with cultural dispossession and biological inferiority, There Is Confusion suggests how imitation might operate instead to perpetuate, circulate, and nurture African American culture and the American national culture that it, in turn, helps to create. It is key here that the dance Joanna auditions and then performs onstage is not her own original invention but rather one she has borrowed and adapted from girls playing in the street. Indeed, her indebtedness to the girls is so crucial to her performance that it must become part of her performance when she invites girls gathered randomly from the street to participate in her audition and later in her stage show. Joanna’s choice of this dance fosters a complicated engagement with tropes of racial authenticity and the related problem of cultural transmission. Joanna first encountered the dance years before when she happened on a scene of American ethnic and cultural plurality, a street where children played: “Italians, Jews, colored Americans, white Americans were there disporting themselves with more or less abandon, according to their peculiar temperament” (TIC, 47). Whether this temperament springs from their individual or racial characters we do not discover, but what catches Joanna’s eye is “a band of colored children [who] were dancing and acting a game” (TIC, 47). The children, all girls, are playing “Sissy in the Barn,” a game that unites singing, dancing, and hand clapping within a playful and self-ironizing wedding scenario.52 If we think only of the game’s lyrical tropes—a barn setting

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and the repeated injunction to “join in the weddin’” (TIC, 47)—the game binds the pastoral and the conjugal, suggesting both a nostalgic desire for the African American folk’s rural authenticity and a conventional yoking of the project of cultural perpetuation with that of heterosexual coupling. The former impulse calls to mind the Harlem Renaissance’s turn to the southern black “peasantry” as the font of African American distinctiveness, while the latter clearly resonates with There Is Confusion’s conclusion—so problematic for recent scholars of the novel—in Joanna’s abdication of her stage career in favor of marriage, child rearing, and veneration of her husband’s authority. Seen from one angle, then, the song transmits racial authenticity wrapped in marriage. The totality of the game, along with Joanna’s ways of participating in and reproducing it onstage, tends to complicate these associations. At the strictly lyrical level, the game hardly offers a coherent marital closure, since the speaking voice repeatedly asks (apparently without answer), “Say, little Missy, won’t you marry me?” Moreover, when the dance pairs two people, they are two girls, who “pointed fingers at each other, shrilling, ‘Stay back, girl, don’t you come near me / All them sassy words you say!’” (TIC, 48). As the choreography of this joint chastisement suggests, the game cannot be understood only on the lyrical level; it includes rhythmic clapping, specific dance moves, playacting, and different groupings for collective singing (the whole group, just the girls in the center, and so forth). These multiple formal elements interact in a way irreducible to the marital conceit of the song. Writing about girls’ games such as these, the ethnomusicologist Kyra Gaunt argues that they teach both the formal principles of black music and the social principles of black community. Such games fold practice in syncopation and rhythmic complexity into the everyday experience of African American girls and perpetuate the formal elements that nurture more recognized African American musical genres. Dancing and clapping games, moreover, advance a social principle with nonmusical applications. As Gaunt suggests, “the ‘we,’ the collective participation of the moment, can never be performed if one player is not in sync with the coordinated body formulas of the play. The mistakes allow for a critical moment in learning the social discipline of black music-making: you gotta be together.”53 Above and beyond this, rhythmic games serve “as a cultural resource for establishing and remembering the individual and social body as it reflects ethnic group cohesion and solidarity despite national, geographic, and socioeconomic differences among African Americans across time and place.”54 Such games, then, function as a

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medium of both cultural identity and historical continuity, constructed not on the ground of essence or genius but on that of artifice and imitation. Joanna’s reception and perpetuation of the game further this way of conceiving of it. Fauset’s description emphasizes the formal choreography of the game. When Joanna sees the dance, she faces a clear narrative opportunity to make proclamations about the folk and its rural essence, but she does not even consider doing so. Rather she joins in, learns the steps, and “outdid them all in the fervor and grace of her acting” (TIC, 48). For Joanna, this is a new cultural acquisition, learned through imitation, rather than a return to a racial wellspring. When she goes home, she uses her imitative skills to teach the dance to her family and friends, an act that makes them all remark that Joanna belongs on the stage; they too see artifice and imitation rather than originary authenticity. The dance’s significance, then, lies in its status as an opportunity for imitation, specifically for imitative action intended to create group coherence. It is, then, of little surprise that when Joanna is asked to “dance like colored people” for “The Dance of Nations,” she chooses “Sissy in the Barn” as her audition piece. Even as a board member proclaims her performance a work of “genius,” Joanna undercuts any notion of her individual originality by inviting in some African American children from the street below, most of whom already know the game, to participate in the dance. The dance, then, is both collectively known in its formal elements and communal in its ownership, a condition that detaches it from the logic of culture as private property that infused debates about genius and national culture. It stands, as James Weldon Johnson suggested of ragtime music, outside of the logic of property; as he wrote in 1922 of a song he reworked with his brother for a show in New York: “It was a song which had been sung for years through the South. The words were unprintable, but the tune was irresistible, and it belonged to no one.”55 While racist anthropology borrowed the romantic association between originality and cultural proprietorship, and while some African American intellectuals at certain moments replicated that logic when they argued that blacks were really originators and therefore really legitimate cultural members (either of U.S. culture or of international intellectual culture), Fauset here offers imitation as the privileged means of cultural transmission and participation. Imitation is not, then, a kind of borrowing of someone else’s cultural property, and therefore the sign of permanent cultural alienation, but a means of circulating collectively owned cultural properties and of forming a community. This is the utopian moment of There Is Confusion, in which the cultural

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logic of imitation displaces the problems posed by the discourse on black genius. Here the benefit of perceiving racial national culture as imitative is not only, as Judith Butler has argued in relation to gender, that identity can then be seen as artificial rather than essential and therefore available to political change. Imitation in There Is Confusion is not just evidence in the case against essentialism; rather, it is the means by which African American culture can be perpetuated and spread in a world hostile to its existence. But this is a novel too concerned with both the material and ideological conditions of cultural membership to let its utopian moment last. As much as There Is Confusion criticizes the genius controversy and offers a competing logic of imitation, it also recognizes the ways in which American racial ideology limits, in practice, the operation of imitation. When, for instance, the dancer who plays “Indian” and white America leaves “The Dance of Nations” out of jealousy for Joanna’s success, the production is left in the logistical and ideological lurch: “Joanna could be cast without any difficulty as an Indian, a wig and grease paint would accomplish that. But Joanna could hardly pose as a white American. She was too dark” (TIC, 231). Joanna’s sister lands on a solution that is almost too perfect (and, it turns out, too confident) in its comprehension of the abstract quality of national citizenship: “‘Why not,’ asked Sylvia, ‘have a mask made for Joanna? She could then be made as typically American as anyone could wish and no one need know the difference’” (TIC, 232). Here the dance has revealed another complication; the white American is not really a white American at all, if we perceive whiteness as a kind of particularity, but rather “America,” a “regal, symbolic figure” (TIC, 232); whiteness dissolves itself in abstraction. Yet the progressive Greenwich Village audience, as enthused as it is by Joanna’s masked embodiment of “America,” apparently cannot stand Joanna’s abstraction. A member of the audience who “somehow . . . guessed the truth” demands her particularity: “‘Pull off your mask, America,’ he shouted. The house took it up. ‘Let’s see your face, America!’” (TIC, 232). A “moment’s silence, a moment’s tenseness” (TIC, 232) greets Joanna’s unmasked face; she dispels the awkwardness by grounding her national identity in the military service of her male relatives: “I hardly need to tell you that there is no one in the audience more American than I am. My great-grandfather fought in the Revolution, my uncle fought in the Civil War and my brother is ‘over there’ now” (TIC, 232). Of course, she does need to tell them and cannot be fully intelligible as an American without doing so. Her claim to citizenship is thus secured by the same redundancy as her greatness. Just as her imagined bill-

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board would performatively utter her greatness (that is, bring it into being) and constantively describe it (by saying that she is already famous), here she prefaces her self-legitimation by saying that she “hardly need[s] to tell” the audience how American she is, presumably because her legitimate national membership is unmistakable. In the same breath, however, it must be told because otherwise it fails to exist. Further complications emerge in Joanna’s chosen mode of civic legitimacy. She derives her legitimacy through her kinship relation to a masculine model of citizenship predicated on military service, which here links her genealogy quite specifically to a history of African American participation in nation formation (which is why, we can gather, her forebears fought in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars rather than in, say, the Spanish-American War), as well as to the contemporary context of World War I. There are other things Joanna could have said, such as, by this point in the narrative, “I can vote” or “As my dance has shown, I’m a crucial contributor to national culture.” Her choice of military service performed by male relatives suggests, for Sharon L. Jones, the patriarchal limits to Joanna’s, and perhaps Fauset’s, thinking about citizenship.56 It also suggests how taking off the mask of the “regal, symbolic” figure causes her to fall into the particularity of gender as well as race, because if America was symbolized as a feminine icon (“Columbia” and Lady Liberty come to mind), then that icon was irreducible to particular women. What her speech evidences most strongly, then, are the limits written into definitions of citizenship. Leading up to women’s achievement of suffrage, the long-standing association between military service and citizenship had been used to dispute women’s right to the franchise, and it thereafter has limited women’s access to the full benefits of citizenship.57 Yet the privileged relation between military service and citizenship encoded in these arguments failed to bring the hoped-for enhanced civic status to African American men deployed during World War I, a condition widely protested in African American periodicals. There Is Confusion addresses this failed hope directly when all of the young male characters, who enlisted and served in the war as an expression of national membership, return and find as their compensation not the full dignities of state and cultural citizenship but rather only Joanna’s performance: “She was indeed for them ‘Miss America,’ making them forget to-night the ingratitude with which their country would meet them tomorrow” (TIC, 269). This is to say that Joanna’s performance fails as memory and operates only as amnesia (and, to add to the difficulty here, amnesia about something that is going to happen in the future).

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So far we have been tracing a set of problems surrounding Joanna’s performance of “America”: that Joanna must take off her mask because America cannot sustain its representation of itself at a strictly abstract level; that she must account for her citizenship when her particular blackness interrupts the smooth continuum between whiteness and abstract, universal citizenship; that when she accounts for herself, masculine terms seem to be the only ones that will do, and those masculine terms fail in the context of race. These problems coalesce into a well-worn problematic: that U.S. citizenship is constituted as both particular and universal, or more devastatingly, in particular terms that pass themselves off as universal terms. To put a finer point on it, seamless citizenship flows from the seeming universality of the white male subject, an equation that usually becomes visible only by negation, when women or racially marked people attempt to attain its privileges. This is precisely the problematic that the black genius discourse found itself constantly reiterating by its very logic of particular representivity. To Jessie Fauset’s irritation, in There Is Confusion and elsewhere, this is also the problematic that the logic of imitation should solve. In “The Gift of Laughter,” her contribution to The New Negro, Fauset returns to the question of the ideological constraints placed on the theoretical possibilities she sees to be inherent in the logic of imitation. Given that Locke hatched the idea of compiling The New Negro at a dinner staged to honor the publication of There Is Confusion, it seems fitting that Fauset would expand the novel’s conception of imitation in her writing for the anthology. Writing about the history of African American acting, Fauset describes the institutional contexts of the American theater that have consigned African American actors to comic roles in the mold of minstrelsy. She observes that the popularity of “the minstrel formula” provided a commercial opening for black actors, and she makes sure to note that they learned their part not by summoning their essential blackness but by using the “art of mimicry” to train in stage conventions of blackness, learned best, it turns out, by going to London and studying under “Pietro, greatest pantomimist of his day.”58 That is to say, black actors learned to “act black” by going to London to work with an Italian master. Writing about the actor Bert Williams, she asks whether his skilled mimicry of stage blackness might not have extended to other imitations: “Can anyone presume to say that a man who traveled north, east, south and west and even abroad in order to acquire accent and jargon, aspect and characteristic of people to which he was bound by ties of blood but from whom he was natively separated by training and tradition, would not have been able to

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portray with equal effectiveness what, for lack of a better term, we must call universal rôles?” (“GL,” 164). The answer is, of course, no, but he does not get to do so for reasons having to do not with the logic of imitation but with the ideological incommensurability between blackness and universality. As she explains: “There is an unwritten law in America that though white may imitate black, black, even when superlatively capable, must never imitate white. In other words, grease-paint may be used to darken but never to lighten” (“GL,” 164). This is exactly the problem Fauset created for Joanna in There Is Confusion a year earlier, in almost the same words. In “The Gift of Laughter,” however, Fauset predicts the triumph of imitation not as universality’s opposite but insofar as it becomes universality’s primary mode. She sees a near future in which “the question of color raises no insuperable barrier, seeing that with chameleon adaptability we are able to offer white colored men and women for Hamlet, The Doll’s House and the Second Mrs. Tanquerary; brown men for Othello; yellow girls for Madame Butterfly; black men for The Emperor Jones” (“GL,” 167). Imitation becomes the means by which black actors can occupy an endless array of subject positions, and it becomes, in fact, the constitutive element of a daringly redefined “genius”: “And so with the culminating of his dramatic genius, the Negro actor must come finally through the very versatility of his art to the universal rôle and the main tradition of drama, as an artist first and only secondarily as a Negro” (“GL,” 167). This ordering of artist and Negro speaks to a persistent and ineradicable tension between artistic universality, here longed for, and the category of race that still troubles it. Yet at the same time the logic of imitation becomes the means by which whiteness too loses its seamless universality, as we can see in Fauset’s novel categorization of the characters of the classical European theatrical tradition as “white colored men and women,” rather than as universal human subjects (or, more simply, as “men,” as her literary contemporaries would have likely called characters such as Hamlet). Imitation, in Fauset’s formulation, becomes not only the means by which it is possible to occupy all imaginable positions and recognize that capacity for occupation as the capacity for universality; it also becomes the means by which to recognize that each position—whiteness included—has a partial relation to universality, which now becomes, under imitation’s sway, a function of artifice and projective imagination democratically available precisely through, rather than against, differences and particularities (such as gender and race). This is the neat trick that Joanna in theory could pull off but in practice

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cannot, at least not under the current institutional constraints on imitation. These constraints form the conditions under which she retreats to marriage and domesticity. Unlike some recent scholars of the novel, I see no reason not to lament this retreat, even if the novel embeds it in a narrative revealing the pragmatic and ideological obstructions to an African American woman’s public achievement.59 Yet, given the novel’s elevation of imitation over originality, it becomes impossible not to notice that Joanna stages subordinated wifehood precisely as the imitation of originality. When Joanna transfers her public ambition to her new husband, she attempts to cultivate his ability by producing for him the illusion that he possesses a certain kind of originality: “In a thousand little ways she deferred to him, and showed him that as a matter of course he was the arbiter of her own and her child’s destiny, the fons et origo of authority” (TIC, 292). If she is giving her husband the impression that he is the origin of authority, origins have lost their authority to secure proprietary cultural membership. Originality thus becomes the bad faith of her marriage, tolerable maybe only because it is a provisional measure protecting her private retreat from a racist public until the logic of imitation can do its transformative work. But Fauset makes sure we do believe that this originality, or the authority it produces, is real. The plot of Joanna’s creativity and its social potential, however, luckily does not conclude in this spousal confidence game. Joanna gives her creativity a new form and new life in the last moments of the novel. She begins writing songs: “With her slight knowledge of composition she composed two little songs and glimpsing future possibilities, she began to study that most fascinating of all the sciences—harmony” (TIC, 291). The implicit claims of racial science, with its reification of biology and logic of origins, give way before that “most fascinating of all the sciences,” harmony. In her moderately millennial way, Joanna grounds artistic production once again not primarily in originality and ownership but rather in collaboration and artificial organization. Creative voice does not give her purchase on the nation, but it does give her a model for the social, based on the harmony that can be made from mingled voices.

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Gertrude Stein in Occupied France

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EING a genius, at least according to Gertrude Stein, excuses one from thought: “anyway a genius need not think, because if he does think he has to be wrong or right he has to argue or decide, and after all he might just as well not do that.”1 The genius she has in mind here is herself, comprehended in her typical terms of universalized masculinity. Stein wrote these words in Everybody’s Autobiography, published in 1937 as an attempt to refresh the literary celebrity she had achieved with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). It is a book, in other words, in which outrageous throwaway lines about genius stand only to enhance the celebrity aura that Stein had produced for herself. But a few years later, as World War II clamped down on Europe and Stein wrote about her life in occupied France, the stakes of not thinking— and of having to be wrong or right—became dramatically more acute. For instance in her memoir of her life in Vichy and then Nazi-occupied France, Wars I Have Seen (1945), Stein recalls running into a stranger during her nightly walk, “not a man from around here,” and having a completely banal and at the same time intensely terrifying conversation about Stein’s dog, who is barking at him: “I said in French he is not dangerous he is only barking, and he said is he a caniche and I said yes and he said in English he is a good doggie and I said in French no he is not dangerous, and it did seem to me that he emphasized the last e in doggie and what naturally did that make him and one always is a little nervous you never know and we went on down Basket and I did and he went on up and after a while I looked up and he was looking down and I came home and I asked Alice Toklas what she thought about it but naturally there was nothing to think about it, there never is, no there never is.”2 Stein and Toklas are lying low in the French countryside at Culoz during the occupation. In answering the man insistently in French, Stein is trying to hide her American nationality. If known by the wrong peo-

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ple, her nationality could expose her to any number of consequences, most of which could kill her. As her account makes clear, she strongly suspects that the man realizes she is a native English speaker, and reading his accent and his observation of her route, she also strongly suspects that he is indeed one of the wrong people. It turns out that nothing comes of this encounter, except, of course, the “nothing” to be thought, rendered in what is for Stein an extremely straightforward grammatical ambiguity. There is “nothing to think about it,” she writes, followed by what reads colloquially as an affirmation but technically as a refutation: “there never is, no there never is” nothing to think about it, which is to say that there always is something to think about instances like these. This ambiguity between never and always having to think about the situation of danger refuses to fade away. Whether or not the self-proclaimed genius—Stein herself—“need not think” or thinks constantly or can even bear to do any thinking becomes a central question in this memoir. In another key, Stein’s responsibility to think critically during the occupation has become a prime point of contention for recent scholars, many of whom accuse her of embracing quietism rather than resistance (or the Résistance) during the occupation. Concern over her obligation to think, or to think something different than she apparently did, during wartime has been heightened by the discovery that she translated into English the speeches of the collaborationist head of Vichy France, Maréchal Pétain, and flourished under the protection of her good friend Bernard Faÿ, a convicted Nazi collaborator and Gestapo agent, while so many other Jews were deported from France to concentration camps. The status of Stein’s “genius” during the war becomes even more complicated when we realize that it was the term through which Bernard Faÿ mobilized collaborationist state agency on Stein’s behalf. As a high-ranking cultural administrator in the Vichy regime installed after France’s defeat, Faÿ had access to Pétain. Faÿ reports in his memoir that he met with Pétain and spoke “of Gertrude, of her genius, the dangers she faced and, particularly, of the peril she would find herself in during the winter when she risked freezing.”3 Stein’s genius—her exceptional cultural value—creates her exception to the persecutions administered under Pétain. The claim that she is a genius can serve this function, a kind of politesse really, even though it is likely that Faÿ’s personal and professional investment in his relationship with her and Pétain’s reliance on Faÿ are the actual reasons for her protection. Genius functions to prettify instrumental maneuvering and normalize Nazi persecu-

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tion by making Stein an exception. Faÿ’s ready exploitation of the language of genius suggests its complete exhaustion and one might even say corruption as a political trope. “The Winner Loses” (1940) and Wars I Have Seen complicate this picture. Stein’s accounts situate her ongoing discourse on genius—a discourse focused on herself as the primary exemplar of what genius is and can do—in a scene beyond the United States’ national frames of liberalism and mass culture (those frames that have concerned this book), though it remains in rich communication with them. The construct of genius performed many kinds of work for Stein over her long career. In the moment of her war memoirs, though, genius becomes a distressed trope, and one that propels a meditation on conditions of negated agency, administrative power, occupation, and quotidian life in the grips of an occupying power and in the shadow of unpredictable violence. It is not that Stein’s ways of reimagining and asserting her genius in these works neatly resolve the matter of her complicity or agency in occupied France. They do better: her reworkings of genius provide a rich account of the plural ways agency and human value can be asserted or attenuated, affirmed or obliterated, by the project of creative expression under conditions of occupation. Given the complex role that conceptions of genius play in Stein’s thinking about the conditions of military occupation, it is striking to observe how the trope of genius and the polarities of creative agency it organizes have determined recent critical responses to Stein’s war writings. “Genius” has become an implicit critical means of managing, and often prematurely resolving, the predicament of authorial agency under conditions of extraordinary political duress. The example of Stein during wartime extends and radically revises the political significance of genius. In this book I have argued that a cluster of discourses on female genius organized controversies over women’s cultural and political citizenship in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. “Genius” never existed as a conceptual monolith or a coherent model of gendered subjectivity or citizenship. Instead it was constituted across a variety of disciplines and conversations that were themselves diverse, including most prominently those focused on romantic aesthetics, postbellum reformist social theory, psychology, biology, statistical population studies, cultural criticism, pedagogy, therapeutic culture, mass culture, cultural civil rights activism, performance technique, and the genres of popular and high-cultural fiction. Given this diversity, the category of genius could “do” many things, some of which remain in the background of the discussion here.

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It could operate to mystify artistic production; it could function as a term of superficial approbation; it could naturalize social hierarchies—these tendencies have been amply critiqued. What has persistently interested me, though, is how conceptions of genius provided ways to imagine political agency and collectivity for women during the years leading up to and directly following their incorporation as voting citizens. Conceptions of genius did so by offering alternatives to the liberal models of citizenship and political subjectivity that shaped controversies over the vote and defined citizenship in terms of individuality, autonomy, direct agency, rational deliberation, and universality. Women, collectively and individually, could aspire to this definition. Yet since their identities as women were defined in opposition to the terms definitive of full citizenship, their political efforts were mired in paradox. As Joan Scott has put it, “in order to protest women’s exclusion, they had to act on behalf of women and so invoked the very difference they sought to deny.”4 Moreover, the major categories of liberal citizenship were constantly in crisis, under dispute, and widely suspected of not being able to offer a sustainable or just vision of democracy. The discourses on female genius often intervened in these uncertainties, offering alternative visions of collective life and political agency. Conceptions of genius could do this work because they were fueled by their own paradoxes. In its central romantic formulation, genius was both a unique kind of person and a representative kind of person. Genius localized expression in an exemplary individual but also fractured individuality, given that the force of genius was paradigmatically experienced as a universal truth flowing through, not from a particular person. As an instance of unique individual expression, genius looked like a kind of personal property, but as an articulation of universal truth, it looked more like a collective possession. In another paradox, a person of genius seemed to have no merely personal agency but at the same time expressed enormous suprapersonal agency for collective aesthetic or social life. As my discussions of particular scenes of female genius have sought to show, these paradoxes made it possible to imagine democracy in terms that overcame the binary oppositions between public and private, collectivity and individuality, and agency and passivity that structured women’s marginality. Genius remained an active concept for framing positions about women’s citizenship through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it underwent shifts in relation to larger cultural changes, especially the rearrangement of social life that accompanied the decline of separate spheres

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ideology, the growth of mass culture, and the assimilation of concepts of human diversity to the biological and statistical sciences. At certain points that I have tracked, the discourses of female genius opened up progressive ways of imagining both identity and public life as domains of innovation and creative political work. But these possibilities were limited by modern scientific formulations of genius that understood it in terms of biological race and, by extension, as the originating source of racial cultural property and thus legitimate membership in a racially defined national culture. The scientific discourse on genius reframed innovation according to essentialist models of identity that operated in exclusive ways and defined U.S. national culture as the racial property of white people. When biological race and national culture were linked in this way, discourses of female genius lost their usefulness for challenging exclusive models of citizenship. My main discussion concluded with Jessie Fauset’s satire on genius and greatness in her novel There Is Confusion, which perceives these tendencies. Fauset’s novel shifts the Harlem Renaissance conversation about the political value of artistic excellence away from the fetishization of originality and toward another model of cultural production and collective social life based in imitation. At the same time, though, “genius” was still—and is still—a pervasive cultural term for conceiving of creativity in terms of miraculous intellectual and creative expression, particular instances of transcendent universality, and outsized expressive agency accomplished through the attenuation of personal agency. Against this background Gertrude Stein staged herself as an exemplary genius. “Genius” was Stein’s term for herself, and apparently many people believed her. Over the course of her career genius was her status, her ontology, her process, and ultimately her brand. Stein’s depiction of herself as a genius drew on the existing idiom and scientific archive of genius, but it also played on genius, giving it new life as both the fuel of high modernism and the currency of mass culture. In terms familiar from romanticism, Stein framed her genius as an inexplicable, irresistible, and immediately evident force. The first chapter of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas famously ends with Toklas evidencing Stein’s genius through her own magical intuition. On meeting Stein, Toklas reports, “I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Alfred Whitehead.”5 Stein invested her genius with prodigious transformative power. In her

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autobiography, for instance, Stein calls her novella Melanctha “the first definitive step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in literature” (AABT, 5). Yet genius is also a mystery to her. Everybody’s Autobiography includes a section that returns repeatedly to the question, given in typical Steinian fashion without a question mark: “What is a genius”; and again, “And so what is it makes you a genius”; and “What is a genius. If you are one how do you know you are one. It is not a conviction lots of people are convinced they are one sometime in the course of their living but they are not and what is the difference between being not one and being one. There is of course a difference but what is it” (EA, 86–87). Stein’s syntax may be unique but her questions are familiar questions. The immunity of genius to exact definition has historically provided an extremely productive opacity, productive, for instance, of authority for people who do not otherwise have it, of malleable identities, and of public consensus made possible by the suspension of rational certitude. Gertrude Stein’s massive literary production moves through the history tracked in this book without being pinned within any one model of genius or public life. As a form of consciousness, her genius as she understood it was both split in the conventional romantic manner and eerily integrated. As Barbara Will documents, Stein developed her method of unconscious automatic writing in response to experiments she conducted under William James’s direction, but at the same time she insisted that her writing had no subconscious.6 As Stein writes in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, “Gertrude Stein never had any subconscious reactions, nor was she a successful subject for automatic writing” (AABT, 74). As her insistence on her distinction as a genius consistently shows, she had a profound interest in exceptionality, which the science of her day, as she well knew, framed as deviation; at the same time, she has Alice B. Toklas report of her, “She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting” (AABT, 78). Moreover, Stein was an antiessentialist essentialist, claiming simultaneously that genius was male and not Jewish and that she, a Jewish woman, was the literary genius of her age (or that she was neither a Jew nor a woman; her improvisations on identity have kept us busy for many years).7 Like the racial scientists who shaped Mary Austin’s later writing on genius, Stein was obsessed with human typology in its relation to national culture, as attested by the racial typing in Melanctha and her description of her enormous experimental novel, The Making of Americans, as an attempt to “describe really describe every kind of human being that

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ever was or is or would be living.”8 Stein gives the impression of exploiting the full range of polarities and incoherence made available by the discourse on genius. Yet even though the trope of genius played such a prominent part in controversies over women’s status, Stein, as an exemplary genius, often takes pains to distance herself from feminist efforts. As her rendering of Toklas tells it in The Autobiography, “Her very close friend Marion Walker pleaded with her, she said, but Gertrude Gertrude remember the cause of women, and Gertrude Stein said, you don’t know what it is to be bored” (AABT, 77). Literally, Walker is pleading with Stein to continue her medical studies in order to advance the cause of women by claiming a prestigious position in an overwhelmingly masculine profession, and literally it is medical studies that bore her. More than this, though, the “cause of women” is completely irrelevant to her: “Not, as Gertrude Stein explained to Marion Walker, that she at all minds the cause of women or any other cause but it does not happen to be her business” (AABT, 78). There is a play here on gendered identity—the “cause of women” is not Stein’s because she is not a “woman”—and a play as well on “causes” as essentially another form of “business.” Still, the fact that all “causes” here are indistinguishable in merit and all equally irrelevant is striking, and fairly consonant with the reactionary politics and cheerful nationalism of the second half of her life. It is striking as well that Wars I Have Seen covers the time period in April 1944 when women were granted the vote in France but makes no mention of it. Her distance from the struggle for women’s suffrage in its active phases in the United States and France, criticism of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s programs, expressed opinions on African Americans, and the generally imperious tone of many of her pronouncements on social and political life have led some critics to construe her politics as those of a “rentier” or “patrician,” terms that would be less incongruous if she had actually been either of these.9 Such archaic political terminology suggests how difficult it has been to assign Stein an intelligible place on the political map. In her war memoirs, however, Stein documents the radical destruction of all recognizable political life. During World War II, France was literally remapped and politics, as a process of public contest and transformation, obliterated. Occupation as Stein depicts it alienates its subjects from their homes and themselves—from, that its, the grounds of their political subjectivity. Stein quotes her neighbor, who captures the uncanny nature of this condition when she remarks after Germany’s takeover of France, “Well, I suppose we will go on working even if we are no longer masters in our own home.”10

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People living in Culoz in general (though there are many striking exceptions) are lucky enough to be able to continue their merely life-sustaining activities, but they have lost the self-possession that gave those activities meaning, and they have lost as well their places in a politically organized society. Stein’s memoirs describe conditions of complete political negation: all premise of self-rule or civil rights is suspended; the public sphere of free and ostensibly equal communication has been replaced by state-controlled propaganda; and lethal violence erupts unpredictably. Stein renders the total negation of political life and omnipresent threat to human life even more unsettling by depicting, simultaneously, the ongoing domestic and social life of the French countryside, where ordinary activities such as cooking, walking, conversation, and shopping sometimes go on as if there were no occupation. Because of the total subjection experienced under the occupation, however, these activities feel like uncanny parodies of themselves. Any conventional meaning of “home” is undermined by literal and figurative homelessness. Political dispossession makes literal refugees of particular people and symbolic refugees of every person in France: “and then of course there are a lot of Jews French and every other kind refugee anywhere in any small place and then young men who do not want to go to forced labour and they chance their town oh dear everybody is a refugee” (WIHS, 72). The pervasive sense of homelessness at home creates a suppurating psychic wound. When Stein meets “a woman from Mondane a refugee” grieving for her home, she reflects that “undoubtedly this conviction that where you live is the real right place makes the will to live, without that conviction anybody could give up the struggle” (WIHS, 121). France is no longer a real place— Stein comments over and over on the sense of “unreality” that comes with the occupation—and it is no longer its right self. In light of such radical negations of political rights, self-possession, and human value, the political significance of Stein’s conception of genius—and of herself as a genius—begins to become apparent. In the contexts tracked throughout this book, models of genius gained their political force from their ability to use paradoxes of agency and subjectivity in order to imagine new political worlds. Stein’s writing on living under the occupation implicitly incorporates this convention, at first by rejection and then by reconstruction. In “The Winner Loses,” Stein distances herself from the representational logic of genius as she understood it. But in Wars I Have Seen, she recuperates this logic in three linked ways. The first relies on a conception of genius as an expressive mode defined by a distinct grammatical temporality, the “continu-

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ous present tense” of her experimental writing. The second derives from an association between genius and nature, in which nature both overtakes the agency of the creative genius and authorizes the particularity of her being in a context where that being has become literally and “essentially” illegal. The third recuperated dimension of her conception of genius has to do with its cognitive dimensions, defined by the distinction between “genius” and “thinking” with which this coda opened. In terms of this distinction, “genius” represents resistance to the misrepresentation of coercion as consent under conditions of total political domination through force. According to Stein’s account, the stylistic invention of the “continuous present tense” was an expression of her genius, her unique innovation of modern literature. Stein recalls in “Composition as Explanation” (1926) her development of this technique in 1905, during the writing of Three Lives: “I wrote a negro story called Melanctha. In that there was a constant recurring and beginning there was a marked direction in the direction of being in the present.”11 With The Making of Americans, she advances this style, which becomes “more and more complicatedly a continuous present” (“CE,” 518). Whereas the trope of genius historically designates the spontaneous creativity that brings something new, but also representative, into the world, Stein’s technique of the “continuous present” is a demonstration of ongoing newness. In this way her technique, rather than her content, is genius; as Bob Perelman notes, “Stein’s luminous sense of the genius continually creat[es] meaning without having that meaning freeze into dead, and hence identifiable shape.”12 In “Composition as Explanation,” Stein laments that literary culture cannot seem to step into the temporality of the continuous present and instead can only apprehend literary writing as reified and complete, or in Stein’s terms, “classified” and “classical”: “Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having become past is classified and the description of it is classical” (“CE,” 514). Stein claims that the literary public lives in the past rather than in the present moment of creation, an observation that brings her to an insight unsettling in its brutality. The outbreak of World War I, she writes, created urgent contemporariness, because “war is a thing that decides how it is to be when it is to be done” (“CE,” 513–14). As a principle of creation in the present tense, war brings the culture in general into contemporariness and therefore gives it the ability to embrace contemporary art. World War I, she writes, “created the completed recognition of the contemporary composition. Every one but one may say every one

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became consciously became aware of the existence of the authenticity of the modern composition.” For this reason war situates the genius and her culture in the same temporality: “And so war may be said to have advanced a general recognition of the expression of the contemporary composition by almost thirty years” (“CE,” 521). If there are any disparities between the scale and significance of war and the modern composition, Stein does not make note of them. War and genius are twinned forces of radical contemporariness. Given the catastrophic consequences of World War I, it still feels shocking to see Stein single out her own literary recognition as the consequence most worth noting. But Stein’s account of war and occupation in “The Winner Loses: A Picture of Occupied France” exploits this formulation in order to create the feeling of safety. Here if genius is like war, then a retreat from genius constitutes a retreat from war. “The Winner Loses” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1940, shortly after the armistice between France and Germany that left much of France under German occupation while the rest was governed by Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy regime. Stein expresses support for the armistice and Pétain’s governance, seeing them as preserving France from an almost certain annihilation by German forces. With these positions, Stein has earned the ample criticism that has been directed at her essay.13 What catches the attention in light of her equation of genius and the “continuous present tense,” though, is her conspicuous abandonment of the genius mode. Written in the recent aftermath of French military defeat and in a still extremely volatile political situation, the essay depicts Stein’s terror of the present and enacts a flight into aesthetic formations dissociated from the “contemporary” moment. She flees, that is, into works without genius. The article has a largely conventional narrative structure, opening as France’s military falters, continuing through the armistice and the brief military occupation of the region where Stein lives, and closing with the normalization of daily life under Pétain’s rule. Stein composed the article primarily in the past tense, a conventional choice but a striking one for Stein to make. The past tense grammatically cordons off the recent traumatic contingencies of war and occupation from her present tense—the tense present in which she lives. Stein reports over and over her desire to retreat from her present reality. When she and Toklas overhear a radio report at a café saying that Amiens has fallen, Stein declares, “Let’s not believe it” (“WL,” 619). Her spontaneous denial becomes an intentional frame of mind: “I said I would not hear any more news—Alice Toklas could listen to the wireless, but as for me I was going to

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cut box hedges and forget the war” (“WL,” 623). The major tension of the memoir, however, is between such attempts to avoid thinking about the war and the regular violation of her peace of mind by the pressure of events. As she recalls, “I pretty well did succeed in keeping my mind off the war except for the three times a day when there was the French communiqué, and that always gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach, and though I slept well every morning I woke up with that funny feeling in my stomach” (“WL,” 620). As the war escalates, her fear becomes all consuming: “And then Italy came into the war and then I was scared, completely scared, and my stomach felt very weak, because—well, here we were right in everybody’s path; any enemy that wanted to go anywhere might easily come here” (“WL,” 623). Since Stein finds that she cannot simply ignore the war, she stages an aesthetic retreat. In “Composition as Explanation,” Stein claims that World War I “made every one not only contemporary in act not only contemporary in thought but contemporary in self-consciousness made every one contemporary with the modern composition” (“CE,” 521). In “The Winner Loses,” Stein reverses this process. Instead of the war making the mind contemporary with the modern composition, the memory of an antique composition takes the mind out of contemporary life, even in the face of the most pressing danger. Before the news of the armistice comes, the sound of cannonade and the prospect of immediate violence become constant. When Stein sees and smells the residue of battle, she freezes her narrative temporally to paint a picture that she compares to a nineteenth-century photograph: “and then one evening I smelt the brimstone, and the color of the earth in the setting sun was a very strange yellow green and there were clouds, strange clouds, the kind of clouds I had never seen before, thick yellow-green clouds rolling past the hills, and it reminded me of pictures of the Civil War, the battle of Lookout Mountain and that kind of thing—it looked like it and it smelled like it, and in a strange way it was comforting” (“WL,” 629). The explosions are projected into the past, flattened into two dimensions, and metaphorically shrunk to a size she could hold in her hand. She even neutralizes their smell of “brimstone,” clear evidence of their dangerous proximity, by comparing it to the smell of the sulfur used to tone nineteenth-century photographs. Although “genius” has a history of creating alternative scenes of political optimism in the face of exclusion or oppression, the “continuous present” of genius becomes the state of mind that Stein cannot bear. Stein complements these aesthetic reifications by putting her confidence in two elements of social life defined by continuity with the past rather than

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transformation in the present: the family and the repetitive routines of daily life. As Stein retells it, after the American consul in Lyon urges Stein and Toklas to leave France immediately, they run into a doctor and some local farmers who separately warn them against the contingency of risking themselves “among strangers” (“WL,” 624). One farmer promises that Stein and Toklas will be safe where they are because “Here in this little corner we are en famille” (“WL,” 625). Secure in this promise, Stein concludes the essay with the reassurance that the French are “tremendously occupied with the business of daily living, and that will be enough” (“WL,” 637). Stein’s pun on being “occupied” here displaces the extraordinary political negations and contingencies of military occupation with the reassuring continuities of daily life. In Wars I Have Seen, written during the later phases of the occupation and published in 1945, any such faith in community, the routines of “daily living,” and aesthetic retreat unravels. At the beginning of the war Stein took hold of the farmer’s promise that “in this little corner we are en famille,” but now she enters a more troubling reality: “every neighbour is denouncing every neighbour, for black traffic, for theft, for this and that, and there are so many being put in prison” (WIHS, 23). This theme runs throughout the memoir. The general social life of Culoz becomes one of tense, mutual animosity: “Nobody can, it is extraordinary really extraordinary how difficult it is just now for anybody to love their neighbour any neighbour, here there and everywhere it is very certain that it is not at all a natural thing for any one to love one another” (WIHS, 82). The promise of mutual care evaporates as the conditions of the occupation pit local people against each other. Stein’s account of “daily living” in Wars I Have Seen is lacerated by evidence of random-feeling but nevertheless highly orchestrated coercion and violence. As she writes early in the memoir, “you keep on thinking how quickly anybody can get killed, just as quickly just as very quickly, more quickly even than in a book even much more quickly than in any book” (WIHS, 13). She reports over and over again that young French men are rounded up to be impressed into the German army, forced to labor, or sent “to Germany as hostages to be put in a pen” (WIHS, 22), while others escape to the mountains and mount sorties against the occupation but endure cold and hunger; “Oh dear me one cannot sleep very well” (WIHS, 22), she writes in response. Local violence and anxiety escalate after Germany occupies the whole of France but begins losing the war on several fronts. Ordinary activities such as walking, of which Stein made an almost daily habit, become potentially lethal: “we cannot go walking up the mountains because if there is an alert, then maybe

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there will be parachutists and so everybody that is away from home will be shot on sight” (WIHS, 119). Stein hears reports of Germans executing civilians in a nearby village (WIHS, 112) and wiping out another village entirely, in retaliation for some action by the Resistance: “the Germans well they are afraid to come back but now they have an evil habit of sending over five or six airplanes from Ambeiru near Bourg and they drop bombs on a village, three days ago they did this completely wiping out a village and killing most of the population” (WIHS, 149). She reasonably fears that the same will happen to Culoz, “and almost every day these six odd German airplanes come over our heads, and what they will do, this we do not know, but something horrible that is certain” (WIHS, 149). The prospect of violence is certain, but its specific timing or manifestation is uncertain—the perfect balance for creating pervasive anxiety. The “continuous present tense,” the mode of genius that Stein had put aside in “The Winner Loses,” becomes the vehicle for capturing the sense of contingency and terror brought on by occupation in Wars I Have Seen. Covering the time period from mid-1943 through the liberation of France and Stein’s return to Paris in 1945, the book begins as a meditation on the history of recent wars in relation to Stein’s intellectual development but soon gives way to what reads like a diary written in the present tense. The prose flows for 171 pages without section breaks, and dates slip into the middle of sentences, giving a twinned sense of both a prolonged single moment and a historical progression as the Nazis occupy the whole country, America enters the war, local fighting escalates, and finally, in what Carl Van Vechten has called “indubitably one of the best pieces of writing yet accomplished by Gertrude Stein . . . sixty-six ecstatic pages,” France is liberated.14 Throughout, however, the “continuous present tense” definitive of genius shows how unforeseeable such an end was during the experience of the war. A great deal of the book’s sense of terror and anxiety derives from the nonteleological method, which represents occupation as a condition of helpless and vertiginous contingency. In Wars I Have Seen, Stein deploys genius as more than a representational temporality well suited to capturing the terror of occupation from which she had distanced herself in “The Winner Loses.” Genius also becomes an implicit point of resistance against the violent negations of occupation. What permits this challenge to negation is the complex association that Stein constructs between genius and the natural. This association draws on her earlier work, such as “Composition as Explanation,” where she conducts pyrotechnic plays on the word “natural” and its variants. One persistent sense of the

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natural in “Composition as Explanation” defines Stein’s genius according to the familiar split structure of romantic genius: genius is essential to her in particular but derives its authority from impersonal forces larger than any conceivable human being. As she writes of her invention of the “continuous present tense,” “I created then a prolonged present naturally I knew nothing of a continuous present but it came naturally to me to make one, it was simple it was clear to me and nobody knew why it was done like that, I did not myself although naturally to me it was natural” (“CE,” 518). She repeats versions of this formulation over and over, as for instance when she claims of her style in The Making of Americans, “Here again it was all so natural to me” (“CE,” 518), or of her famous portraits, “In the meantime to naturally begin I commenced making portraits of anybody and anything” (“CE,” 518). In a manner typical of the discourses of genius, Stein dissociates her innovation from her agency. Her prose seems autonomous from her person; “there was a constant recurring and beginning” (“CE,” 517), she writes. At the same time her new formal mode is essential to her—“natural.” Stein pairs authenticity with alterity, agency with usurpation, and authority with personal abnegation in a manner that is familiar from the political trope of female genius. In Wars I Have Seen, Stein poises these pairings against the total negations of agency and personhood that characterize the condition of occupation. The affirmative potential of genius arises from its opposition to one of Stein’s major figures for complete political dispossession and the dangers it poses: the figure of the prison. Wars I Have Seen renders imprisonment as painfully specific and terrifyingly general and, at the same time, as arbitrary and systemic. Particular people whom Stein knows are constantly arrested. She attests, “Berard where we used to lunch is in prison, for black traffic, and an Alsatian and his wife and his son” (WIHS, 30), and she later recalls, “We have an acquaintance, she was taken by the Germans because well there was a reason, there usually is a reason one might say there always is a reason . . . and so she was in prison for two months” (WIHS, 33). More generally, she sees that “so many are prisoners, prisoners, prisoners everywhere” (WIHS, 30), and referring to the mass imprisonment of French men by Germany, she laments that “now in 1943 the large part of the men of the whole nation are in prison” (WIHS, 34). Without losing the sense that certain people are held as prisoners in confinement, and that this matters, Stein expands the concept of the prison to encompass the entirety of occupied France, associating it more broadly with the expansion of surveillance and bureaucratic administration and the ability of these to become lethal at any moment. The people of France,

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she writes, are “managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they want to feel free, the word discipline, and forbidden and investigated and imprisoned brings horror and fear into all hearts” (WIHS, 48). At moments such as these, Stein depicts imprisonment as the shared condition under occupation, and she sees “all hearts” united in anxiety but also in longing, as she writes, “to be free, to talk to eat to drink to walk to think, to please, to wish, and to do it now if now is what they want” (WIHS, 48). Occupation has imprisoned French people on the level of free action and also on that of thought and desire. As much as Stein sees imprisonment as a generalized condition in occupied France, the fear that she and Toklas will be arrested plagues her. Historically they were in an obviously perilous position: Americans living in a territory held by a country at war with the United States, and Jewish lesbians living under the control of the Third Reich.15 Stein refers to their particular peril regularly but obliquely. The specter of their confinement rises early in the memoir, in a passage dated February 1943, when Stein’s lawyer urges her and Toklas to flee the country. It is an obvious reprise of the moment in “The Winner Loses” when the American consul tells Stein and Toklas to leave, but now the stakes are put in more concrete terms. Conveying a message from a local official, the lawyer says, “Maurice Sivain said to me, tell these ladies that they must leave at once for Switzerland, to-morrow if possible, otherwise they will be put into a concentration camp” (WIHS, 31–32).16 The full genocidal implications of a concentration camp were not yet clear, but if it still surprises (and how can it not?) that Stein and Toklas resolve to stay in France at this point, Stein explains her refusal to go: “But how could we go, as the frontier is closed, I said” (WIHS, 32). Her lawyer tells her that they could possibly escape by fraud, but Stein worries about the dangers of this tactic. Germany has clamped France shut like a prison. Later, after Germany occupies the whole of France, the material comfort of their domestic retreat at Culoz becomes perilous when they twice have to quarter enemy soldiers. Stein and Toklas stay as quiet as possible in order to conceal their nationality and thus their vulnerability to arrest. As Stein explains: “I thought with that kind of German it was just as well to keep our American accents out of it” (WIHS, 138). Even after the American army has landed in France and Allied victory seems immanent, Stein and Toklas still fear discovery. When they receive a letter on behalf of American authorities telling them to write out a letter giving information about themselves and declaring whether or not they want to be repatriated, they scoff: “Natu-

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rally American authorities not really realizing what it is to live in an occupied country ask you to put down your religion your property and its value, as if anybody would as long as the Germans are in the country and in a position to take letters and read them if they want to” (WIHS, 131). Neither Stein nor Toklas was at this point a person of faith, so the reference to religion here is as close as Stein comes to saying that she and Toklas are ethnically Jewish and in extremely heightened danger for this reason. Although Stein is reticent here, she gives an origin to her thinking about the topic of imprisonment that puts her ethnicity, and her sexuality, front and center. Moreover she establishes the value of her “natural” composition as a genius in the face of the radical annihilation of human agency that characterizes political subjugation. She follows up her mention of the concentration camp with her recollection of how she learned about “government employees” and “officialdom” through two particular examples, “the Dreyfus case and anti-semitism” and “the famous Oscar Wilde trial” (WIHS, 32).17 The persecution of a Jew and the persecution of another self-dramatizing literary genius and sexual outlaw become Stein’s touchstones for understanding the force of state power, paired with cultural consensus, to annihilate agency, mobilize its capacity for confinement, and negate human value. Through the instance of Dreyfus, she connects the historical scene of French antiSemitism to her current context: “it was first made real to me by the Dreyfus trial and now from Germany . . . and so anti-semitism which has been with us for quite a few centuries is still something to cling to” (WIHS, 36). Her discussion of Oscar Wilde is more elliptical and more suggestive at once. She writes that Wilde’s trial raised “the question of public opinion” (WIHS, 32), a broad enough term to allow us to remember that the trial and public response linked Wilde’s sexual practices with his aesthetic theory and writing, venomously perceiving both as expressions of a dangerous decadence and deviance. Thus, when she wraps the issue of his persecution in that of her own history as a literary reader and writer, the analogy that she builds between herself and Wilde as sexual and aesthetic outlaws is already strong. She makes it even stronger when she concludes a paragraph about French political prisoners by returning to Wilde: “so Oscar Wilde and the Ballad of Reading Gaol was the first thing that made me realize that it could happen, being in prison” (WIHS, 35). The missing phrase here—“that it could happen to me”—is the obvious, idiomatic gaping hole in the sentence. More is at stake here, though, than her awareness that anti-Semitism, homophobia, and anxiety about aesthetics could catalyze the power of the state

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to imprison or kill her during the occupation of France by Germany. She draws her primary examples of coercive state power—Dreyfus and Wilde— not from the ideological context of Nazi fascism but from that of democratic liberalism. In a similar move, she compares the ordinary experience of black people in the United States to the conditions suffered under occupation: “At the Hopkins’ hospital when I was a medical student, when we asked some Negro where another one was, the frequent answer was oh he is in jail, but Miss, that is no disgrace. And it is like that now, what with black traffic, and this and that and politics, and this and that it is no disgrace” (WIHS, 46). The offhand racism of the phrases “some Negro” and “another one” coexists with the insight that being an African American in the United States is like living in an occupied country, where power abrogates rights and prison is an ordinary dimension of everyday life rather than an exceptional confinement. In this way, and without becoming an integrated analysis, Stein’s memoir points to the limits on agency, rights, and the security of home in the ordinary life of liberal democracy, limits constructed, in her account, on the basis of sexuality, genius, ethnicity, and race. Stein’s comparison between the exceptional and world-historical traumas inflicted by German fascism in the 1930s and 1940s and the ordinary oppression that racial, ethnic, and sexual others experience under liberal democracy might validly be said to miss important distinctions relevant to both her situation under the occupation and any defensible theoretical analysis of the conditions instituted by the Third Reich. Even if one agrees with this—and I do—Stein still achieves an insight into the logic by which subjects are abjected from the protections of civil standing and the recognition of full human value and are thus subjected to the imprisoning and murderous power of the state. Her insight, that is, is into the conditions and hazards of political negation. The operative terms in Stein’s account of imprisonment—sexuality, ethnicity, and race—grounded exclusions in ways that were and are diverse. In the operative paradigms of the first half of the twentieth century, though, they shared an appeal to nature as the grounds of essential and immutable difference. Stein addresses this appeal directly in her discussion of Wilde. She writes of his trial and imprisonment: “up to that time I had never conceived the possibility of anybody being in prison, anybody whose business it was not naturally because of natural or accidental crime to be in prison” (WIHS, 34). Stein’s play on nature, as in her discussion of her writing, is complex. She turns on its head the historical legal term “crimes against nature,” phrasing the imprisonment rather than the crime as the offense against nature and

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the crime itself as natural. She also attenuates Wilde’s sexual and aesthetic agency—as well as her own—with the pairing of “natural or accidental.” Her language here recalls that of Havelock Ellis, who claimed that “sexual inversion” was an “organic aberration” that was both natural and accidental.18 On this basis Ellis argued strenuously against the criminalization of homosexuality and was regarded as a sexual liberator.19 Conceiving of a human particularity as a natural essence, however, determines nothing about how that essence will be treated. It can ground an argument for decriminalizing, because the essence is not the fault of the person who has it, as it did for Ellis, or it can be used to justify political negation, as it was in the case of slavery or Nazi racial ideology. Stein’s conception of the operation of her genius, by contrast, asserts the human value of her writing—“this natural way of creating” (“CE,” 519), as she calls it—against the negations prosecuted through the category of “the natural.” The term “nature” appears in “Composition as Explanation” primarily in its adverbial form, describing the flux and live movement of her writing rather than her biological essence. Over and over, in various forms, she writes permutations of the sentences: “Naturally I would begin again. I would begin again I would naturally begin. I did naturally begin” (“CE,” 519). In defiance of the threat of imprisonment based on “natural crime,” the crime of having one’s nature, Stein “naturally begins” to write her “continuous present” in Wars I Have Seen. The complex of asserted and denied agency in the “natural” writing of genius stands in stark and affirmative contrast to the brutal negations of agency under the occupation and in broader democratic exclusions as well. Stein perceives danger in her writing. As she notes after the German army pulls out of Culoz, “Alice Toklas has just commenced typewriting this book, as long as there were Germans around we left it in manuscript as my handwriting is so bad it was not likely that any German would be able to read it” (WIHS, 150). In her house, twice invaded, her illegible manuscript provides a refuge for “this natural way of creating.” Stein associates Toklas’s typewriting with the amelioration of local danger and the lifting of restrictions on social life and material life: “dear me, such little things but they do amount to a lot, and it is so” (WIHS, 150). While Toklas’s typing signifies their regained privacy, it also points toward their reemergence into the international literary public sphere, where her “natural way of creating” is affirmed. Yet it also clearly will not do to conclude the issue of Stein’s political or practical agency during World War II on the ground of affirming aesthetic production. She inhabited a clearly coerced and perilous position. At the

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same time, she supported the armistice, took a pro-Vichy stance, apparently survived through her friendship with the convicted collaborator Bernard Faÿ, and worked on a project translating the speeches of Pétain into English for an American audience, for which she also wrote a laudatory introduction praising Pétain as the savior of France. These circumstances have presented baffling conundrums of agency and complicity for recent critical discussions of Stein. Remarkably, conceptions of genius have shaped the critical reception of her war memoirs, in ways both implicit and explicit. Read collectively, recent critical writings on Stein during World War II present her at once as a figure of extravagant expressive and political agency and of agency’s annihilation, making Stein a kind of exhibition piece of the transactions between agency and abnegation historically characteristic of the female genius trope. At some moments critics fantasize for Stein an almost shocking level of practical agency. One critic, for instance, speculates that “had Stein decided to leave her adopted country for the duration of the war, as a socially wellconnected celebrity, she could have tried to secure American visas for friends or strangers who fell victim to anti-Semitic terror in Europe,” a possibility asserted without any clear sense of the connection between being a famous author and the process of securing visas in the tense and shifting conditions of war.20 More dramatically, another critic castigates Stein for not budging from her “habits” and “temperament” in order to “take political action, to revolt against the status quo, to document the war’s violence, to join the Résistance,” as if a person on the cusp of seventy and without technical skill of any kind would have been capable of participating in a guerrilla-style military campaign, or as if “political action” were a possibility for anyone living under Nazi occupation but especially for an American Jewish lesbian trying to survive by “playing possum” (WIHS, 131), as Stein describes her public profile during the occupation. When critics complain about Stein’s inadequate practical measures, they mostly do so in order to support a point about Stein’s writing: that it fails to do enough to counter Nazi occupation. To think, though, that a piece of writing could ever do enough in such circumstances is to accord it agency and power beyond anything fantasized by even the most exuberant discourses of genius. The desire here seems almost to be for Stein to accomplish with her writing and actions what the whole of France, with its military and vast population, could not. Other discussions, including the one conducted here, find liberatory agency in Stein’s writing. Maria Diedrich claims, for instance, that Stein “strove to replace universal HIStory by a personalized and individualized

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HERstory. In doing so, she not only forced her readers to review critically and question the paradigms of their discourse and to abandon canonized expectations of coherent sense, but she also induced them to perceive the diversity as well as the immediacy of experience.”21 One might argue with the particular framework of this and similar discussions, but more generally claims such as this one show a disciplinary commitment to understanding exemplary acts of expression as having world-transforming power. This is a commitment that this book, like so many others in English and modern language studies, sometimes shares—for instance, in my argument that the discourses on female genius in the novels I have examined had significant bearing on the construction of gendered political subjectivity and models of democratic life. The current critical tendency to ascribe superabundant agency to texts and authors, however, is in some ways an extension of the discourses on genius that I have examined here. Recent critical assessments of Stein’s work in the highly pressured and intensely complicated context of her survival in occupied France suggest how fully the belief in an author’s paradigm-changing or world-transforming expressive agency is a hope installed in modern criticism. Critics often castigate Stein for not trying to transform the world, in her writing or her actions, during World War II or praise her for transforming it at the level of conception, when her context shows the heightened intractability and immediate danger of her situation. The gap between the expressive agency that critics can now find and the historical possibility of asserting effective agency in Stein’s moment is enormous. The critical case of Stein shows how, despite the warmed-over theoretical death of the author, the magical expressive power central to the trope of female genius in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has become an implicit assumption of criticism, reproduced through very different critical positions that converge on the question of how literary writing crystallizes as political significance. The trope of “genius,” that is, remains the repressed of literary criticism. To say this, though, is not to nullify the pressing historical questions about Stein’s agency, intentions, and complicity during the occupation. Some recent critical work construes Stein’s political expression during the occupation on a human scale, and with scholarly precision. Although Stein’s comfort with Pétain is evident in “The Winner Loses” and for stretches of Wars I Have Seen, it is lightly drawn, and she never mentions her efforts translating his speeches, her draft of a laudatory introduction to them, or Bernard Faÿ as the source of her protection. In a biographical appendix to their edition of The

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Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, Burns and his coauthors lay these facts bare and try to do the work of extrapolating Stein’s motives and level of complicity, but as they write, “What she understood about Faÿ and how she saw the situation remains a troublesome puzzle.”22 Stein’s translation of Pétain’s speeches also presents puzzles. Stein worked on the translation project from late 1941 through some unknown date in 1943, perhaps simultaneously with the early portions of Wars I Have Seen. Faÿ likely initiated and certainly oversaw the project, hoping that Stein’s prestige would allow her to win an American audience over to Pétain during a time when the United States still had diplomatic relations with Vichy France, and probably hoping as well that the project would fortify Pétain’s will to protect her.23 Stein halted the project after two friends convinced her that “it drew excessive attention to her in an already risky situation under the occupation. By the time she stopped, she had translated approximately three-fifths of the French printed text.”24 If Stein undertook the translations while under the illusion that Pétain, known as the “hero of Verdun” after World War I, would save France, the question remains, as Burns and his colleagues ask, why Stein continued working on the translations long after it was clear that Pétain’s regime was collaborating extensively with the Nazi occupiers. It is remarkable to note the degree to which the trope of genius has been summoned to make sense of Stein’s political agency as a translator. Wanda Van Dusen’s groundbreaking analysis of Stein’s introduction to Pétain’s speeches detects Stein’s complicity with fascism in her “veneration of genius and power.”25 In Van Dusen’s reading, Stein renders Pétain a mythic and miraculous “symbol of national unity” that represses class, ethnic, and sexual difference, a unifying function typical of universal models of genius that, I have argued, the discourse on female genius in the United States both exploited and undermined. Such a reading calls to mind the danger implicit to the political trope of genius, a danger that Henry James, for instance, exploited in his satire on female genius in The Bostonians. In feminist uses of “genius” in the United States, the unifying, suprapolitical quality of genius was mitigated by the way it was summoned to mediate differences in the particular context of an American political culture in transition. Stein’s introduction shows the ease with which, beyond these contexts and uses, the trope of genius as a cipher of universality can function to mystify nationalism and suppress difference. While some critics see the trope of genius as the basis of Stein’s compromising political agency, others use it to frame the conditions of her dam-

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aged political agency. Barbara Will locates Stein’s translation Pétain’s speeches on another pole of the genius discourse, linking it to self-splitting, ventriloquism, and abnegated agency, constructs familiar from discussions in this book of the emergent problematics of female subjectivity and public life in The Bostonians and Trilby. Will sees World War II as a moment when Stein, a literary luminary whom Faÿ had courted, becomes his cipher; Faÿ makes Stein “a pawn in the power fame of her friend,” and one way he does so is by making Pétain speak through Stein, just as Svengali sings through Trilby but with the ethnicities reversed.26 Although she insists that “Faÿ’s ‘use’ of Stein does not excuse her collaborative activities,” Will sees the translation project as an expression of Stein’s radically negated agency: “Stein—isolated, elderly, living in a region of France targeted for particular ‘purges’ of Jews by the Vichy secret police—was the disempowered supplicant, writing as faithfully as possible in order to save her own life.”27 Will sees evidence of this terror and negation in the text of the translations. Her illuminating examination of the unpublished manuscript drafts reveals that they are “remarkable for their literalism: as though Stein had simply translated word for word; or as though she were passively giving herself up to the authoritarian voice and language of the fascist Father.”28 Will finds that Stein’s literalism is “antithetical to her sense of herself as a genius,” understood here as both Stein’s originality and her dialogic sense of genius as “talking and listening at the same time.”29 This interpretation construes the translation project within a paradox: Stein expresses her political agency, her resistance to Pétain and the project of translation, by withholding the negated agency of genius, her “natural way of creating.” It is worth noting that this model of agency recalls the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses of female genius that attempted to frame intricate, often compromised, and sometimes utopian scenes of women’s political agency, staged in a dynamic with their objectively negated political agency. The opposition that Stein creates between “genius” and “thinking”—the opposition with which this coda opens—provides another angle on the problem of political speech more generally for Stein. To repeat Stein’s words from Everybody’s Autobiography, “anyway a genius need not think, because if he does think he has to be wrong or right he has to argue or decide, and after all he might just as well not do that” (EA, 88). As the history of Stein’s critical reception proves, her claims to genius have not excused her from considerations of whether she was wrong or right; nor have they made it seem that she did not in an important sense “decide” to comply with a collaborationist

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regime by staying in France or undertaking the translations. The compelling weight of Stein’s demurral, however, lies not in the excuse she provides for not deciding but in her generalized skepticism about thinking, argument, and decision. Elsewhere in Everybody’s Autobiography, in Wars I Have Seen, and in her last opera, The Mother of Us All, Stein evinces a profound anxiety about the coercive power of “thinking” and persuasion, as opposed to genius. In Everybody’s Autobiography she writes, “I did not care for any one being intelligent because if they are intelligent they talk as if they were preparing to change something” (EA, 77). Writing on the eve of World War II and in the face of increasing military aggression from the Third Reich, Stein has a very particular “something” in mind here: “It is like it was during the war the most actively warlike nation the Germans could always convince the pacifist to become pro-German. That is because pacifists were such intelligent beings that they could follow what anyone is saying” (EA, 77). Stein here is ambiguous. Do pacifists become pro-German because they are convinced by Germany’s vision for the world, or because they are convinced that the only way to forestall violence is by capitulating to Germany? In either case the “understanding” is the ground of coercion and ultimate political subjection to a “warlike nation.” Stein returns less ambiguously to the conceit of “understanding” and German coercion during a particularly alarming passage about the execution of civilians in Wars I Have Seen. She reports: “Someone has just come in and said he saw in one town where the Germans had been executing people and they put up a placard signed by the German commanding officer saying that he regretted all these horrors but they were necessary because the civilian population had gotten into the habit of making mock of the Germans and of course that would not do the French would perfectly understand that so what could the occupying forces do than do what they did do” (WIHS, 112, emphasis mine). This placard is designed to cloak German responsibility for violence—the occupying forces had no choice—and to misrepresent coercion as consent—“the French would perfectly understand.” It threatens more executions should anyone again make “mock of the Germans.” Where mockery expresses a ludic civilian resistance, the “understanding” constitutes the ground of coercion backed by violence. In this context of coerced understanding, persuasive power is a function of force, which is to say that Stein has no faith in “understanding” as an autonomous function at all. Taken on its own and without the backing of force, in Stein’s conception, persuasive eloquence appealing to the understanding

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is likely to activate coercive power against itself. Stein drives this point home in her 1946 opera about Susan B. Anthony, The Mother of Us All. The opera is nearly impossible to summarize coherently. It situates Anthony in a set of exchanges with several American historical and contemporary figures— including John Adams, Daniel Webster, the stage actress Lillian Russell, and Gertrude Stein herself—and several allegorical figures, including “Joe the Loiter.” At the opera’s climax, Anthony addresses the legislature, appealing to their understanding on behalf of woman suffrage. Her speech has the opposite effect from what she intends: it consolidates women’s exclusion from constitutional citizenship. After Anthony makes the address, which is not staged, her friend Anna Hope, figured in the opera as Anthony’s intimate, tells her, “Oh it was wonderful, wonderful, they listen to nobody the way they listen to you.”30 Because Anthony has put the case for woman suffrage so well, however, the men resolve to solidify women’s political exclusion. “Yes it is wonderful as a result of my work for the first time the word male has been written into the constitution of the United States concerning suffrage,” Anthony laments, referring to the Fourteenth Amendment, which while granting full citizenship to African American men also defined citizenship for the first time as explicitly male.31 Anthony’s speech “changes things” by galvanizing her opponents to use their legislative power against her. Stein thus depicts appeals to the understanding as both coercively instrumental in their intents and unpredictable in their effects, which suggests why, as Stein writes, “a genius need not think.” Instead the genius will “begin again and again” with her “natural way of creating,” just as France would renew itself creatively, even while under the heel of the occupation: “They say now they can begin to feel that they have their future to create” (“WL,” 636–37). If with this assertion Stein did not frame an adequate answer to the negation of expressive political agency under conditions of occupation, she has vast company. Her commitments, compromises, and complicities were historical and particular, certainly her own, and available to the rigorous critique that has become an ongoing project in the study of her war memoirs. Examining her writing during World War II and recent critical responses to it, though, shows how vigorously the genius trope flourishes—in both literary writing and criticism—in moments when political agency enters a crisis. Stein responded to her political negation by enlisting the paradoxes of genius in her writing. In recent criticism an implicit ideology of genius, centered on the issues of individual agency and political signification, has guided readings of her work in particular and of literary acts of intelligibly political writing

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more generally. An explicit discourse of genius in relationship to gendered citizenship now reads as an archaism, for the historical reasons traced here, but the questions that conceptions of genius addressed—about the conditions and structures of agency, about the constitution of collectivity, and about the complexities of consent—remain vital. When such pressing questions circulate in current criticism through a persistent discourse of genius, it not only signifies how difficult it still is to find a critical language capable of managing the contradictions that obstruct women’s political agency, but also represents a relic of the historical struggles that I have tracked in this book to imagine a more just democracy.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Quoted in Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 203. 2. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government [1690], ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Second Treatise, section 27. 3. See discussion in C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); and Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 64–93. 4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems, ed. Robert D. Richardson (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 159. See my discussion of Emerson’s conceptions of genius in Chapter 1 of this book. 5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems, ed. Robert D. Richardson (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 216. 6. Ibid., 204. 7. “What Is Genius?,” American Phrenological Journal 30.4 (October 1859): 54. 8. G. Lowes Dickinson, “Olive Shreiner: Woman of Genius,” Living Age, 21 June 1924,1203. 9. Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1869), vi, 35. 10. Cesare Lombroso, The Man of Genius, 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), v. 11. “Why America Will Be the Land of Genius,” Current Opinion, June 1919, 376. 12. To be sure, the division of spheres was more an ideological than a literal construct, as many historians have noted. Nevertheless it was the reigning legal and conceptual model of liberal democracy. 13. On the diverse political activities of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American women, see in particular Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

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Notes to Pages 7–11

14. On the compensatory functions of mass culture and their hazards, see in particular Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), esp. 107–44; and Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002). 15. See my longer discussion of The Bostonians in Chapter 2 of this book. 16. Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995). 17. Russ Castronovo, Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). See also Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson, eds., Materializing Democracy: Towards a Revitalized Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). 18. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004). 19. Caroline Field Levander, Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Nancy Ruttenberg, Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). 20. See in particular Berlant, The Female Complaint, but also, for its critique of liberalism and exploration of alternative sexual cultures, Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). The literature on sentimental culture in America is large, but my discussion draws from Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Glenn Hendler and Mary Chapman, eds., Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Julie K. Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 21. Anne E. Boyd, Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Naomi Z. Sofer, Making the “America of Art”: Cultural Nationalism and NineteenthCentury Women Writers (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005). 22. Bob Perelman, The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Barbara Will, Gertrude Stein, Modernism and the Problem of “Genius” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 23. Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 24. Gustavus Stadler, Troubling Minds: The Cultural Politics of Genius in the United States, 1840–1890 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xv. 25. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 119. See also Robert Currie, Genius: An Ideology in Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974).

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26. Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 27. Françoise Meltzer, Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 86. 28. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 84. 29. Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Rush’s Lectures on the Mind, ed. Eric T. Carlson, Jeffery L. Wollock, and Patricia S. Noel (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1981), 688. Rush is writing within the faculty theory of mind that reigned before the invention of general intelligence and the fully romantic formulation of genius. See my discussion in Chapter 1for a fuller account of the significance of the differences between these models. 30. Otto Weininger, Sex and Character, authorized translation from the 6th German ed. (New York: Putnam, 1906), 113. 31. Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman: A Study of Human Secondary Sexual Characters (London: A. & C. Black, 1930), 490. 32. See, for instance, Will’s discussion of Stein’s use of “genius” to parody gender and sexuality in Gertrude Stein, 143–46. 33. Quoted in Ellis, Man and Woman, 420. 34. Angles of this categorical problem are of particular interest to Battersby, Gender and Genius, 3, 23. 35. C. Gasquoine Hartley, The Truth about Women (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1913), 310. 36. Grace Griswold, “Ban on Women’s Genius,” New York Times, 21 August 1915. 37. Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988). 38. At the same time, however, their claim on citizenship was often based on subordinating awareness of their economic inequality to their formal equality as voting citizens. On these developments, see James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); and Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997). 39. See in particular Caroline F. Levander and Carol J. Singley, eds., The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Caroline F. Levander, Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W. E. B. Du Bois (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006); and Gregg D. Crane, Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 40. Aileen Kraditor, Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 43–74.

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41. Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 20. 42. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 152. For further discussion, see also William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 64–94. 43. The literature on this issue is large, but see in particular Iris Marion Young, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 120–35; and Ernesto Laclau, “Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity,” in Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (New York: Routledge, 1995), 93–108. 44. Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). See also Joan W. Scott, “Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990), 134–48. 45. Emerson, “Self Reliance,” 148. 46. Emerson, “The Poet,” 223. 47. Hartley, Truth about Women, 311. 48. Emerson, “Politics,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems, ed. Robert D. Richardson (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 258 49. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 178. 50. Julia Kristeva, “Is There a Feminine Genius?,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Spring 2004): 496. Subsequent citations of this work appear parenthetically in the text and notes as “FG.” This essay condenses some of the main arguments from Kristeva’s three-volume work on “feminine genius,” as extrapolated from the works of Colette, Melanie Klein, and Hannah Arendt. See Julia Kristeva, Colette, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); and Kristeva, Melanie Klein, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 51. For Kristeva’s purposes, the feminine psychosexual form is defined by bisexuality, being an outsider to language, maintaining permanent connections with outside objects, and having a distinct temporality defined by childbearing. 52. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “The Two Offers,” in A Brighter Day Coming: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, ed. Frances Smith Foster (New York: Feminist Press, 1990), 106. Subsequent citations to this work appear parenthetically as “TO.” 53. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 54. Frances Smith Foster, ed., A Brighter Day Coming: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York: Feminist Press, 1990), 105.

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55. Sylvia Kopald, “Where Are the Women Geniuses?,” Nation, 10 December 1924, 619.

Chapter 1 1. Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 330. Subsequent citations of this work appear parenthetically as W. 2. Julia Ward Howe, quoted in J. B. Pond, Eccentricities of Genius: Memories of Famous Men and Women of the Platform and Stage (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1900), 148. Subsequent citations of this work appear parenthetically as EG. Before offering this quotation, Pond recollects that Howe “told [him] how she came to write ‘Battle-Hymn of the Republic.’” The wording he provides is very close to what Howe gives in her Reminiscences, 1819–1899 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), 275. 3. Naomi Z. Sofer, Making the “America of Art”: Cultural Nationalism and NineteenthCentury Women Writers (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 168. 4. Anne E. Boyd, Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 129. 5. Gustavus Stadler, Troubling Minds: The Cultural Politics of Genius in the United States, 1840–1890 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 117, 111, 110. 6. Anne Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), esp. 82–116. 7. Political theorists have richly analyzed these polarities, and the literature on this question is too enormous to cite fully. A few crucial resources for this essay include Carole Pateman’s canonical account of liberalism’s constitutive exclusion of women in The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988); and Pateman’s The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989). Wendy Brown helpfully revises Pateman by locating the reproduction of unequal citizenship in liberalism’s foundational polarities; see Brown, “Liberalism’s Family Values,” in Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 135–56. 8. See, for instance, Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); and Françoise Meltzer, Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 82–127. 9. See Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “genius.” See also Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 143–44. 10. Lorraine Daston, “The Naturalized Female Intellect,” Science in Context 5 (Autumn 1992): 209–35. 11. Ibid., 215–16.

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12. Judith Sargent Murray, “On the Equality of the Sexes,” in Selected Writings of Judith Sargent Murray, ed. Sharon M. Harris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 4, 5. 13. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 63–113. 14. Daston, “Naturalized Female Intellect,” 222–24. 15. Quoted in J. A. Neal, An Essay on the Education and Genius of the Female Sex (Philadelphia: Jacob Johnson, 1795), 9. 16. Quoted in ibid., 28. 17. As Daston has suggested, the eighteenth century conceived natural qualities as susceptible to education; the mid-nineteenth century, however, began to figure “nature” as deterministic. See Daston, “Naturalized Female Intellect,” 225. 18. J. W. Stevens, “An Address to Mr. John Poor, A.M., Principle of the Young Ladies’ Academy; on Being Present at the Late Commencement,” in Neal, Education and Genius, iii, iv. 19. On women’s citizenship in this era, see in particular Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 189–231. 20. John Swanwick, “Address,” in Neal, Education and Genius, 22, 23. 21. Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland and the Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 133. 22. Ibid., 150. On the antirevolutionary ideology of this novel, see Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 40–61; and Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 145–202. 23. Foucault has called “genius” an aspect of the construct of “the author,” and thus a concept that individualizes discourse and fiction (Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow [New York: Pantheon Books, 1984], 101–20). While this is particularly true in relation to both the market and the production of institutional knowledge about culture, “genius” also functioned as a trope for fragmented individuality, as my discussion below suggests. 24. Meltzer, Hot Property, 82–86. 25. On the European development of romantic genius, see in particular M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958); Michael Beddow, “Goethe on Genius,” in Genius: The History of an Idea, ed. Penelope Murray (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 98–112; and Matthew Wickman, “Imitating Eve Imitating Echo Imitating Originality: The Critical Reverberations of Sentimental Genius in the Conjectures on Original Composition,” ELH 65 (Winter 1998): 899–929. 26. Battersby, Gender and Genius, 76–79, 107–12. More recently Gustavus Stadler has argued that “genius” destabilized identity and sexuality; see Stadler, “Louisa May Alcott’s Queer Geniuses,” American Literature 71 (December 1999): 657–77.

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27. Lydia Sigourney, “Essay on the Genius of Mrs. Hemans,” in Felicia Dorothea Browne Hemans, The Works of Mrs. Hemans (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1840), vii. Subsequent citations of this work appear parenthetically as “MH.” 28. Bonnie Honig, “Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 269. 29. Ibid., 270. 30. The fragmentary quality of the narrative has also to do with the compositional history of the novel. Alcott incorporated into Work the novel Success, which she had drafted in 1861 and from which she had published at least one chapter as a stand-alone short story. See Joy S. Kasson, introduction to Alcott, Work. 31. Further work needs to be done to understand Alcott’s anti-Irish moments, and her nativism more generally, especially in light of her challenges to the implicit whiteness of citizenship. 32. Beryl Satter, Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 183–89. 33. On how disciplines of knowledge and rhetorical styles shape democratic contexts, see Iris Marion Young, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 120–35. 34. Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 136–46. In his discussion of Work here, Hendler significantly revises his earlier assessment of Christie’s speech as a failure to articulate “an individual form of public femininity that is not undermined by the threat of narcissism or self loss” (Hendler, “The Limits of Sympathy: Louisa May Alcott and the Sentimental Novel,” American Literary History 3 [Winter 1991]: 702–3). 35. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Genius,” in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 3, 1838–1842 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1972), 68–84. Subsequent citations of this work appear parenthetically as “G.” 36. Boyd, Writing for Immortality, 23. 37. Dana Nelson considers how Emerson’s notion of representivity effaces difference across his writings on democracy. See Nelson, “Representative/Democracy: The Political Work of Countersymbolic Representation,” in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 225–30. 38. Ernesto Laclau, “Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity,” in Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (New York: Routledge, 1995), 107. 39. Christopher Newfield, The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 60. Newfield argues that Emerson’s pronouncements in favor of the authority of the individual self are often followed by injunctions to submit to some transcendent entity—nature or natural language or a

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subsuming unitary “Oneness.” For this reason Newfield believes that Emerson prepares American minds for the degraded liberalism of authoritarian bureaucracy. Newfield’s critique implies that there is an unproblematically willed and authentic consent that the subject indeed could grant and that would authorize a democracy. For other considerations of Emerson’s relation to liberal political culture, see Carolyn Porter, Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 91–120; and Sacvan Bercovitch, “Emerson, Individualism, and the Ambiguities of Dissent,” South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (Summer 1990): 623–61. 40. Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 82–125. On Benjamin Franklin, see Gillian Brown, Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 114–22. 41. Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 179–96. 42. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 1:73. 43. Allison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), esp. 306–43. 44. Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in NineteenthCentury America (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 35; Kimberly K. Smith, The Dominion of Voice: Riot, Reason, and Romance in Antebellum Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 87–117. 45. Smith, Dominion of Voice, 118–61. 46. Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 30. 47. Quoted in ibid., 40. 48. Ibid. 49. Elaine Scarry, “Consent and the Body: Injury, Departure, and Desire,” New Literary History 21 (Autumn 1990): 884. 50. Nancy Frazer, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 13–18. 51. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 109. For a critique of the critical impasse perpetuated by the separate spheres paradigm, see Cathy N. Davidson, “Preface: No More Separate Spheres,” American Literature 70 (September 1998): 443–63. 52. William Leach, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1980), esp. 133–212; Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), esp. 95–129. 53. For a consideration of how this problem has conditioned scholarship on domes-

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tic fiction, see Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).

Chapter 2 1. James is said to have modeled Verena on Anna E. Dickinson. It hardly seems necessary, though, to decide on a single actual career to explain Verena; the tropes of genius with which James surrounds her were widely used to characterize women’s public expression, especially in radical movements. On Dickinson as a precedent, see Sara DeSaussure Davis, “Feminist Sources in The Bostonians,” American Literature 50 (January 1979): 571–73. On Dickinson’s association with genius, see Giraud Chester, Embattled Maiden: The Life of Anna Dickinson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1951), 8. Martha Banta and Howard Kerr argue that Verena’s public speaking represents that of spirit mediums, but it is never the premise of the novel that Verena channels the dead, nor that she is simply and necessarily magnetized by her father. Olive clearly, and it turns out rightly, sees him to be expendable when she reflects, “that [Selah] should be mixed up in any way with this exercise of [Verena’s] genius was a great injury to the cause, and Olive had already determined that in future Verena should dispense with his co-operation” (B, 133). See Martha Banta, Henry James and the Occult: The Great Extension (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 33; and Howard Kerr, Mediums, and Spirit-Rappers, and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 203. 2. Henry James, The Bostonians (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 60. Subsequent citations of this work appear parenthetically as B. 3. See my discussion in Chapter 1. 4. On the persistence of arguments about partiality, see Iris Marion Young, “Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications of Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory,” in Feminism, the Public and the Private, ed. Joan B. Landes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 421–47. 5. The commercial opportunities that proliferate around Verena have been analyzed. Jennifer Wicke, for instance, sees the novel’s advertising plot to have engrossed sexuality in the novel. The Bostonians, she writes, is “nominally a book about a ‘Boston marriage,’ a platonic lesbian relationship and its connections to the feminist movement. . . . it is in fact the delineation of the Barnumization of America” (Wicke, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading [New York: Columbia University Press, 1988], 99). 6. Philip Fisher, “Appearing and Disappearing in Public: Social Space in LateNineteenth-Century Literature and Culture,” in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 155–56. See also Ian F. A. Bell, “The Personal, the Private, and the Public in The Bostonians,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 32.2 (Summer 1990): 240–56.

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7. Bell, “The Personal, the Private,” 241. 8. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). 9. Henry James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 19. 10. Ibid., 20. 11. See in particular Henry James, The American Scene, ed. Leon Edel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 10. 12. See in particular Bell, “The Personal, the Private”; Fisher, “Appearing and Disappearing”; Richard Salmon, Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Joyce A. Rowe, “‘Murder, What a Lovely Voice!’: Sex, Speech, and the Public/Private Problem in The Bostonians,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40 (Summer 1998): 158–83; and Lynn Wardley, “Woman’s Voice, Democracy’s Body, and The Bostonians,” ELH 56 (Autumn 1989): 639–65. 13. Fisher, “Appearing and Disappearing,” 168, 169. 14. Ibid., 169. 15. On the demise of these ideals, see Richard F. Hixson, Privacy in a Public Society: Human Rights in Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 12–16. 16. Ibid., 26– 37. On the growing centrality of sexuality to privacy, see Pamela Haag, Consent: Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 63–93. 17. Salmon, Culture of Publicity, 15. 18. Kerr, Mediums, and Spirit-Rappers, 216. 19. John Spurlock, Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 4–9. 20. Salmon, Culture of Publicity, 18. 21. Alfred Habegger, Henry James and the “Woman Business” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 29–33. 22. Henry James, Literary Criticism, vol. 1 (New York: Library of America, 1984), 567. 23. Quoted in George Wallingford Noyes, comp., Free Love in Utopia: John Humphrey Noyes and the Origin of the Oneida Community, ed. Lawrence Foster (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), xx, xxi. 24. Ibid., 246. 25. John Humphrey Noyes, quoted in Louis J. Kern, An Ordered Love: Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias—The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 237–38. For discussions of the sexual organization and ideology of Oneida, see Kern, Ordered Love, 207–56; Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 72–122; and Lawrence Foster, Women, Family, and Utopia: Communal Experiments of the Shakers, the Oneida Community, and the Mormons (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 75–120.

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26. Kern, Ordered Love, 238. 27. Henry James, Literary Criticism, 567. 28. Ibid. 29. Spurlock, Free Love, 139–63; Hal D. Sears, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), esp. 3–27. For a discussion of the free love movement’s advocacy for women’s equality, see Joanne E. Passet, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 30. On liberalism’s division between the public domain of politics and the private domain of natural power relations, see Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988); and Kristin A. Kelly, Domestic Violence and the Politics of Privacy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 12–20. 31. Spurlock, Free Love, 223. On the growing ethos of romantic love in the midnineteenth century, see in particular Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 28–55; and Steven Seidman, Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830–1980 (New York: Routledge, 1991), 65–118. 32. Jesse F. Battan, “‘The Word Made Flesh’: Language, Authority, and Sexual Desire in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” in American Sexual Politics: Sex, Gender, and Race since the Civil War, ed. John C. Fout and Maura Shaw Tantillo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 101–22. 33. Spurlock, Free Love, 227–29. 34. Grant B. Mindle, “Liberalism, Privacy, and Autonomy,” Journal of Politics 51 (August 1989): 578, 586–88. 35. Hixson, Privacy in a Public Society, 26–51; Mindle, “Liberalism, Privacy, and Autonomy,” 586–87. 36. Quoted in Hixson, Privacy in a Public Society, 33. 37. See in particular Fisher, “Appearing and Disappearing”; and Bell, “The Personal, the Private.” 38. Terry Castle, for instance, praises James as “the first major modern writer . . . to open a space for a sympathetic reading of a lesbian character.” See Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 177. David Van Leer has suggested that the novel tempers its condemnation of Olive’s possessive passion for Verena by showing “the inadequacy of normality,” as it is proposed by Basil. See Van Leer, “A World of Female Friendship: The Bostonians,” in Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire, ed. John R. Bradley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 108. For an argument that the novel stages the “liberating possibilities inherent in female friendships,” see Kathleen McColley, “Claiming Center Stage: Speaking Out for Homoerotic Empowerment in The Bostonians,” Henry James Review 21 (2000): 151–69. Both Van Leer and McColley locate the sexual politics in the novel in the question of whether the representation of “the lesbian” can be read as positive, rather than in any consideration of the ways in which sexuality and politics coalesce, either in The Bostonians or in the world outside it.

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39. I would here disagree with Richard Salmon’s suggestion that The Bostonians “dramatizes the emergence of  .  .  . the “‘counter-public sphere’ of feminism” (Salmon, Culture of Publicity, 18). James’s depiction of the women’s movement denies it content of any kind; the novel does not dramatize but rather annihilates. 40. Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 71. 41. Lucia T. Ames, “The Bostonians,” Woman’s Journal,13 March 1886, 82. 42. Brook Thomas sees the agreement between Basil and Verena to keep this secret as a contract that establishes privacy by creating a connection between them, and also a space between them because Verena refuses to let Basil walk home with her as a condition of her keeping this secret. Thomas describes this as a moment of civil contract, which she claims makes a more meaningful form of privacy than the marriage contract. See Brook Thomas, “The Construction of Privacy in and around The Bostonians,” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 64.4 (December 1992): 735–36. I do not share Thomas’s optimism that civil contract creates conditions of equality and integrity. Moreover, I do not think that Basil and Verena really make a contract—neither one accepts the other’s idea of the meaning of the secrecy they discuss. 43. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (1890; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1950), 393. Subsequent citations of this work appear parenthetically as P. On the influence of William James’s psychological studies on Henry James’s realism, particularly in The Bostonians, see Banta, Henry James and the Occult, 96–100, 178–83; Kerr, Mediums, and Spirit-Rappers, 197–209; and Susan Wolstenholme, “Possession and Personality: Spiritualism in The Bostonians,” American Literature 49 (January 1978): 580–91. 44. Henry James, American Scene, 166. 45. Spurlock, Free Love, 140. 46. Pamela Haag, “In Search of ‘The Real Thing’: Ideologies of Love, Modern Romance, and Women’s Sexual Subjectivity in the United States, 1920–40,” in American Sexual Politics: Sex, Gender, and Race since the Civil War, ed. John C. Fout and Maura Shaw Tantillo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 164. 47. Jacob Katz Cogan, “The Look Within: Property, Capacity, and Suffrage in Nineteenth-Century America,” Yale Law Journal 107.2 (November 1997): 473–98. 48. James praises A Woman’s Reason in an essay on Howells that he published in 1886, just a few months after The Bostonians completed its serialization and as it was being reissued as a book. See Henry James, “William Dean Howells,” in Henry James, Literary Criticism, 503. 49. William Dean Howells, A Woman’s Reason (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1884), 13. Subsequent citations of this work appear parenthetically as WR. 50. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” The E-text Center at the University of Virginia. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JamEssL.sgm&images=images/ modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=private&part=6&division=div1. Accessed July 17, 2008. All subsequent quotations from “The Art of Fiction” are from this source.

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51. Henry James, Letters, vol. 3, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 53. 52. Henry James, Complete Notebooks, 19. 53. Ibid., 20. 54. Thanks to Stephen Railton for an illuminating conversation about this. 55. In terms of the feminist movement in the United States, however, this particular representivity is precisely the problem, as primarily northern, white women become the “universal” subject of feminism. 56. Cited from Kevin Hayes, ed., Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 169. 57. Cited from ibid., 158. 58. Cited from ibid., 169, emphasis mine. 59. Cited from ibid., 158. 60. Henry James, Letters, 101. 61. Ibid., 70. 62. Ibid., 121. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Cited from Hayes, Henry James, 171.

Chapter 3 1. George Du Maurier, Trilby (1894; repr., Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003), 39. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically as T. 2. L. Edward Purcell, “Trilby and Trilby-Mania: The Beginning of the Bestseller System,” Journal of Popular Culture 11 (1977): 64. Harper’s circulation increased by over one hundred thousand between the first and second installments of Trilby (Emily Jenkins, “Trilby: Fads, Photographers, and ‘Over-Perfect Feet,’” Book History 1.1 [1998]: 228). 3. Purcell, “Trilby and Trilby-Mania,” 69, 64. On the British theatrical run, see Jenkins, “Trilby: Fads,” 235–39. 4. Joseph B. Gilder and Jeannette L. Gilder, Trilbyana: The Rise and Progress of a Popular Novel (New York: Critic Co., 1895), 20, 27. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically as TRP. 5. Frederic Almy, Walter Cary, John B. Olmsted, and Carleton Sprague, Frilby: An Operatic Burlesque (Buffalo, N.Y.: Printed privately, 1895); Leopold Jordan, Drilby Re-Versed, illus. P. E. Ackerman (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1895); William Muskerry, Thrilby: A Shocker in One Scene and Several Spasms (London: Samuel French, 1896). 6. Jenkins observes that most of the parodies focused on the boom as much as they did the plot or substance of the novel. The parody Thrilby, for instance, has the heroine enter with the words “A popular heroine well advertised, / My morals eccentric / have

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been criticized / Society has me / in tableau ‘vivong’ / I’m known on the stage / and I’m quoted in song” (quoted in Jenkins, “Trilby: Fads,” 240). 7. Beaumont Fletcher, “Trilby as Play,” Godey’s, June 1895, 570–71. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically as “TP.” 8. Henry James, “George Du Maurier,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, September 1897, 606. 9. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 167, 168. 10. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 101. 11. Ibid., 108. 12. Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Jane M. Gaines, Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 13. Gaines, Contested Culture, 59. 14. Ibid., 43. See also Mark Rose, “The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship,” Representations 23 (Summer 1988): 51–85, on whose argument Gaines is building. 15. Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 119. 16. For more on the status of women in and the supposed classlessness of Bohemia, see Michael Wilson, “‘Sans les femmes, qu’est-ce qui nous resterait?’: Gender and Transgression in Bohemian Montmartre,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 195–222. 17. Françoise Meltzer, Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 124. 18. On the conflation of “Britishness” and “Englishness” in the service of empire, see Sarah Gracombe, “Converting Trilby: Du Maurier on Englishness, Jewishness, and Culture,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 58.1 (June 2003): 78. 19. Gracombe persuasively makes the case that Trilby’s training in Englishness expresses contemporary debates over whether Englishness was essential or could be acquired. These debates, as she demonstrates, were integral to the culture of empire and its ambivalence over the extent to which subordinated territories could or should be assimilated to the nation (Gracombe, “Converting Trilby,” 88–96). 20. Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 170. 21. William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (1890; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1950), 373; emphasis in original. 22. Ibid., 379, emphasis in original. 23. The refinement of Trilby’s English personality also serves to control the erotic attractions that circulate among the three painters. See Dennis Denisoff, “‘Men of My

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Own Sex’: Genius, Sexuality, and George Du Maurier’s Artists,” in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 153–62; Jonathan H. Grossman, “The Mythical Svengali: Anti-Aestheticism in Trilby,” Studies in the Novel 28 (Winter 1996): 531; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 193–95; and Wilson, “Sans les femmes,” 195–216. 24. Nina Auerbach, “Magi and Maidens: The Romance of the Victorian Freud,” Critical Inquiry 8.2 (Winter 1981): 284–85. 25. See, for instance, Gracombe, “Converting Trilby,” 100; Lara Karpenko, “Purchasing Largely: Trilby and the Fin de Siecle Reader,” Victorians Institute Journal: Victorian Literature, Art, and Culture 34 (2006): 227; Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 339–41; and Neil R. Davison, “‘The Jew’ as Homme/Femme-Fatale: Jewish (Art)ifice, Trilby, and Dreyfus,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society 8.2–3 (Winter–Spring 2002): 73–111. 26. Translation taken from Leonee Ormond’s edition of Trilby: George Du Maurier, Trilby, ed. Leonee Ormond (London: Everyman, 1994), 412. 27. Phyllis Weliver makes a similar point about this speech in Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 264–65. 28. Du Maurier, Trilby, ed. Ormond, 410. 29. For thoroughgoing consideration of this issue, see Winter, Mesmerized. Several sensational criminal trials in the United States and Europe featured defendants who argued, with mixed results, that they committed their crimes under hypnotic influence and therefore could not be criminally responsible. For an example of how this question surfaced in magazine culture, see Alfred Binet, “Hypnotism in Disease and Crime,” Popular Science Monthly, April 1888, 763–69. For a history of the question, see JeanRoch Laurence and Campbell Perry, Hypnosis, Will, and Memory: A Psycho-Legal History (New York: Guilford Press, 1988). 30. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 2 (1890; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1950), 605. Compare with Binet: “It is interesting to ascertain whether the subject who is actuated by an irresistible impulse behaves like an automaton . . . or if, on the contrary, the subject is capable of reflection and of reasoning like a normal individual. This latter is more frequently the case. When care is taken to suggest a somewhat complex act, for the performance of which some combination is necessary, we may observe that the subject invents such combined expedients although they had not been suggested to him, and this inventive process shows that everything is not explained by comparing him to an automaton” (Binet, “Hypnotism,” 768). 31. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 116. 32. William James, Psychology, 2:609. Interestingly, James also noted that “sudden alterations in outward fortune often produce such a change in the empirical me as almost to amount to a pathological disturbance of self-consciousness” (378). Someone

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who has experienced a precipitous rise in fortune, such as Trilby has, could “find no medium of continuity or association to carry him over from the one phase to the other of his life” (379). 33. Along similar lines Phyllis Weliver has suggested that Trilby’s several personalities fulfill the late nineteenth-century psychologist and psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers’s conception of the “multiplex personality” composed of several possible modalities of consciousness. Using Myers’s vocabulary, Weliver also argues that the hypnotized Trilby is an active personality rather than Svengali’s cipher. See Weliver, Women Musicians, 261–74. 34. For this sympathetic reading, see Arthur T. Quiller-Couch, “Trilby,” in Adventures in Criticism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896), 389. 35. Svengali, directed by Archie Mayo, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1931. 36. For readings of the anti-Semitism of the novel, see Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000); and Davison, “The Jew,” 111. 37. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Genius,” in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 3, 1838–1842, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Wallace E. Williams (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1972), 79. 38. Cesare Lombroso, The Man of Genius (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), v. 39. Lawrence Birken, Consuming Desire: Sexual Science and the Emergence of a Culture of Abundance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 77–78. 40. Lombroso, Man of Genius, 5–37. 41. Purcell, “Trilby and Trilby-Mania,” 69. 42. Ibid., 65. 43. Ibid., 69. As Purcell notes, the publisher might actually have done better to keep all of the money, since it went into receivership four years later. 44. Quoted in Gaines, Contested Culture, 46, emphasis in original. 45. Purcell, “Trilby and Trilby-Mania,” 70. 46. Gaines, Contested Culture, 67–69. 47. The same letter writer who quotes Nodier to the Critic also disputed that he actually did take the name from Scott. Claiming that scholars had been unable to find a reference to anyone or anything named Trilby in Scott’s work, the letter writer proposes other means by which Nodier might have arrived at the name (TRP, 38). 48. Henry James, “George Du Maurier,” 607. 49. Pamela Thurschwell has suggested that Trilby expresses anxiety about the porousness of the mind that had arisen with scientific inquiry into such phenomena as hypnotism, telepathy, and altered personality. While agreeing with this general principle, I would like here to specify those anxieties in the conjunction of mass culture and the manner in which practices such as hypnosis were imagined to divide the personality. See Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology, and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 51–53.

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50. Robert H. Sherard, “The Author of ‘Trilby’: An Autobiographical Interview with Mr. George Du Maurier,” McClure’s, April 1895, 399. James also recalls this transaction; see Henry James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 52. 51. For example, see also Boris Sidis, The Psychology of Suggestion: A Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society (New York: D. Appleton, 1909), 364. 52. Constance Goddard DuBois, “A Case of Unconscious Cerebration,” Critic, June 1895, 480. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “unconscious cerebration.” The phrasing of Dr. W. B. Carpenter’s coinage reveals both his sense of its inadequacy and his sense that what he was naming was certainly not on the order of either an alternate personality or a constitutive component of subjectivity (such as Freud’s “unconscious” is): “It is difficult to find an appropriate term for this class of operations. The designation unconscious cerebration is perhaps less objectionable than any other.” 56. Alfred Binet, On Double Consciousness (Chicago: Open Court, 1894), 143. A notice for Binet’s book appeared in Harper’s just a month after DuBois’s confession. 57. William James, Psychology, 2:614. For an extended discussion of how memory became key to the definition of multiple personality, see Hacking, Rewriting the Soul. 58. Almy et al., Frilby: An Operatic Burlesque, 35. 59. The True Tale of Trilby Tersely Told (Baltimore, Md.: Emerson Drug Co., 1895).

Chapter 4 1. Mary Hunter Austin, A Woman of Genius (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1985), 270. Subsequent citations of this work appear parenthetically as WOG. 2. Janis P. Stout, “Mary Austin’s Feminism: A Reassessment,” Studies in the Novel 30 (Spring 1998): 86. For a similar reading, see Nancy Porter, “Afterword,” in Austin, Woman of Genius, 296–97. 3. The literature on this issue is large, but for the history of science as a crucible of gender, see in particular Londa L. Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). On the historical category of “women,” see Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). 4. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 5. Bonnie Honig, “Toward an Agonistic Feminism,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 136. For a feminist critique of Arendt, see Drucilla L. Cornell, “Gender Hierarchy, Equality, and the Possibility of Democracy,” American Imago 48 (1991): 247–63.

256

Notes to Pages 137–144

6. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 231. 7. On the issue of women’s coherence as a political category after the Nineteenth Amendment, see Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 51–83. 8. Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1904), 20–76. 9. Quoted in Esther Lanigan, Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), 139. 10. C. Gasquoine Hartley, The Truth about Women (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1913), 297. 11. Sylvia Kopald, “Where Are the Woman Geniuses?,” Nation, 10 December 1924, 620. 12. See Chapter 1 of this book for a fuller discussion of this aspect of the discourses of genius. 13. Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences, (London: Macmillan, 1869), 41. 14. Cesare Lombroso, The Man of Genius (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891), 138. 15. Clemence Dane [pseud.], “The Feminine of Genius,” Yale Review 13 (June 1924): 686. 16. Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman: A Study of Human Secondary Sexual Characteristics, 6th ed. (London: A. & C. Black, 1930), 489. Man and Woman was first published in 1894 and was revised and reissued every few years until 1930. 17. See Lorraine Daston, “The Naturalized Female Intellect,” Science in Context 5.2 (1992): 213–22; and Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex, 160–78. 18. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1–17. 19. On the philosophical claims, see Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 76–79, 110–15. 20. Hannah More, “Female Knowledge—View of the Sexes,” in The Young Lady’s Guide, ed. C. W. Keef [?] (New York: American Tract Society, 1870), 290. I cite here a version of the essay republished in a late nineteenth-century American conduct book, which suggests the persistence of the moral model. 21. Nancy Leys Stepan, “Race, Gender, Science and Citizenship,” Gender and History 10 (April 1998): 31. 22. Ellis, Man and Woman, 18. 23. Ibid., 488. 24. Simon Baruch, “Why Women Lack Great Originality,” New York Times, 4 July 1915. 25. Alexander Goldenweiser, “Man the Creator,” Nation, 10 December 1924, 623. 26. Lester Ward, “Genius and Woman’s Intuition,” Forum 9 (June 1890): 404. 27. Anna Garlin Spencer, “The Drama of the Woman of Genius,” Forum 14 (January 1912): 38.

Notes to Pages 144–151

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28. Ibid., 49. 29. Alice Beal Parsons, “Sex and Genius,” Yale Review 14 (June 1925): 745. 30. Kopald, “Where Are the Woman Geniuses,” 621. 31. Ward, “Genius and Woman’s Intuition,” 404. 32. [Mary Austin], “Woman Alone,” Nation, 2 March 1927, 230. 33. George Becker, The Mad Genius Controversy: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1978). 34. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 275. 35. Ellis, Man and Woman, 521. 36. Kopald, “Where Are the Woman Geniuses,” 619. 37. Ibid. 38. Ellis, Man and Woman, 529. 39. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 2 (1890; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1950), 110. Subsequent citations of this work appear parenthetically as P. 40. Kopald, “Where Are the Woman Geniuses,” 619. 41. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 163. 42. “The Inferiority of the Genius to the Average Person,” Current Literature 51 (November 1911): 517. 43. Lombroso, Man of Genius, 2. 44. Mary Hunter Austin, Earth Horizon (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), 156. 45. Lombroso, Man of Genius, 138–39. 46. Ellis, Man and Woman, 491. 47. Ibid., 492. 48. Havelock Ellis explicitly denied that his claims about gender had any bearing on women’s political status; as he wrote, “It may not be out of place to add that in emphasising the variational tendency in men, the conservative tendency in women, we are not talking politics, nor throwing any light whatever on the possible effects of women’s suffrage” (Ellis, Man and Woman, 496). But this claim rested on his extremely limited conception of what he called “the small and shifting sphere of politics” (496). Beyond his idea of politics, he sees that the distinction between variation and conservation organizes an entire, highly eroticized social order in which men have power and women serve them. As he writes, the “progressive and divergent energies of men call out and satisfy the twin instincts of women to accept and follow a leader, and to expend tenderness on a reckless and erring child, instincts often intermingled in delicious confusion” (497). Complementing this, the “organically primitive nature of women, in form and function and instinct, is always restful to men tortured by their vagrant energies” (497). 49. Joan Wallach Scott, “Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990), 137.

258

Notes to Pages 151–167

50. Spencer, “Drama,” 52. 51. Floyd Dell, Women as World Builders: Studies in Modern Feminism (Chicago: Forbes, 1913). 52. Otis Tufton Mason, Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture (New York: D. Appleton, 1902), 162. 53. Jean Finot, Problems of the Sexes, trans. Mary J. Safford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Knickerbocker Press, 1913), 121. Kopald cites this book familiarly over a decade after its publication, suggesting that it remained well known. 54. Austin, Earth Horizon, 282. 55. Mary Hunter Austin, Everyman’s Genius (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1923), 57, 72. 56. Joan W. Scott, “Experience,” in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 57–71; Teresa de Lauretis, “Semiotics and Experience,” in Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 158–86. See also Lorraine Code, “Experience, Knowledge, and Responsibility,” in Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy, ed. Morwenna Griffiths and Margaret Whitford (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 187–204; and Marnia Lazreg, “Women’s Experience and Feminist Epistemology: A Critical Neo-Rationalist Approach,” in Knowing the Difference: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology, ed. Kathleen Lennon and Margaret Whitford (New York: Routledge, 1994). 57. Mary Hunter Austin, The Young Woman Citizen (New York: Womans Press, 1920), 64. Subsequent citations of this work appear parenthetically as YWC. 58. Mary Hunter Austin, “Women as Audience,” Bookman 55 (March 1922): 2. 59. [Austin], “Woman Alone,” 230. 60. Austin, Earth Horizon, 327. 61. Ibid., 328, emphasis mine. 62. Mary Austin, “Greatness in Women,” North American Review 217 (January– June 1923): 203, emphasis mine. 63. Mary Austin and Anne Martin, Suffrage and Government: The Modern Idea of Government by Consent and Woman’s Place in It, with Special Reference to Nevada and Other Western States (New York: National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1914), 3. Subsequent citations of this work appear parenthetically as SG. Arguments about women’s suffrage that turned on women’s capacity for violence present their own interesting problems. Although the current chapter does not provide enough space to consider these problems fully, my ongoing research addresses them. 64. Mary L. Cady, Young Women in the New Social Order: Outline for Group Discussion or Individual Study, for Use with The Young Woman Citizen by Mary Austin (New York: Womans Press, 1919), 2. 65. Austin, Everyman’s Genius, 58. Subsequent citations of this work appear parenthetically as EG. 66. On the development of the species rhetoric of race, see Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Press, 1982).

Notes to Pages 168–180

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67. Ellsworth Huntington, The Character of Races as Influenced by Physical Environment, Natural Selection and Historical Development (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924), unnumbered. 68. Ibid., 6. 69. Ibid. 70. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 6, 8. 71. Ibid., 11. 72. Emile Coué, Self-Mastery through Conscious Auto-Suggestion (New York: American Library Service, 1923). Austin lists Coué in her suggested bibliography on genius, though with the reservation that he has not incorporated some of the most recent insights of science. In a loose way Austin’s guide incorporates the Freudian concept that creativity springs from unconscious forces, though without including any theory of repression as a constitutive force of the unconscious. 73. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 53. 74. H. Maudsley, quoted in Becker, Mad Genius, 91. 75. Lombroso, Man of Genius, vi. 76. Thomas Troward, The Creative Process in the Individual (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1915), 27. 77. Lears, No Place of Grace, 47.

Chapter 5 1. Benjamin Brawley, The Negro Genius: A New Appraisal of the American Negro in Literature and the Fine Arts (1937; repr., New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1966), 224. 2. Deborah McDowell, “The Neglected Dimension of Jessie Redmon Fauset,” in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 86–88. 3. Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 168. 4. Jane Kuenz, “The Face of America: Performing Race and Nation in Jessie Fauset’s There Is Confusion,” Yale Journal of Criticism 12.1 (1999): 95. 5. Susan Levison, for instance, sees Fauset to be “signifying,” in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s sense of the term, on the novel, “revising its conventions in order to reveal its limitations and those of any act of impersonation.” What marks Fauset’s value for Levison here is her revisions, not her repetitions; she must innovate, rather than imitate. See Susan Levison, “Performance and the ‘Strange Place’ of Jessie Redmon Fauset’s There Is Confusion,” Modern Fiction Studies 46.1 (Winter 2000): 826. 6. Jessie Redmon Fauset, There Is Confusion (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), 229. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically as TIC.

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7. Marjorie Garber, “‘Greatness’: Philology and the Politics of Mimesis,” Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture 19.2 (Summer 1992): 242. 8. Beth A. McCoy, “‘Is This Really What You Wanted Me to Be?’: The Daughter’s Disintegration in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s There Is Confusion,” Modern Fiction Studies 40.1 (Spring 1994): 107–9. 9. “From the Abolition Intelligencer: The Surprising Influence of Prejudice,” Freedom’s Journal, 18 May 1827. 10. Henri Gregoire, An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties and Literature of Negroes, trans. D. B. Warren (1810; repr., College Park, Md.: McGrath, 1967). 11. John William Gibson, The Colored American: From Slavery to Honorable Citizenship (Cincinnati, Ohio: W. H. Ferguson, 1902). 12. Frances Elizabeth Hoggan, American Negro Women during Their First Fifty Years of Freedom (London: Personal Rights Association, 1913); Munroe Alphus Majors, Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities (1893; repr., New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1971); Benjamin Brawley, Women of Achievement (Chicago: Women’s American Baptist Home Mission Society, 1919). 13. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk (1924; repr., Millwood, N.Y.: KrausThomson Organization, 1972), 259–73. Subsequent citations of this work appear parenthetically as GBF. 14. The fact that the sister’s descendants marry each other through the succeeding generations suggests the cost of resisting patriarchy in a world structured by it; the families have no social world, it seems, beyond themselves. 15. McCoy (“What You Wanted”) also sees the novel to critique “greatness,” but for reasons slightly different than I suggest here. While McCoy sees “greatness” as implicitly masculine and white supremacist, and therefore unattainable for Joanna, I see the novel to reveal greatness to be a genre that formally mystifies the social and economic relations organized around the history of race in the United States. 16. William Wells Brown, The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (New York: Thomas Hamilton, 1863), 34–36. 17. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 101–20. 18. James Weldon Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry, Chosen and Edited with an Essay on the Negro’s Creative Genius (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), vii. 19. David Levering Lewis, new preface to When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), xxii. 20. Johnson, American Negro Poetry, vii. 21. Nancy Leys Stepan, “Race, Gender, Science and Citizenship,” Gender and History 10 (April 1998): 31. On the historical development of conceptions of race as a response to theorized equality, see Bruce Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 58–64. 22. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 139. On faculty psychology in the Enlighten-

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ment, see Lorraine Daston, “The Naturalized Female Intellect,” Science in Context 5.2 (Autumn 1992): 213–22. 23. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003), 23–26; Gates, “Phillis Wheatley and the Nature of the Negro,” in Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley, ed. William H. Robinson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 215–33. On the importance of the philosophical equation of writing and reason for African American slave narratives, see Gates’s introduction to The Slave’s Narrative, ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), xi–xxxiv. 24. “Travelling Scraps,” Freedom’s Journal, 25 July 1828. 25. “From the New York Evangelist,” Colored American, 25 March 1837. 26. Françoise Meltzer, Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 82–86. See also my discussion of the U.S. reception of George Du Maurier’s Trilby in Chapter 3 in this book. 27. On genius and the distinctions among the races of Great Britain, see in particular Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1904). 28. Not that Galton argues that the Anglo-Saxons are the most able race ever to walk the earth. That place he reserves for the ancient Athenians, who, of course, are all long dead and thus pose no threat to Anglo-Saxon rule. Significantly, he argues that the Athenians declined as a race because of loose morals and racially overwhelming immigration. We must therefore consider their “superiority” to function primarily as a monitory example for Anglo-Saxons, who should temper their morals and seriously limit immigration. 29. Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1869), 338. 30. Charles Horton Cooley, Sociological Theory and Social Research: Being the Selected Papers of Charles Horton Cooley (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1969), 121. Or, in Cooley’s more florid concluding metaphor: “On the whole it seems to me that the relation between genius and fame is fairly well represented by the comparison, suggested at the outset, of a farmer sowing mixed seeds in a furrow which traverses a great variety of ground. Here many come up and flourish, there none, and there again only those of a certain sort. The seed-bag is the race, the soil historical conditions other than race, the seeds genius, and the crop fame” (158). 31. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History (1918; repr., New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1970), xix–xx. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically as PGR. 32. Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 305. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically as RTC. 33. Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman: A Study of Human Secondary Sexual Characteristics (London: A. & C. Black, 1930), 491, 492. 34. Brawley, Negro Genius, 9. I quote here the 1937 edition of this essay, but with the important exception I note below, these words were included in Brawley’s original, 1915

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version of the essay. See Benjamin Brawley, “The Negro Genius,” Southern Workman 44 (1915): 305–8. 35. Brawley, Negro Genius, 2. It is striking here that Brawley embraces the fairly stereotypical picture of African Americans as sensuous, and even more so that he sees that tendency to be embodied in poetry and music; in debates about women’s genius, the genius for poetry and music, which women were generally seen not to possess, was associated with an advanced capacity for abstract thinking, and thus with a higher capacity for justice, rationality, and systemic discernment, which in turn were understood to be the ideal faculties of the good citizen. 36. Albert C. Barnes, “Negro Art and America,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 19. 37. Brawley, Negro Genius, 15. 38. Ibid., 8–9. 39. See in particular Ellsworth Huntington, The Character of Races as Influenced by Physical Environment, Natural Selection and Historical Development (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924). 40. The literature on this issue is large, but see in particular Ernesto Laclau, “Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity,” in Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (New York: Routledge, 1995), 93–108; and Sayla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). 41. William Stanley Braithwaite, “The Negro in American Literature,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 43. 42. Ibid., 40. 43. Ibid. 44. Recent work on the reception of Alexander Pushkin by African American critics in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suggests the ways in which Pushkin, as the descendant of an African great-grandfather and the first Russian national poet to write in the country’s native language, became a compelling figure for this issue. See Olga P. Hasty, “The Pushkin of Opportunity in the Harlem Renaissance,” in Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness, ed. Catharine Nepomnyashchy, Nicole Svobodny, and Ludmilla A. Trigos (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 226–47; and Anne Lounsbery, “‘Bound by Blood to the Race’: Pushkin in the African American Context,” from that same volume, 248–78. 45. Johnson, American Negro Poetry, xix. 46. Ibid., viii. 47. Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), 462. 48. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 11. 49. Invoking these legacies was a typical move in defenses of African and African American genius stemming back to the abolitionist writing of the early nineteenth cen-

Notes to Pages 202–213

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tury. Du Bois’s innovation here is to figure this cultural history under operations of the gift economy. 50. Jacques Derrida, Given Time I, Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 171. The emphasis is Derrida’s. 51. Her apparent facility as “a red one” has certainly to do with the history of Native American masquerade, stretching from the Boston Tea Party to the Washington Redskins, in which “Indians” signify U.S. nationality insofar as they remain invisible, or seem to be extinguished, as actually existing people. This is not an issue that concerns the novel. 52. A 1954 recording of children singing and clapping “Sissy in the Barn” can be heard on the Florida Memory Project Web site at http://www.floridamemory.com/Collections/folklife/mps/Sissy.mp3. Accessed 25 July 2009. The words are almost identical to those Fauset recorded in There Is Confusion. 53. Kyra Gaunt, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 31. Gaunt’s research draws on dancing and clapping games from the mid-twentieth century onward, a historical constraint determined at least in part by available evidence of the games. The game described in There Is Confusion, though, seems to fit the patterns Gaunt finds still operating later in the century. 54. Gaunt, Games, 57. 55. Johnson, American Negro Poetry, xi. 56. Sharon L. Jones, Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002), 112. 57. Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 221–301. 58. Jessie Fauset, “The Gift of Laughter,” in The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1925), 162, 164. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically as “GL.” At the same time, the anthology is a relic of the affront offered Fauset when Locke and others upstaged her at her own celebratory dinner, largely ignoring her novel and promoting their own project. 59. I would agree with Deborah McDowell’s assessment that “In her depictions of Maggie and Joanna [in There Is Confusion], Fauset must finally be seen as a traditionalist regarding women’s roles” (McDowell, “Neglected Dimension,” 98).

Coda 1. Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change, 1993), 88. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically as EA. 2. Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen (London: B. T. Batsford, 1945), 113–14. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically as WIHS.

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3. Quoted in Barbara Will, “Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Ruthless Flowers of Friendship,” Modernism/Modernity 15.4 (November 2008): 658. 4. Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), x. Scott is writing specifically about French feminists, but they struggled within the same overarching framework of liberal citizenship that characterized the U.S. context. Scott’s work on French feminism in the early twentieth century, furthermore, clarifies that Stein was writing and living in the context of debates over women’s citizenship closely analogous to those in the United States. 5. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 5. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically as AABT. 6. Barbara Will, Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 21–47. 7. Ibid., 35–40. 8. Gertrude Stein, “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,” in The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 245–46. 9. For a discussion of Stein’s political positions, see Edward Burns and Ulla E. Dydo with William Rice, eds., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 412–14. Burns et al. quote one of her correspondents describing her politics as those of a “rentier” (414). Bob Perelman calls her politics “patrician” in The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 14. 10. Gertrude Stein, “The Winner Loses: A Picture of Occupied France,” in The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 630. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically as “WL.” 11. Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation,” in The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 517. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically as “CE.” 12. Perelman, Trouble with Genius, 157. 13. See, for instance, ibid., 157–58; and Zophia Lesinska, “Gertrude Stein’s War Autobiographies: Reception, History, and Dialogue,” Literature Interpretation Theory 9 (1999): 328, 330–31. Lesinska also urges that Stein’s quietism be considered in light of pervasive French acceptance of the armistice and even complicity with Pétain’s rule. 14. Carl Van Vechten, introduction to excerpt from Wars I Have Seen in The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, by Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 640. 15. By Bernard Faÿ’s no doubt self-interested account, she had some protection while Pétain was in power, but there is no way to know how effective it would have been had she been arrested or identified by German officials.

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16. As Burns et al., Letters, 410, notes, Stein here misspells the name of Maurice Sivan. 17. She also mentions in this passage learning “what one did by bribing” from hearing about her brother’s fraud in getting admitted to the Grand Army of the Republic, an advocacy group that established privileges for veterans of the Union army. He was too young to have served in the Union army and so “had to grow a beard to look old enough” (WIHS, 32). 18. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1908), 186. On the connection between “variation” and “genius” in Ellis’s thought, see my discussion in Chapter 4 of this book. 19. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 277. See also Smith-Rosenberg’s discussion of the differing implications of Ellis’s theory and advocacy for men and women, 275–80. 20. Lesinska, “Gertrude Stein’s War Autobiographies,” 316. 21. Maria Diedrich, “A Book in Translation about Eggs and Butter,” in Women and War: The Changing Status of American Women from the 1930s to the 1950s, ed. Maria Diedrich and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 92. For other readings that see Stein’s style in Wars I Have Seen as progressive because they pose a challenge to masculinist modes of writing history, see Phoebe Stein Davis, “‘Even Cake Gets to Have Another Meaning’: History, Narrative, and ‘Daily Living’ in Gertrude Stein’s World War II Writings,” Modern Fiction Studies 44.3 (1998): 568–607; and Jill Pruett, “Gertrude Stein’s ‘Emotional Autobiography’: A Body in Occupied France,” in New Essays on Live Writing and the Body, ed. Christopher Stuart and Stephanie Todd (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 58–69. 22. Burns et al., Letters, 413. For a provocative discussion of the historical and critical problems posed by Stein’s politics, war writing, and connections during World War II written for a general audience, see Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007). 23. Burns et al., Letters, 408. 24. Ibid., 410. 25. Wanda Van Dusen, “Portrait of a National Fetish: Gertrude Stein’s ‘Introduction to the Speeches of Maréchal Pétain,’” Modernism/Modernity 3.3 (1996): 87. 26. Will, “Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ,” 657. 27. Ibid., 659. 28. Ibid. 29. Barbara Will, “Lost in Translation: Stein’s Vichy Collaboration,” Modernism/Modernity 11.4 (November 2004): 663. 30. Gertrude Stein, The Mother of Us All, in Gertrude Stein: Last Operas and Plays, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 79. 31. Ibid., 79–80.

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index

Abolition Intelligence, 181 Adams, John Quincy, 236; Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, 61 Addams, Jane, 152 aesthetic philosophy, 11, 12, 13, 25, 140 aesthetic theory, 3, 5, 10, 24, 26, 40, 41, 60, 66, 92, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 122, 124, 135, 136, 177, 178, 190, 192, 196, 197, 199, 215 African Americans, 24, 191, 195, 196, 199, 206, 207, 219, 229; acting, 210; art and literature, 187; artists, 188; critics, 194, 262 n.44; culture, 198, 205, 208; economics, 201; genius, 262 n.49; greatness, books about, 178–87, 217, 260 n.15; labor, 200; men, 162, 209, 236; periodicals, 209; poetry, 197; racial genius, 30; after Reconstruction, 97; sensuality, 262 n.35; slavery, 202; women, 200, 212; writing, 193, 261 n.23. See also black genius agency, 6, 18, 22, 23, 26, 30, 31, 155; and sexuality, 230; Gertrude Stein in occupied France, 214–17, 220, 221, 226, 228, 229, 231–34, 236, 237; in Trilby, 117, 129; and women’s public speech, 33, 36, 37, 43, 54, 57, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66; women’s sexuality, 91 Alcott, Louisa May: and Emersonian genius, 54, 55–65; “The Freak of a Genius,” 34, 35; ideas of genius, 38–44, 45–55; Little Women, 34, 35; A Marble Woman, 34; “A Modern Cinderella,” 34; A Modern Mephistopheles, 34; political cultures, 38–44; “Psyche’s Art,” 34; reforming female genius, 45–55; Work: A Story of Experience,

27, 33–65, 66, 69, 245 nn.30–31, 245 n.34 Alexander the Great, 55 American Phrenological Journal, 4 Anglo-African, 20, 24 Anglo-Saxons, 190, 261 n.28; creative intelligence, 168, 195; male originality, 205; self-abstraction, 51 Anthony, Susan B., 15, 236 antisuffragists, 15, 16, 70, 73, 161 Arendt, Hannah, 137, 242 n.50, 255 n.5; The Human Condition, 19 Aristotle, 38, 42, 142 artist, 96, 105, 106; identity of, 35; opposition to conventional social expectations, 26; self-sufficiency, 115 Atlantic Monthly, 97, 222 Austin, Mary Hunter: conceptions of averageness, 136, 148–50, 156–57; conceptions of experience, 147, 153, 155, 156–59; conceptions of genius, 134–76; conceptions of race, 167–76; Everyman’s Genius, 29, 138, 155, 166, 167, 169, 170, 175; literature as experience, 156–59; political community, 156–59; racial genius, 167–76; variation and genius, 146–56; A Woman of Genius, 29, 134–36, 139, 140, 144–45, 152–60, 166, 167, 169, 173–74; women’s suffrage, 136, 138, 139, 159–67; The Young Woman Citizen, 29, 136, 156, 157, 163, 164, 166, 167, 169, 174 authorship, 25, 53, 116, 185; collective, 129, 133; concept of, 28–29, 125; ideology of, 103, 106, 126; individual, 123; of musical composers, 115; original, 128; and Trilby, 103, 106, 123, 125, 126, 128, 129, 133

282

Index

averageness, 6, 136, 148–50, 156–57, 190 Azam, Eugène, 112 Banneker, Benjamin, 185 Banta, Martha, 247 n.1 Barnes, Albert C.: The New Negro, 194, 196 Barrymore, John: Trilby, 119 Battersby, Christine, 11, 241 n.34 Bell, Ian F. A., 74 Berlant, Lauren, 9 Besant, Walter: “The Art of Fiction,” 95–96 Binet, Alfred, 131, 253 n.30, 255 n.56 Birken, Lawrence, 120 bisexuality, 242 n.51 black genius, 30; anti-racist arguments in support of, 179, 181, 184, 186, 187, 194, 195, 203, 210; racist arguments against, 190, 192, 193, 198, 208 bohemianism, 105, 108, 109, 115, 252 n.16 Booth, Maude Ballington, 36 Boston Evening Transcript, 127 Boston Evening Traveler, 97 Boyd, Anne E., 10, 34, 35 Braithwaite, William Stanley, 194, 195; The New Negro, 196–97 Brandeis, Louis, 83, 88 Braude, Anne, 37 Brawley, Benjamin, 177, 194–95, 261 n.34, 262 n.35; Women of Achievement, 182 Bromo-Seltzer: The True Tale of Trilby Tersely Told, 132, 133 Brown, Charles Brockden: Wieland, 40 Brown, Wendy, 16–17, 243 n.7 Brown, William Wells, 184; The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements, 181 Burns, Edward: The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, 233 Butler, Judith, 137, 208 Carby, Hazel, 177 Carpenter, W. B., 255 n.55 Castle, Terry, 249 n.38 Castronovo, Russ, 8 Chesnutt, Charles W., 196–97 Chickering, Elmer, 125–26, 128 Chopin, Frédéric: “Impromptu,” 115 Ciceronian style, 60, 61 citizenship, 10, 29, 30, 241 n.38; definition, 6, 9, 209, 236; democratic, 1; equal, 14;

frameworks for, 27; full, 2, 8, 15, 17, 99, 216, 236; gender and, 14, 237; liberal, 216, 243 n.7, 264 n.4; logic of, 188; masculine model of, 209; national, 208; necessities of, 140; norm of, 15; in opposition to political forms and ideas, 3; political, 215; proper, 156; racialization of, 8; republican, 40, 78; sexual difference and, 42; state, 8, 15, 17, 18, 25, 103; universal, 210; whiteness of, 245; women, 2, 8, 9, 12, 16, 25, 31, 35, 38, 46, 49, 66, 68, 70, 73, 93, 94, 99, 103, 136, 140, 156, 159–67, 176, 179, 210, 216, 217, 236, 244 n.19, 264 n.4 civil rights, 140, 220; activism, 215 collaboration, 52, 163, 178, 212; cultural, 30; Nazi, 31; in Trilby, 28, 103, 109, 110, 114– 22, 133; in The Young Woman Citizen, 156 Conrad, Joseph, 172 consciousness, 62, 77, 218; double, 112, 114–22, 129–33; false, 196; human, 4, 60, 71; immediate, 170; innate, 43; ordinary, 36; political, 139; self-consciousness, 223, 253 n.32, 254 n.33; sensory, 171; split, 29, 102, 190; states of, 3, 4, 28, 66, 78 Contemporary Review, 98 Cooley, Charles Horton, 191, 261 n.30 copyright, 28, 107; holders, 107; infringement, 106, 125; law, 103, 122; ownership, 129 Cott, Nancy, 16 Coué, Emile: Self-Mastery through Conscious Autosuggestion, 171, 259 n.72 creativity, 2, 3, 4, 6, 11, 26, 27, 28, 30, 35, 106, 108, 114, 133, 138, 152, 156, 162, 166, 170–72, 195, 199, 203, 212, 215, 221, 236, 259 n.72; individual, 12, 19, 129; political, 65, 217; romantic theories of, 41, 91 Critic, 125-27, 130, 254 n.47; Trilbyana: The Rise and Progress of a Popular Novel, 101, 102, 125–28, 251 n. 254 n. 47 Curie, Madame, 144 Current Literature, 149 Darwin, Charles, 5, 141; The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 146 Daston, Lorraine, 38, 39, 244 n.17 da Vinci, Leonardo, 55 Davis, Katherine, 152 de Lauretis, Teresa, 155 Dell, Floyd, 151

Index democracy, 42, 55, 58, 73, 136, 156, 163, 165, 166, 174, 199, 216, 237, 245 n.37, 245 n.39; American, 8, 164; constitutional, 17, 162; eccentric, 37; egalitarian, 176; gender in relation to, 7, 13; liberal, 1, 6, 14, 16, 18, 50, 51, 64, 179, 229, 239 n.12; models of, 31, 137; modern, 161; political, 196; postLockean, 2; rhetoric of, 56; theory of, 191 Denver Lyceum Stock, 126 Derrida, Jacques, 202, 203 Dickinson, Anna E., 34, 36, 53, 247 n.1 Diedrich, Maria, 231 Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock, 9 DuBois, Constance Goddard, 130, 131, 255 n.56 Du Bois, W. E. B., 194, 198; Crisis, 182; The Gift of Black Folk, 182, 199, 200, 202, 262 n.49; The Souls of Black Folk, 199 Du Maurier, George: agency in Trilby, 117, 129; authorship and Trilby, 103, 106, 123, 125, 126, 128, 129, 133; collaboration in Trilby, 28, 103, 109, 110, 114–22, 133; double consciousness in Trilby, 112, 114–22, 129–33; mass audience in Trilby, 114–22; Trilby, 28–29, 101–33, 234, 251 n.2, 252 n.19, 252 n.23, 254 n.32, 254 n.33, 254 n.47, 254 n.49, 261 n.26; Trilby as intellectual property, 122–29 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 11 Dydo, Ulla E.: The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, 233 Edelman, Paul, 123 Elfenbein, Andrew, 10 Ellis, Havelock, 148, 163, 167, 168, 175, 190, 230, 265 n.19; Man and Woman, 12, 141–42, 143, 146, 147, 148, 150, 193, 257 n.48, 261 n.27; Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion, 230; Study of British Genius, 138 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “The Artist,” 55; conceptions of genius, 3–4, 8, 17–18, 27, 245 n.39; conceptions of genius and the problem of democratic publicity, 55–65; connections to Louisa May Alcott, 54, 55–65; and democracy, 245 n.37; “Genius,” 54–62; “The Intellectual,” 55; Nature, 60; “The Poet,” 17, 55; “Politics,”18; “SelfReliance,” 3, 55 Emerson Drug Company, 132

283

Enlightenment, 12, 26, 38, 55, 135, 188; psychology, 61; racial science, 189 essential difference, 15, 30, 142, 179 Faneuil Hall, 56, 62 Fauset, Jessie Redmon: antiracist writing, 180–87; critique of ideal of genius, 187–200; gift economy, 201–12; “The Gift of Laughter,” 210, 211; greatness genre, 180–87; national culture, 187–200; There Is Confusion, 30, 177–212 Faÿ, Bernard, 214–15, 231–34, 264 n.15 Finot, Jean, 152 Fisher, Philip, 74, 76 Fliegelman, Jay, 61 Forten, Charlotte N., 181 Foucault, Michel, 11, 28, 103, 106, 107, 122, 128, 185, 244 n.23 Fourteenth Amendment, 236 France, Anatole, 172 Franklin, Benjamin, 59 Frazer, Nancy, 63–64 freedom, 1, 10, 51, 156, 181; agent of, 59; America’s, 26; consent-as-freedom, 59; democratic, 20; modern, 19; women’s, 26 Freedom’s Journal, 181, 189 free love, 28, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 92, 93, 249 n.29 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 131, 255 n.55, 259 n.72 Fuller, Margaret, 25 Gage, Frances, 1–2, 3, 6 Gaines, Jane, 106, 252 n.14 Galton, Francis: Hereditary Genius, 5, 141, 148, 190–91, 195, 261 n.28 Garber, Marjorie, 181 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 189, 259 n.5 gender: bourgeois, 23, 67; and citizenship, 14, 237; construction, 199, 232; and democracy, 7, 13; difference, 148, 161, 192; differential citizenship, 161; dimorphism, 148; discourse of, 96; essentialisms of, 138; and genius, 24, 26, 30, 35, 38, 41–44, 99, 137, 142, 146, 147, 148; language of, 86; limits of, 95; and politics, 161, 179; of public life, 25, 99; reconstruction, 6, 7 genius: African Americans, 262 n.49; and art market, 105–14; continuity, 27, 34, 42, 141, 162, 173, 191, 207, 223, 253 n.32; critical responses to ideas of, 10, 11, 18, 27, 31,

284

Index

genius cont. 37, 38, 45, 64–65, 67; debates, 2, 14, 24, 27, 29, 37, 86, 105, 136, 140, 142, 143, 159, 262 n.35; and degeneration, 5, 120–21; and experience, 147, 153, 156–59; evil, 41; female, 3, 11, 18, 20, 22–27, 35–44, 65–69, 74–78, 93, 94, 95, 97, 102, 103, 104, 133, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 152, 165, 167, 175, 176, 215, 216, 217, 226, 231–34; and gender, 24, 26, 30, 35, 38, 41–44, 99, 137, 142, 146, 147, 148; as a gift, 201–12 ; and the labor of art, 105–14; new privacy, 74–78; oppositional uses of conceptions of, 3, 6, 48; in opposition to culture, 142; in opposition to intellectual characteristics, 42; in opposition to material deprivation, 141; in opposition to social strictures, 141, 144; in opposition to the repetitions of habit, 147; in opposition to thinking, 234; and originality, 11, 12, 28, 29, 30, 66, 71, 90, 91, 92, 105–7, 110, 132, 133, 152, 163, 165, 178, 180, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 198, 203, 205, 217, 234; and political community, 38–44, 156–59; public scenes, 7, 10; and race, 30, 167–76 ,190, 192, 193, 198, 208; reforming female, 45–55; and representativeness, 4, 5, 6, 13, 44, 56, 58, 59, 62, 69; romantic conceptions, 3–6, 10, 18, 20, 21, 25, 26, 36, 41–44, 55, 68, 77, 106, 110, 135, 138, 141, 142, 146, 148, 149, 166, 169, 170, 190, 192, 195, 207, 215, 216, 226, 241 n.29, 244 n.25, 249 n.31; scientific conceptions, 3, 5–6, 10–13, 24, 29, 30, 117, 135–138, 142–43, 146–47, 149, 158, 174, 175, 190, 193, 195, 217; special character, 3, 4; special character of woman, 18; and variation, 146–56; and “The Woman Question,” 139–46. See also black genius; genius under specific individuals and topics The Genius of Universal Emancipation, 196 Gibson, J. W.: The Colored American from Slavery to Honorable Citizenship, 182, 189 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 160 Godey’s, 124 Goldenweiser, Alexander, 143 Goncourt brothers, 13 Gracombe, Sarah, 119, 252 n.19 Grant, Madison, 198; The Passing of the

Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History, 191, 192 greatness, 178, 180–87, 208–9, 219, 260 n.15 Gregoire, Abbé, 181–82 Haag, Pamela, 92, 93 Harlem Renaissance, 176, 177, 179, 182, 187, 188, 193, 196, 198, 205, 206, 217 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 181; Iola Leroy, 20, 21; “The Two Offers, 20–24 Harper and Brothers, 122–23, 125, 126, 129 Harper’s Monthly, 101, 109, 130, 251 n.2, 255 n.56 Harvard Law Review, 83 Hemans, Felicia, 42–45 Hendler, Glenn, 53, 54, 61, 240 n.20, 245 n.34 Hennequin, Victor: Les Amours au phalanstère (Love in the Phalanstery), 79 heterosexuality, 48, 90, 92, 93, 94 Hoggan, Frances Elizabeth: American Negro Women during Their First 50 Years of Freedom, 182 homosexuality, 230 Honig, Bonnie, 48, 49, 137 Hope, Anna, 236 Howe, Julia Ward, 36, 53, 243 n.2; “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” 34 Howells, William Dean: A Woman’s Reason, 93–94, 250 n.48 imitation, 3, 114, 136, 178, 217, 259 n.5; claimed to be characteristic of black people, 168, 177–212; claimed to be characteristic of women, 205, 207; elevating, 201–12; logic of, 30; as the opposite of genius, 91; as universality, 210–11 intellectual property. See property, intellectual International Copyright Act, 103 intelligence, 35, 39, 41, 71, 164, 170, 241 n.29; creative, 195; Enlightenment ideas, 38; female, 148, 150; gendered, 99, 142; literature on, 190 James, Henry, 127, 129, 130, 255n50; The Bostonians, 7, 27, 28, 66–100, 147, 233, 234, 249 n.38, 250 n.39, 250 n.43, 250 n.48; conceptions of privacy, 87–95, 102; genius and the new privacy, 74–78; and

Index Oneida Community, 78–81, 248 n.25; public depleted, 83–87; publicity, 104–5; sexual politics and privacy, 78–84, 247 n.5, 249 n.38; Verena’s genius, 68–74; “Woman of Genius” and the “The Art of Fiction,” 95–100 James, Henry, Sr., 79 James, William, 113, 117–19, 131, 136, 155, 163, 165, 172, 218; Principles of Psychology, 147–48, 253 n.32, 255 n.57 Johnson, Georgia, 197 Johnson, James Weldon, 186, 194, 195, 198, 207; “Essay on the Negro’s Creative Genius,” 188, 197 Kant, Immanuel, 41, 142 Kern, Louis J., 80 Kopald, Sylvia: “Where Are the Women Geniuses?,” 140, 147, 148, 258 n.53 Kristeva, Julia, 19–20, 22, 24, 242 nn.50–51 Kuenz, Jane, 177 Künstlerroman, 26, 139 Lackaye, Wilson: Trilby, 124, 128 Laclau, Ernesto, 58–59, 63 Laqueur, Thomas, 39, 142 Lears, Jackson, 171 Lewis, David Levering: When Harlem Was in Vogue, 187–88 liberalism, 8, 9, 17, 18, 25, 36, 69, 215, 229, 240 n.20, 243 n.7, 245 n.39, 249 n.30 limitation, 11 Livermore, Mary A., 36 Living Age, 5 Lombroso, Cesare, 5, 149, 150, 163, 167, 171, 190; The Man of Genius, 120, 141 Majors, Munroe Alphus: Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities, 182 manhood suffrage, 51, 165 marriage, 9, 20–23, 81, 82, 84, 85, 93, 94, 134, 157, 158, 159, 174, 184, 187, 206, 212, 247 n.5, 250 n.42; group, 79, 80; institutional, 83; laws, 140; monogamous, 80 Martin, Anne, 160–62 Mason, Otis Tufton: Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture, 151 mass culture, 7, 10, 78, 81, 102, 105, 126, 128, 129, 254 n.49; compensatory functions of, 240 n.14; currency of, 217; dimension of,

285

103, 122; growth of, 217; intertextuality of, 104; liberalism and, 215; sensory experience of, 131 Mauss, Marcel: The Gift, 200, 202, 203 McClure’s, 129, 130 McCoy, Beth A., 181, 260 n.15 McKay, Claude, 197 Meltzer, Françoise, 11, 13, 41, 109, 189, 190 Mesmer, Anton, 59 mesmerism, 4, 60, 61, 118, 119 More, Hannah, 142 Murray, Judith Sergeant, 39 Myers, Frederic W. H., 254 n.33 Nation, 140, 143, 144, 145, 147 National American Woman Suffrage Association, 139 national culture, 2, 6, 8, 207, 209, 218; and Mary Hunter Austin, 169; genius tropes and, 187–200; membership, 14; racial, 208, 217; U.S., 30, 178, 193, 199–200, 203, 205, 217 Native Americans, 138, 162, 168, 263 n.51 “nature,” 39, 40, 149, 230, 244 n.17 Nelson, Dana, 245 n.37 Newfield, Christopher, 59, 245 n.39 New York Times, 14, 143 Nineteenth Amendment, 7, 256 n.7 Nodier, Charles: “Trilby, le Lutin d’Argail,” 126–27, 128, 254 n.47 Nordau, Max, 120 Nordhoff, Charles: Communistic Societies of America, 79 Noyes, John Humphrey, 79, 80 opposition, 3 originality: crisis in the concept of, 28, 114, 122, 124; and genius, 11, 12, 28, 29, 30, 66, 71, 90, 91, 92, 105–7, 110, 132, 133, 152, 163, 165, 178, 180, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 198, 203, 205, 217, 234; legal, 103, 104; and ownership, 107, 113, 123–29, 131, 198, 207, 212 ownership, 1–2, 56, 106, 129; author’s, 107, 123; black cultural, 30; of culture, 190, 198, 207; of intellectual property, 103, 113, 115, 123, 125; property, 14, 107, 189; race’s, 190; self, 1, 106; wives’ wages, 1 Pétain, Maréchal, 214, 222, 231–34, 264 n.13, 264 n.15

286

Index

Picasso, Pablo, 217 political culture, 36, 37, 65, 78, 87; liberal, 66, 245 n.39; U.S., 38–44, 233 Pond, J. B.: Eccentricities of Genius: Memories of Famous Men and Women of the Platform and Stage, 33–34, 36, 243 n.2 possessive individualism, 1, 11, 36, 41, 46, 189, 190 Potter, Paul M.: Trilby, 123–25, 128, 132 privacy, 29, 62, 65, 74, 85, 86, 87, 102, 154, 159, 174, 182, 230, 250 n.42; decline of, 67; definition of, 28, 84; domestic, 9; heterosexualized, 104; new, 74–78; redefinition of and sexual politics, 78–83, 248 n.16; sign of, 44; of the unconscious self, 87–95; women’s, 27, 28, 37, 43, 45 property, 1, 15, 80, 81, 92, 202, 203; collective, 53, 175; common, 58, 126; culture as, 176, 198; human, 23, 55, 73, 202; intellectual, 28, 29, 101–33, 201; law of, 77; logic of, 194, 207; ownership, 14, 93, 189; personal, 216; political, 175; private, 28, 56, 77, 80, 83, 88, 103, 107, 122, 207; racial, 175, 191, 192, 194, 217; rights to, 140; Trilby as intellectual, 122–29; women, 82, 85, 173–74 public, 4; depleted, 83–87; life, 2, 3, 7–10, 13, 16, 18, 25, 26, 27, 43, 45, 68, 71, 75, 76, 77, 79, 152, 178, 217, 218, 234; presence, 2; scenes, 7, 10; speech, 33, 34, 36, 37, 43, 54, 57, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66; sphere, 7, 9 publicity, 54, 102, 105, 126; culture of, 75, 104; democratic, 7, 54, 55–65; growth, 67; history of, 76; mass, 28, 74, 75, 77, 102, 103, 104; metadiscourse on, 104; owners’, 76; and the perils of double consciousness, 129–33; as property and labor, 182; violence of, 127, 128; women’s emergent, 24 Punch, 127 Purcell, L. Edward, 254 n.43 Pushkin, Alexander, 262 n.44 Quetelet, Adolphe, 148 Reconstruction, 20, 97 Rice, William: The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, 233 romantic theory, 3–6, 10, 18, 20, 21, 25, 26, 36, 41–44, 55, 68, 77, 106, 110, 135, 138, 141, 142, 146, 148, 149, 166, 169, 170, 190,

192, 195, 207, 215, 216, 226, 241 n.29, 244 n.25, 249 n.31; heterosexuality, 90–94; post, 189 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 219 Rose, Mark, 106 Rush, Benjamin, 12, 241 n.29 Russell, Lillian, 236 Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, 23 Sand, George, 144 Scarry, Elaine, 62 Scientific American, 12 Scott, Joan W., 17, 151, 155, 216, 264 n.4 Scott, Walter, Sir, 126 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 41 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 64 self, unconscious. See unconscious self self-interest, 16, 61, 70, 73, 81, 92, 156, 264 n.15 self-ownership, 1, 106 sexual politics, 177, 249 n.38; and the redefinition of privacy, 78–83 sexuality, 35, 78, 81, 82, 83, 93, 146, 154, 158, 159, 182, 228, 229, 241 n.32, 244 n.26, 247 n.5, 248 n.16, 249 n.38; feminine, 19, 153; in opposition to public culture, 83, 146; politicization of, 157. See also bisexuality; heterosexuality; homosexuality sentiment: in opposition to public culture, 83 Shreiner, Olive, 5 Sigourney, Lydia: “Essay on the Genius of Mrs. Hemans,” 42–45 slavery, 14, 15, 20, 21, 23, 24, 37, 47, 180–85, 189, 200, 202–3, 230; American narratives, 261 n.23; chattel, 82; escaped, 49; fugitive, 48; women, 1, 85 Smith, Ann, 39 Sofer, Naomi Z., 10, 34 special character, 3, 4; of woman, 18 Spencer, Anna Garlin, 143–44, 151, 197 spheres ideology, 7, 9, 10, 18, 76, 175; division of, 239 n.12; intellectual, 12; private, 41; public, 14, 41; separate, 45, 48, 49, 64, 65, 66, 86, 182, 216, 246 n.51 Stadler, Gustavus, 10, 35, 244 n.26 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 15 Stein, Gertrude, 12; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 213, 217, 218, 219; “Composition as Explanation,” 221, 222, 223, 225, 226, 230; conceptions of genius,

Index 31; conceptions of genius under the German occupation of France, 213–37; “continuous present tense” as a form of genius, 221, 222, 225, 226; Everybody’s Autobiography, 213, 218, 234, 235; The Making of Americans, 218, 221, 226; Melanctha, 218, 221, 226; The Mother of Us All, 235, 236; Three Lives, 221; Wars I Have Seen, 30, 213, 215, 219, 220, 224–28, 230– 33, 235, 265 n.21; “The Winner Loses,” 30, 215, 220, 222, 223, 225, 227, 232 Stepan, Nancy Leys, 142 Stoddard, Lothrop, 198; The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy, 191, 192, 193 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 144 Sundquist, Eric, 199 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 172 Thackeray, William Makepeace: “Little Billee,” 127, 128 Thomas, Brook, 250 n.42 Thurschwell, Pamela, 254 n.49 transformability, 19, 136, 137–38. See also untransformability Tree, Beerbohm: Trilby, 125 Trilby (film), 119 Troward, Thomas, 171 Tubman, Harriet, 185 unconscious self, 87–95 untransformability, 29 universal equality, 14, 15, 30 Van Dusen, Wanda, 233 Van Leer, David, 249 n.38 Van Vechten, Carl, 225 wages: factory, 47; laborers, 14; livable, 140; white laborers, 15; women, 1, 2, 3, 50, 134

287

Wald, Priscilla, 8 Walker, Marion, 219 Ward, Lester, 143, 144, 152 Warner, Michael, 103, 105, 130 Warren, Samuel, 83, 88 Watkins, Frances Ellen. See Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins Webster, Daniel, 236 Wedgwood, Julia, 98–100 Weininger, Otto: Sex and Character, 12 Weliver, Phyllis, 253 n.27, 254 n.33 Wheatley, Phillis, 181, 185, 189 White, William Allen, 140 Whitehead, Alfred, 217 Whitman, Walt, 97 Will, Barbara, 218, 234 Winter, Alison, 60 Woman’s Journal, 85 Womans Press, 166 women: essential difference, 15, 30, 142, 179; and men sameness, 136, 150; in opposition to full citizenship, 216; sameness, 17, 29, 150, 152, 153, 161, 166; wage-earning, 1, 2, 3 women’s rights, 2, 14, 20, 36, 67, 135, 136, 176, 182, 209; advocates, 1, 15, 16, 34, 50, 140; to vote, 139 women’s suffrage, 7, 10, 12, 15, 19, 29, 64, 85, 136, 138, 139, 159–63, 179, 199, 209, 219, 236, 257 n.48, 258 n.63; anti, 70, 73, 161; post, 29 Woodmansee, Martha, 106 Woolf, Virginia: A Room of One’s Own, 143 World War I, 169, 187, 203, 209, 221, 222, 223, 233 World War II, 30, 213, 219, 230, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236, 265 n.22 Wright, Frank Lloyd: Robie House, 76 Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia, 39

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Acknowledgments

It’s a great pleasure to be able to thank the many people who have contributed to this book, and it’s a daunting task to contemplate how I might begin to repay them more fully than I could ever do here. At the University of Chicago, I had the benefit of apparently inexhaustible support from Lauren Berlant and Bill Brown, whose distinct gifts have shaped my efforts in more ways than I can say. As challenging thinkers and good friends, Patricia E. Chu, Maureen McLane, and Anne-Elizabeth Murdy sustained this project—and me—throughout the entire writing process. I have been extremely fortunate in finding such a rich intellectual community at the University of Virginia. The English Department chairs during my time here—Michael Levenson, Gordon Braden, Jahan Ramazani, and Cynthia Wall—have made this an exciting place to be and a supportive environment. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Rita Felski, Jennifer Wicke, and Caroline Rody for their thorough, stimulating, and demanding comments on an earlier incarnation of the entire manuscript. Steve Arata, Anna Brickhouse, Sylvia Chong, Susan Fraiman, and Franny Nudelman all read significant portions of the manuscript and helped me see it with new and sharper eyes. I will be forever grateful for their help, even if I cannot boast that I always managed to live up to the insights of all of these colleagues. Lily Beauvilliers went above and beyond the call of duty as my research assistant and was an astute reader of the entire book. Extraordinarily discerning comments from the two anonymous readers at the University of Pennsylvania Press pushed the book across the finish line. I am very grateful to Jerome Singerman, my editor at Penn, for his support of this project. Writing a book is lonely work, but luckily I have many colleagues and friends to thank for the conversations and intellectual camaraderie that they provided along the way. I am particularly grateful to Alison Booth, May Chapman, Stephen Cushman, Jessica Feldman, Elizabeth Fowler, Grace Hale, J. Paul Hunter, Eleanor Kaufman, Clare Kinney, Christopher Krentz, Lotta

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Acknowledgments

Löfgren, Victor Luftig, Stephen Railton, Marion Rust, Lisa Russ Spaar, and Lisa Woolfork for their patient willingness to hear about the book and their illuminating responses. My family has fostered this project and enriched my existence in ways that are beyond measure. I thank my parents, Michael Lance Olwell and Eileen Olwell, for their confidence in me. My father did not live to see the completion of this book, or many other more important things, but his memory gives me happiness and courage every day. My mother has been a sympathetic listener, a fierce supporter, and a source of practical help; I could not have done this without her. Elizabeth Kiehner, Keith Olwell, Greg Olwell, and Lauren Lyle Olwell have all egged me on and also sometimes made me take a break. Regina O’Brien and the late James O’Brien have given me invaluable encouragement, as have Elizabeth White, Matthew White, Amy White, Mary White, and David White. Aidan and Maeve O’Brien-Olwell were born during the course of this project and have done absolutely nothing to help anyone write a book (yet). I’m afraid that I cannot in good faith thank them for their patience or support of this project. They both manage, though, to be endlessly inspiring just by being themselves. I thank them for that. John O’Brien is my cherished ally in everything I do. I dedicate this book to him with gratitude and love.