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CHAPTER 2

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

ALCOTT’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 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-first-century 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 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 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).