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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 1
“It Spoke Itself”: Genius, Political Speech, and Louisa May Alcott’s Work
LOUISA 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 working-women, 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 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 wished-for 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 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 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 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.
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 intellect, 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;
In genius brigxht, 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”) 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 control.” 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 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 self-interest, 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 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 eighteenth-century 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 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). 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.
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, 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 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 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 citizenship. 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 self-recognizing public movement from working women’s isolated experiences.
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 debates 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 class-divided 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 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 transparent 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 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 “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 copied 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.
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 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 vocabulary 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-as-freedom, 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 Benjamin 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 trouble 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 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 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 well-known formulation, a counterpublic sphere provides an activist remedy to 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 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.