Genius

Although much eighteenth-century thought about genius continues to be retained in academic institutions as well as in popular culture, late-twentieth-century critics returned to reconsider the category of genius in the light of contemporary critical trends. Literary criticism was dominated in the latter half of the twentieth century by poststructuralism, a critical school the major by-product of which is the critique of discourse. The meaning of any linguistic utterance always exceeds the utterance itself; there is always more meaning in any text than may be apprehended by simply understanding the words. This excess meaning, the poststructuralists say, is socially, historically, and politically determined and produced. With this critical apparatus, critics have reconsidered the category of genius of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a discursive formation. That is, current critics see the notion of genius as an idea that was shaped, indeed constructed, by the social, political, and historical circumstances of the Enlightenment.

In addition to the poststructuralist idea that meaning is produced, the twentieth-century philosopher and critic Jacques Derrida (b. 1930), in his theory that is now called deconstruction, has pointed out that all of Western thinking is predicated on a system of binary oppositions, such as good and evil, man and woman, white and black. More important, Derrida argues that one component of these Western oppositions is always prioritized over the other. Good is always better than evil, white is always better than black, and man is always better than woman. Likewise, reason has always, for nearly the entire span of recorded Western history, been prioritized over feeling. Both Aristotle and Plato valued reason above emotion; these Aristotelian and Platonic ideas were revived by Renaissance thinkers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By the eighteenth century the priority of reason was fully entrenched. Western culture has not yet let it go. Derrida's principal contribution was to point out that all the prioritized components in Western oppositions tend to enjoy similar advantage. Reason, prioritized over emotion, is thus a predominantly male characteristic. Genius, with its divine ability to create, was on a par with the divine ability to reason; likewise, genius was associated with masculinity and with men's superior ability to reason. While Kant opposed genius to taste, this opposition did not obtain in the discursive formation of genius. Rather, genius, in its association with human power (of reason and creation), became notably opposed to sentiment.

But even before the poststructuralism of the latter part of the twentieth century, feminists were already beginning to ascertain the historical vicissitudes of genius. Virginia Woolf, in her remarkable 1929 book A Room of One's Own, conducts a lively thought experiment, imagining that Shakespeare had a sister named Judith and wondering what life would have been like for her. After considering all the social constraints placed on an Englishwoman of the sixteenth century, Woolf concludes that "a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty" (p. 49). Woolf points to the unevenness of history's representation of genius; she identifies the sociohistorical circumstances that determined which writers would be published and read, and what those writers would write about. And although Woolf wrote before Derrida, Derrida's critique of Western culture applies.

Woolf, however, does not identify genius itself as a discursive formation, because she still believes in it, and argues for the genius of women writers; but she does indicate the way in which women were not allowed to realize their genius until around the nineteenth century. While Woolf rightly identifies the exclusion of women writers from "high culture," she does not consider "genius" itself to be a discursively formed masculine category. For Woolf, poetry is the "high culture" into which women ought to be admitted. Although Woolf recognizes the gendering of genre, she fails to recognize the gender of genius. A deconstructive reading, by contrast, identifies genius as a prioritized oppositional category; moreover, the category of "high culture" is prioritized in its opposition to "popular culture."

In the late twentieth-and early twenty-first centuries critics have considered genius precisely through the critical lens of gender. Literary reviewers most often relegated women writers of the nineteenth century to the category of sentimentalism. In Derrida's register, genius was opposed to sentiment, with the concomitant prioritization of genius. In nineteenth-century evaluations of artists, genius and sentiment worked as a gender-determined opposition. Woolf is aware of this opposition in A Room of One's Own. She evaluates the novel as the likely genre for women writers such as Jane Austen and Emily Brontë because of the novel's propensity for feeling and sentiment. Yet Woolf wishes for women to realize their genius in poetry—she seems not to notice the genderedness of genius, as do late-twentieth-century critics. Historically, genius was, gender studies critics maintain, a territory mapped out for masculine writers. The categories of domesticity and sentiment emerged as a standard for evaluating women's writing that excluded women from the "high culture" of genius.

Queer theorists have taken this work in the gender of genius and explored the ways in which nineteenth-century constructions of genius actually crossed gender lines. The critic Gustavus Stadler has found that many male authors were consumptives and victims of affect, indulgences that the literary community was generally content to allow its genius writers. These afflictions were typically associated with the feminine gender; the degree to which male "geniuses" were afflicted with these tendencies suggests the way in which "genius" routinely crossed the gender divide in the nineteenth century. Stadler points out that, "It is on this queer turf [of genius], in which famous literary men become madwomen and dying girls enable women to become public authors, that the discourse of genius holds the most promise for disrupting and diversifying the assumptions about gender and sexuality that undergird our understanding of nineteenth-century American literature" (p. 662).

Critics have also noted the ways in which conventions and styles of writing were overtly gendered by nineteenth-century literary movers and shakers. For instance, Andrew Elfenbein has noted that women writers were considered poor writers if they engaged in "literary cross-dressing" (p. 931)—if, that is, they wrote in genres that were the reserved province of male writers, or wrote in a style usually thought of as masculine. In short, women were supposed to write about private life, domesticity, and matters exclusively feminine in concern. Some writers, however, did cross-dress, Elfenbein tells us, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, who thought that genius was a combination of masculine characteristics, such as logical thinking and intense concentration, with feminine qualities, such as emotionality and loss of control. Here in Wollstonecraft can be seen an attempt to deconstruct the traditional oppositions associated with nineteenth-century notions of genius.