“Genius Must Do the Scullery Work of the World”: New Women, Feminists, and Genius, circa 1880–1920
Genealogies of Genius, 2016
Genius in its nineteenth-and twentieth-century formations has powerful connotations of elitism, a... more Genius in its nineteenth-and twentieth-century formations has powerful connotations of elitism, and is likely to have boundaries that exclude the socially marginalized or disempowered. It was a common assumption in Victorian and Edwardian Britain that women were by nature unlikely to display genius. Nonetheless, “genius” proved a captivating and, on occasion, workable concept for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminists. The significance of creative, prophetic, and “superbest” individuals fascinated many within the women’s movement, despite unpromising late Victorian scientific formulations of genius. This chapter examines the lives and writings of two feminist figures that theorized genius and attempted to enact it in their own lives. The British writer Edith Ellis and the South African Olive Schreiner were both born in the mid nineteenth century, but their writings stretch into the twentieth century. This chronological span serves to demonstrate the changing uses of “genius” in a rapidly changing sociocultural context. Though both Ellis and Schreiner were best known as novelists, this chapter will examine the correspondences, memoirs, lectures, and photographs produced by these two writers. Not only are these ephemera sources much less well known, but they also display very direct engagement with concepts of “genius.” These sources enable a closer examination of both change over time and the visual lexicon of genius than the much smaller numbers of novels that each wrote.
Uploads
Papers by Lucy Delap
New Woman periodical publishing, through its focus on women’s
sexuality and autonomy from men. The journal appears to offer a more
daring, twentieth-century and modern ‘new woman’, more willing than
even her 1890s counterpart to embrace free unions or sexual
experimentation. The Freewoman’s extraordinary discussions of
sexuality have tended to distract historians’ attention from other
elements of the debates it engendered. In particular, the political
argument found within its pages has received insufficient attention; the
journal tends to be misread as a socialist publication. Placing the
journal as part of the New Woman narrative lends itself to an
alternative view of the political subject of The Freewoman; the New
Woman focus on individuality, autonomy and creative genius plays an
important part in the distinctive political debates found within the
journal. Although the suffrage struggle dominated Edwardian feminist
activism, many Freewoman contributors rejected the vote entirely. In a
period when new liberal or Fabian conceptions of an increasingly
interventionist state appeared to sit comfortably with feminist demands
for a more inclusive and socially responsible state, The Freewoman
took an anti-statist stance. Rejecting the common suffragist metaphor of
the state as the home writ large, Freewoman contributors saw the state
as machine-like. The author explores the motivations for these positions,
and the development of an individualist-feminist, or even egoist stance.
Specifically, she outlines contributors’ rejection of militant suffrage
activism, and their contestation of the citizen as a rights-holding and
consenting political subject, and maps the alternative political structures
suggested within The Freewoman, and the manner in which concepts of
individuality found within New Woman discourse served to construct a
disturbingly elitist and even coercive feminist politics.