The Genius of Democracy by Olwell Victoria;

Author:Olwell, Victoria;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Genius and Variation

The scientific model of genius against which feminists argued did more than reify gender as an immutable biological fact and reinforce the gendering distribution of resources. As a “sex characteristic” definitive of maleness in scientific models, genius had far different implications than did many other sex-linked characteristics, such as facial hair, or even purely intellectual characteristics associated with maleness, such as rationality, and not simply because genius implied venerated abilities. Scientific models linked the innovative capacity definitive of genius to a larger characteristic of male bodies: the tendency toward variation. The scientific model of genius as an expression of an organic variational tendency had its conceptual roots in romanticism, which saw genius as a self-contradicting exceptionality—the genius was exceptionally universal—and associated genius with extremes of thought, feeling, and personality. Late nineteenth-century science recast this exceptionality as biological anomalousness, psychological changeability, and statistical deviation.33 Genius in these terms originated in a male capacity for self-difference—variable bodies differed from each other and, through time, from themselves.

In its biological form, this argument that male bodies were more variable than those of females had its most influential expression in Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). There, Darwin proposed that male organisms of all species tended to vary in their characteristics more than female bodies did.34 Biological science understood “variation” in terms of unforeseeable individual mutation. In the biological model, variation is one of the hazards attending the reproduction of living things. The vast majority of variations can be expected to be disasters, producing damaged or inviable organisms. Yet at the same time, mutation is the basic condition of evolution. Some mutations turn out to confer advantages; they increase an organism’s chances of survival and reproduction and thus pass into the stream of species characteristics. As Havelock Ellis explained, “the greater variability of men, while it produces many brilliant and startling phenomena, also produces a greater proportion of worthless or even harmful deviations.”35 In the binary opposition of sexuality, “the male is the agent of variation; the female is the agent of type conservation,” repeating her body in the next generation.36 This model figured males as the driving forces of biological evolution; their tendency to mutation, to be new and different from themselves, was seen to push the process of evolution forward (even as it produced a great and unavoidable number of maladaptive variations).

Analogously, masculine biological variation was imagined to be the origin of cultural and social variation and therefore innovation. As Kopald discerned in her feminist article for the Nation, “great social significance is attached to the comparative variability of the sexes, especially in mental achievement … variation had become an advantage and the basis and hope of all progress.”37 For Havelock Ellis, the biological novelty of genius created cultural innovation, allowing him to see an organic basis for the “great men” theory of cultural progress: “in the greater variational tendency of man we are in the presence of a fact that has social and

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