Battersby “Gender and Genius” 1989
1) Women’s progress in the art has been slow.
a) The Romantic conception of genius is particularly harmful to women.
b) Our present criteria for artistic excellence have their origin in theories that denied women
genius.
c) Great artists are associated with male personality types, roles, energies.
d) Women who want to create must manipulate aesthetic concepts that are anti-female.
e) When they do create their achievements are obscured.
2) The 19th century reworked and amplified the older rhetoric of sexual exclusion rooted in the
Renaissance view of art and sexual difference, which ideas went back to the Greeks and Romans.
a) In the 19th century qualities previously downgraded as feminine became valuable.
3) Genius and ingenium were central for rationalizing male supremacy through the Renaissance.
a) Genius linked to male procreativity.
b) Ingenium was used to explain a person’s abilities and judgment, and to mark females as inferior
in judgment and talent.
4) Until the Romantic period insofar as a person had a character he had a genius: most women were,
following Pope, thought to have no character at all. (1735) or, if granted genius, it was of a inferior
type.
a) Imitation was thought to improve genius.
5) Our modern notion of genius crystalized in the late eighteenth century.
a) Originality came to be more important than talent.
b) Edward Young (1759) called genius the stranger within, an inner god, and the reader was
exhorted to let his genius rise: he even called on us to worship it.
i) It worked below consciousness, allied to instinct, feeling, imagination
ii) An original rises spontaneously from the root of genius, grows
iii) Imitation by contrast is a matter of mechanics.
iv) Genius partakes of something divine since it uses invisible means.
v) Human excellence is given characteristics previously associated with females: i.e. he
describes it in terms of fairy-queens who rule over an empire of chimeras
vi) This suggested that women if freed from domestic duties could achieve genius.
6) Young’s ideas explain the change in attitude to the primitive and instinctual.
a) Mass exodus from the countryside and the rise of factories and consequent class society in
which bourgeoisie gained power caused urban man to feel nostalgia for older ways.
b) Organic and natural means of production were contrasted to the mechanical.
c) Women had been seen as emotional, instinctive, natural, but now males began to covet these
descriptions, and used them to refer to themselves.
d) Romantic concept of genius came into existence as old pre-industrial world disintegrated.
e) The concepts of woman and of aesthetic and moral values were in crisis.
f) And it could no longer be taken for granted that women were cultural inferiors.
g) Male supremacy needed new rationalization, and this came from new ideas of genius.
7) Great artists were supposed to possess ease and facility, e.g. Renaissance craftsmen.
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a) By the nineteenth century the passivity and labor involved in genius was stressed: Carlyle:
great man struggled, creation involved suffering, pain, tears, and the outcome was natural and
organic, as in giving birth.
b) Metaphors at first were taken from plant and insect kingdoms, not human or animal, but then
into the 19th century they drew from male motherhood and midwifery
c) This reached its apogee with Nietzsche, though he was no kinder to female creators when he
identified himself as psychically female.
Romantics inherited from pre-Romantics a taste for nature as savage
a) Mountains dubbed as sublime vs. delicacy of cultivated valleys.
b) Tamed wild: luxury of aesthetic appreciation of the sublime.
c) Johnson vs. Boswell 1785.
Male fashion moved from well fed with bright ornamented costumes and wigs to drab colors and
trousers and gaunt masculine features.
a) References to father of nature.
b) Sublime was gendered as male.
c) Burke 1757 sublime associated with the language of sexual power and the beautiful what men
love in the opposite sex.
Kant: genius as talent which gives the rule to art
a) It is an inborn talent ingenium, autonomy, power to shape
b) He takes a step beyond the pre-Romantics [not clear how]
c) Does not value dark instinctual forces from the unconscious so important to the next century.
d) Reason, memory and imagination: through this can envisage God’s infinite power.
He contrasts beauty and sublime: the former appeals to the senses.
a) In two minor texts: 1764 and 1798 he treats the sublime as a male preserve.
b) Women are motivated by taste for the beautiful, which explains emotion of sympathy in their
moral make-up.
c) The best human beings act out of duty rather than love: rules make men god-like, sublime.
d) Women are amoral and inferior in understanding: their duty is always to be beautiful and
without intellectual pretension, their science is humankind, especially men, her philosophy
relates to sense not reason, knowledge makes them ugly, some capable of intellectual pursuits
but this is an imperfection, there is a beautiful understanding not a deep one, to aim at the
sublime makes her ridiculous and loathsome, the male is her master. [all references to 1764],
nature gives them a taste for the beautiful so that they can beautify themselves, for
reproduction, she fulfills only nature’s purposes, not fully human, only males can have true
justice or sublime genius.
e) Kant dissents from pre-Romantic emphasis on passion: ironically Kant and Rousseau are both
sexist but in different directions, passion vs. reason.
Genius by end of the 18th century was a type of being, a personality: the ideal woman came to lack
spiritual ecstasy and sexual desire
The talent/success model of greatness is the more useful for women now: Romantic notions of
genius came to bar their recognition.
Five separate strands of the modern notion of genius, only one of which is useful for women.
a) Romanticism: genius as a personality type, an outsider, near to madness, etc.
b) Pre-Romantic: mode of consciousness, passion, imagination etc.
c) Genius as energy, sublimated sexual: all three contaminated by past usage
d) Kind of potential for eminence, skill, talent, devised with males in mind, also bad for women
e) Pragmatic notion of genius, assessed against an appropriate background, work between old and
new ways and lasting value.
15) For a feminist a female genius is not an elite being but someone judged to occupy a strategic
position in the tradition or culture, beyond mere popularity or influence, though being influential is
relevant, but they have been excluded from academies, so they are fewer, cultural momentousness
is requisite/
16) Using genius vocabulary does not wrench the woman from historical and social context
a) And the emphasis on achievements of individual woman does not deny the importance of
collectives: you need to see the individual within the collective.
b) Only through the collective enterprise of feminist critics that the understanding of what is
possible for women may be transformed.