GENDER, CULTURE & SOCIETY @UL SEMINAR

Niamh A. O’Sullivan Women’s Studies PhD Candidate, Department of History, UL

Title: ‘The gendering of artistic genius in the nineteenth century: presumption and reality through the experiences of a mid-Victorian woman artist’

Time: 3-4pm Thursday 13 October 2011

Venue: A1051 (Main Building)

Abstract The nineteenth century concept of artistic genius was highly gendered, relying on the Romantic notion that genius was a sole male preserve, it held that a woman did not have the intellectual and physical ability and emotional control to be a genius, that genius could only belong to the male who utilised his internal feminine qualities to produce great works and exhibit genius. In addition, those singular women who did show signs of greatness in their work were presented as unsexed anomalies. So pervasive was the notion, and so powerful the early twentieth century backlash against Victorianism, that the paradigm that Victorian society excluded the possibility, and, indeed, actively excluded the possibility, of female genius remains a legacy in our understanding of women’s experiences in the nineteenth century. However, was this idea of male genius more theory than actual experience? Curiously, the thoughts of those who were most affected by the gendering of genius have been neglected, leading to the question how did women artists in the mid-Victorian era treat the notion of genius? This paper will examine the idea of nineteenth-century artistic genius in Britain and investigate how women artists reacted to the question of genius through an examination of the writings of Dorothy Tennant, a professional woman artist of the 1870s and 1880s, in which she revealed her thoughts on artistic genius, including her experience with Romantic beliefs, the subject of the woman genius and her own desire to be a great artist.