#victorian ideals

[theriseofthesea]

[monuments1]

Redfield Monument, Forman Park, Syracuse, NY

The figures of Joshua Forman (sitting), considered to be the founder of Syracuse, and newspaperman Lewis Redfield (standing) are placed atop this monument. Relegated to a lower position on the monument is the statue of a sitting Indian. Unfortunately this vertical arrangement can be taken as representing the subjugation of the local New York state Indians by the overwhelming advance and civilizing influence of the Euroamerican nation and pushing the Indians into a lower stratum of Victorian era society. The bronze statues were made by sculptor Fidardo Landi and the monument was given to the city by a daughter of Redfield in 1908.

[contracat25]

"Genius’’ is in fact a Latin word derived from the Greek ginesthai (‘‘to be born or created’’). In classical pagan tradition, a ‘‘genius’’ referred to the guiding or tutelary spirit allotted to each person at birth. From the Renaissance until the eighteenth century, English authors frequently invoked the older meaning of genius as tutelary spirit. This usage gradually gave way in the nineteenth century to the now familiar definition of genius as superlative intellectual ability (or a person possessing such ability). Significantly, the period when this linguistic transition occurred—the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—witnessed the birth of several modern myths about genius. Whereas Enlightenment authors described the genius as directly inspired by God, Romantics developed a secularized version of this view that emphasized the artist or poet himself as a godlike figure. Politically, the Romantic genius was a rebellious figure who challenged social hierarchies by suggesting that innate creative powers trump class status.

Romantics embraced the classical notion of the creative process as an inherently irrational furor poeticus: an ‘‘aesthetic response [that] seemed to involve a spell, a rapture, a delirium, a momentary madness.’’ The creative process was also inherently solitary and necessitated a certain degree of suffering for one’s art. In England, the Romantic figure of the godlike yet tormented genius was memorably embodied by Lord Byron’s self-loathing protagonists, the eponymous hero of Percy Shelley’s ‘‘Prometheus Un- bound,’’ and Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein.

Whereas the Romantics saw genius as a mystical phenomenon beyond the reach of scientific investigation, Victorians brought scientific tools and techniques to bear on superlative ability. Rather than glorifying creative powers, Victorians pathologized genius and upheld the mediocre man as an evolutionary ideal. Michel Foucault has discussed how the impetus towards medical and social conformity reasserted itself as the Romantic cult of individuality waned; nineteenth-century scientists ‘‘embrace[d] a knowledge of healthy man . . . and a definition of the model man.’’ This emphasis on normalcy derived partly from Belgian mathematician Adolphe Que ́telet’s influential statistical concept of the ‘‘homme moyen’’ or average man. Que ́- telet’s essay A Treatise on Man and the Development of his Faculties (1835) presented his so-called ‘‘average man’’ as the central value around which measurements of a human trait are grouped according to the normal distribution. According to this model, all aberrations from the norm could be seen as pathological, including extreme intelligence.

- If you want to read the rest of the article it is an excerpt from Literature in Mind: H.G. Wells and the Evolution of the Mad Scientist by Anne Stiles; which appeared in the April 2009 volume of Journal of the History of Ideas and has some really fascinating views on Victorian concepts of genius