10 A Novel of Female Genius: Mme de Staël’s Corinne

Minerva, the goddess of genius, was a virgin; her name … means without breasts, or, according to the energy of the terms, not effeminate.

—Julien-Joseph Virey, “Génie,” Dictionnaire des sciences médicales

Genius is a masculine noun and is generally gendered male. In the ancient world it was a tutelary spirit reserved for men since women were provided with a Juno. It was associated with the paterfamilias, and its begetting has invariably been viewed as a masculine rather than a feminine affair. For long enough this went without saying. But with increasing interest in the physiological basis of the mind and with the greater cultural prominence of women, there was a corresponding increase toward the end of the eighteenth century in the active assertion of the incompatibility of genius with the female sex. Women were not just the “other” of genius, but its very antithesis.

Rousseau is blunt in his exclusion of women from genius when he asserts that women are constitutionally unsuited its demands: “Women in general possess no artistic sensibility … nor genius.” They can acquire knowledge through a certain diligence, but, he continues, “the celestial fire that emblazons and ignites the soul, the inspiration that consumes and devours, … these sublime ecstasies that reside in the depths of the heart are always lacking in women’s writings.” The characteristics that made learning and talent the laborious obverse of genius are also those of women. Christine Battersby, who cites Rousseau’s remarks in her book Gender and Genius, makes it clear that such attitudes were common currency at the time.¹Close

Diderot stands out from most other commentators by taking the possibility of female genius seriously, and in an essay on women written in 1772 as a riposte to a recently published Essai sur le caractère, les moeurs et l’esprit des femmes dans les différens siècles (An essay on the character, habits and mind of women in different ages) by one Antoine-Léonard Thomas, he suggests that genius in women has its distinctive—and distinctively positive—modes: “When they possess genius, I believe that it makes a more original impression than in us.” This, he says, is because “[w]omen carry inside them an organ that is subject to terrible spasms, over which they have no control, and which creates phantoms of every kind in their imaginations. … It is from this origin, which is particular to their sex, that their extraordinary ideas arise.”²Close But such views were rare.

When the question of the character of women was set as the topic for the essay competition run by the Société des Sciences, Lettres et Arts de Mâcon in 1809, the more commonplace negation of female genius is given an aura of medical endorsement by Julien-Joseph Virey in his prize-winning entry when he writes that women combine tenderness, seduction, and charm, but that—in an echo of Rousseau’s claim—men alone are capable of the “fiery transports of genius.” Women are physically unsuited to the creativity of invention, being both delicate and inconsistent; their domain is feeling, while that of men is “thought”; they are designed to be subjugated, while men aspire to an “immortality” that would be incompatible with the expectation of “modesty” in women. Virey backs up these claims with references to further medical authority in the form of one Doctor Roussel, author of a Système pratique et moral de la femme (Practical and moral system concerning women), published in 1775, as well as to Rousseau’s discussion of women in Émile. In Virey’s account women are not just unsuited to genius, they are its active negation, for as the representatives of “taste” in society, they pose an active threat to “the strength of genius,” which succumbs all too easily to the “brilliant games of elegant wits” favored by taste.³Close In sum, whether it is women’s association with diligence, wit, or taste, which the eighteenth century opposed to genius, or whether it is the physical, moral, and intellectual nature attributed to them in philosophical and medical discourse, there would seem to be no place for women in genius or for genius in women.

At the same time, the novel, which was traditionally associated with a female readership, was gaining status as a literary genre. In her Essai sur les fictions (Essay on fictions) Mme de Staël asserts that “a novel as we conceive it, and which we have a few examples of, is one of the finest creations of the human mind.” She makes the point again in De la littérature, where she describes novels as “those varied creations of the mind of the moderns,” and this insistence on the modernity of fiction anticipates the importance the genre went on to acquire in the nineteenth century. A large part of this modernity is due, in Mme de Staël’s argument, to qualities associated with women. Citing the excellence of English novelists, she claims that the “host of subtle nuances and touching situations” that provide fiction with its subject matter and inspire the creativity of its authors is the direct result of the influence of women in English society.⁴Close This comes very close to saying that Richardson owes the genius celebrated by Diderot to the female sex, whose sensibility is responsible for bringing the subtleties of his fiction into being.

Fiction also offers scope to genius, which for Mme de Staël consists in the fidelity of its depiction of the real: “It is in truth that the divine stamp is found: we attach the word invention to genius, and yet it is only by tracing, connecting and discovering what is, that it has earned its creative renown.” This is not yet, and not quite the realism of Balzac’s Comédie humaine, and it is still part of the aesthetic of effects that belongs to the eighteenth century, but those effects and their incitement to virtue are directly dependent on the grounding of action in “present circumstances.” The intimate knowledge of the human heart, which novels provide and women facilitate, requires the depiction of “all the situations of private life, and the impressions that they give rise to.”⁵Close There is, in other words, something specifically gendered female—if only by association—in fiction, which makes a virtue, not just of virtue, but also of its realism.

The realist tradition of the nineteenth-century novel is, as critics have remarked, a largely masculine one, but it also has a feminine streak. Balzac prided himself in his “Avant-propos” to the Comédie humaine on writing a form of fiction that was faithful to social realities, and this included the fact that in society—as distinct from nature—women are not always “the female of the male.”⁶Close Realist fiction may be written by men, but it has been made possible by women, it needs to be (in part) about women—and it will continue, as it always has, to be read by women.

As the status of the genre rose, one might expect it to be associated with the same sort of ambition toward genius that poetry exhibited, and Balzac’s cry on thinking up the scheme for the Comédie humaine—“Congratulate me because I’m well and truly becoming a genius”—confirms that the novel was seen as an arena for inventive prowess.⁷Close But in the main, the novel’s role seems to have been to provide a forum in which genius could be examined by writers whose own relation to the phenomenon was, more often than not, distinctly ambivalent. Whereas genius in poetry suffers and goes unheeded until it is recognized by its fellows, in the novel it almost always fails.

Nineteenth-century French fiction—France’s “great tradition”—is not so much a pretext for the demonstration of authorial genius, as the means of portraying the failure of genius in a fictional character. The latter does not totally exclude the former—Mme de Staël and Balzac being cases in point—but genius becomes an uncertain value. Some of this is no doubt due to the novel’s rivalry with science. Balzac sets himself up as the equal of Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Zola’s fictional alter ego is the physician and geneticist Doctor Pascal. As Zola’s encounter with Dr. Toulouse indicated, the language of medicine rubbed off on the novel, and with it a certain detached approach to genius and a certain set of quantificational protocols for its observation. In sum, realist fiction is less a means for the direct affirmation of genius than for its scrutiny—and predominantly in the mode of failure.

This fictional scrutiny is very often carried out by placing genius in conjunction with a female character in a variety of permutations. In Mme de Staël’s Corinne, the genius—for once—is herself a woman. In Balzac’s Louis Lambert, Lambert is a (possibly) mentally ill genius who retreats into a world to which only his erstwhile fiancée has access. And in Zola’s L’Œuvre, Claude Lantier is the failed genius whose art is both inspired and destroyed by a female muse. Genius is put to the test by means of these associations with women—tested and mostly found wanting, but in ways that make it both more ambiguous and more interesting than a simple summary of its failures might suggest.

Mme de Staël was, as we have already seen, one of the rare women commentators on genius, but in those comments, she made no explicit attempt to counter the arguments of those who denied genius to her sex. Indeed, she echoes many of their assumptions—albeit in less virulent mode—as when she writes that “[w]omen have not composed truly superior works but they have eminently served the progress of literature by all the thoughts inspired in men through their relations with these mobile, delicate creatures.”⁸Close They have facilitated genius in men but never achieved it themselves. It is perhaps all the more extraordinary, then, that Mme de Staël should portray the heroine of her second novel, Corinne (1807), as an unambiguous incarnation of female genius. If Corinne is a novel of failed genius, it is not because its heroine, Corinne, is prevented from realizing her genius, but because, having had it, and moreover having been lavishly and publicly acknowledged as having it, she then loses it. The pathos of the novel derives from the narration of the circumstances that lead to this loss, and though it is significantly enhanced by the fact that Corinne is a woman, the question of whether the failure of her genius can be ascribed to her sex is not a straightforward one.

Corinne is not just a women of genius, but a national genius too. She makes a triumphant entry into the novel aboard a chariot drawn by four white horses that takes her to the Capitol in Rome for her laureation, where she is hailed as Italy’s greatest living genius. Her talents are multiple, and she is eulogized for her skills as a tragedienne, a dancer, a painter, and a conversationalist, as well as for her ability to improvise in verse, which she goes on to demonstrate in the ceremony itself. She is described as the most famous woman in Italy, and the crowd on Capitol Hill greets her with cries of “Long live Corinne! Long live genius! Long live beauty!” Her genius is a matter of patriotic pride for the Italians who regard her as “the image of our beautiful Italy.”⁹Close

There is no equivocation in the public recognition of her genius, and no one holds it against her that she is a woman. In the “song” that she writes for her last public appearance before her death, Corinne thanks Italy, a “liberal nation,” for not banishing women from the temple of “glory”; and the odes composed by her fellow poets for the laureation ceremony praise her in terms that also speak generously of a whole tradition of women of genius. This goes back as far as Sappho and includes Corinna the great rival of Pindar, whose name Mme de Staël’s heroine has taken.¹⁰Close

The accolade “genius” is bestowed unstintingly, but mostly in conformity with the norms of the day whereby genius is an attribute or a quality and not a person: whence “a man,” or in the case of Corinne, “a woman of genius.” This formulation is elaborated in the description of Corinne during her performance in the laureation ceremony where she is presented as “an inspired priestess joyfully dedicating herself to the worship of genius.”¹¹Close This image of a priestess evolves later on in the novel into the figure of the Sybil: Corinne’s house is built opposite the temple of the Sybil, and toward the end of the novel when her former lover, Lord Nelvil, is visiting Italy with his new wife Lucile, he is stopped in his tracks by Domenichino’s “Sybil,” in which he evidently sees a likeness of Corinne. Despite the difficulties of imagining a woman genius in the period, the image of the priestess in the temple of genius or the prophetess in the grip of divine inspiration is one means whereby it becomes possible for such a figure to take plausible form.

The Comte d’Erfeuil pays Corinne a rather backhanded compliment when he comments that she is a person of such superior intellect, depth of learning, and delicacy of feeling that the rules by which women are ordinarily judged cannot be applied to her. But Erfeuil is French, and the Italians take a more enlightened view of female genius than do their fellow Europeans. In short, Mme de Staël could hardly have imagined a more propitious configuration of talents and circumstances for her heroine, and Corinne certainly fares much better than the male geniuses that her contemporaries were soon to portray, whether Vigny’s Chatterton, the other poets who appear in Stello, Hugo’s Chateaubriand, Lamartine’s Bonald, or Balzac’s fictional Louis Lambert, all of whom encounter a hostile world in which even male genius finds it hard to flourish.

If Corinne’s genius fails, this is not because genius in itself poses a problem for women in the idealized Italian world of the novel, but because there are aspects inherent to genius that eventually succeed in undermining it. The first of these is gloire, or what the OED calls “honourable fame.” This is the indispensable form taken by the recognition of genius, but its effects insidiously work to destroy the phenomenon it celebrates. Corinne herself acknowledges the extent to which she depends on her audience for her improvisatory skills: she describes her improvisations as a “lively conversation” in which, as she explains, “I go along with the impression that my listeners’ interest makes on me, and it is to my friends that I owe the greatest part of my talent in this field.”¹²Close For Corinne, the audience plays an integral part in her own artistic creations, which are almost all performances of one kind or another.

But there is more to gloire than this, for, as Corinne herself affirms, “Genius inspires the need for fame,” and “she admitted unaffectedly that admiration was very attractive to her.” The real problem is not the desire for gloire as such, but the fact that the recognition provided by gloire has a variant in the form of love. Corinne has a tendency to conflate the two with what turn out to be disastrous consequences: “Love and fame [gloire] had always been mingled in her mind.” It is here that the gendering of genius begins to open up the possibility of its own destruction, since this conflation—or so Corinne herself suggests—is one that women are especially prone to make: “in seeking fame, I always hoped that it would make me loved. What use would it be, at least to women, without that hope?”¹³Close All this notwithstanding, Corinne is initially as blessed in her search for love as she is in the genius with which she is endowed by her creator: the laureation ceremony rewards her not just with the crown of laurels but also with a lover, Oswald (Lord Nelvil).

He sees Corinne for the first time in the ceremony, which offers him the first chance he has ever had to witness a woman of genius being publicly rewarded. An exchange of glances between himself and Corinne reveals another aspect of the exceptional woman, an aspect that, complicatedly, makes her like all women: “[I]n the midst of all this splendour and success it seemed to him that Corinne’s eyes had sought the protection of a man friend, a protection no woman, however superior she may be, can ever dispense with. And he thought it would be pleasing to be the support of a woman who would feel the need for such support only because of her sensitivity.” If Corinne comes over here as a woman in search of love, love is immediately defined as a superior version of the recognition that is granted by gloire. As Oswald listens to the poets singing her praises, he hears nothing in their eulogies of Corinne that could not equally well be applied to any of the talented women to whom she is compared. The lover, in contrast to the public speaker, can offer a type of recognition that is an infinitely more precise response to the specific qualities of the woman who is nevertheless so generously celebrated: “Lord Nelvil was already suffering from this way of praising Corinne. He felt already that, just by looking at her, he could there and then have produced a truer, more accurate, and detailed portrait, a portrait which would have fitted no one but Corinne.” This is not just the wishful thinking of the would-be lover. Prince Castel-Forte, who delivers the eulogy, makes a similar point when he says that though Corinne is the most famous woman in the land, only her friends will be able to paint an accurate portrait of her, because “the soul’s qualities, when they are genuine, always require other people to sense them.”¹⁴Close

Love appears at this stage to be a more responsive and therefore superior form of recognition than gloire. But the two eventually prove impossible to combine, and these apparently complementary forms of response to genius become opposed, to the ultimate detriment of genius itself. The lovers are gradually torn apart by their differences over the relative values of gloire and love and whereas Oswald begins by rejoicing at the prospect of all Corinne’s gifts being bestowed on him in the private domain, Corinne comes to realize that “[t]alent needs an independence that true love never allows.” The difference between the lovers on this issue becomes decisive with Oswald’s provocative reply to her: “If that is the case, … may your genius be silent, and your heart be all mine.”¹⁵Close

It doesn’t help that Corinne has the misfortune to find in Oswald a lover whose cultural assumptions are very different from her own, and who, as an Englishman reared in Scotland, places the highest values on duty and self-sacrifice in women, and can imagine love only in the guise of conjugal domesticity. It is these factors (along with his guilty desire to comply with his late father’s wishes on the matter of a suitable wife) that draw him to Lucile, who is in every way the opposite of Corinne, despite being, as is later revealed, her half sister.

And yet these polarities are not as simple as they might appear. Even if Corinne had found a lover with cultural assumptions closer to her own, the tension between love and gloire, intimacy and the public domain, is written into genius from the outset. This is because genius itself is defined as having its source in the personal characteristics of its possessor: if genius is “essentially creative,” this is because “it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.” It is a matter of individual qualities, rather than a particular aptitude in a given artistic sphere, and in Corinne these qualities are described as “liveliness of mind,” “freshness of imagination,” and “passionate sensibility,” which enable her to “understand the affective links between the beauties of nature and the most deep-seated impressions of the soul.” Her originality—through which her genius is manifested—is attributable to her character and above all to her “way of feeling.”¹⁶Close This manière de sentir proves to be the second major element whereby genius is, as it were, undone from within.

There is nothing exceptional for its time in the definition of genius as deriving from imagination and sensibility. Equally, if Corinne possesses an unusually wide range of talents, these are portrayed as a symptom of her reluctance to be bound by any set of rules and conventions, and as so many languages that collectively enable her to express a single imaginative power. Her verse improvisations are the greatest of these talents, but in the course of the novel she also dances, acts in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, takes a role in a comedy, and paints a portrait of Oswald’s late father that bears an astonishing resemblance to him. However, the qualities that lie behind these multiple forms of artistic expression exact their own toll: “Corinne’s ardent imagination was the source of her talent, but unfortunately for her, her imagination was linked to her natural sensitivity and often caused her great pain.”¹⁷Close Imagination and sensitivity are at once the source of her genius and the cause of the suffering that brings about its destruction. It is this conundrum that the novel brings to light.

Corinne’s love for a man is the specific origin of her misery, but this aptitude for unhappiness is not specifically gendered. Corinne may conclude at the end of her life that of all the “faculties of the soul [she] has received from nature, that of suffering is the only one [she] has fully put into practice,” but in this, according to Mme de Staël, she is doing no more than exemplify the finest of human qualities as they exist in the modern world regardless of gender. Discoursing to Oswald on the history of the arts during a visit to the Vatican Museum, Corinne herself comments, “In our modern times, in our cold, oppressive society, grief is our noblest emotion, and in our day, he who has not suffered will have neither felt nor thought.” Whereas in the ancient world nobility was expressed as a “heroic calm” and a “sense of power,” the modern world turns individuals in upon themselves to feed upon their inner feelings—and genius is no exception to this historically determined rule.¹⁸Close

The truth of this phenomenon is borne out by the example of Tasso (to whom Corinne is specifically compared), which prompts the conclusion that it is the very condition of genius to multiply the causes of its own suffering: “When persons of genius are endowed with real sensitivity, their sorrows are multiplied by those same gifts …, and as the heart’s unhappiness is inexhaustible, the more ideas they have, the more they feel it.”¹⁹Close Corinne’s unhappy experience illustrates a universal truth about genius. Loving and suffering are not the unique preserve of the woman genius, but are the inevitable consequence of the combination of imagination and sensibility that characterizes all genius in the modern world.

The drama of the novel comes from the paradoxical results of this principle, which demonstrates that genius is destroyed by its own virtues. Corinne’s suffering is caused in part by a man who, in loving the personal qualities of which her genius is made, also wishes to remove them from the public stage on which they exist. Her suffering is further exacerbated by his subsequent preference for a woman—Lucile—who is not encumbered by genius, though she makes him no happier than Corinne. The focus of the narrative is Corinne’s gradual loss of her own genius, as she slides from a voluntary relinquishing of her talents to a painful endurance of their absence. In deciding to follow her lover, she acknowledges that she knows what price she will be paying: “I shall be following Oswald without knowing what fate he has in store for me, the man whom I prefer to the independent destiny thanks to which I have passed such happy days! I shall perhaps return, but with a wounded heart and a withered soul, and even you, fine arts and ancient monuments …, will no longer be able to do anything for me.” Her prediction is confirmed in due course and, as she finally lies dying in Florence, she laments the fact that Oswald stifled the gifts that were designed to “arouse enthusiasm in hearts in harmony with mine.”²⁰Close Her genius is gone, wasted on a love that is ultimately denied her.

The gendering of genius in Mme de Staël’s novel serves to highlight a certain paradoxical truth about genius, which applies as much to men as to any woman. As a woman, Corinne may be more vulnerable to suffering because of a woman’s supposed desire for protection and the consequent confusion between love and gloire, but suffering has many causes, and is not confined to female experience. Genius contains the seeds of its own undoing, and this is the truth that Mme de Staël depicts in Corinne.

In view of all this, one might wonder about Mme de Staël’s own investment in her creation of the first female genius in French literature. Corinne was a huge success, not just in France but across Europe too. Despite the fate of Mme de Staël’s genius-heroine, readers saw in the novel proof of the genius of its author: Maria Edgeworth hailed Corinne as “a work of splendid genius,” and later in the century, George Eliot would ensure that Maggie Tulliver owned a copy of the novel in Mill on the Floss. One of the paradoxical effects of the novel’s success was that Mme de Staël was popularly imagined as Corinne herself. Her own response to this blurring of her identity with that of her heroine was to say, “I am not Corinne, but if you like I shall be.”²¹Close

A few months after the publication of the novel, the painter Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun portrayed Mme de Staël as Corinne, an association that Mme de Staël herself seems to have encouraged and that she was happy to underscore by commissioning a (slightly more flattering) copy of the portrait from a local Genevan painter. Certainly posterity saw her in this light, and the painting commissioned from François Gérard after her death depicts her in the role of Corinne at Cape Miseno, with the same lyre and heavenward gaze as the earlier portrait (Figure 7).²²Close

This conflation of the two figures, Mme de Staël and her heroine, is intriguing, and it clearly implies that Mme de Staël was not disadvantaged by her association with a woman whose genius fails. This may in part have something to do with the fact that the novel’s mode of narration does not establish a direct identification between its author-narrator and its heroine. Moreover, before even considering its narrative mode, almost everything about the novel distinguishes

it from the artistic practices favored by Corinne. Her talents are almost all those of performance, and where they involve her literary skills, these are employed in the spoken rather than the written word. Even when she does write (for the last performance that she is too ill to carry out herself), her text is designed for performance, not reading.

Mme de Staël’s heroine, then, is not a writer. In fact, it could be said that it is Corinne’s reluctance, or refusal, to write that contributes in a major way to the rupture between her and Oswald, since she fails to answer his letters when he returns to Britain. In any case, her preferred literary medium is poetry, not prose, and the difference between the two is underscored in the novel itself where it is claimed that poetry is the only form in which the peoples of the South can give voice to their feelings, and that they lose all spontaneity when they move from the spoken to the written word. Novels are a genre almost unknown in Italy, and the language of Corinne—French—is very different from the Italian in which Corinne composes and performs and whose spirit she gives creative voice to. In short, Corinne is a novel written in French about a heroine whose genius is for performing improvised verse in Italian.

The mode of narration is impersonal, the narrator having neither face nor gender, and authorial comments are kept to a minimum. Moreover, Corinne is unusual for a novel of its time in having no preface, where the author might have introduced herself.²³Close But despite the fact that Corinne differs from her creator in being a performer rather than a writer, she does nevertheless become a kind of surrogate author, regularly adopting an authorial tone and posture, thanks to the fact that most of the novel’s commentary about the arts and culture of Italy is delivered by its heroine as she introduces her lover to its major sites and cultural artifacts. The novel is about Italy as well as about Corinne, and she is presented as an authority on Italian culture. The effect of this is to make the few interventions from the author proper sound like those of her heroine, and, as the novel progresses toward its sad conclusion, the pathos of the heroine’s decline is underscored in sentences such as the following, which differ almost not at all from those uttered by Corinne herself as she comments on her plight:

Believing she was suffering a fatal illness, Corinne wanted to bid Italy and especially Lord Nelvil, a last farewell which would recall the time when her genius shone in all its glory. It was a weakness which we must forgive her. Love and fame had always been mingled in her mind, and until that moment when her heart made the sacrifice of all earthly affections, she wanted the ungrateful man who had deserted her to feel once more that he had given the death blow to the woman who, of all those of his time, knew best how to love.²⁴Close

The author’s sympathies emerge in this appeal for the reader’s understanding.

Only in the very last sentence of the entire novel does the author speak in her own—but still ungendered—voice in response to a series of questions about what became of Oswald, what the world thought of his past conduct, and whether, after all that he had lost in Corinne, he was happy in his humdrum existence with Lucile. Adopting the first person for the first and only time, she replies, “I do not know, and, on that matter, I want neither to blame nor to absolve him.”²⁵Close This final intervention, though it concerns Oswald and not Corinne, can be read as a sign that Corinne’s plight has ultimately drawn its previously invisible author-narrator into a sympathetic understanding of her heroine. It is perhaps less that Corinne has been constructed in the image of her author, than that, as with the portraits of Mme de Staël, the author has come to resemble her heroine out of imaginative sympathy with her. Sympathetic understanding was, of course, the prerogative of the novel as Mme de Staël had defined the genre, attributing this quality to the influence of women in society. True to the female inspiration of the genre to which it belongs, the novel turns its attention to the phenomenon of genius, and comes into its own in its description of the nuances of the suffering soul of its genius heroine.

As far as Mme de Staël herself is concerned, readers were divided about the extent to which the genius that the novel credited her with was specifically female. Women writers such as Maria Edgeworth or George Sand may have taken inspiration or comfort from the combined example of Mme de Staël and her heroine, but in the laudatory essay that Sainte-Beuve wrote about her in 1835 he makes no reference to her sex when he remarks that “as art, as a poem, the novel of Corinne, would constitute an immortal monument in its own right,” and adds that it revealed its author to be an “an artist to the utmost degree.”²⁶Close His willingness to take women writers seriously, as implied by the existence of the volume, Portraits de femmes (Portraits of women), in which this essay appears, indicates that he did not share the hostility of his contemporaries toward talented women who include Mme de Lafayette, Mme de Sévigné, Mme Roland, and Mme de Duras. He is more than willing to use the word “genius” about women, although in the case of Mme de Staël he describes her intellect and the tone of her writing as “masculine.” He attributes to her what he claims is one of the defining characteristics of genius, which is to find itself paired with a rival (as instanced in the cases of Voltaire and Rousseau, Scott and Byron, or Goethe and Schiller), and suggests that Mme de Staël’s genius rival is the indubitably male Chateaubriand.²⁷Close This remark places her alongside the author of the Génie du christianisme, and implicitly acknowledges the fact that Corinne—female author and female protagonist notwithstanding—has its own truth to tell about the nature of genius.

By including the “other” of woman in its account, Corinne explores a truth about genius in general. The story of the failure of a woman genius serves the cause of all genius by ascribing its failures to some of its essential features. In doing so it also qualifies its author for the accolade of genius in her turn, but it would seem that it nonetheless fails to establish the possibility of a definitive gendering of genius as female. Subsequent depictions of genius in fiction almost always give the starring role to men, and reserve women for the role of helpmeet or destroyer. In Balzac’s Louis Lambert, it is Lambert who is the genius figure, and Mme de Staël—specifically described as the author of Corinne—is given a walk-on part as the person who has the honor of recognizing the boy’s talent, before disappearing from the story and leaving its male author to narrate the destruction of its hero’s male genius.