The Blazing World and Other Writings (Penguin Classics)

by Cavendish, Margaret

  The Blazing World is already improbably and hermaphroditically coupled with a serious treatise on natural philosophy, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, in both its printings of 1666 and 1668. In Observations Cavendish asserts that ‘Art produces hermaphroditical effects, that is, such as are partly natural, and partly artificial… [but] art itself is natural, and an effect of nature, and cannot produce anything that is beyond, or not within nature’. It is through a thoroughgoing pursuit of hybridization that Cavendish raises the Utopian possibility of a productive or honorific singularity. This singularity exceeds existing categories whilst asking to be read in terms of them, as a model of surpassing. Every invention and description of a fantastical compound authorizes the Duchess’s textual and personal singularity as authentically poetic and a new nature.

  In the epilogue to The Blazing World, Cavendish writes: ‘I added this piece of fancy to my philosophical observations, and joined them as two worlds at the ends of their poles; both for my own sake, to divert my studious thoughts … and to delight the reader with variety … But lest my fancy should stray too much, I chose such a fiction as would be agreeable to the subject I treated in former parts …’ (‘To the Reader’). Promiscuously mixing what she calls romancical, philosophical and fantastical elements, Cavendish composes a new generic mixture in The Blazing World, while the description itself thematizes the proliferation of new hybrids as the very principle of natural classification in the Blazing World.

  The Blazing World is an extravagant text which revels in the self-consciously fantastic representation of opulence, ornament, novelty and variety as well as the rhetoric of description and amplification, accounting and recounting. But this extravagance does not function simply in the service of commodity fetishism. Consumption is linked to the desire for reparation or restoration of various kinds: aesthetic, economic, sexual, ideological and epistemological. Though the pleasure of the account is figured as its own not inconsiderable reward, for both reader and writer, the text is haunted by the recognition of loss, denial and contingency. The text also attempts a comprehensive survey of the state of knowledge, and a tour of the disciplines, but in doing so repeatedly discovers the precariousness and self-interestedness of all truth-claims.

  The Blazing World combines a narrative of the effortless rise of a woman to absolute power, with a narrative of the liberty of the female soul and the emancipatory possibilities of Utopian speculation and writing specifically for women. Its first miracle conforms to the romance imperative of virtue rewarded. An anonymous ‘young Lady’ is abducted by a foreign merchant and, as the ship passes from ‘the very end point of the pole of that World, but even to another pole of another world’ (p. 3), owner and crew freeze to death and then ‘thaw, and corrupt’ (p. 4). The merchant’s initial crime against rank, property and propriety is appropriately punished by a fatal crossing between worlds, while the ‘distressed Lady’ is honoured with the highest recognition of her innate merit: ‘the Emperor rejoicing, made her his wife, and gave her an absolute power to rule and govern all that world as she pleased’.

  The sudden metamorphosis of the anonymous young Lady into the Empress of the Blazing World occasions the text’s first extended blazon or catalogue, which is later virtually reproduced at crucial moments in the staging of the Empress’s domestic and imperial power. The description proper of the site of the Blazing World is inaugurated by the introduction of the woman as stranger, but it is she who becomes the most wonderful sight in the Blazing World, a reversal marked by her ritual blazoning and re-presentation as Empress, newly attired in the literally blazing costume of power:

  Her accoutrement after she was made Empress, was as followeth: On her head she wore a cap of pearl, and a half-moon of diamonds just before it; on the top of her crown came spreading over a broad carbuncle, cut in the form of the sun; her coat was of pearl, mixt with blue diamonds, and fringed with red ones; her buskins and sandals were of green diamonds: in her left hand she held a buckler, to signify the defence of her dominions; which buckler was made of that sort of diamond as has several different colours; and being cut and made in the form of an arch, showed like a rainbow; in her right hand she carried a spear made of white diamond, cut like the tail of a blazing-star, which signified that she was ready to assault those that proved her enemies.(pp. 13–14)

  Building on the rhetorical centrality of the aristocratic figure of the blazon in her Blazing World, Cavendish’s Empress is a kind of hermaphrodized warrior queen, whose representation recalls the cult of Elizabeth I and the masques of Henrietta Maria.21 In the preface to the Blazing World, Cavendish crowns herself ‘Margaret the First’ – ‘though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First’ – in an ironic trope of the female author’s construction of, and control over, a textual empire, and an imperial narrative: ‘And although I have neither power, time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not to be mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own.’ In the course of the narrative the Empress succeeds in putting down rebellion both at home and abroad, through a combination of the seductive manipulation of self-image as allegorical display, and a campaign of terror through burning.

  The self-coronation of ‘Margaret the First’ in the preface, partly authorized by the Duke of Newcastle’s commendatory poem which precedes it, is displaced into another more extravagant story of husbandly permission which Cavendish herself calls ‘romancical’. The function of the blazon in this narrative subverts its customary role in the patriarchal coding of a figure of woman. Here, the catalogue dwells on the account and itemization of costume, materials, colours and the emblematic accessories of power. It functions iconographically to ratify a seduction which has already occurred within the narrative – the seduction of the Blazing World by the young lady – and which is now extended to the reader. The blazon also serves to externalize and further materalize a blazing virtue which has already literally preserved the heroine from rape and death by exposure.

  Though the rise to power of Cavendish’s Empress is staged through the authorizing gaze of men, her blazoning by the female narrator is at once a description and demonstration, for the reader, of the Empress’s absolute power over her new male subjects. It is a second moment of wonder and the point at which the young lady, now reconstructed as Empress, exceeds masculine ratification. The literal body of female virtue is never made available for representation. Indeed it is through the miraculous abandonment of corporeality that the souls of women are able to commune with each other as platonic lovers, and move freely and invisibly from one world and one body to another.

  ‘Margaret the First’ recuperates the blazon in a tableau of female investiture and, in doing so, stages a different power relation: the female author’s creation and description of an obscure imperial heroine as unnamed stand-in. Developing the story of reciprocal love and service of Travellia and the Queen of Amity in ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’, The Blazing World turns out to be a utopia compulsively interested in the erotics of female doubling and collaboration. The conventionally labyrinthine geography of the Blazing World is matched by the intricately recursive plotting of its narrative of mutually beneficial platonic love between women in the context of their enabling and prestigious marriages to largely absent husbands.

  Embedded within the romance plot of The Blazing World is a mirror-narrative of fortunate female:female abduction, of which none other than the ‘Duchess of Newcastle’ is the beneficiary. Through the introduction of ‘Margaret Newcastle’ as the Empress’s scribe, the Duchess as author-scribe of The Blazing World stages a self-confirming dialogue on the production of fictional worlds as an immensely pleasurable compensatory activity for women:

  The Duchess of Newcastle was most earnest and industrious to make her world, because she had none at present (p. 98)… which world, after it was made, appeared so curious and full of variety; so
well ordered and wisely governed, that it cannot possibly be expressed by words, nor the delight and pleasure which the Duchess took in making this world of her own. (pp. 100–101)

  Like the body of the Empress, the Duchess’s world is not available for description, although its existence and excellence is verified by the Empress’s admiration.

  The Blazing World offers an heroicized sexual allegory of Cavendish’s own life and times: ‘abducted’ by the course of the Civil War from the royalist kingdom of EFSI (England, Scotland, France and Ireland), she makes a brilliant marriage in exile. As a Utopian space of reparation, wish-fulfilment and plenitude triangulated by representations of pre- and post-revolutionary England (’EFSI’ and ‘E’), the Blazing World offers an imaginary vantage point from which to observe, critique and revise the course of history, the state of knowledge and the forms of power. Insofar as The Blazing World provides a space in which the historical Duchess of Newcastle can vindicate and demonstrate her infamous ‘singularity’, she also distinguishes between the Utopian properties of her fictional ‘description’ and the limited aesthetic compensations provided by the book in which it appears. Like all Utopian texts, The Blazing World cannot forget its place of origin, its ‘true relation’.

  Cavendish’s final gesture, simultaneously inviting and defensive, seeks to ground the efficacy of her description in reception, in the seduction of readers. She extends to these projected subjects both a promise and a threat:

  if any should like the world I have made, and be willing to be my subjects, they may imagine themselves such, and they are such, I mean in their minds, fancies or imaginations; but if they cannot endure to be subjects, they may create worlds of their own, and govern themselves as they please. But let them have a care not to prove unjust usurpers and to rob me of mine … (p. 160)

  This uneasy dialectic between insolent self-sufficiency and the desire for ‘subjects’ whose existence will ratify her independent sovereignty, is characteristic of Cavendish’s authorial rhetoric and narrative projections. In such textual strategies it is possible to witness the simultaneously defiant and abject construction of the publishing woman writer and her implied readers, present and future. She emerges as an ironically self-designated hermaphroditic spectacle and as the self-proclaimed producer of hybrid creations and inimitable discourses. Such a claim to complete singularity, so often thematized in Cavendish’s writing, should be situated in terms of her experiments with the generic frames of feminized romance and masculinized utopia. The prose fiction included here represents a powerful negotiation of gender and genre, and of sexual ideology, privileging the hermaphroditic as an arena of mobility and supplementarity, particularly enabling to women. More straightforwardly, the proliferation of literal and figurative couples and doubles in these and other texts by Cavendish, and their actual or implicitly contractual basis, dramatizes an heroic figure of woman, who ingeniously turns patriarchalized scenarios of power and seduction to her own benefit.

  Cavendish’s narratives of female virtue rewarded are supplemented by complex authorial commentaries or meta-narratives. Through them she addresses the reader who, located in the world beyond the text, necessarily escapes her control. It is this extratextual, historically unspecific and mobile relation which constitutes the most important seduction of all, for it is the gaze of the reader which will guarantee the Utopian viability of the author’s signature, outside me closed system of the library catalogue or publisher’s list. My role as editor and introducer adds another level to this recursive process of female collaboration. On behalf of, and in the spirit of, Cavendish’s own authorial interventions and ambitions, this collection solicits new readers and new readings.

  NOTES

  1 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Duchess of Newcastle’ [1925], in Virginia Woolf, Women and Writing, ed. Michele Barrett, London: The Women’s Press, 1979, 79.

  2 See Patricia Crawford’s invaluable, ‘Women’s Published Writings 1600–1700’, in Women in English Society 1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior, London: Methuen, 1985, 211–82. The only comparable figure is Aphra Behn, whose first play was produced in London in 1670. On sixteenth and early seventeenth century women’s writing, see Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987, and Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric 1520–1640, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

  3 For Cavendish’s relation to the new science see Lisa Sarasohn, ‘A Science Turned Upside Down : Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish’, Huntington Library Quarterly 47 (1984), 289–307, Sylvia Bowerbank, ‘The Spider’s Delight: Margaret Cavendish and the “Female” Imagination’ in Women in the Renaissance, eds K. Farrell, E.H. Hageman, A.F. Kinney, Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 187–203, and Gerald D. Meyer, The Scientific Lady in England, 1650–1760, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955, ch. 1. For a broader introduction see M. Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. For an overview of a number of recent studies of Cavendish’s relation to the new science see Eric Lewis, ‘The Legacy of Margaret Cavendish’, Perspectives on Science 9 (2001), 341–64.

  4 ‘A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life’, in Nature’s Pictures, London: A. Maxwell, 1656, 368–391. ‘A True Relation’ was dropped from the second edition of 1671, presumably because its authenticating function was no longer considered necessary. On Cavendish and autobiography see Dolores Paloma, ‘Margaret Cavendish: Defining the Female Self, Women’s Studies 7 (1980), 55–66, and Mary Beth Rose, ‘Gender, Genre and History: Seventeenth-Century English Women and the Art of Autobiography’, in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Mary Beth Rose, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986, 245–78.

  5 On Cavendish’s drama see Sophie Tomlinson, ‘“My Brain the Stage”: Margaret Cavendish and the Fantasy of Female Performance’, in Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760, eds Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss, London: Routledge, 1992, and Susan J. Wiseman, ‘Gender and Status in Dramatic Discourse: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’, in Women/Writing/History 1640–1740, eds Isobel Grundy and Susan J. Wiseman, London: Batsford, 1992.

  6 As well as Sara Heller Mendelson’s elegant and condensed biography, The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies, Brighton: Harvester, 1987, there are two full-length studies: Douglas Grant’s readable and reliable, Margaret the First, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957, and Kathleen Jones, A Glorious Fame: The Life of Margaret Cavendish, London: Bloomsbury, 1988. Other helpful overviews of Cavendish’s life and work are Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica. Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800, London: Virago, 1989, ch.3, and Marilyn L. Williamson, Raising Their Voices: British Women Writers, 1650–1750, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990, ch.1.

  7 Some notable exceptions are the sympathetic, generically motivated accounts offered by B.G. MacCarthy, Women Writers: Their Contribution to the English Novel 1621–1744, Cork: Cork University Press, 1944, Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction 1558–1700, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985, ch.16, and Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–88, London: Virago, 1988. Catherine Gallagher, ‘Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England’, Genders I (1988) 24–39, offers a textually sophisticated reading of Cavendish as ‘Tory feminist’.

  8 Two specialized check-lists agree on this: R.W. Gibson and J. Max Patrick, ‘Utopias and Dystopias 1500–1750’, in St. Thomas More: A Preliminary Bibliography of his Works and of Moreana to the Year 1750, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961, and Lyman Tower Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature 1516–1985: an annotated, chronological bibliography, New York: Garland, 1988. See also, Kate Lilley, ‘Blazing Worlds: Seventeenth Century Women’s Utopian Writing’, in Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760, eds Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss, London: Routledge, 1992.

  9 See Gallagher, Todd, Salzman and Sarasohn. For an early, re
latively favourable discussion of Cavendish as an anti-decadent prose writer see MacCarthy. Salzman includes a fully modernized and repunctuated text of The Blazing World in his valuable recent collection, An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

  10 Samuel Pepys, Diary, 11 April 1667, eds Robert Latham and William Matthews, Vol.8, London: Bell and Hyman, 1974, 163.

  11 It is important for Cavendish’s writing, and my own discussion, that ‘hermaphrodite’ can mean, consisting of, or combining the characteristics of, both sexes, and more generally, a person or thing combining any two opposite qualities or attributes.

  12 For an account of Margaret Cavendish’s dress, see Mendelson, 46. James Fitzmaurice offers an interesting discussion of the frontispiece portraits of Cavendish as images of the ‘solitary genius as melancholic’ in ‘Fancy and the Family: Self-characterizations of Margaret Cavendish’, Huntington Library Quarterly 53 (1990), 198–209.

  13 See, respectively, Bowerbank, 197–201; Mendelson, 38; MacCarthy, 131; Frank Manuel and Fritzie Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979, 7.

  14 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own [1929], St Albans: Triad/Panther, 1979, 59–60.

  15 Dorothy Osborne, Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, ed. Kingsley Hart, London: Folio Society, 58.

  16 See S.I. Mintz, ‘The Duchess of Newcastle’s Visit to the Royal Society’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology (1952), 168–76.

  17 On romance as ‘feminized’ see Helen Hackett, ‘“Yet tell me some such fiction”: Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the “femininity” of Romance’, in Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760, eds Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss, London: Routledge, 1992, and Rosalind Ballaster, Seductive Forms, Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.

  18 For a brilliantly suggestive discussion of ‘the gaze of wonder’ in relation to the blazon and the prospect see Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property, London: Methuen, 1987, ch.7.