Margaret Cavendish
–
The Blazing World –
The Context.
Margaret Cavendish,
Duchess of Newcastle, being not as famous as the other writers we shall allude
to in the course, it might be useful to give you a few pieces of information
about the historical, biographical and textual context of her Description of the Blazing World. We
shall then comment upon several particles taken from her fanciful worlds.
Nota bene:
If you have never read a book written in the seventeenth century, take the time
to skim through the pages of a good anthology covering the period so that you
understand what the issues (political, philosophical, “artistic” were). Take
the time to have a look at a book on architecture, what the Fine Arts were like
then, and what kind of music was then played and listened to. Key terms such as
baroque, mannerism, and classicism should be known to you but we will have to
come back to these terms as they are usually carelessly used – even by scholars
and journalists who cannot resist importing art history terms into literary
analysis without – most of the time – further explanation on what they actually
mean when they appropriate them.
The Circumstances
I.
Margaret the frondeuse
Margaret Cavendish was
born in 1623 (she died at the age of 50 in 1673). Born an aristocrat, she
married William, Marquis (later Duke) of
We chose to describe
Margaret as a frondeuse
not as a derogatory judgment of some sort, which is miles away from our sphere
of activity, but to emphasize the fact that, in our view, Margaret Cavendish,
however extraordinary she certainly was, had been influenced and impressed by
the attitude and personae of those
aristocratic French ladies who nobly defied conventions during the Thirty
Years’ War by sometimes joining their husbands on the battlefields or taking
over the administration and management of their family estates while their
husbands were away. The frondeuses
(literally, women become heroines in movement as well as in artistic and
philosophical contemplation) were the updated version of the timeless Amazon
icon and undoubtedly served the Duchess of Newcastle as role models.
II.
Her achievements, literary and otherwise
Margaret Cavendish is the
author of moral tales, speculative fictions, romances, scientific treatises,
letters, poems, orations, closet drama, an autobiography and a biography of her
husband. Through experiments in different genres and due to the varied quality
of her writings, Cavendish emerges as an ironically self-designated spectacle,
and as the self-proclaimed producer of hybrid creations and inimitable
discourses. It is clear Margaret Cavendish was devoted to personal excess and
that she cherished impure and unexpected hybrids in her life as well as in her
literary output. Her writings are not only copious but also polemical and
formally experimental.
Kate Lilley, in the
introduction to the Penguin edition, lists all the genres with which her
productions flirt: moral fable, romance novella, fictionalized treatise,
autobiographical memoir, utopia and dystopia. Neither
should one forget that she published her books under her own name (an extremely
rare thing then) and that, in her prefaces, she insisted on, but also played
with the notion of authorship. When her authorship was challenged, she even
used ironic self-defence: “for I have not spoke so much as I have writ, nor
writ so much as I have thought” and mocked her detractors comparing their fates
to that of the legendary pirate Drake: “Let them search the author or
authoress!”
Besides “The Blazing
World”, the Penguin edition includes “The Contract” and “Assaulted and Pursued
Chastity”, two pieces which are not devoid of interest. The three tales are
based on the same pattern: a young girl is thrown into a new environment and
makes discoveries of all kind (the first picara in literary history???).
In the case of the brief “Contract”, the first page hurls the reader into the
chain of disruptions a family has to undergo and which leaves the girl to her
fate. She soon discovers that both the Viceroy and the Duke are in love with
her. There is a digression on what a masque is supposed to be but after the
happy celebrations, there is a general melancholy that seems to hover above
this romance. Some letters are then exchanged (epistolary fiction was not born
in the 18th century!!!) and the action then jumps to the rivalry
between the Duke and the Viceroy. The tale ends with the ruling of a lawsuit
that opposes the Duke and the Duchess: Divorce!
“Assaulted and Pursued
Chastity” reads even more as a tale especially as its introduction (after a few
cautionary paragraphs against the dangers of travelling) is very much that of a
fabula: “In
the
Margaret Cavendish is
also the author of a book of poems Poems and Fancies
and a collection of philosophical essays Fancies
and Philosophical Fancies, followed by The
World’s Olio. The Blazing World was
first published in 1655 as The Blazing
World. Philosophical and Physical Opinions and reissued in 1668 as Grounds of Natural Philosophy.
III.
A description of The Description
of a
The usual reading of the Blazing World is either to see it as a
by-product of personality and a receptacle for speculative ideas or to consider
it from a feminist point of view. But The Blazing World could equally be
tagged as the first Science Fiction novel (and we could add quite a long list
of alternative labels), which explains why we shall not discuss the text from a
purely generic point of view in this course: it is another textual evidence to
illustrate how vain labelling (however sophisticated it might be) is in the
case of such a singular creativity as Margaret Cavendish’s. In the seventeenth
century, comments were already misleading: the famous diarist Samuel Pepys wrote that “the whole story of this lady is a
romance, and all she doth is romantic” and three centuries later Virginia Woolf said that she found in her work “a vision of
loneliness and riot as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the
roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death”.
The fact is that besides
her extraordinary and sometimes almost surrealistic flights of fancy, Margaret
Cavendish was gifted with both an exceptional brain and a ravishing sense of
humour which made her scientific, political, linguistic and philosophical views
so sharp and puzzling at the same time. Reading Cavendish is a bit like looking
at oneself not under a microscope but in a distorting looking glass. Satire
becomes a reflexive anamorphosis.
The text actually starts
after an exegesis in verse by her husband and a formidable address to the
reader that leaves one rather baffled and breathless (see commentaries further
down) with the story of a merchant who wants to elope with his beloved to some
foreign country. The text is divided into two very uneven parts, the first of
which extends from page 120 to 202 and the second one is a mere twenty or so
pages long. The first part recounts the wreckage and the fate of the poor
narrator left to her own destiny. She is the only survivor but resiliently
explores the new territory where she soon meets all sorts of strange creatures
(bearmen, foxmen, geesemen and then satyrs) which guide and help her to reach
the Blazing World and its Emperor. On her way, she discusses all sorts of
philosophical or practical ideas such as the design of a kind of hovercraft
(described p. 129). In a typically Cavendish order, she then describes the
Emperor’s palace, the life at Court, some of the customs of the country, the
religious situation and beliefs and finishes with practical comments such as
housing for instance. Then follows a
long part, probably the most fascinating, which extends from page 136 to 179 :
it consists in a series of conversations that the newly-promoted Empress has
with some strange creatures inhabiting the place: Bird-men are interested in
the natural elements (138/39) and discuss
the substance of things with her ; Bear-men are experts in experimental
philosophy and optics (140-42) and exchange their views with the Empress on
astronomy ; Fish- and Worm-men are more puzzled by questions appertaining to
natural philosophy (biology, zoology, reproduction etc.) 143-53 ; the ape-men
are chemists (154-58) and, last but not least the spider-men (mathematicians),
lice-men (geometricians) and logicians (magpie, parrot and jackdaw) speculate
on logics and speculative theories through the remaining pages. The debate
becomes bellicose and the Empress becomes tired of these confrontations; she
then feels the need to find a scribe to write all the thoughts that have lately
sprung to her mind and the scribe happens (180) to be nobody else but a Duchess
of Newcastle who befriends the Empress. They discuss together more terrestrial
matters such as the limitations of a kingdom. In the second part (starting on
page 203), a war breaks out, they travel all together back to where they came
from (216) and the two lady-friends rejoice in the company of the Emperor
(221).
(The
following pages are not academic literary commentaries; they are reading notes
which focus on the most striking moments in the narrative from either a stylistic
or epistemological point of view).
I.
Dedication and Address to
the reader.
Dedication: (p. 121)
This short elegy written
in iambic pentameter is the loving expression of a husband’s admiration for his
wife’s talent. It is not devoid of
humour either and promptly introduces the central questioning in Cavendish’s
work: what are the circumstances of intellectual creation? The author of the
poem evokes the past and reminds readers that not so long before, the “Elder
World” had considered that the world was divided into three parts (namely
Europe, Africa and what was vaguely known as the Orient) until Columbus
discovered a new World (“America ‘ tis nam’d”). The comparison between
Moreover,
Address to the reader: (p.123-4)
Margaret Cavendish does
not mince her words from the start. She goes straight to the point in a rather
ruthless manner by tackling the problem of what fiction is by differentiating
fancy and reason but instead of adopting a Cartesian faith into the cogito,
immediately adds that her canon fodder is directed at causal effects rather
than reason itself. She even insists on an apparent paradox: “The end of reason
is truth; the end of fancy is fiction and gives reason to contemporary art
critics who define the creative act as creating a vision but also imposing it
on others.
She then comes back on a
favourite subject of speculation, which is an attempt (and she makes sure she
never reaches a satisfying neutralizing definition of the genre of her own
piece of writing). She quotes Lucian, justifying in that respect our own
reading of The Blazing World as a
science-fiction narrative[1]. She then described the
three-layer nature of her work: it is meant to be romancical,
philosophical and fantastical.
The address ends on a
more tongue in cheek comment on what her aims are in claiming authorship for
her production. The tone is arrogant, thought provoking but certainly very
humorous too. She avows she cannot vie with Caesar or Alexander the Macedonian
but she is definitely determined to make a first name of herself: she will be
Margaret 1st!
II.
Clinging to one’s world:
The Fight Club. (From “After the Empress …” to “…, as love.” p.162-4)
After a first series of
confrontations with hybrid creatures who/which are all experts on various
aspects of natural philosophy (biology, astronomy, physics etc.), the Empress
is considering the spiritual dimension of her new world and how to wield this
efficient power tool to rule her Blazing World to perfection (in other words,
at this stage in the text, the narrator is tackling “religious conversion” and
proselytism in general). Yet, what is striking is that this passage is also an
oblique satire (through the exposure the Empress’s many contradictions) of the
supposedly perfect design of a new world. It would be a gross mistake to
believe that the protagonist is the mouthpiece for the author’s views on
monarchy or religious matters; the narrator’s role in the narrative should be
examined closely.
The structural
progression of the narrative makes the Empress’s present reflection (“she was
troubled, that so wise and knowing a people should have no more knowledge of
the divine truth”) quite preposterous when we remember that the narrator was
quick to remark earlier in the book that diversity is the foremost quality in
individuals (“as there were different sorts of creatures, so they had also
different ways of respirations” 147). This lack of religious tolerance in the
Empress’s views, especially when one considers her otherwise exceptionally
broad intellectual horizons, is soon condemned by the narrator as the congregation
of women she made up turns into a bunch of bigots (“but the women, which
generally had quick wits, subtle conceptions, clear understandings, and solid
judgments, became, in a short time, very devout and zealous sisters”, 162). It
is a well known fact that the slave-trade for instance initially found
intellectual backing among liberal circles and it is necessary to pay great
attention to style in a piece of literature of the period. Although a first
reading of the text might give you the impression that everything the Empress
does is described with superlatives, it nevertheless is a fact that the number
of litotes and “but” link-words is such that you should be careful about the
irony of the narrative situation.
The Empress is not just
happy about having created and domesticated a New World ; she wants to ensure
that her reign is maintained and unsurpassed (“fearing that in time they would
grow weary, and desert the divine truth, following their own fancies, and
living according to their own desires”, 163). Do not forget that she forbade
the bear-men to use their powerful “glasses” in the previous pages as they were
considered as inferior creatures; in fact, she wants to make sure that her
subjects keep on believing in a “revealed” religion, not something they can
speculate on or check by themselves. This is where superstition may play a
decisive role. She refers to alchemy and exploits a folk-tale about a mountain
“that did burn in flames of fire” to make her subjects mesmerized by the
supernatural power of the emblematic sun-stone. This Cavendishian
fire-like version of the Holy Grail establishes a link between her subjects and
the power above, a mission that they will never be able to carry out to the
full and which ensures a complete dedication because it is precisely superhuman
and unattainable.
In a typical Cavendish
flight of fancy, the narrative turns into the description of what could
otherwise be labelled as architectural follies. Yet, this fanciful digression
is not entirely disconnected from what has been said earlier: keeping the
subjects busy with a pharaonic sublime project
(building two extraordinary Gothic chapels) is maybe the best way to subject
them to your (almost) divine power. The artful description of the chapels is as
dazzling, seducing and hypnotizing as it is artificial. One might be tempted to
read the passage as an allegory for the Empress’s mental constructions. Yet the
mannerism of the architecture is also to be read as an act of political
propaganda as Baroque architecture was used in other parts of
III.
Entrée royale: a character named “The Duchess of
The passage under
scrutiny takes place after the Empress’s patience has been severely tried by
the arguments put forward by the spirits. She is now exhausted by the long
series of philosophical confrontations she had with the several groups of
creatures she had sent for on specific matters. It is now time for her to put
down to paper (and maybe to posterity?) the fruits of her conversations. She is
now to write her “Cabbala” but she needs a scribe to help her in that matter
and asks advice from the spirits.
The selection of a worthy
scribe is the occasion for comic relief so to speak. Wit and sarcasm alternate
in the comments made by the spirits on the possible applicants for the job.
Always ready for the best (and always discarding the rest), the arrogant
Empress suggests lists of names: Would Aristotle Pythagoras, Plato or Epicurus
do? No, answer the spirits, they are so “wedded to their own opinions, that
they would never have the patience to be scribes” 181. Why not Galileo, Gassendus, Descartes, Helmont,
Hobbes then? No, insist the spirits “they are so self-conceited that they would
scorn to be scribes to a woman” 181. Behind the “dramatic irony” of the
narrative situation, lies also an attack on the male-chauvinistic vision of the
arts. But the climax in dramatic irony is reached when the spirits suggest no
one else but the Duchess of Newcastle as a scribe.
The narrative situation
becomes blatantly original. The Description
of the Blazing World becomes the narrative by an author who writes a tale
in which the heterodiegetic narrator introduces a
character who is the projection of the author(ess),
that is to say herself, as an alter ego to the protagonist. Needless to say
such an entrée royale
is made even more spectacular as she is chosen among an illustrious gallery of
historical geniuses with which the new character does not ever fear comparison.
The new character may not be le roi soleil but certainly is l’autoresse solaire! Not only is her entrée into the narrative magnificent
but there are also litotes to enhance her striking and no nonsense singularity:
“although she is not one of the most learned, eloquent, witty and ingenious,
yet is she a plain and rational writer, for the principle of her writings, is
sense and reason” 181.
The first interview
between the two ladies concerns the Jewish Cabbala and the Duchess of Newcastle
immediately proves to be an apt talker on the subject. She then seems to be the
one who brings sense and reason in the way the empress considers her
philosophical objects. She insists for instance on the fact that a “vulgar
interpretation is superior to a mystical way of interpreting it” and towards
the end of the passage the philosophical
dimension fades away to give place to the more overtly political. On this more
pragmatic field (an actual terrain d’entente really!), the two lady-friends, we are told,
become “platonic lovers, although they were both females”! The Duchess
eventually suggests that the Empress write a poetical or romancical
Cabbala (“wherein you can use metaphors, allegories, similitudes,
etc. and interpret them as you please”)
IV.
Virtual worlds. (From “What, said the
Empress…” to “…laws and customs of several nations.” p.185-9)
As one student neatly
remarked (Kirk Sides), in this passage, “Cavendish presents the creative
maturation of two women suddenly given the power (or shown their own inherent
power) to create, rule, administer or dissolve worlds of their own”. It is not
an exclusive opportunity for privileged ladies of rank. The Empress enquires
“What, can any mortal be a creator? – Yes, answered the spirits” 185) Anyone
indeed can be a creator but does any one need, aspire to, benefit from being a
creator? The Duchess will be quick on the uptake to prove to her lady-friend
that the question is not a matter of power but one of the nature of your
creations or worlds.
The whole passage can be
read of course as a defence of a “British” empiricism against the continental
influences of a Cartesian rationalism but I prefer to see in this most
convincing and thought-provoking debate by the Duchess a by-product of the
chance encounter in a seventeenth century mind of atomism (the reference to
Epicurus is there) and a certain qui bono
attitude towards existence. The Duchess tries at length to convince the Empress
that the material world is gross indeed and that boring duties and physical
constraints accompany the privileges of being master of a material world. Her Vanitas-like demonstration rather tends towards the
creation of an immaterial world which, in a way, is not that far from the
immaterial “insignificance (in the Empress’s eyes) of the native citizens of
the Blazing World as described earlier in the narrative. Matter is the matter ;
the mind can always take care of itself.
The Empress does not
reject those views but rather neutralizes them by assimilating them to her own
ambitious projects: she will have two worlds. In other words, she will have MORE,
more of everything and anything. In fact she is advocating virtual realities
(this reality and other parallel realities) which paradoxically give so much
importance to the solid (and often sordid) reality. Conversely, the Duchess, if
we read the text carefully, appears much more in favour of simulation as fancy
is according to her a category of reason and vice-versa.
V.
Girls want to have fun:
The nuances of the climate. (From “One time the Duchess…” to the end, p. 221-3)
Bearing the following headers in
mind you can now try your hand and draw your own commentary on the passage
suggested for criticism:
- Taking the air or drowning: a
refreshing view on art and literature.
- A CAMP attitude towards objects,
attributes and attire.
- Collation & music: The
unbearable lightness of being.
VI.
Epilogue to the Reader:
The Trojan Mare. (p.224-5)
Before going any further,
one should question the voice which speaks in this epilogue? Is it still the heterodiegetic narrator of the main narrative or is it the
author? You will find clues to this at the end of the passage.
Reading these last two
pages might change completely your mind about what you have read and even
prompt you to re-read it all as confusion is introduced. The narrator is now
claiming to be not only the Empress (was the narrator and the Empress in the
tale speaking the same voice, or is it another narrator?) but also the
Authoress of a whole world. Besides the hubris
and the comic inherent in such over-stated and bombastic claims, there lies a
central question: what power is sought after and to what ends? The voice that
speaks in the epilogue is in fact challenging the motives of heroic conquerors
but Cavendish does not stoop to conquer either; she advocates in fact heterological (that is confrontational, conflictual,
non-penetrative or assimilative) relations among subjects of mind or matter for
the benefit of Life and the celebration of the powers of the imagination. A
very conservative and outrageously efficient form of revolution indeed!
[1] One can easily date the first examples of
science-fiction narratives back to the time of the writing of Gilgamesh
(in which the story is set off by the arrival of a friend, a kind of twin soul,
arriving from another space and the revolution it occasions in the narrator’s
sensibility) but, more specifically speaking, to Roman antiquity with Lucian of
Samosata’s Vera Historia
(150 AD) and Apuleius. In the 16th century Thomas More’s Utopia 1516 as well as Campanella’s
La città del sole 1623 are obvious examples
followed by quite a number of them in the following century: Francis Bacon’s New
Atlantis 1626, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan 1651, Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem 1600 (probably the first
dystopia ever), Margaret Cavendish’s The
Description of a New world, called the Blazing World 1668 and A.Kircher’s Itinerarium
Exstaticum 1656. Other better known examples can
be found in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where the genre developed
into what was then described as « scientific romances ». As a matter
of fact, the first occurrence of the term is to be found in William Wilson’s A
Little Earnest Book Upon a Great Old Subject 1851 (“In science fiction, the
revealed truths of science may be given, interwoven with a pleasant story which
itself may be poetical and true’’) and we also may refer to early twentieth
century oddities such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan or Edgar
Wallace’s King Kong, at a time when the phrase was being vulgarized
by Hugo Gernsback
(1894/1967) but it is in the sixties that a new wave appeared probably thanks
to the promises that a burgeoning new science based on computers announced. It
established itself into many different trends: totalitarian dystopias,
new age utopias, and SF also became the material for more and more experimental
prose (Will Self said that Ballard’s short stories then were the zenith in
experimental fiction and both writers are avowed admirers of the most poetic of
all science-fictionalists: William Seward Burroughs
who updated the genre into a most singular manner with The Naked Lunch in 1959 and many other writings) The best
definition of this new science fiction is maybe to be attributed to the author
of Billion Year Spree or Non-Stop, Brian Aldiss, who said: “Science fiction is the search for a
definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our
advanced but confused state of knowledge” or even more laconically “Hubris
clobbered by nemesis’’. In a nutshell, we might suggest that the main themes,
quite beyond the stereotypes associated to the genre, are combining alienation,
change and a potential for stretching the imagination into alternative logics.
Sex and sexual metamorphosis (of which gender-crossing is only one of many
alternatives) also form a distinctive feature which operates through the manipulation
and the re-creation of types and stereotypes. In science-fiction novels, up to
the latest cyberpunk narratives, traditional gender-types have never been so
strong.