By Juliana Hall (Fall 2022)
While men in power, both fictional and real, are consistently praised for their actions and excused for their wrongdoings, women in power are criticized or portrayed as weak and unworthy of titles. In The Blazing World, however, the relationship between the two female characters and the power they each possess, or desire, is at the core of the story. Drawing on her life experiences to portray these dynamics, Margaret Cavendish creates a utopia known as “The Blazing World” where women have autonomy, freedom, and power they normally would not hold in seventeenth-century society and literature.
Margaret Lucas Cavendish was a seventeenth-century philosopher, poet, scientist, fiction-writer, and playwright; a list that would garner praise and adoration today but only had her called “mad” and “pretentious” (Cunning) while she was alive. Born Margaret Lucas in 1623, she grew up in a royalist family. She was not given a formal education, but she was an avid reader and began to pen her ideas at an early age. At the time, it was “unseemly for a woman to be publicly intellectual” (Cunning), but she was always able to converse with her brother, John, who was already an established scholar. He would later go onto become a founding member of the Royal Society, of which Cavendish was the first woman to be invited to participate. In 1643, she applied to be part of Queen Henrietta Maria’s court as a maid of honor. When the queen was exiled to France a year later, Cavendish accompanied her and later met William Cavendish whom she married. They remained in exile until the restoration of the crown in 1660. Cavendish’s marriage is important because in the seventeenth century, it was unusual for a publisher to print a woman’s philosophical and scientific work, though she was such an impressive writer that she was able to publish some of her work without assistance. However, William Cavendish’s connections were able to boost her other works to be published as well. William Cavendish also hosted meetings he called the “Cavendish Circle” where philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, and Kenelm Digby would gather. Cavendish attempted to engage with them, but many of the figures at these meetings would not engage directly with her. In response to this, she interacted with their views from a critical lens in the form of correspondence between herself and a third person (Cunning). Cavendish was also set apart by the topics she wrote about. Her subjects were ones that a woman never wrote about. Focuses on her personal desires and circumstances, aspirations to fame, and even her personal opinions on anything, “from love to the scientific method” (Villareal) were unheard of from women writers. Though she was an impressive scientist and writer, Cavendish’s limitations as a woman set her back from being able to achieve what men of the time could. It is no surprise then that she turned to writing to escape these bounds.
Bookended by author’s notes addressed to the reader, Margaret Lucas Cavendish’s The Blazing World is an early utopian novel. It begins with a damsel in distress, a Lady who has been kidnapped by a merchant who claims to be in love with her. When a fatal storm strikes, leaving the Lady the only survivor, she finds herself in a new land known as The Blazing World. She is greeted with kindness by the men who live there, though they are not purely human men. They are hybrids, half animal half human; she meets the bear-men first, who she remarks are not the most beautiful people she has ever seen but they showed her “all civility and kindness imaginable” (Cavendish). They decide to bring her to their Emperor and along the way, the Lady meets several other groups that live in this world; fox-men, bird-men, satyrs, green-colored people. Everyone is kind to each other, and everyone speaks the same language. Upon meeting the Emperor, he quickly decides that the Lady should be made Empress and gives her “absolute power to rule and govern all [the] world as she pleased” (Cavendish). After her appointment as Empress, she is asked by the Spirits if she would like a scribe. Eventually, it is decided her scribe will be the Duchess of Newcastle, who is later described as the Empress’s Platonick Lover. When the Duchess, who is later revealed to be Margaret Cavendish herself, desires her own world to rule over, the Spirits explain that she cannot take over a world that is already occupied, but instead she can create her own world to be Empress over. The Empress and Duchess learn that any mortal can create their own celestial world. In the letter to the reader at the end of the text, Margaret Cavendish reveals that she is the Duchess and encourages anyone to go out and create their own world so long as they do not try to usurp hers. It is an inspiring and motivating note to end the story on, leaving all readers, not only women, to go out and use their imagination to create a world that serves their desires.
Since The Blazing World only has two primary female characters, their roles are vital to the plot and also serve to subvert gendered tropes of the seventeenth century. Women had limited agency in the seventeenth century; society was dominated by men and the patriarchy, a fact that is evident when looking at how Cavendish’s publication was made easier when she utilized her husband’s connections. Many women in the seventeenth century were not publishing under their own names as well, instead choosing to use a male pseudonym “mainly to escape criticism and protect their reputation as women,” and some used pseudonyms to “sell work that might otherwise not have been taken seriously” (Ezell). Cavendish’s tenacity carries through her life and into her work with her strong female characters.
Throughout the story, Cavendish portrays both the Empress and the Duchess as women in power, showing how they grapple with the power they have either been given or want for themselves. The Empress is given power while the Duchess desires a world of her own that she would have power over. As it is revealed that the Duchess is actually a portrayal of Cavendish herself, she is showing her own desires and beliefs for women to have power, especially power over men. All of the characters that the Empress and Duchess interact with are men, though it is mentioned that there are women in the Blazing World as well. Margaret Cavendish’s experience in the royal family likely influenced her desire for power and the characters of the Empress and Duchess within the story. Since she grew up in a royalist family and then worked for the queen, her desire to see women in power and the restoration of a monarchy makes sense to be included in the story. This is prominent when the Duchess expresses her desire for power, saying she “shall never be at quiet until I be [an Empress of a World]” (Cavendish). Her desire for power allows Cavendish to express her worldly desires for the same power that men hold in society and also her desire to be taken seriously in philosophical and scholarly spaces.
It is for this reason that Margaret Cavendish must create this secondary world. The limited agency that she has leaves her no choice but to make space for herself. When the Empress is approached by the Spirits about having a scribe, she requests first an ancient famous writer, and then a philosopher. The Spirits tell her that although these men were great writers and philosophers, they would “never have the patience to be Scribes” and “would scorn to be Scribes to a Woman” (Cavendish). This reflects how in Cavendish’s personal life she was looked down upon by the philosophers her husband was friends with. She had to learn to make space for herself; in her life that was through her critical responses to their writings and in The Blazing World, it is through having herself, as the Duchess, become the scribe to the Empress.
Cavendish’s creation of a utopian world is also a testament to her reaction to gendered expectations in the seventeenth century. While a utopian world serves a purpose for specific people and is not always a utopia for everyone, Cavendish creates a world where women have power and freedom. The Empress has the power to create new careers and positions for the people in her world, dictating to each group who will do what. This may not be a utopia for these people as they have no say in their career, but because everyone submits to the same rulers, they comply. The utopia that Cavendish creates has one religion for everyone, one ruler to submit to, and everyone can understand the languages of each other. These are perfect aspects in a sense because it means there is no prejudice, but Cavendish’s creation of this utopia does speak to society and its views of the time. She decided to create a utopian world because “[her] ambition is not onely to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole World” (Cavendish). In her ideal world, the above are the attributes she desires, especially for women and for herself. Had a man written this story, perhaps even her husband, he would not have had the same desires as he has already been afforded power, privilege, and the freedom to do as he wishes solely based on his gender. For this reason, Cavendish’s creation of her utopia is a matter of gender, specifically empowerment for female voices to hold power and desire it while also ensuring that they are not overstepping the bounds of someone else’s world.
Cavendish’s work is still important in the twenty-first century not only because of her tenacity in publishing and having her voice heard, but also for her portrayal of women as unapologetic leaders, something that men have been praised for and women are historically criticized for because of the pressures of the patriarchy. Cavendish paints the figure of the “powerful woman as a natural wonder of the world” (Leslie 6) which can be seen as an early feminist act. Giving women power in a text during the seventeenth century when Cavendish herself was struggling to have her voice heard is still powerful hundreds of years later because of her perseverance. Her letter to the readers at the end of The Blazing World encourages them to go “create Worlds of their own, and Govern themselves as they please” (Cavendish), leaving an empowering note that stands the test of time and proves relevant in the twenty-first century as well. Her own experiences with not being taken seriously or looked down upon by the men William Cavendish interacted with likely fueled this desire to create a world where not only she could have power, but all women. Views like this led to her being considered an “early modern feminist” (Leslie 7) and so her pursuit for control and power as a woman should not have been seen as “mad” or “clinically perverse” (Leslie 12) and maybe would not be seen that way now. As the first woman to publish a science fiction work though, Margaret Cavendish paved the way for utopian texts written by women today and encouraged them to have the imagination and self-assurance to create them. Cavendish defied the patriarchy in her own life and continued defying it within her written works, subverting gendered expectations in both in a “society and culture that was so eminently patriarchal” (Caballero 33).
Despite her impressive writing skills and dedication to scientific and intellectual discoveries and conversations, Margaret Cavendish still struggled through being taken seriously in a patriarchal society. By contributing to conversations from an outside perspective, Cavendish put her views out into the world whether people wanted to hear them or not. Her search for male recognition among her husband’s peers may have afforded her some success, but her greatest success is in the way she empowered women to take power and autonomy of their life and create their own worlds to rule and govern. Influenced by her own life experiences, Margaret Cavendish wrote a novel that puts women in positions of power and upends the expectations of both real and fictional women of the seventeenth century.
Works Cited
Caballero, Juan D. D. T. “Yet is She a Plain and Rational Writer”: Margaret Cavendish’s Self-fashioning in The Blazing World, Politics, Science and Literature.” British and American Studies, vol. 24, 2018, pp. 19-35,269. ProQuest, http://goddard40.clarku.edu/login?url= https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/yet-is-she-plain-rational-writer-margaret/docview/2115984728/se-2.
Cavendish, Margaret. “Reading: From The Blazing World.” Press Books, https://pressbooks.pub /earlybritishlit/chapter/margaret-cavendish-the-blazing-world/.
Cunning, David, “Margaret Lucas Cavendish”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives /win2021/entries/margaret-cavendish.
Ezell, Margaret J.M. “Reading pseudonyms in seventeenth-century English coterie literature.” Essays in Literature, vol. 21, no. 1, spring 1994, pp. 14+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A16082459/LitRC?u=mlin_c_clarkunv&sid= googleScholar&xid=c9d9fe5a.
Leslie, Marina. “Gender, Genre and the Utopian Body in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World.” Utopian Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 1996, pp. 6–24. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org /stable/20719470.
Villareal, Allegra. “Introduction.” Press Books, https://pressbooks.pub/earlybritishlit/chapter/ margaret-cavendish-the-blazing-world/
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