Abstracts
Abstracts
Concocting the world's olio:
Margaret Cavendish and continental influence
Sara H. Mendelson
McMaster University
Mad Science Beyond Flattery:
The Correspondence of Margaret Cavendish and Constantijn Huygens
Nadine Akkerman
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Marguérite Corporaal
University of Groningen
Happy Families and Learned
Ladies:
Margaret Cavendish, William Cavendish, and their onstage academy debate
Alexandra Bennett
Northern Illinois University
Playing with Religion:
Convents, Cloisters, Martyrdom, and Vows
Erna Kelly
University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
Fighting the Kingdom of
Faction in Bell in Campo
Oddvar Holmesland
Agder University College
Crime and Context in The
Unnatural Tragedy
Lisa Hopkins
Sheffield Hallam University
The
Intellectual and Literary Courtship of Margaret Cavendish
James Fitzmaurice
Northern Arizona University
Defects Redressed: Margaret
Cavendish Aspires to Motley
Lesley Peterson
University of Alberta
The City of Chance, or, Margaret
Cavendish's Theory of Radical Symmetry
B.R. Siegfried
"My Spirits long to
wander in the Air...": Spirits and Souls in Margaret Cavendish's Fiction
between Early Modern Philosophy and Cyber Theory
Miriam Wallraven
University of Tübingen
"I hate such an old-fashioned
House": Margaret Cavendish and the search for home
Alison Findlay
Lancaster University
An Empowering Wit and an "Unnatural"
Tragedy: Margaret Cavendish's Representation of the Tragic Female Voice
Marguérite Corporaal
University of Groningen
Gender Subversion in the
Science of Margaret Cavendish
Lisa Walters
Edinburgh University
Concocting the world's olio: Margaret Cavendish and continental influence
Sara H. Mendelson
McMaster University
For some years now, Cavendish scholarship has been roughly divided between two schools of thought, those on the one hand who have depicted the duchess as an intellectual solipsist whose creative productions issued mainly from her own imagination, and those on the other hand who have emphasized the ways that she was influenced by her intellectual milieu. Rather than trying to settle the question one way or the other, this essay explores the effects on Cavendish of a different kind of influence, her experience of the general ambience of Catholic continental Europe during her exile from Interregnum England during the 1650s. In Catholic Flanders, the preference for conspicuous consumption was associated with a religious aesthetic of baroque excess which dominated all the arts, in contrast to the spartan philistinism of contemporary left-wing English Protestantism. We can infer that Cavendish was strongly attracted to this baroque Catholic aesthetic, since clear traces of its influence can be discerned in both the style and substance of her writings.
Mad Science Beyond Flattery: The Correspondence of Margaret Cavendish and Constantijn Huygens
Nadine Akkerman
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Marguérite Corporaal
University of Groningen
Margaret Cavendish's letters to the famous Dutch diplomat, poet and composer Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687) are still extant and hitherto neglected in Cavendish criticism. It is important to study these letters for several reasons. The letters indicate that Cavendish participated in the scientific debate of her age through her correspondence with Huygens. They exchanged their views about atoms and discussed the scientific phenomenon of "Rupert's drops." Second, her letters to Huygens reveal that Cavendish attempted to establish her reputation as a writer, and that she sought to control the position of her writings. Cavendish sought to spread her fame as a writer by sending Huygens her published books, in order to have them incorporated in the library of the widely admired Dutch scholar. Above all, the letters reveal that she used Huygens as the intermediary to have her works included in the university library of Leyden, the Netherlands, and thus to become established in the world of letters.
Happy Families and Learned Ladies:
Margaret Cavendish, William Cavendish, and their onstage academy debate
Alexandra Bennett
Northern Illinois University
It is a truism to say that Margaret Cavendish owed at least some of her productivity as a writer to the support of her loving husband, William. Well-known excerpts from her biography of the Duke and her autobiography paint a portrait of Cavendish married life as exemplary domestic bliss, a relationship governed by a wise and benevolent male figure at whose side the Duchess was happy to sit, listening to his discussions with other learned men and gazing at him adoringly. They appear to have concurred on every possible topic, or else she deferred to her husband's views in light of his greater age, wisdom, and experience of the world. However, it is also possible to look at Margaret Cavendish's written relationship with William as expressing an active engagement, and occasional disagreement, with some of the ideological positions set forth in his plays. By examining William Cavendish's The Varietie (performed onstage in the early 1640s and published in 1649) and Margaret Cavendish's The Female Academy (written during the 1640s or 1650s and published in 1662) side by side within the context of the history of women's education in England, this paper demonstrates that the Duchess responded actively and acerbically to her husband's satire. While The Varietie sees women's knowledge networks as decidedly sinister and threatening to the social status quo, The Female Academy extols the virtues, purposes, and possibilities of women's education. The Duchess's replies to her husband's positions suggest that on this subject, at least, she was determined to show herself his equal rather than his acquiescent follower.
Playing with Religion: Convents, Cloisters, Martyrdom, and Vows
Erna Kelly
University of Wisconsin, Eau ClaireReferences to religion in Margaret Cavendish's writings are relatively rare; serious considerations even rarer. Although Cavendish treats religion in a playful way in The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious, she does this with the aim of conveying serious considerations about marriage and about government and to some extent serious considerations about the intersection of all three: religion, government, and marriage. These plays also reveal that Cavendish had considerable knowledge of Catholicism and some of its practices. While not denying the strain of scepticism and utility in matters concerning religion, which can be found throughout Cavendish's work, examining these two plays in light of historical context and biography can lead to support for the possibility that Catholicism held some attraction or at least interest for Cavendish beyond merely serving as a vehicle for her ideas about secular matters.
Fighting the Kingdom of Faction in Bell in Campo
Oddvar Holmesland
Agder University College
Critics of Bell in Campo have mostly emphasized Cavendish's feminist drive to emulate masculine valour and compete with the men for glory and renown. This essay also traces a counter-impulse in the play: Lady Victoria's concomitant aim on the battle field is to prove the women's capacity to make common cause with the men. There is a paradox in the way Cavendish accentuates both separatist self-realization and unifying companionship; the former promotes emulation, the latter mutuality.
This essay approaches the play in terms of a quest for ideological mediation. Cavendish thus turns to natural philosophy and the classics in search of an original, less contrived society, one based on more natural gender combinations and balances. The Law of Nature, she suggests, bears on both emancipative and moderating principles. It is a dialectical principle containing the competitive motives of, not just women, but mankind. Cavendish can be seen to encourage singularity within the bounds of natural moderation. As a civic humanist, she sees the need for tempering both individual and factional ambition in the interest of communal balance.
Crime and Context in The Unnatural Tragedy
Lisa Hopkins
Sheffield Hallam University
This paper traces the ways in which Margaret Cavendish's play The Unnatural Tragedy can be seen to derive not only from Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, from which it obviously borrows, but also from a second play, The Fair Maid of Bristow, which I have, I believe, recently identified as a source for Ford, and also from details and events of Margaret Cavendish's own life. I argue that despite the obvious similarities between Ford's play and Cavendish's, it is actually in the differences between them that the meanings of Cavendish's play are to be found. Ford wrote a private, coterie play; it does, I think, borrow from The Fair Maid of Bristow, but that allusion is never flagged up. Cavendish, by contrast, makes plain both her debt to Ford and the ways in which her play reflects on her own family, and in so doing she asks us to consider not only her story but the ways in which she tells it and the social background of the events it relates, so that events are seen to mean not only in themselves but in relation to their context. And this, ultimately, is the real point of Cavendish's play, which to Ford's reticence opposes a deliberate foregrounding of debts and analogues in order to make the point that the construction of meaning is no isolated phenomenon, but is, inevitably, a product of the social circumstances of the author.
The Intellectual and Literary Courtship of Margaret Cavendish
James Fitzmaurice
Northern Arizona UniversityIn The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf suggested that the marriage of William Newcastle and Margaret Cavendish was based on a powerful literary and intellectual affinity that in turn was characterized by amateurish ineptitude as well as isolation from the belletristic mainstream. Recent criticism has worked against Woolf's understanding by placing much of Margaret's writing well within the dominant currents of seventeenth-century letters, while also crediting her with originality of approach. Nobody, however, has looked carefully at the way in which Margaret and William interacted as writers and thinkers. Did each greet what the other produced "with raptures of delight," as Woolf suggested, and, if so, to what extent might the two have been justified in doing so? I would agree that Margaret and William were involved in an intellectual and literary dialogue, a dialogue that began during the time of their courtship. Intellectually, they were, at that time, both interested in a number of topics including the connections that might be made between painting and poetry. As writers of literature, they explored the style that we today associate with metaphysical poetry. Their courtship poems and letters are well worth reading, and the two were certainly justified in finding joy what each other wrote, especially given the suffering that each had endured in the English Civil Wars.
Defects Redressed: Margaret Cavendish Aspires to Motley
Lesley Peterson
University of Alberta
Critical attention to the influence of Shakespeare's works on Margaret Cavendish has largely
focused on the figure of the cross-dressing heroine. But Cavendish's female figures also owe a great deal to Shakespeare's fools: they share similar experiences of exile and marginalization and similar strategies for negotiating their positions relative to those in power. Shakespeare's comic fools, Touchstone and Feste in particular, are for Cavendish models of how both dress
and language may be used to assert andrdogyny, construct a place to speak from, and unsettle patriarchy without overturning it.The City of Chance, or, Margaret Cavendish's Theory of Radical Symmetry
B.R. Siegfried
Like many thinkers of her day, Margaret Cavendish perceived a shared set of points between theories of matter and philosophies of social order. Her science writing is filled with parallel concerns regarding nature and citizenship, and demonstrates a special affiliation with the classical ideal of the city as the site which mediates between the nature within and the nature without. Moreover, the classical ideal preserves a special place for singularity, for human variability, for chance - a model that stands in sharp contrast to the period's growing confidence in the more deterministic law of necessity. In this light, her persistent preoccupation with questions of qualitative analysis show to best advantage. In Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, Cavendish acknowledges limited predictability while insisting on an infinitude of variables, and allows for the radical particularity of each and every entity without succumbing to a "scientific" procedure which grinds those particularities into mere cases of general laws. Hence her "City" of the "Braine" is a model in which intentionality may be both a finite and primary cause. In this regard, free will is not only preserved by singularity, but depends upon it."My Spirits long to wander in the Air...": Spirits and Souls in Margaret Cavendish's Fiction between Early Modern Philosophy and Cyber Theory
Miriam Wallraven
University of Tübingen
In this essay, I trace the recurring topic of souls and spirits in Margaret Cavendish's fiction (especially in Nature's Pictures and in Blazing World) and in her poetry (Poems, and Fancies; Nature's Pictures). An analysis of Cavendish's departure from and dialogue with discourses of early modern natural philosophy, theology and mysticism, reveals that Cavendish's innovative playful approaches to the topic of spirits/souls lead to a larger reconceptualization of humanity, space and time. These experiments with the idea of an enhanced human being are addressed in comparison with Cavendish's own scientific-philosophical theory in Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy. This comparison sheds light on Cavendish's deliberate use of genre and her transformations of contemporary discourses. Cavendish's concept of spirits/souls combines material features of human corporeality, such as the senses, the brain and language with disembodied spiritual characteristics, such as unrestrained mobility, time-transcending knowledge, gender fluidity and immortality. Thus, Cavendish's texts explore different utopian visions of humanity and (virtual) realities connected with transformations of spatial and temporal perception. Taking into account Cavendish's self-fashioning as a creative deviator from textual and scientific conventions, I situate her in the conflation of early modern science and twentieth-century theories of virtual reality and the cyborg. In this context, I want to show that Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, famous for its appropriation of the idea of a hybrid, enhanced machine-human being in feminist and socialist terms, illuminates Cavendish's conceptualizations of ideal human beings as well as her specific textual approaches and also parallels Cavendish's experiments.
"I hate such an old-fashioned House": Margaret Cavendish and the search for home
Alison Findlay
Lancaster University
This paper invokes the spatial context of the household as a significant feature in Margaret Cavendish's drama and uses it to explore Cavendish's search for 'home' in a wider sense. It explores The Religious in relation to the exiled writer's memories of her lost childhood home, St John's Abbey in Colchester. It then discusses Cavendish's ambiguous presentation of the traditional country estate, and the new town house in the light of changes in aristocratic household culture in the later seventeenth century. Scenes from The Several Wits and The Unnatural Tragedy reveal how the politics of home and gender are intimately connected. Cavendish's representations of different households are also an exploration of changing ideas about a woman's place.
An Empowering Wit and an "Unnatural" Tragedy: Margaret Cavendish's Representation of the Tragic Female Voice
Marguérite Corporaal
University of Groningen
The 1662 edition of Cavendish's dramatic corpus consisted of thirteen closet plays, which were probably written in Antwerp in the late 1650's. Of all thirteen plays only The Unnatural Tragedy was categorised as tragedy. Readers of The Unnatural Tragedy will be struck by the similarities between the play and John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1633), in particular in view of the incestuous love plot between a brother and sister in both tragedies. However, Cavendish has reworked Ford's plot significantly, defying the gender discourses on the female voice which had dominated tragedy in the two decades preceding the Civil war. Cavendish points out that a woman's silence leads to her disempowerment and victimisation. At the same time she produces a tragedy which is "unnatural" in that it undermines the written and unwritten tragic generic conventions of the age. In her revision of these tragic generic codes, Cavendish not only offers a more radical challenge to the dominant gender ideology than any of the women writing closet tragedies before her, but actively engages with and transforms the tradition of staged tragic drama.
Gender Subversion in the Science of Margaret Cavendish
Lisa Walters
Edinburgh University
This paper will address how Margaret Cavendish's science disrupts and redefines the patriarchal framework that structured various traditions within the Scientific Revolution. Cavendish's science which includes animism, materialism, atoms and theories of multiple worlds, question and reinterpret the underlying gendered metaphors that were the foundations of scientific knowledge, demonstrating how power functions not only through direct coercion, but also through various institutions and cultural practices. Yet, her science not only questions epistemologies that maintained beliefs in natural sex inequalities, her theories have further subversive implications. Contrary to most critical understandings of Cavendish, hierarchy of all kinds is challenged within her theoretical system.
© 2004-, Matthew
Steggle (Editor, EMLS).