Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700

Volume 7: Margaret Cavendish

Sara H. Mendelson, Sara H. Mendelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351964845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A maverick in her own time, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) was dismissed for three centuries as an eccentric crank. Yet the past few decades have witnessed a true renaissance in Cavendish studies, as scholars from diverse academic disciplines produce books, articles and theses on every aspect of her oeuvre. Cavendish's literary creations hold a wide appeal for modern readers because of her talent for thinking outside the rigid box that delimited the hierarchies of class, race and gender in seventeenth-century Europe. In so doing, she challenged the ultimate building blocks of early modern society, whether the tenets of Christianity, the social and political imperatives of patriarchy, or the arrogant claims of the new Baconian science. At the same time, Cavendish offers keen insights into current social issues. Her works have become a springboard for critical discourse on such topics as the nature of gender difference and the role of science in human life. Sara Mendelson's aim in compiling this volume is to convey to readers some idea of the scope and variety of scholarship on Cavendish, not only in terms of dominant themes, but of critical controversies and intriguing new pathways for investigation.

Part I

Self-Fashioning as a Female Writer

1

The Spider’s Delight: Margaret Cavendish and the ‘Female’ Imagination

Sylvia Bowerbank

The world arose from an infinite spider who spun this whole complicated mass from his bowels.

Brahmin Teaching
(Cited by David Hume)

RECENTLY Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673), was remembered in the popular Book of Failures as “the world’s most ridiculous poet.”¹ And for the past three hundred years—although Charles Lamb may have enjoyed the eccentricity of her person and prose—readers of her works have agreed that she failed as a philosopher and as a writer. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf goes searching for a seventeenth-century “Judith Shakespeare” and finds in Cavendish’s writings “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.”² In her study of seventeenth-century travel fantasies, Voyages to the Moon, Marjorie Nicolson refuses to describe Cavendish’s New Blazing World because she cannot bear to reread that “ponderous tome” in order “to bring order out of…. chaos.” ³ But Cavendish herself confesses her shortcomings. In a typically disarming epistle to the reader she warns, “I shall not need to tell you, I had neither Learning nor Art to set forth these Conceptions, for that you will find yourself” (PO/63). Her naivete of method can be and has been blamed on her lack of education and lack of access to learned and critical communities.⁴ Yet anyone who has ventured to read ten pages of Cavendish’s work knows that her method, or rather her defiance of method, is deliberate.

I. Cavendish’s Conception of Herself as a True Wit

In most of her writings Cavendish celebrates, in theory and in practice, what she calls her “natural style.” Her first book, Poems and Fancies (1653), announces the approach she exemplifies:

Give Mee the Free, and Noble Stile,

Which seems uncurb’d, though it be wild…

Give me a Stile that Nature frames, not Art:

For Art doth seem to take the Pedants part. (PF, p. 110)

She associates the writings of the learned with sterile artificiality and labored imitation. Cavendish’s “true wit” is natural wit unrestrained. Occasionally in her writings she depicts playful confrontations between fancy and reason; for example, in Philosophical Fancies (1653), Reason cautions Thoughts to “walke in a Beaten Path” lest the world “think you mad.” But Thoughts rebel: “we do goe those waies that please us best. / Nature doth give us liberty to run / Without check.” For Cavendish, “Learning is Artificial, but Wit is Natural” (OEP, “To the Reader”).

While Restoration comedy might be seen to share this perspective in spirit, if not in method, the prevailing literary opinion and practice of her age denied such a polarization between natural wit and learned judgment. As early as 1595, Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie claimed that natural wit “reined with learned discretion” becomes true wit.⁵ In Timber, Ben Jonson uses the same image (ultimately taken from Plato) of the rider-poet reining in his horse (spontaneous wit) with a bit (judgment). Like the bee—now known to scholars as “the neo-classic bee”— the true writer imitates; he is able “to draw forth out of the best, and choicest flowers…and turn all into honey.”⁶ In Epicoene, Jonson creates the archetypal Truewit who has many descendants in Restoration comedy. In all his speeches Truewit seems to speak spontaneously; actually Jonson constructed his “instinctive” eloquence by means of a careful rejuvenation of classical sources.⁷ For Jonson, study and imitation, rather than making wit artificial, purify it and make it more right and more natural. In later neoclassical writers, like Dryden, the trend to understand true wit in terms of judgment dominating fancy increased to the point of eliminating fancy altogether.⁸

It will be clear how estranged Cavendish was from the prevailing literary attitudes if we look at a passage from a writer of the next generation who excelled at anatomizing perversions of wit. Readers of A Tale of a Tub are familiar with Swift’s masterly creation of the narrator who can be identified as “a mad modern.” In a remarkable passage at the end of “A Digression concerning … Madness,” Swift reveals the narrator’s mentality by playfully applying the traditional horse/rider image: madness is the overthrow of reason by fancy; it is a “revolution” against the natural hierarchical order of the two faculties: “I myself, the author of these momentous truths, am a person, whose Imaginations are hard-mouthed, and exceedingly disposed to run away with his reason, which I have observed from long experience to be a very light rider, and easily shook off; upon which account my friends never trust me alone.”⁹

What is mad for Swift is feminine for Cavendish. Reason may predominate in men, but fancy predominates in women. In Poems and Fancies, Cavendish reminds ladies of poetry as “belonging most properly to themselves.” Female brains, she claims, “work usually in a Fantasticall motion” and therefore “go not so much by Rules and Methods as by choice” (PF, “To all Noble and Worthy Ladies”). Elsewhere she emphasizes that reason is enslaved by necessity while fancy is voluntary (BW/66, “To the Reader”). In “Poetesses hasty Resolution” prefacing Poems and Fancies, she describes how her self-love in its ambition for fame overcame her judgment when she published her poems without revision. Reason is depicted as an authoritarian bully who would have told her how ill her poems were if she had not rushed them into print. In a later work she defends herself against a rude comment by a reader who said, “my wit seemed as if it would overpower my brain” by asserting that “my reason is as strong as the effeminate sex requires” (TR, p. 151).

She is claiming, for women at least, a freedom from “rules and method” denied writers by the seventeenth-century literary climate, dominated as it was by the opinions of Horace, whose satiric target in Ars Poetica is the Democritus who believes “that native talent is a greater boon than wretched art and shuts out from Helicon poets in their sober senses.”¹⁰ Cavendish was convinced that her originality was enough “ground” for “lasting fame.” ¹¹ Over and over again, she tells her readers that she has no time for studying other people’s work because “our sex takes so much delight in dressing and adorning themselves.” Besides, her ambition is not to be a lowly scholar but a great philosopher: “A Scholar is to be learned in other mens opinions, inventions and actions, and a philosopher is to teach other men his opinions of nature” (PO/55, “To the Reader”). This ambition led her to send her Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655) to Oxford and Cambridge. Hoping this action is “not unnatural, though it is unusual for a woman,” she asks the universities to house her book “for the good encouragement of our sex; lest in time we should grow irrational as idiots, by the dejectedness of our spirits, through the careless neglects and despisements of the masculine sex to the effeminate” (PO/55, “To the two Universities”). Besides, she does not see why her opinions should not be studied with other “probabilities” (such as Aristotle’s teachings); after all, only the custom of teaching ancient authors prevents readers from a “right understanding” of “my newborn opinions” (PO/55, pp. 26–27).

As we have seen, Cavendish associates fancy unregulated by judgment with vanity, especially in women. Yet she expects readers to share her good-natured tolerance of this charming foible, “it being according to the Nature of our Sex” (PL, p. 1). At the same time, she presents literary labor as pedantry not becoming to noble persons like herself. Although this attitude was not uncommon among her contemporaries (at least professedly), it led Cavendish to reject revision of her work as a task beneath her dignity and also unnatural to her as a woman. In her supposedly revised Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1663), she thinks it is enough that she is “very Studious in my own Thoughts and Contemplations” and that she records them in their natural and noble disorder: she had “neither Room nor Time for such inferior Considerations so that both Words and Chapters take their Places according as I writ them, without any Mending or Correcting” (PO/63, “Epistle to Reader,” my italics). She goes on to hope that “Understanding Readers” will not reject the “Inward worth” of her philosophy “through a Dislike to the Outward Form.” The truth is there somewhere, she claims, because she makes no attempt to censure “Nature,” which gives her thoughts “which run wildly about, and if by chance they light on Truth, they do not know it for a Truth” (PF, “Epistle to Mistris Toppe”).

Her justification for her lack of method is that she recreates pure nature. Although she cannot create a well-wrought urn, so to speak, she gives fresh thoughts: she asks, “Should we not believe those to be Fools, that had rather have foul Water out of a Golden Vessel, than pure wine out of Earthen or Wooden Pots?” (ODS, “To the Reader of My Works”). The natural trait she imitates is fecundity. Nature brings forth monsters, as well as well-proportioned offspring, and lets them die of their own deformity; in like manner, Cavendish claims, she “scribbles” down whatever comes to her and lets the reader sort it out (TR, pp. 185, 205, 206). Fecundity and originality are the gifts of the true wit. Cavendish is best understood, then, as a defender not of her sex, but of self and self-expression.

Hers is the mentality which is the target of Swift’s Battle of the Books (1704). In the famous confrontation between the bee and the spider, the ancient and the modern respectively, Swift uses the bee to symbolize the principles and practices of neoclassicism. “By an universal Range, with long Search, much Study, true Judgment, and Distinction of Things,” the bee-writer “brings home Honey and Wax.”¹² The spider, on the other hand, is akin to Jonson’s Littlewit, in Bartholomew Fair, who “like a silkworm” spins creations “out of myself.”¹³ Swelling up, Swift’s spider boasts, “I am a domestick Animal, furnisht with a Native Stock within my self. This large Castle … is all built with my own Hands, and the Materials extracted altogether out of my own Person.” His characteristics—his stress on originality; his fondness for a domestic rather than a “universall” perspective; his aimless creativity which, although it creates a space for himself, gives nothing of use (honey and wax) to others—are so extreme that he is fittingly called a subjectivist. The neoclassical bee warns that the spider’s perspective (“a lazy contemplation of four Inches round”) and his method (“feeding and engendering on it self”) turns “all into Excrement and Venom; producing nothing at last, but Fly-bane and a Cobweb.”¹⁴

Yet with what exuberance did Cavendish embrace this subjectivist perspective and method as her own. With a curious aptness she favors imagery of silkworm, spider, and spinning for depicting literary creativity, particularly hers. In Poems and Fancies, she writes that “all brains work naturally and incessantly” and goes on to call the wr...