A Princely Brave Woman

Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

Stephen Clucas, Stephen Clucas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351755665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour la littérature comparée

This title was first published in 2003. This collection of essays presents a variety of new approaches to the oeuvre of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, one of the most influential and controversial women writers of the seventeenth century. Reflecting the full range of Cavendish's output - which included poetry, drama, prose fictions, orations, and natural philosophy - these essays re-assess Cavendish's place in seventeenth- century literature and philosophy. Whilst approaching Cavendish's work from a range of critical (and disciplinary) perspectives, the authors of these essays are united in their commitment to recovering her writings from their frequent characterisation as "eccentric" or "idiosyncratic", and aim to present her work as historically legible within the cultural contexts in which they were written. The "Mad Madge" of literary legend and tradition is re-written as a bold, innovative and experimental creator of a female authorial voice, and as a thinker vitally in contact with the intellectual currents of her age.

1

Introduction

Stephen Clucas

After nearly three decades of feminist literary criticism, decades which have seen the recovery of a wide-ranging canon of women’s writing, from the middle ages through to the twentieth century a collection of essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle hardly needs an apology. Cavendish was arguably the first Englishwoman to fashion herself as an author – a woman who desired, and achieved, publication on an unprecedented scale, and in a wide variety of literary genres. Her pursuit of literary fame and reputation was vigorous and startlingly self-conscious. She wrote an epistolary dedication addressed ‘To all the Universities in Europe,’ ¹ and presented the handsome folio volumes of her works to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and to prominent members of the nobility.² She maintained an argumentative philosophical correspondence with Joseph Glanvill and openly criticised the ‘experimental philosophy’ of the Royal Society and the philosophical writings of Thomas Hobbes and Henry More .³ And yet – as Kate Lilley has noted – Cavendish’s works have frequently been interpreted as ‘deformed in various ways: chaotic, old-fashioned, uneven, contradictory and insane.’⁴ Perhaps more than any other early modern woman writer Cavendish has prompted critical disclaimers, qualifications, and apologies. The necessity for these apologetics is not entirely clear. The unimpeachably canonical Sir Thomas Browne, whose style was condemned by his contemporary Sir Kenelm Digby for its ‘wilde fantasticke qualities and moods,’⁵ does not require elaborate contemporary apologetics – there is no ‘Sir Tom o’ Bedlam’ label to negotiate, as ‘Mad Madge’ must be repeatedly negotiated by Cavendish scholars. It is as if at some unconscious level of modern apologetics, beneath the principled complaints of women’s unequal access to education, and consequent ‘lack’ of literary and philosophical mastery, we are still negotiating Margaret Cavendish’s writings as transgressive, and thus in need of justification.

The uneasiness that has marked Cavendish’s scholarly reception in the past is currently being revised in the light of re-emergent contexts for her ‘lack’ of order and method. As Anna Battigelli has recently argued in her book, Margaret Cavendish: Exile of the Mind, when viewed in the light of particular philosophical and literary concerns:

The very characteristics that have caused scholars to dismiss Cavendish – her lack of method, her willingness to embrace contradictions, her confidence in deductive thinking, her eccentricity and self-absorption – become historically significant.⁶

Margaret Cavendish, like many other early-modern figures, benefits from being located in appropriate discursive contexts. ‘Discourse’ itself, in fact, in the sense of speech, or conversation, is a neglected, but vitally important key to understanding Cavendish’s work, which she often talks of in connection with familiar (and familial) conversation. In her Philosophical and Physical Opinions of 1655, for example, Cavendish defended her familiarity with the ‘names and terms of art’ as a natural attainment for a member of a ‘family of quality’, who are accustomed to use such language in ordinary discourse. Her family she says, were ‘rational, learned, understanding and wittie’ and so was their discourse (see illustration 1.1).⁷ She has learnt her discursive skills, she says, from ‘my neerest and dearest friends as from my own brothers, my Lord brother, and my Lord,’ and listening to their discourse, she says, has taught her more than others have gained from a formal education because of her natural wit:

For truly I have gathered more by piece-meals, then from a full relation, or a methodical education for knowledge; but my fancy will build thereupon, and make discourse therefrom, and so of every thing they discourse of [.]⁸

Charges of plagiarism lead her, however, to distinguish between the knowledge she acquired through ‘intimate acquaintance and familiar conversation’ and the more specialised knowledge that she might have gleaned from ‘visiting and entertaining discourse’ with ‘professed Philosophers’ (such as Descartes and Hobbes). Her exchanges with the philosophers in their circle she says was largely made up of ‘cautionary, frivolous, vain, idle, or at least but common and ordinary matter’. She has, however, discoursed intimately with her ‘husband, brothers, and the rest of my family’ who although they neither ‘Philosophers nor Scholars’ are ‘learned therein.’⁹ This point about the emergence of her philosophical talents in the context of familial discourse is re-iterated by William in his apologetic preface, where he defends her philosophical literacy from charges of unseemliness and plagiarism:

I assure you her conversation with her Brother, and Brother-in-law, were enough without a miracle or an impossibility to get the language of the arts, and learned professions, which are their terms, without taking any degrees in Schooles […] but truly she did never Impe her high-flying Phancies, with any old broken Fethers out of any university[…].¹⁰

Ultimately, of course, it is these ‘high-flying Phancies’ of her own, that are the self-legitimating grounds of Margaret’s discourse, especially in the arena of natural philosophy, which she saw as a realm of particular philosophical liberty:

in natural things my natural reason will concieve them without being any wayes instructed; and so working a brain I have that many times on small objects or subjects will raise up many several phancies, and opinions therein, from which my discourse betwixt reason and the opinions will be produced […] [so that] my head is fully populated with divers opinions, and so many phancies are therein, as sometimes they lie like a swarme of bees in a round heap, and sometimes they flie abroad to gather honey from the sweet flowry rhetorick of my Lords discourse, and wax from his wise judgement which they work into a comb making chapters therein.¹¹

Illustration 1.1Familiar Conversation in the Cavendish Household: Engraved frontispiece from Natures Pictures (1656), by permission of The British Library, 8407hll

It is in this collapsing of the distinction between philosophical and civil discourse, and the privileging of ‘natural’ wit, reason and fancy that Cavendish’s unique claims to female authorship reside – claiming her right to discourse, first as a noblewoman, and then as an author and philosopher.

In his 1995 novel Slowness, Milan Kundera suggested that conversation is no trivial occupation. ‘Conversation’, he said, ‘is not a pastime; on the contrary, conversation is what organises time, governs it, and imposes its own laws […]’¹² Cavendish’s ‘conversation’ of the intellect (an intellect whose identity is fractured in discourse), her discursive productivity, organises her time (displacing the structures of ‘domestic time’ allotted to her sex – ‘such Works as Ladies use to pass their time withall’) and imposes its own discursive laws (see illustration 1.2). ‘I understand the […] Ordering of a grange, indifferently well’ she says in the prefatory epistle to her husband in her Sociable Letters, although she does not ‘Busie’ herself with it ‘by reason my Scribling takes away the most part of my Time.’¹³ In this collection the contributors seek to understand the self-proclaimed ‘laws’ of Cavendish’s discourse and, in their different ways, make various aspects of Cavendish’s work historically legible.

Hero Chalmers in her 1997 article on Cavendish’s ‘authorial self-representation’ argued that ‘Cavendish’s marital circumstances and her figuration of their links with her publication […] assist her to reconcile an unusually self-promoting authorial voice with the dictates of wifely obedience.’¹⁴ In the first essay of this volume Kate Lilley also focuses on Cavendish’s discursive dependence on the ‘particular economy of the [aristocratic] married couple’, and the way she uses it to legitimate the ‘linked activities of writing, reading, conversing and publishing.’¹⁵ In this nuanced tropological analysis of Cavendish’s strategies, Lilley argues that Cavendish constantly presents her writing as a ‘conjugal effect’ of her marriage to William and uses ‘Emulation towards Men’ (with her husband as an exemplary masculine type), and the reciprocal rhetoric of the marriage contract, to legitimate her own intellectual independence. ‘Cavendish’s sexualised and hierarchical poetics’, Lilley suggests, and

the scene of marriage and its textual instantiations offer a complex venue for negotiating relations between author and reader, discourses of gender, and hierarchies of knowledge and value.¹⁶

Drawing sustenance from the unquestioned law of [aristocratic] privilege as self-reproducing and self-authorising’, Cavendish validates herself as simultaneously a ‘singular or catechrestic woman’ and as ‘the fixed and chaste term’ of a noble,

Illustration 1.2‘Studious she is and all alone’: Cavendish and the ‘time of composition’: Engraved portrait from the frontispiece of The Worlds Olio (1655), by permission of The British Library, G. 11599 fp

Marion Wynne-Davies also sets Cavendish’s literary productivity within the context of a familial structure, but in this case not the limited sphere of the ‘couple’, but the broader, dynastic milieu of the aristocratic family as a social unit. While it is important, Wynne-Davies argues:

to recognise the importance of a female tradition of writing within the early modem period, at the same time we have moved beyond the need to link all women writers simply because of their sex. Rather, and perhaps not unsurprisingly, family bonds emerge as a powerful way of uniting female literary productivity, and these familial discourses simultaneously encompass and deflect male influence, resonating about certain fixed locational points.¹⁷

It was the ‘combination of wealth, a secure space, together with male complicity’, she argues, that allowed a few Early Modern women dramatists to evade the prohibitions on women’s writing, and begin to find a voice. Like Susan Wiseman, who also suggests that the disruption of the social hierarchy during the Civil War and the Protectorate was a motor of Cavendish’s literary production,¹⁸ Wynne-Davies maintains that the exiled situation of the Cavendish family, which was ‘representative of the widespread disruption experienced in many Royalist households’ was a stimulus to literary productivity amongst the women of the Cavendish family.

Cavendish’s prose fictions, ranging from orations to epistles, from utopian fantasy to aphorism, are amongst her most generically plastic or fluid literary forms of expr...