Part I
Self-Fashioning as a Female Writer
1
The Spiderâs Delight: Margaret Cavendish and the âFemaleâ 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 (1623â1673), was remembered in the popular Book of Failures as âthe worldâs most ridiculous poet.â1 And for the past three hundred yearsâalthough Charles Lamb may have enjoyed the eccentricity of her person and proseâreaders of her works have agreed that she failed as a philosopher and as a writer. In A Room of Oneâs Own, Virginia Woolf goes searching for a seventeenth-century âJudith Shakespeareâ and finds in Cavendishâs writings âa 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.â2 In her study of seventeenth-century travel fantasies, Voyages to the Moon, Marjorie Nicolson refuses to describe Cavendishâs New Blazing World because she cannot bear to reread that âponderous tomeâ in order âto bring order out ofâŠ. chaos.â 3 But Cavendish herself confesses her shortcomings. In a typically disarming epistle to the reader she warns, âI shall not need to tell you, I had neither Learning nor Art to set forth these Conceptions, for that you will find yourselfâ (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 Cavendishâs work knows that her method, or rather her defiance of method, is deliberate.
I. Cavendishâs Conception of Herself as a True Wit
In most of her writings Cavendish celebrates, in theory and in practice, what she calls her ânatural style.â Her first book, Poems and Fancies (1653), announces the approach she exemplifies:
Give Mee the Free, and Noble Stile,
Which seems uncurbâd, though it be wildâŠ
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. Cavendishâs âtrue witâ 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 âwalke in a Beaten Pathâ lest the world âthink you mad.â But Thoughts rebel: âwe do goe those waies that please us best. / Nature doth give us liberty to run / Without check.â For Cavendish, âLearning is Artificial, but Wit is Naturalâ (OEP, âTo the Readerâ).
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 Sidneyâs Defence of Poesie claimed that natural wit âreined with learned discretionâ 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 beeânow known to scholars as âthe neo-classic beeââ the true writer imitates; he is able âto draw forth out of the best, and choicest flowersâŠand turn all into honey.â6 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 âinstinctiveâ 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 Swiftâs masterly creation of the narrator who can be identified as âa mad modern.â In a remarkable passage at the end of âA Digression concerning ⊠Madness,â Swift reveals the narratorâs mentality by playfully applying the traditional horse/rider image: madness is the overthrow of reason by fancy; it is a ârevolutionâ against the natural hierarchical order of the two faculties: âI 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.â9
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 âbelonging most properly to themselves.â Female brains, she claims, âwork usually in a Fantasticall motionâ and therefore âgo not so much by Rules and Methods as by choiceâ (PF, âTo all Noble and Worthy Ladiesâ). Elsewhere she emphasizes that reason is enslaved by necessity while fancy is voluntary (BW/66, âTo the Readerâ). In âPoetesses hasty Resolutionâ 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, âmy wit seemed as if it would overpower my brainâ by asserting that âmy reason is as strong as the effeminate sex requiresâ (TR, p. 151).
She is claiming, for women at least, a freedom from ârules and methodâ 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 âthat native talent is a greater boon than wretched art and shuts out from Helicon poets in their sober senses.â10 Cavendish was convinced that her originality was enough âgroundâ for âlasting fame.â 11 Over and over again, she tells her readers that she has no time for studying other peopleâs work because âour sex takes so much delight in dressing and adorning themselves.â Besides, her ambition is not to be a lowly scholar but a great philosopher: âA Scholar is to be learned in other mens opinions, inventions and actions, and a philosopher is to teach other men his opinions of natureâ (PO/55, âTo the Readerâ). This ambition led her to send her Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655) to Oxford and Cambridge. Hoping this action is ânot unnatural, though it is unusual for a woman,â she asks the universities to house her book âfor 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 effeminateâ (PO/55, âTo the two Universitiesâ). Besides, she does not see why her opinions should not be studied with other âprobabilitiesâ (such as Aristotleâs teachings); after all, only the custom of teaching ancient authors prevents readers from a âright understandingâ of âmy newborn opinionsâ (PO/55, pp. 26â27).
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, âit being according to the Nature of our Sexâ (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 âvery Studious in my own Thoughts and Contemplationsâ and that she records them in their natural and noble disorder: she had âneither 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 Correctingâ (PO/63, âEpistle to Reader,â my italics). She goes on to hope that âUnderstanding Readersâ will not reject the âInward worthâ of her philosophy âthrough a Dislike to the Outward Form.â The truth is there somewhere, she claims, because she makes no attempt to censure âNature,â which gives her thoughts âwhich run wildly about, and if by chance they light on Truth, they do not know it for a Truthâ (PF, âEpistle to Mistris Toppeâ).
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, âShould 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?â (ODS, âTo the Reader of My Worksâ). 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 âscribblesâ 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 Swiftâs 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. âBy an universal Range, with long Search, much Study, true Judgment, and Distinction of Things,â the bee-writer âbrings home Honey and Wax.â12 The spider, on the other hand, is akin to Jonsonâs Littlewit, in Bartholomew Fair, who âlike a silkwormâ spins creations âout of myself.â13 Swelling up, Swiftâs spider boasts, âI 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.â His characteristicsâhis stress on originality; his fondness for a domestic rather than a âuniversallâ perspective; his aimless creativity which, although it creates a space for himself, gives nothing of use (honey and wax) to othersâare so extreme that he is fittingly called a subjectivist. The neoclassical bee warns that the spiderâs perspective (âa lazy contemplation of four Inches roundâ) and his method (âfeeding and engendering on it selfâ) turns âall into Excrement and Venom; producing nothing at last, but Fly-bane and a Cobweb.â14
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 âall brains work naturally and incessantlyâ and goes on to call the wr...