SYLVIA BOWERBANK

The world arose from an infinite spider

who spun h s whole complicated mass from
his bowels.
Brahmin Teaching
(Cited by David Hume)

, RECENTLY Margaret Cavenhsh, Duchess of Newcasde

(1623-1673), was remembered in the popular Book of Failures as
“the world’s most ridiculous poet.”’ And for the past three
hundred years-although Charles Lamb may have enjoyed the eccentric-
ity 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 N e w Blazing World because she cannot bear to
reread that “ponderous tome’’ in order “to bring order out o f . . .
chaos.”3 But Cavendish herself confesses her shortcomings. In a typically
(4
disarming epistle to the reader she warns, I shall not need to tell you, I

1. Stephen Pile, The Incomplete Book of Failures (New York, 1981), p. 94. This verdict is
probably based on Samuel Pepys’comment on reading Cavendish’sLiji of her husband: “it shows
her to be a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman, and he an asse to suffer [her] to write what she
writes to him and of him.” The Diary ofSamuel Pepys (9 vols.), ed. Robert Latham and William
Matthews (London, 1974), IX, 123.
2. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1st ed. 1929 (London, 1979), pp. 59-60.
3. Marjorie Nicolson, Voyages to the Moon (New York, 1948), p. 224.

13921
 Sylvia Bowerbank 393

had neither Learning nor Art to set forth these Conceptions, for that you
will find yourself” (P0/63). Her naiveti 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 prac-
tice, 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”1est 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 judg-
ment. 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 (judg-
ment). 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
4. See Myra Reynolds’ The Learned Lady in England, 1650-1760 (Boston, Mass., 1920), pp.
46-49; Douglas Grant’s Margaret the First: A Biography of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle
1623-1673 (Toronto, 1957), pp. 37-38 and passim; Hilda Smith’s Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-
Century English Feminists (Urbana, Ill., 1982),pp. 75-95. For the full titles of Cavendish’s works, see
the listing that follows this essay.
5. Philip Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry,” in Critical Theory since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams
(New York, 1971), pp. 158-59.
394 English Literary Renaissance
,,
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.7For 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 ofjudgment 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 ofA
Tale ofa 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 h s 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.”g
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 Fantastical1
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

6. Ben Jonson, “Timber or Discoveries,” The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (Har-
mondsworth, 1975), 11.2146,3068; pp. 426,448. Also see James W . Johnson, “That Neo-classic
Bee,”Joumal ofthe History ofldeus, 22 (1961),262-66.
7. JOMS Barish, “Ovid, Juvenal and the Silent Woman,”PMLA, 71 (1956). 213-24.
8. Dryden defined wit as merely “a propriety of thoughts and words”; see “Introduction,”
Critical Essays ofthe Seventeenth Century ( 3 vols.), ed. J. E. Spingarn (Oxford, 1980), 1, xxxi.
9. Jonathan Swift, A Tale . f a Tub and other Satires, ed. Kathleen Williams (London, 1975), p.
114.
 Sylvia Bowerbank 395

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,
66
my wit seemed as if it would overpower my brain” by asserting that
66
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
99
senses. 10 Cavendish was convinced that her originality was enough
66 99
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 hls opinions of nature” ( P 0 / 5 5 , “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” ( P 0 / 5 5 , “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” (P0/55, 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 ofour 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

10. Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge, Mass., 1978), p. 475.
11. Grant, p. 192.
396 English Literary Renaissance
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 Philosophicaland Physical Opinions (1663), she thinks it is
enough that she is “very Studious in my own Thoughts and Contempla-
tions” and that she records them in their natural and noble disorder: she
had “neither Room nor Time for such infwior Considerations so that both
Words and Chapters take their Places according as I writ them, without
any Mending or Correcting” (P0/63, “Epistle to Reader,” my italics). She
goes on to hope that “Understanding Readers” will not reject the
“Inward worth” of her phdosophy “through a Dislike to the Outward
Form.” The truth is there somewhere, she claims, because she makes no
(6
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. Caven-
dish 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 ofthe 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
CL
principles and practices of neoclassicism. By an universal Range, with
long Search, much Study, true Judgment, and Distinction ofThings,” the
bee-writer “brings home Honey and Wax.”12 The spider, on the other
hand, is akin to Jonson’s Littlewit, in Bartholornew 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

12. Swift, p. 149.

13. Bm/onson’s Plays (2 vols.), Everyman’s Library (London,1967), 11, 183.
 Syluth Bowerbank 397

Materials extracted altogether out of my own Person.” His character-

istics-hs stress on originality; h s 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 t h s subjectivist
perspective and method as her own. With a curious aptness she favors
imagery of silkworm, spider, and spinning for depicting literary creativ-
ity, particularly hers. In Poems andFuncies, she writes that “all brains work
naturally and incessantly” and goes on to call the writing of poetry
66 99
spinning with the brain. She intends to win fame as a writer “by
spinning” a “Garment of Memory”: “I cannot say the Web is strong, fine
or evenly Spun, for it is a Course piece; yet I had rather my Name should
go meanly clad, then dye with cold” (PF, “The Epistle Dedicatory”). I
have italicized “web” to emphasize how naturally Cavendish could fuse
the images of the spinner and the spider. Cavendish resorts to spinning
imagery when excusing herself for encroaching on male prerogative:
women have so much “waste time” that “our thoughts run wildly
about,” producing not only “unprofitable, but indiscreet Actions, wind-
ing up the thread of our lives in snarles on unsound bottoms” (PF, “An
Epistle to Mistris Toppe”). To describe “great masters of speech,” she
writes that they can speak “untangled”; they “can winde their words off
their tongue” without a snarl or knot; they can work the “thread of sense
into a flourishing discourse’’(TR, p. 181).Yet Cavendish is aware of the
commonplace implications of the imagery of silkworm and spider. In
Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil (1656), a collection of conflicting
tales about life by various speakers usually identified by sex alone, she has
“a Man” denigrate the creativity of spider and silkworm:
The Silkworm and the Spider Houses make,
All their Materials from their Bowels take . . .
Yet they are Curious, built with Art and Care,
Like Lovers, who build Castles in the Air,
Which ev’ry puff of Wind is apt to break,
As imaginations, when Reason’s weak. (NP, p. 126)
14. Swift, pp. 149-50.
398 English Literary Renaissance
In her autobiography Cavendish presents a poignant picture ofher life as
an isolated duchess who would be a famous writer. Her one delight was
her solitary creativity which she describes using her favorite imagery: “I
had rather sit at home and write . . . I must say this on behalf of my
thoughts, that I never found them idle; for if the senses bring no work in,
they will work of themselves, like silkworms that spins [sic] out of their
own bowels” (TR, p. 208).

11. No Room in Salomon’s House

In his New Atlantis, Francis Bacon imagines Salomon’s House, a
patriarchal institution dedicated to enlarging “the bounds of Human
Empire” over nature.15 When the Royal Society was founded in 1662, it
was based on the Baconian principle that the search for knowledge must
be communal and experimental. Because the advancement of knowl-
9,
edge requires a mind “steadily fixed upon the facts of nature, Bacon
was suspicious of the speculative mind which works “upon itself, as the
spider worketh h s web,” and brings forth only “cobwebs of learning.”16
For Baconians, there could be no room in Salomon’s House for natural
philosophers who give out their “own imaginations for a pattern of the
world. ”17
Margaret Cavendish’s writings, as we shall see, attempted to provide
an alternative perspective to the prevailing Baconian paradigm. Her
lifelong ambition was to win public acceptance as Nature’s true cham-
pion. In 1653, as R. H. Kargon points out, Cavendish “expounded an
Epicurean atomism at once so extreme and so fanciful that she shocked
the enemies of atomism and embarrassed its friends.”18 Everything could
be explained by the motion of atoms, such as: what causes dropsy, how
the brain works, and why the earth has attraction. And “the Cause why
things do live and dye, / Is, as the mixed Atomes lye” (PF, p. 14). At
times her descriptions of atoms are no less plausible than the descriptions
of how the world works given in the learned texts of her more restrained
contemporaries who were also fumbling around in search of a credible

15. Francis Bacon, New Atlantis in A Selection ofHis Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft (New York,
1965), p. 447.
16. Bacon, The Projkience and Advancement of Learning, in Selections; p. 225.
17. Bacon, The Great Instauration, in Selections, p. 323.
18. Robert Hugh Kargon, Atomism in Englandfrom Hatiot to Newton (Oxford, 1966), p. 73.
 Sylvia Bowerbank 399

mechanics-for example, Robert Boyle with his corpuscular universe.19

At other times she is fancy-free and plays with her atoms, as when she
imagines “A World in an Eare Ring”: “Wherein a Sun goeth round, and
we not see. / And Planets seven about that Sun may move.” And her
ultimate defense ofher opinions is that, although they may or may not be
true, they are natural. After all, “I do not applaud my self so much as to
think that my works can be without errors, for Nature is not a Deity”
(OEP, “To the Reader”).
Her intuitive, if erratic, exposition and defense of Nature’s ways
continued after 1660, although, probably in response to the more restric-
tive intellectual climate of the Restoration, she abandoned atomism: if
each atom were “absolute,” there could never be “good government” in
the universe (P0/63, “Another Epistle to the Reader”). This use of a
political analogy suggests that her social perspective-that of a royalist
duchess restored to her place in a regulated kingdom-had some influ-
ence on these later speculations about the natural order. In another work
she repudiates atomism because in that philosophy every atom is “a kind
of Deity” undermining the harmonious whole of Nature. In this typi-
cally entertaining passage she depicts rebellious democratic atoms:
“Nature would be like a Beggars coat full of lice; Neither would she be
able to rule those wandering and stragling atomes, because they are not
parts of her body, but each is a single body by itself, having no depen-
dance upon each other” (OEP, p. 142).
Yet she continued to present Nature as self-moving and perceptive.
PhilosophicalLetten (1661) should be read as a vindication of the wisdom of
nature and the “intelligence” of matter from what Cavendish considers
the belittling attacks of Henry More, Hobbes and Descartes. She ridi-
cules More for assuming the passivity ofnature (PL, “Letter VIII”). She
denies Hobbes’ claim for human supremacy by means of language over
66
the rest of creation. As everyone knows, she quips, a talking man is not
9,
so wise as a contemplating one. Other creatures, she says, have their
own reason: “For what man knows, whether Fish do not know more of
the nature of water, and ebbing and flowing, and the Saltness of the
Sea?” (PL, pp. 113,40). She attacks Descartes’ separation of mind from
body and his reductionist attitude toward the body: “the Eye, Ear, Nose,
Tongue, and all the Body, have knowledge as well as the Mind.”

19. See Robert Boyle, The Works (6 vols.), ed. Thomas Birch(Hildesheim, 1966), I, 356; II,43;
Grant, pp. 193, 196.
400 English Literary Renaissance
The only difference is that the mind, rational matter, is not ‘‘encumbered
with the grosser parts of matter to work upon” but the senses, sensitive
matter, “works or moves only in its own substance” (PL, pp. 116,127).
Reason, as she tells us in another work, is “nothing but corporeal
self-motion, or a particle of the purest, most subtil and active part of
matter.” This being the case, she asks why the human should “be the
onely Creature that partakes of this soul of Nature,” and why the rest of
Creation “should be soulless or (which is all one) irrational. ” The natural
soul of reason permeates nature: “I do not deny that a Stone has Reason”
(OEP, pp. 45-46). Clearly these insights into nature’s vital connective-
ness resemble the ideas of Anne Conway and others.20
Her philosophy of nature is empathetic, subjective, and fragmentary.
Sometimes she happens to create a startlingly beautiful analogy; for
example, she likens animate matter to a spinner and inanimate matter to
66
yarn: Natural air seems to be made by such kinds of motions as spiders
make cobwebs, for the animate matter’s motions spin from a rare degree
of inanimate matter.”21 But mostly her natural philosophy consists of
passages excusing and flaunting her ignorance; for example, she writes
about the anatomy of the body by confessing that she never read a book
on the subject nor studied the body because “the modesty of my Sex
9,
would [not] permit me. In Observations upon Experimental Philosophy
(1666), she presents a curious argument to show that speculation is a
higher means toward knowledge than experiment is. Playing on the
overlapping social and intellectual connotations of the word “mechan-
ick, ” she writes that “experimental or mechanick Philosophy” should be
subservient to speculative philosophy just as “the Artist or Mechanick is
but a servant to the student”(OEP, p. 7). Her main target in Observations
is the microscope, that “artificial informer” that “more deludes than
informs.” The year before, Robert Hooke published his influential
Micrographia describing his experiments with the microscope. Cavendish
thinks it “unnatural” to change the size of creatures so they “cannot be
judged according to their natural figure. ” For illustration, she ridicules
one of the experiments describing the 14,000 eyes on a fly. The micro-
scope must be misleading us here or else, she asks, why doesn’t a fly see a

20. In a chapter entitled “Women on Nature,” Carolyn Merchant discusses Conway’s

vitalism, but does not note this strain in Cavendish’s work. The Death 4Nature: Women, EcoIogy and
the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, 1980), chapter 11.
21. P 0 / 6 3 , p. 183; Grant, pp. 199-200.
 Sylvia Bowerbank 401

spider? She adds that these “eyes”might be “blisters or watery pimples”

(OEP, pp. 24,26-28).
This is the kind of speculation Joseph Glanvill, an apologist for the
Royal Society, compliments in a letter to “your Grace” when he admires
Ib
the quickness and vigor of your conceptions.”But he adds that hers is a
pattern that men should not imitate. Glanvill denies that ratiocination is
higher than “perfection of sense” by reasserting the Baconian paradigm.
A natural philosopher must be willing “to tie down the mind in Physical
things, to consider Nature as it is, to lay a Foundation in sensible
collections, and from thence to proceed to general Propositions, and
Discourses” (Coll, p. 99). Walter Charleton, another member of the
Royal Society, also treats her with the tact required in writing to a
duchess: he professes not to know “which of the two, Aristotle or your
Grace, hath given us the best definition of the humane Soul.” But he also
warns her that all opinions, even hers, must be subjected to “skeptical
Judgement” (Coll, pp. 111-12).
In another letter, Charleton tells her the use to which he puts her
philosophy: “Whenever my own Reason is at a loss, how to investigate
the Causes of some Natural Secret or other, I shall relieve the Company
with some one pleasant and unheard of Conjecture of yours so that by
reading your Philosophy, I have acquired thus much advantage: that
where I cannot Satisfy, I shall be sure to Delight” (Coll, pp. 143-44).
With her peculiar sense of humor and self-importance, Cavendish would
have been pleased with this unusual tribute. There is no doubt that in
small selected doses Cavendish delights us, as she intends to, with her
fanciful conjectures and self-mockery. Charleton also teased her about
66
her eccentric style: You plant Fruit-trees in your Hedge-rows, and set
97
Strawberries and Raspberries among your Roses and Lilies. Yet even
for this “art” he flatters her: she has a fancy “too generous to be
restrained” by “the laborious rule of Method” (Coll, pp. 143-44).
It was probably not any of her ideas-radical and eccentric as they
may seem-that alienated her from the community of natural philoso-
phers. After all, Charleton, a popularizer of Epicurean atomism of the
type made respectable by Gassendi, was forgiven after he trimmed hls
work to the hostile winds of Restoration science.” As we have seen,

22. See Nina Rattner Gelbart, “The Intellectual Development of Walter Charleton,” Arnbix,
18 (Nov., 1971),149-68; Howard Jones, Pierre Gassendi 1592-1655: AnIntellectual Biography (Nieuw-
koop, 1981), pp. 280-95.
402 English Literary Renaissance
Cavendish willingly discarded her politically dangerous atomism. And
other writers, if more cautiously, were sympathetic to finding the life
principle immanent in nature.23 There were two main factors, then,
contributing to her exclusion from the intellectual community: her sex
and her untamed method. Lady Ranelagh is the only other contemporary
Englishwoman who has a claim to being called “a scientific lady,” and
she was content to work through her brother, Robert Boy1e.a To a
limited extent Cavendish was able to overcome social restrictions
because of her status as a duchess and as the wife of a patron of virtuosi:
she corresponded with leading thinkers; she published her works; she got
invited, albeit as a spectator, to the Royal Society in 1667. But mostly she
was isolated. With good reason, then, she defends contemplation as the
means, indeed her only means, to seek natural truths. The Royal Society,
based as it was on the inductive method and the fraternal accumulation of
knowledge, could provide no home for her person or her perspective.
Cavendish’s response to her failure as a natural philosopher was to
retreat into fantasy. In 1666 she created her own New Blazing World. As
she tells us in “To all Noble and Worthy Ladies” of the 1668 edition, the
opinions advanced in New Blazing World have “sympathy” and “coher-
ence” with those expressed in Obseroations, to which it was originally
appended in 1666. But in New Blazing World, she could be “Margaret the
First” in a more congenial world; no one should begrudge her this
pleasure “since it is in every ones power to do the like”(BW/66, “To the
Reader”).
The tedious chaos of the “plot” is an obvious feature of this work
which has been attacked elsewhere.25 The central character is an
Empress of a newly found polar lungdom whose main interest is in ruling

23. Even the fathers ofmechanics, Newton and Leibnitz, sought a vitalistic inner principle in
nature because they were not satisfied with mechanistic explanations of biology. See Carolyn
Merchant’s chapter “Leibnitz and Newton,” pp. 275-89. Descartes of course thought the
machne metaphor was adequate to describe the life of bodies. See Philip R. Sloan, “Descartes,
the Skeptics and the Rejection of Vitalism in Seventeenth-Century Physiology,” Studies in the
History and Philosophy ofscience, 8 (1977), 1-28, p. 17.
24. For the close relationship between Boyle and Ranelagh, see Gilbert Burnet’s “A Sermon at
the Funeral of the Honourable Robert Boyle,”Sekct Sermons (Glasgow, 1742). Brother and sister
died within a week of each other; Burnet preached the sermon on January 7,1692. See Charles
Webster’s attempt to establish Ranelagh’s “membership” in the Invisible College, The Great
Instauration: Science Medicine and Reform 1625-1660 (London, 1975),pp. 62-63. For a general study,
see Gerald Meyer, The Scient$c Lady in England 1650-1750: A n Account ofHer Rise, with Emphasis on
the Major Roles ofthe Tekscope and Microscope (Berkeley, Cal’., 1955).
25. See Nicolson’s attack referred to at the beginning of this essay.
 Sylvia Bowerbank 403

over the virtuosi: “the Bearmen were to be her Experimental Philoso-

phers, the Bird-men her astronomers, the Flyworm- and Fish-men her
Natural Philosophers, the Ape-men her Chymists, the Satyrs her Galen-
ick Physicians,” for example ( B W / 6 8 , p. 15). The Empress becomes
angry at her virtuosi when the Bearmen observe celestial phenomena
through a telescope and begin to quarrel. The Empress condemns tele-
scopes as “false informers’’ which “delude” their senses. Obviously this is
the same opinion Cavendish advances in Observations, but in New Blazing
World the Empress has power to command them to smash their instru-
ments. She lets them keep their toys only when her experimental
philosophers admit that “we take more delight in Artificial delusions,
than in Natural truths” ( B W / 6 8 , pp. 26-28).
In New Blazing World, Cavendish deliberately lets fancy take the reins
and creates a world which indulges her fondest wishes-even allowing
her some harmless retaliations against the Royal Society. Cavendish
imagined a situation, improbable even in the twentieth century, in which
a female leader dominates the scientific community. Her experimental
philosophers are hack workers on detail, servants who bring in their
observations so that the Empress can triumphantly speculate and create a
synthetic truth. But the independent, intelligent Empress gets lost in the
oblivion of Cavendish’s prose.
What we remember instead is the eccentric duchess created in Pepys’
Diary, who made an infamous visit in 1667 to the Royal Society during
which leading scientists such as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke did
experiments to provide what Marjorie Nicolson derisively calls “the
afternoon’s entertainment. ’’26 According to Pepys’ enduring version,
Cavendish did not “say anything that was worth hearing, but. . , was full
of adrmration, all admiration.”= What we remember, then, of the
seventeenth-century “scientific lady” of England is the image of woman
as audience and, at best, as patron of men’s accomplishments.
To reinforce how fanciful, how “mad,” how revolutionary, and
ultimately, how irrelevant Cavendish’s vision of a female scientific
genius was to her contemporaries, we need only compare the relation-
ship of the Empress to her virtuosi with the more famous depiction of the
relationship between an intelligent woman and a modern philosopher in
26. Marjorie Nicolson, “‘Mad Madge’ and ‘The Wits’,’’ Pepys’ Diary and the New Science
(Charlottesville, Va., 1%5), p. 113. For another account, see Samuel Mintz’s “The Duchess of
Newcastle’s Visit to the Royal Society,”journalofEnglish and GerMlanic Philology, 51 (1952), 119-28.
27. Pepys, VIII, 243.
404 English Literary Renaissance
Bernard Fontenelle’s Plurality of Worlds. Entretiens sur la pluralit; des mondes
(1686) was one of Fontenelle’s most ingenious tactics in hs life-long
attempt to popularize the ideas of the new phdosophy. There were 28
editions of Entretiens in Fontenelle’s long lifetime (1657-1757)? The
passages quoted in this essay are from the 1638 translation by Aphra
Behn. The immense popularity of Plurality of Worlds can be explained, to a
great extent, by Fontenelle’s choice offormat. As Behn’s subtitle tells us,
he uses “five nights conversation with Madam the Marchioness of ***” in
a garden in order to defend the mechanical philosophy and the theory
that there are other inhabited worlds. W e are to enjoy a pleasant and
flirtatious dialogue between “Fontenelle” and Madam even as we learn
66
the truths of the Cartesian universe: we are always in the Humour of
mixing some little Gallantries with our most serious Discourses. ’29
But what interests us here is the relationship between the two conver-
LL
sationalists: Fontenelle” is the authority; he will teach the Copernican
(6
system. There are, for him, no more unnecessary Difficulties” because
he can reduce nature to a few easy laws. Because nature works like the
contrivance of machines behind the scenes of an opera, he can “draw the
Curtains and shew you the World.” What room is there for dialogue
when one party has all the answers? Well, this expert is a chivalrous
servant to a noble and charming lady. Madam is an eager, intelligent, and
pliable student. But she has her little rebellions-‘3ust like a woman.”
When “Fontenelle” offers to demonstrate a point by drawing a zodiac in
the sand, she stops him: “It would give a certain Mathematical Air to my
Park, which I do not like.” Although she admires the simplicity of the
Copernican system, she objects to the insecurity of the earth in it. She
teasingly claims to favor the Indian system in which the earth is sup-
ported by four elephants. If danger threatens these solid foundations, the
Indians “would quickly double the number of their elephants.” “Fonte-
nelle” laughs “at her fancy”; this is reminiscent of Charleton’s pleasure
at Cavendish’s wit. Late on the first night, Madam at last agrees to be
reasonable and to be Copernican. Later when she holds back in attractive
timidity from the implications of such a vast universe, he urges her on to
intellectual courage.3

28. Leonard M. Marsak, “Introduction,” The Achievement ofBemardle BouvierdeFontenelh ( N e w

York, 1970), pp. xvi, xxvi.
29. “Monsieur Fontenelle’s History of the Plurality o f Worlds,” in Histories and NoveL ofMrs.
A . Behn (2 vols.), (1718), II,98. Behn’s was the third English translation.
30. Plurality of Worlds, 11, 7-9, 19, 22, 27, 95.
 Sylvia Bowerbank 405

Thus although modernists like Fontenelle might eagerly debunk the

traditional cosmic hierarchies of Aristotle and Aquinas, “Fontenelle”
and Madam embark into the new universe with their respective sexual
roles intact. He leads intellectually and she follows. Even though Behn
might object to the inconsistency of Madam’s superficial yet profound
character, Fontenelle’s book did teach women (and men) what was
actually being debated in the science of the seventeenth century, and
Behn approved of bringing women into intellectual circles. But Caven-
dish’s New Blazing World offered no instruction and no access to or
compromise with the outside world.
In her own world Cavendish can refuse to moderate her desires to
accessible goals and can create her women free from the restrictions
which hampered Cavendish in both the social and intellectual realms.
Only in paradise, only in a state with people of many complexions-
literally azure, purple and green-and only in a state ruled by an
66
Emperor extraordinary” like her husband in his easygoing, non-
authoritarian character, only in fantasy, could Cavendish find a haven
for the intellectually ambitious woman. But beyond making this crucial
point, New Blazing World offers little reading satisfaction or intelligibil-
ity. A passage from Robert Boyle reiterating the contempt the new
science felt for subjective truth illustrates why Cavendish failed as a
natural phtlosopher in the age of reason. There was no room in Salo-
mon’s House for the spider who “taking notice only of those objects, that
obtrude themselves upon her senses, lives ignorant of all the other rooms
in the house, save that wherein she lurks.”31
111. Margaret Cavendish and the Crabbed Reader
Cavendish was used to such complaints as mine. In Orations of Divers
Sorts (1668), she ridicules her censorious critics: “those Faults or Imper-
fections I accuse my self of, in my Prefactory Epistles, they fling back
with a double strength against my poor harmless Works; which shews
their Malice and my Truth.” She asks such “ill-natured” readers why
they bother to accuse her plays of having no plots when she already
acknowledges that. Such critics “prefer Plots before Wit.” Then she
states her most characteristic stance as a writer: “I write to please myself,
rather than to please such Crabbed Readers.”Z Still there is a prolifera-

31. Boyle, “Of the Usefulness of Natural Philosophy,” Works, II,9.

32. “To the Readers of my Works,” 00s; also see TR, p. 213.
406 English Literary Renaissance
tion of prefaces before her works in which she addresses readers, shares
her problems as a writer and as a thinker, and tells us how to read her
work. Yet for three hundred years, her readers have remained
crabbed-except for her husband, Charleton perhaps, and Charles
Lamb. Perhaps we have yet to understand the nature of the legacy she
left to posterity.
Maybe her sense of humor eludes us. Maybe we are like her sour
contemporary, Mary Evelyn, who on overhearing the friendly banter
between Charleton and the Duchess to the effect that universities should
be abolished if they didn’t abandon Aristotle and teach Cavendish’s
new-found ideas, became so provoked by Cavendish’s manner that she
dismissed the Duchess as mad.3 Maybe Cavendish intends us to laugh at
the incongruous juxtaposition of her self-deprecation and self-dramati-
zation. She not only ridicules herself and the foibles of her sex but
also-and this is important-casts doubt upon serious claims to knowl-
edge of nature’s secrets. William Cavendish seems to have shared her
skeptical and playful attitude in this passage inserted at the end of her
Philosophical and Physical Opinons (1663): “Since now it is A-la-mode to
Write of Natural Philosophy, and I know, no body Knows what is the
Cause of any thing, and since they are all but Guessers, not Knowing, it
gives every Man room to Think what he lists, and so I mean to Set up for
my self, and play at thts Philosophical Game as follows, without Patching
or Stealing from any Body.” Perham Margaret Cavendish developed her
science of the fancy to restore the balance in an age of reason. Her work
represents, in a whimsical way, a groping toward an alternative vision to
Salomon’s House with its pretence to finding certain and objective
knowledge. And she does attempt a relationship with nature that runs
counter to the exploitive mastery proposed by Bacon; her approach is
sensitive and reverent as well as subjective.
By her own admission, she was vain, inconsistent and silly; yet she
took herself and her philosophy seriously. She was incapable of sustained
study and thinking, so she said; yet she wanted to be a famous philosopher
and to join the scientific establishment. In the same work she expounds a
vitalistic and a mechanistic universe. Her writing is muddled and indeci-
sive; yet she expected posterity to admire it. The effect of letting
contradictions stand is to undermine continually any authoritative stance

33. Mary Evelyn, “A Letter to Mr. Bohun,” Diaryand Correspondenceojjohn Evelyn ed. William
Bray (London, 1900), pp. 731-32.
 Sylvia Bowerbank 407

she might be achieving. And yet at times this method gets at the
complexity of psychological and social reality: for example, in Orations of
Divers Sorts, she lets several female speakers describe the lot of women
from conflicting perspectives. They claim everything from “we live like
Batts, or Owls, labour like Beasts, and dye like Worms’’ to “what can
we desire more, than to be Men’s Tyrants, Destinies, and Goddesses?”
(ODS, pp. 240-46). Since Cavendish makes no judgmental distinctions
among her female orators, it would be a mistake to guess her viewpoint;
perhaps she shared all their attitudes to some extent.%Contradiction is
typical ofher style. It is hard to say whether this is an intentional strategy
or the unfortunate result of her refusal to revise and to edit her writing.
Cavendish’s work is a defense of free fancy or subjective expression in
principle and in practice. Some modern writers like Andis Nin advocate
a revolution in style toward one that would reflect psychological reality:
the new literary form would be “endlessly varied and fecundating as
each crystal varies from the next.”35 Cavendish can be seen as a pioneer
of such an approach. Even those of us who are attracted to her personal-
ity and ideas cannot help but wish she had been a more disciplined writer.
It is also useful, then, to see Cavendish’s place in literary hstory as a
cautionary tale for those of us who would suggest that craftsmanship and
order are masculine, and artlessness and chaos are feminine. Do we really
want to create a literary ghetto called the “female imagination” and
claim as its characteristic style of expression, anarchic formlessness?
Style has no sex. After all, the real spider’s web, although spun out of
herself, is architectonically sound, even elegant.
MCMASTER UNIVERSITY

ABBREVIATIONS:
The following abbreviations have been used in the text and notes:
BWI66: The Description of a New Blazing World, appended to OEP.
B W/68: The Description ofa New World, called the Blazing World. London: A. Maxwell,
1668.
Life: The Life ofthe First Duke ofNewcastle. First ed. 1667. Everyman Library #182.
London: J. M. Dent, n.d.

34. Woolf takes the angry “we live like Batts” for Cavendish’s own voice in Room, p. 59.
35. Anais Nin, The Novel ofthe Future (New York, 1976), p. 29.
408 English Literary Renaissance
NP: Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to Life. London: A. Maxwell, 1671.
0El?: Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, to which is added, the Description of a
New Blazing World. London: A. Maxwell, 1666.
0DS: Orations of Divers Sorts, Accommodated to Divers Places. Second ed. London: A.
Maxwell, 1668.
PF: Poems and Fancies. First ed. 1653. Facsimile, Scolar Press, 1972.
PL: Philosophical Letters: or, Modest Reflections Upon some Opinions in Natural Philoso-
phy, Maintained B y several Famous and Learned Authors ofthis Age. London, 1664.
P0/55: The Philosophical and Physical Opinions. London: J. Martin & J. Allestrye, 1655.
P0/63: Philosophical and Physical Opinions, London: William Wilson, 1663.
TR: A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life appended to Life.
Coll: A Collection ofletters and Poems: Written by several Persons of Honour and Learning,
Upon divers Important Subjects, to the Late Duke and Dutchess ofNewcastle. London:
Langly Curtis, 1678.