The Blazing World and Other Writings (Penguin Classics) (2 page)

Cavendish’s response to the narrow territory with which women were supposed to concern themselves was a desire for encyclopaedic coverage. This will to inclusiveness has often been used as proof of her unsound scholarship and unbecoming lack of modesty. Her scientific speculations have been routinely ridiculed, but Lisa Sarasohn has shown that Cavendish’s secular atomism and, later, extreme materialism were not implausible or disreputable in their historical context. Sarasohn argues that the combination, in Cavendish’s avowedly speculative writing, of skepticism and gender critique ‘shows how the radical implications of one area of thought can reinforce and strengthen the subversive tendencies of another, quite different attack on authority’ (Sarasohn, p. 290).

Both ‘The Contract’ and ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ first appeared in
Nature’s Pictures drawn by Fancy’s Pencil to the Life
(1656). This is Cavendish’s most ambitious attempt to combine modes and genres, as the title page indicates: ‘In this volume there are several feigned stories of natural descriptions, as comical, tragical, tragi-comical, poetical, romancical, philosophical, and historical, both in prose and verse, some all verse, some all prose, some mixed, partly prose, and partly verse. Also, there are some morals, and some dialogues; but they are as the advantage loaves of bread to a baker’s dozen; and a true story at the latter end, wherein there is no feignings.’ The whole volume runs to almost 400 closely printed pages, beginning with six prefatory addresses to the reader. The closing epistle, ‘A Complaint and Request’, specifically addresses the reader acquainted not only with this book but Cavendish’s publications to date. In this, her fifth book issued in three years, she assumes a continuing audience for her work: those implied readers whose existence confirms her career as a writer in a public sense.

Both stories from
Nature’s Pictures
included here concern the eventual marriage of a young and wealthy heroine to a younger brother whose fortune is made by the death of the first heir. Both men, initially married to wealthy, older widows, are
offered as desirable and sexually libertine. The narrative denouement requires the removal of the present wife, respectively through annulment and death, and the reform of the rakish husband by the virtuous, beautiful and brilliantly accomplished heroine. William Cavendish was just such a dissolute and successful younger brother, whom Margaret Cavendish married after the death of his first wife, a rich widow. Clearly Margaret Cavendish was rewriting the narrative of her own history as romance, focusing her main attention and admiration on the advantageous production of woman as spectacle. In particular she charts the difficult progress of the exceptional, and exceptionally chaste, woman to her just reward: a brilliant marriage and her own title.

Cavendish was pointedly censorious about the deleterious effects of romance on the minds and conduct of female readers. The heroine’s guardian in ‘The Contract’ ‘never suffered her to read in Romancies, nor such light books’ (
p. 185
), while Miseria, the heroine of ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’, refuses to read romances; choosing mathematical treatises instead. Cavendish herself claimed never to have read romances, but did not scruple to write what she called ‘romancical’ books. Her own experiments with the feminized romance mode dramatize women’s sexualized access to power through marriage and eroticized friendship.
¹⁷
Similarly, they play out the empowering possibilities of disguise or masking, allowing women the opportunity to excel in literally masculine or masculinized roles (Empress, Viceregent, General, legal advocate, ‘son’).

Cavendish repeatedly feminizes the aristocratic and chivalric trope (or figure) of the fair unknown. In her stories, the woman as stranger effortlessly and instantaneously seduces all who encounter her, and is able to profit by the recognition of her own status as fetish. These narratives centre on the strangeness of woman, both inherent and circumstantial, and her ability to solicit and shape ‘the gaze of wonder’.
¹⁸
Though her plots lead to, or hinge on, advantageous marriage, each of these stories also privileges relations between women as asymmetrical doubles. An adversarial contest between current and future wives forms
the climax of ‘The Contract’, while eroticized platonic love and female patronage are crucial to ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ and
The Blazing World.

In ‘The Contract’, an orphaned infant heiress is brought up by her father’s brother, whose own children are dead. A marriage contract is mooted between the niece and a Duke’s younger son.
¹⁹
When the child is almost seven the Duke falls ill and the contract is ratified as his dying wish. The son ‘seemed to consent, to please his Father’, but after the Duke’s death ‘did not at all reflect upon his contract’. He goes to war, fortuitously inherits the Dukedom on the unexpected death of his elder brother, and marries a rich widow who ‘claimed a promise from him’ (
p. 185
). The spurned niece recognizes the potential unhappiness of such an arrangement, and the value of her own financial independence, for ‘who are happier than those that are mistresses of their own fortunes?’ (
p. 186
). It is her uncle who seeks revenge, vowing to take his niece to the city and make her ‘a meteor of the time’. There he escorts her to lectures on natural philosophy, physics, chemistry, music, and to courts of law, always ‘masked, muffled, and scarfed’. At sixteen she is literally unveiled at court in a series of carefully planned and titillating appearances.

The niece designs her own clothes, and is thus partly the orchestrator of, and commentator on, her own spectacular singularity: ‘what doth my uncle mean to set me out to show? sure he means to traffic for a husband; but Heaven forbid those intentions …’. On her first appearance she dresses all in black ‘like a young widow’. Entering the masque after all the court is seated, ‘as if a curtain was drawn from before her’, she displaces the performance as the chief wonder. At her second appearance she dresses in white satin embroidered with silver, ‘like a Heaven stuck with stars’. Again, she enters late, without veil or jewellery, to be ‘more prospectious’ (
p. 193
), and is received as ‘some divine object’: ‘the beams of all eyes were drawn together, as one point placed in her face, and by reflection she sent a burning heat, and fired every heart’, (
p. 193
) The men wait on her, while the women watch with envy, but it is the two most
prominent men in the assembly, the aged Viceroy and the unhappily married Duke, who are singled out as chief admirers. The young woman, unwittingly at first, desires only the man to whom she was betrothed as a child, faithful to the terms of the contract.

Against the wishes of his niece, the uncle verbally accepts the Viceroy’s proposal of marriage, while the Duke and the still unnamed young lady exchange letters declaring their love. The Duke confesses his youthful error, and repents his disobedience to his father and to the strictures of contractual and moral obligation, urging her to ‘place [her]self ’ (
p. 203
) by recourse to law. This boudoir scene in which the Duke asserts a husbandly prerogative is followed by another intimate confrontation, this time between the rival lovers in the Viceroy’s private chamber. It is only now that the name of the placeless and anonymous young woman is revealed as the Lady Delitia, by the man who is now prepared and able to say, ‘she is my wife, and I have been married to her almost nine years’. Once the obstacle of the Viceroy’s pre-contract has been disposed of by a combination of violent intimidation and legal nicety, the uncle agrees to support Deletia in a suit to establish her rightful claim over that of the current Duchess.

In the final movement of the narrative Deletia proves her excellence as a student. Her years as an obscure courtroom observer have prepared her to act confidently and argue eloquendy as her own advocate but, in fact, such a demonstration is legally superfluous. Its narrative importance is as another scene of seduction, for, as the judges inform Delitia, ‘the justice of your cause judges itself’ (
p. 213
). Similarly, though the mutual desire of the Duke and Delitia may be legally beside the point, it is narratively and generically essential to the satisfactory conclusion of the romance. This is the third ‘courtly’ spectacle at which Deletia proves to be the chief wonder and, once again, other women are her only opponents, for this contest is really between the current, inauthentic Duchess and her authentic replacement who ‘came not from nobility, but … the root of merit, from whence gentility doth spring’ (
p. 211
). Deletia fulfils
her uncle’s plan for revenge by indeed becoming a ‘meteor of the age’, able to choose any man as her husband; but her revenge is not against the Duke for breach of contract, but rather in deleting the manipulative widow he married. Revenge is sweet, however: the spurned Viceroy proposes to the Duchess and the tale ends by foreshadowing a double wedding. This neat reversal (corresponding in rhetoric to the scheme chiasmus) privileges the force of the initial marriage contract, and the weakness of the second, realigning the couples according to the moral of the desirability of a younger wife.
²⁰

‘The Contract’ is a contained and elegantly structured narrative, with powerful set-pieces and confrontations. The other two texts included here are more complex, lengthy and ambitious. They extend Cavendish’s ambivalent fascination with the possibilities of romance as the scene of a woman’s heroic agency and successful negotiation of the theatres of power; and her commitment to the representation of women as subjects of desire and subjects in discourse.

‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ is an allegorical romance in which an anonymous heiress is forced from her home and family in the Kingdom of Riches by the dangers of war. Shipwrecked in the Kingdom of Sensuality, she is ‘assaulted and pursued’ by that kingdom’s married Prince, whose behaviour is by turns noble and dissolute. After shooting and wounding the Prince to preserve her honour, the young lady, now known as ‘Miseria’, is driven to a near-fatal suicide attempt. She cuts her hair and escapes dressed as a page, leaving letters signed ‘Affectionata’. Disguised as a boy named ‘Travellia’ she stows away on a ship which proves to be southward bound on a voyage of discovery. Travellia’s presence on the ship is discovered by the Captain, but her disguise remains intact.

The Captain finds in Travellia a ‘son’, she in him a ‘father’. The amorous romance plot is temporarily displaced by a filial romance and this literal ship of fortune then bears the new couple into the generic territory of the imaginary voyage while the main sexual plot is deferred. The heroine’s cross-dressing and change of name inaugurates a masculinized adventure and
travel narrative, which in turns leads to an interlude in a fantastic kingdom; but the significance of Travellia’s female virtue is never forgotten as a motive-force in the construction of the plot, for it is that which rescues the Captain and his adopted ‘son’ from shipwreck and guides them into a scene of mutual wonder.

In this self-contained episode Cavendish offers an extended catalogue of curiosities which anticipates
The Blazing World’s
intense interest in new hybrids and mixed species, as well as the later text’s descriptive and allegorical richness. As Travellia and the Captain travel deeper into the kingdom, and further away from the scene of initial contact, the quality of the materials catalogued becomes more luxurious and the objects themselves more artful and elaborate. Even the appearance of the inhabitants alters to demonstrate a profound physical difference between subjects of different rank: unlike the men with deep purple skin and black teeth by whom they are met, ‘all those of the Royal blood, were of a different colour from the rest of the people, they were of a perfect orange colour, their hair coal black, their teeth and nails as white as milk, of a very great height, yet well shaped’. The royals also have skins ‘wrought, like the Britons’. These ornamental markings are cultural inscriptions of rank on skin which is already hierarchically colour-coded, but they also signify a primitive and decadent potential in those of greatest power which links them with the spear-carrying natives first described – for we learn that they are all cannibals, who will only accomplish true civility by means of this narrative of providential contact.

In the course of a year’s imprisonment, and at the Captain’s urging, Travellia proves her intellectual capacity by learning the language of their captors and, in a violent
coup de théâtre
, averts their destiny as sacrifices. Identifying herself and her ‘father’ as messengers of the gods, she embarks on a series of instructive sermons ‘forbidding vain and barbarous customs, and inhumane ceremonies … by which doctrine they were brought to be a civilized people.’

This fantastic episode establishes Travellia’s credentials as an
effective ‘son’, and prepares the way for the more elaborate drama of multiple disguises and partial disclosures which ensues when the Prince re-enters the narrative. In an interim passage on an uninhabited island the Captain tells the suspicious Prince what he knows of Travellia, the Prince penetrates Travellia’s disguise, and Travellia unfolds the secret of her closeted gender to the Captain, who promptly rescues the ‘son’ who proves to be a daughter in distress.

Travellia and the Prince next meet in the service of monarchs of neighbouring countries, Amity and Amour, where they are drawn into a second plot of assaulted and pursued chastity, hinging on the unsuccessful courtship of the Queen of Amity by the King of Amour. The initial impediment is the Queen’s desire to maintain absolute sovereignty and independence, but the arrival of Travellia adds another twist to the complexities of unrequited love when the Queen chooses Travellia, the fair unknown, on the merits of beauty and character alone. As Travellia had been abducted by the Prince in the story’s beginning, now the Queen is abducted by the King, and Travellia and the Prince, unbeknownst to each other, become leaders of the armies of Amity and Amour.