Women, the republic of letters, and the public sphere in the mid-seventeenth century

Criticism, Spring, 2004 by David Norbrook

Cavendish's intellectual interests have more in common with Marie de Gournay's milieu than with van Schurman's. Gournay had indeed rebuked her Dutch correspondent for devoting too much attention to languages, behind which there perhaps lay a more general censure of her orthodox piety. Gournay had derived from Montaigne a skepticism that might be accompanied by outward deference to religious and political institutions but which constantly provoked critical scrutiny of custom. In Catholic France, the kind of independent lay scrutiny of Scripture in which Englishwomen were becoming versed was harder to pursue, and women writers often gravitated more exclusively to secular themes and in some cases to implicit challenges to religious orthodoxy. (28) By the 1640s such challenges were being reinforced by a new wave of Epicurean science and philosophy.

Though Cavendish's lack of French and Latin made her unable to participate in the little academy her husband organized for figures like Descartes, Hobbes, and Gassendi, she took a keen interest in the issues. Her early encounters with political puritanism in action made her the readier to speculate far outside confessional confines. One reason she would have appeared so strange and singular to her English contemporaries is her enthusiastic embrace of positions that could be interpreted without much strain as atheistic. Her first publication, Poems and Fancies (1653), opened with Lucretian versifications of atomic theory, just four years after Michel de Marolles had published the first translation of the worryingly ungodly Lucretius into any vernacular. Cavendish's discussions of Nature leave very little space for a creating God, and here as in most of her later works she speaks much more of the gods than of God, while her vocabulary is strikingly free of any register of Protestant spirituality. Conal Condren has argued that Cavendish's husband's political Machiavellianism involved a strong degree of skepticism about existing customs in church and state as well as a pragmatic reaffirmation of their political value, and this radical conservatism can be found in Margaret Cavendish's writings too. (29) There is a distinctive vein of Machiavellianism in such comments by her "She anchoret" (in Natures Pictures) as that "that Kingdom, is happiest, that lives under a Tyrant Prince, for when the people are afraid of their Prince, there is Peace, but where the Prince is afraid of the people, there is War; and there is no miserie like a Civill War." Threatened with abduction by a rival prince, the "She anchoret" commits suicide, and while the state sets "up her Statue of brasse, for her courage and love to her Countrey, the Church Deified her a Saint." The religious terminology here is as unorthodox as the unqualified praise for suicide, in a story to which Cavendish draws attention in her preface as one of her most "solid and edifying." (30) Another heroine in the same volume, faced with a comparable threat, simply takes out her pistol and shoots her assaulter, then flees in masculine disguise, "finding opportunity to take Time by the fore-lock." When we are told that the gods favour her for her "virtue," it seems that they are using that term in a Machiavellian rather than Christian sense. (31) Cavendish is appropriating Machiavellian virtu as a female as well as male quality. (32)