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Women, the republic of letters, and the public sphere in the mid-seventeenth century
Criticism, Spring, 2004 by David Norbrook
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)
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This is certainly in one sense a feminist move; but it also has very distinct ideological inflections, of a largely secular, individual pursuit of glory, radically different from the Christianized Machiavellianism of contemporary English republicans, and also from the values of communality and collective work characteristic of the republic of letters. The very fact that Cavendish makes no mention of her celebrated contemporary women writers itself indicates a rather rigorous practice of a cult of individual glory. And the fact that her writings met a mixed reception in England, normally put down to patriarchal hostility to writing by women, surely has to take into account her radical departure from the expected conventions of religious discourse. Her insistence in the preface to Poems and Fancies that the book's "harmlesse Fancies" were distinctively female could be taken less as an expression of female alterity than as a strategic camouflage. (33) It is true that one contemporary praised her specifically for her ethics, describing her plays as "filled throughout with more and truer Idea's of Virtue and Honour than any Book of morality I have read"; but since the individual in question was Thomas Hobbes, this would not necessarily have been found reassuring. (34) That women like Dorothy Osborne and Mary Evelyn were uncomplimentary about Cavendish's works may reflect a resistance to having a rather idiosyncratic intellectual profile put forward as quintessentially feminine. What is most new about her writings is not her gender per se but her synthesis of the profiles of Continental, and especially French, intellectual women for projection into the very different conditions of Puritan England.
