Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind

Derisively dismissed for many years as “crack-brained,” “Mad Madge,” a woman of fantastical fashions, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle and her works are now being critically assessed and brought back from the margins. Anna Battigelli’s “intellectual biography” (9) focuses on Cavendish’s writing self and her conscious identification of herself as an exile. Born into a Royalist family in 1623 and wed at twenty one to famous Royalist General William Cavendish, Margaret spent sixteen years in exile. Battigelli’s thesis is that over her career, Cavendish deliberately utilized the image of the cavalier exile to “[transform] her comparative social isolation into a rhetorical stance” from which she could criticize the world (7). In this elegant and well-researched study, Cavendish emerges not as eccentric and ostracized, but as an intellectually engaged woman who imposed a “voluntary interiority” upon herself (85) as she struggled to find the proper relationship between mind and world.

In 1643 Cavendish experienced her first exile when she joined Henrietta Maria’s court in Oxford. Charles I’s Catholic queen was a flamboyant personality, constantly refashioning her public image, from pious proselytizer to Amazonian war captain leading troops across England to join her husband. She was actively involved in court masques and Platonic love doctrines, using spectacle to woo minds to her beliefs. While the queen’s participation in masques such as Davenant’s The Temple of Love predated Cavendish’s employment, Battigelli makes a convincing case for Henrietta’s influence on her work. In Davenant’s masque, Henrietta played Queen Indamora whose beauty “signals one of the key attractions of Platonic love doctrine: it offered a way of transforming feminine beauty into intellectual power” (17), an essential idea in Cavendish’s writing. But as much as Henrietta provided a positive role model for the bashful maid of honour, she was also an example of a powerful person attempting to force her (Catholic) beliefs onto a resistant public. Often within Cavendish’s works we are presented with two heroines-the contemplative and the active-whose dialogic relationship embodies the conflict in their author’s mind of the two types of engagement with the world. Wary of imposing an ideal on the world, yet realizing the powers of the imagination, Cavendish explores within her works “competing philosophies of mind” (27). The plays “The Lady Contemplation,” “Love’s Adventures,” “The Presence” and “Youth’s Glory and Death’s Banquet” are discussed for their presentation of heroines who either attempt to change their world to realize their own ideals, or silently retreat from it. Cavendish describes her own ambivalent relation to the world in one of her letters: “I am both in it and out of it, a strange enchantment” (23).

Throughout her chapters, Battigelli interweaves Cavendish’s family history, the Queen’s Platonic ideas and the horror of the Civil War as evidenced within Cavendish’s writing. The book’s chronological approach is sometimes frustrating as we anticipate the use of motifs within The Blazing World and other late works but must wait until Battigelli discusses them in the chapter she has designed for them. This approach means that the plays are never returned to for discussion later because they do not employ the theories Cavendish was introduced to in her husband’s circle in exile.

Battigelli devotes a chapter each to Cavendish’s “Review of the New Atomism,” her “Hobbesian Dilemma” and her “Satire of the Royal Society” as she presents Cavendish’s developing relationship with science and philosophy. In accessible language, Battigelli makes clear the complicated theories of Epicurus, Descartes, Gassendi and Lucretius and others and demonstrates Cavendish’s literary reactions to their ideas. Although Cavendish was intrigued with the theory of atomism, she used it predominately “as a metaphor for the brutal and frightening clash of conflicting certainties” of the mind (57). By the time she wrote Poems and Fancies (1653), she was exploring “the epistemological consequences of atomism”(52)-whether there could be a plurality of worlds; whether the senses were reliable; what one could truly know.

By 1655, Cavendish had rejected atomism because of its potential for anarchy, and turned to the ideas of Thomas Hobbes. She was attracted to Hobbes’s deductive method and his rejection of authority because it supported her own speculative activity and self-education. Cavendish’s “Hobbesian dilemma” was her drive to write despite her awareness that the “disputatious nature of the human mind” (a phrase Battigelli is so wed to that she uses it at least three times, including twice in one paragraph) (73; 79) could lead to conflict. Battigelli investigates Cavendish’s use of multiple speakers with their clashing perspectives in Nature’s Pictures with its Chaucerian-like storytellers, Orations of Divers Sorts and the Blazing World to demonstrate the problems of subjectivity: “changeable and unpredicable, the very nature of the self posed a potential threat to political order” (70). The paradoxes and contradictions within Cavendish’s writing, so often dismissed as madness, are presented here as skilfully orchestrated, offering irreconciliable differences between subjective views. Where she differed from Hobbes was over his belief in an absolute authority to guarantee political stability. As she demonstrates in Blazing World, “though making the sovereign the political arbiter of truth looked efficient in theory, it was hardly likely to work in practice” (81). In her critique of Hobbes’s Leviathan in her Philosophical Letters (1664), she writes: “If men do not naturally agree, Art cannot make unity amongst them, or assoicate them into one Politick Body and so rule them. … The truth is, Man rules an artificial Government, and not Government Man, just like as a Watch-maker rules his Watch, and not the Watch the Watch-maker” (83).

The chapter “Rationalism versus Experimentalism: Cavendish’s Satire of the Royal Society” examines the clash between Cavendish’s “rationalist deduction” and the Royal Society’s “induction through experiment and observation” (89). Battigelli effectively outlines Cavendish’s critique of the Royal Society, considering Robert Hooke’s Micrographia and Cavendish’s theory of natural philosophy in particular. Where Hooke “insistently subordinated the operations of the mind to the exact observations of the eye aided by an optical glass,” Cavendish argued in her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666) that “Experimental and Mechanick Philosophy cannot be above the Speculative part, by reason most Experiments have their rise from the Speculative, so that the Artist or Mechanick is but a servant to the Student” (95). For Cavendish, the scientist’s subjectivity would always impose itself on whatever it viewed. Battigelli then examines The Description of a New Blazing World in relation to the Observations-originally published in one volume as companion texts–to show that Cavendish wanted to emphasize “the inner life of the mind and its vagaries, which the experimentalists seemed to overlook” (102). Battigelli becomes a little tentative here when making statements such as “if, Cavendish seems to point out, an observer can be as eccentric as she reveals herself to be, how are we to rely on such an observer’s ‘eye’ for empirical objectivity?” (104). She is also less than convincing when she states that Cavendish’s famous expression of ambition is really a “philosophical positioning of the ‘self'” (105) from which Cavendish states the Blazing World is a product of her own fancy, and satirizes the portrayal of Hooke’s ego-less experimentalist. While this may be true for Blazing World, it does not account for Cavendish’s numerous published articulations throughout her life of her desire for fame. Battigelli’s claims may have some strength; however, if she intends to overturn almost three centuries of reading Cavendish’s ambition, she needs to argue more persuasively than this.

Battigelli is more convincing in her discussion of the Empress and the Duchess as representing “two competing modes of inquiry,” experimentalism and rationalism, respectively (105). The Empress investigates the scientific inquiries of the Bearmen with their telescopes but quickly becomes angry with their distortions and delusions. The microscopes bring them no closer to truth and the Empress finds no practical applications for their observations. Having satirized Hooke’s experimentalism, the dangers of rationalism are represented through the Duchess’s ambition to conquer a terrestrial world. The Duchess, like Cavendish herself, is convinced of the efficacy of creating a world of her own. Unlike Hooke, who would banish the products of “the Brain and Fancy,” keeping his eye servilely fixed on fragments of the external physical world, and unlike the Empress, who struggled to impose her ideals on an unyielding external world, the Duchess turns inward to the speculative and subjective pleasures of the mind. In this she takes “more delight and glory, then ever Alexander or Cesar did in conquering this terrestrial world” (109). With this, we return to the idea of Margaret Cavendish herself as an exile of the mind: rejecting agency in the physical, external world with its potential for civil war through the conflicts precipitated by subjectivity, the written word and religion in order to create her own world within her mind.

This volume includes two appendices: “Problems in the Dating of Margaret Lucas’s Birth” and the very enjoyable “Letters of Margaret Lucas Addressed to William Cavendish.” Battigelli includes the letters because, she writes, they reveal “Lucas’s acute sense of herself as an exile-from court culture, from England, and more generally from the world” (119). They also provide a real sense of the young Margaret’s personality, and an example of the horrible spelling she and her critics are always quick to mention though it never comes across in modern editions.

My lord, pray beleve I am not factious, espashally with you, for your commands shall be my law, but supos me now in a very mallacolly humer, and that most off my contempaltions [contemplations] are fext [fixed] on nothing but dessolutions [dissolutions], for I look apon this world as on a deths head for mortefication, for I see all things subiet to allteration and chaing, and our hopes as if they had takin opum [opium]; therfore I will despis all things of this world, I will not say all things in it, and love nothing but you that is above it, but I should be lost to thos thoughts if I ded not meet some off you [yours] to restor me to my self againe; (124).

The twenty one letters alone are almost worth the price of the book.

The Exiles of the Mind usefully contextualizes Cavendish and her theories within seventeenth-century thought so that she emerges not as an eccentric, cross-dressing introvert but as a vitally engaged philosopher struggling with the complexities of intellectual life after the Civil War. Battigelli’s book offers an interesting perspective from which to reassess Cavendish’s work. It is a commendable study of a fascinating woman and her writing.