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GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10.3 (2004) 433-452



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Margaret Cavendish, Scribe

In a startling moment past the midpoint of A New World, Called the Blazing World, Margaret Cavendish, its presumptive narrator and unquestioned author, appears in the text as a character. The Empress of the Blazing World, a figure readers may well have assumed to be a fantasy projection of the author's, is seeking an amanuensis, and the spirit to whom she expresses this desire recommends the Duchess of Newcastle as "a plain and rational Writer . . . ready to do . . . all the service she can" (208).1 Several critics of Cavendish have recently offered provocative analyses of this moment, many of them responding as well to the theory of absolutist female subjectivity that Catherine Gallagher laid out in an important essay that appeared in Genders in 1988.2 Gallagher had proposed an abyssal, metonymic model of subjectivity, an infinitizing regress that she read off Cavendish's royalist politics as well as what she termed the perspectivalism of Cavendish's natural philosophy. Gallagher's claims have since been retooled: by John Rogers, who argues that Cavendish's gender and her vitalist beliefs are responsible for the transmutation of royalist fantasy into the grounds for a liberal subject; by Eve Keller, who proposes that Cavendish's radical scientific theory must call into question the subject-object distinction that subtends any theory of the subject (a view that can be supported when Cavendish declares in her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, published with Blazing World as its companion text in 1666, that "the distinction of interior and exterior place, is needless");3 and by Mary Baine Campbell, who similarly builds upon Cavendish's science to insist that, rather than an infinite regress of subjectivity, the figures of Duchess and Empress represent an alterity, a doubleness that withstands the possibility of identification.4 Finally, Sandra Sherman takes the moment when Cavendish materializes in her text to instantiate a submissiveness to textuality that must subject its subject.5

Sherman's approach is the one closest to my own here on questions of writing, although I aim to have something further to say about the questions of subjectivity, [End Page 433] natural philosophy, politics, and gender that others have investigated, as well as to open the possibility of female-female erotics that might be read in this moment of authorial replication. This strange moment of resemblance and hierarchization—between the author/narrator, her projection as Empress, and her appearance as a character who functions, it appears, to take dictation—might draw Cavendish into the orbit of a form of lesbian similitude and difference investigated by Valerie Traub in the concluding chapter of The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Like several other critics, Traub discusses lesbian representation in Cavendish, and like them, her focus is on transvestite dramas such as The Convent of Pleasure, not on this or analogous representations of female-female relations as can be found, for example, in Cavendish's Sociable Letters, a correspondence imagined between the author and a friend, whose relationship is one of the subjects that comes under consideration in the letters that the work comprises.6 On the basis of Cavendish's transvestite drama, and despite Traub's professed goal not to legislate what might qualify as lesbian representation, Traub finds Cavendish's representations of female-female desire to be compromised ones, inevitably reinscribing same-sex relationships into normative and renaturalized male-female couples. The pressure of closure in The Convent of Pleasure, when Lady Happy's beloved Princess turns out to be a Prince, succumbs, in Traub's reading, to a mandated heterosexuality that, she argues, also produces a diacritical homo/heterosexual distinction that marks the incipient modernity of the seventeenth century.

Traub's history of lesbian sexuality owes much, as she indicates, to Alan Bray's groundbreaking and unsurpassed Homosexuality in Renaissance England. Whereas Bray excludes any consideration of female-female relations from his study of male-male relations on the likely supposition that a history of "lesbianism" could not be...

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