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Conclusion O Blazing World During their years of Interregnum exile, Margaret and William Cavendish, then marquis and marchioness of Newcastle, maintained a circle of acquaintance extending to the foremost Anglo-French intellectuals of the day, among them Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi, and René Descartes.1 Later, in her Philosophical Letters of 1664, Lady Margaret would attack the theories of Hobbes and Descartes, and for their part, all three of these men had mutual differences as well. However, in the summer of 1648 the three philosophers frequented the Cavendish household; John Aubrey reports Edmund Waller as saying that “W. Lord Marquisse of Newcastle was a great patron of Dr. Gassendi and M. Des Cartes, as well as Mr. Hobbes, and that he hath dined with them all three at the Marquiss’s table in Paris” (2:2.626). Also present at any such meal (or meals) must have been Lady Margaret, and a meeting with Descartes seems particularly appropriate for a woman whose interest in philosophy and experimental science was as keen as her passion for letters. In terms of the present study, the encounter between French philosopher and English writer marks a natural end point: a coming together of nations and of disciplines at the dawn of a new intellectual dispensation. As for Margaret Cavendish, after lying almost dormant for three centuries her literary reputation has gained unprecedented influence over the past fifty years, largely thanks to the efforts of feminist scholars who have seen her as a forerunner in the literary struggle against patriarchy. The censure she incurred in her own day from figures such as Samuel Pepys and Dorothy Osborne has been refashioned as a badge of honor, the sign of a woman ahead of her time in “emancipating herself from seventeenth-century female bondage ” (Meyer 16).2 She has been described as “an eloquent ‘feminist’” avant la lettre (Mendelson 54)—even if the key term here is given in scare quotes. In 192 conclusion addition, her interest in the new science has been correlated to her insistence that “the social order could expand to accommodate the intellectual equality of women,” with the result that at least one reader has insisted, “Cavendish’s work 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 289, 290). Still better for present purposes, Cavendish’s feminism and her interest in science find a parallel in her progressive attitudes toward animals and the natural world. As Keith Thomas has put it, Cavendish “rejected the whole anthropocentric tradition, . . . arguing that men had no monopoly of sense or reason” (Man 128). More recently her views have been described as “remarkably similar to modern criticisms of human anthropocentrism” (Edwards, Horse and Man 20), and she has been credited with “originating a sensibility that we might call ecological” (Bowerbank 62). Contesting masculine bigotry , expressing an ethic of care for animals and the environment, writing bizarre tales that anticipate more-recent forms of science fiction and utopia, Cavendish cuts a brave and distinctive figure. We may perhaps be forgiven for succumbing to the narcissistic temptation to see her as one of us. Still, forgivable or not, the temptation is narcissistic. It is also less than wholly accurate. Despite her bold protofeminist pronouncements, “[t]he Duchess of Newcastle did not conceal her contempt for women of the lower orders; . . . [i]n real life she expressed more empathy for wild animals than for the poor in her midst” (Mendelson 6). Politically a Tory reactionary, she was moved by “a desire to restore past nature (and privilege) under the power of the crown and aristocracy” (Bowerbank 74). In her writing, too, she “echoed the conventional ideas about women in many prefaces” (Crawford 228), while her protagonists often remain “conventionally feminine” in terms of their motives and aspirations (Mendelson 23). Even her choice of literary genres is less forward-looking than it might at first appear, being marred by a “tendency to express her ideas in trite literary forms that had already become old-fashioned by the mid-seventeenth century” (Mendelson 38). In all these respects Cavendish’s reputation as a progressive is compromised, her legacy strangely mixed. The same may also be said of Cavendish’s interventions on the subject of species difference. In some ways these do indeed seem the stuff of future animal-rights philosophy and ecocriticism; yet if this is so, it is in large part because of the very retrograde...

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