Utopian Negotiation: Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish by Oddvar Holmesland (review)

Critics have been reluctant to pair the works of Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn although there is plenty to unite them: born only seventeen years apart, each coming to maturity in the turbulent years following the English Civil War, both evincing strong Royalist allegiances complicated by more subversive proto-feminist sympathies, and together representing two of the most important pioneering women writers of the early modern period. For this reluctance, Virginia Woolf may be to blame. Whereas Woolf famously encouraged women writers to place flowers upon the grave of Behn in tribute to the professional path she cut, Woolf compared Cavendish’s accomplishments to an overgrown cucumber patch.¹ Cavendish was so quick to praise herself and to seek fame through her privileged access to self-publishing and its unchecked results that she left little room or cause for later women writers to praise her. Cavendish was a joke; Behn was a serious writer doing serious work, and most important, being paid for it. This perception of Cavendish as a dilettante has since been dispelled, and her reputation along with Behn’s has flourished in recent years, but as Oddvar Holmesland points out in Utopian Negotiation: Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish, scholars still emphasize their differences, placing them “in sharply different worlds” (p. 12). Holmesland’s purpose, by contrast, is to establish the value of pairing them, and in this regard, Utopian Negotiation unquestionably succeeds. It does so, in large part, by showing how much of a world view, both real and imagined, they shared and yet how unsettled that world proved to be.

His approach is counterintuitive. Rather than emphasize their shared trauma—Cavendish a child of war and exile, Behn a survivor of an exceptionally traumatic period of English history, the post-Restoration and pre-Glorious Revolution years—Holmesland emphasizes instead their mutual exploration of utopian ideals and makes an even more compelling case that utopian negotiations are themselves an intuitive outcome of periods of cultural upheaval. Rather than establish ideal states, utopian literature is likely to put them in question. Drawing upon the work of Louis Marin, among others, he notes the tendency of such literature to appear during periods of ideological upheaval and to function as utopias and dystopias simultaneously, drawing attention to the problems with ideal constructions even as they work to establish perfect, or at least more perfect, unions. What makes this framework so appealing is how productively it reframes the question of Cavendish’s and Behn’s conservative tendencies, a sticking point in their reclamation for feminist purposes. Holmesland identifies their conservatism as less a political position (although he acknowledges their Royalist sympathies) and more as an ideological or even psychological one. Their conservative impulses issue from a desire for recovery and restitution; they seek during an unstable time a more stable and restorative meaning. At the same time, they use the very instability of their times and the categories it has dislodged to question gender relations and masculine hierarchies. The result is a form of Renaissance “self-fashioning,” as defined by Stephen Greenblatt, that produces a dialectical relationship to the gendered truths of their time, and more so for Behn, the emerging republics of a new and re-established European world.²

This pattern is easiest to see in Cavendish, whose work Holmesland discusses first while giving Behn top billing in the book’s subtitle. Cavendish literally constructs utopias, or at least spaces, real and fantastical, that can be cordoned off from the unnatural distinctions of her time. Within these worlds, Cavendish proves unequivocally the competence of her heroines. In Bell in Campo (1662), Lady Victoria ably fights alongside her husband, winning in battle when he does not and after he has denied her this right to pursue, as she frames it, her wifely duty. In The Female Academy (1662), the female orators prove equally capable at public speaking, as a “male audience peeping suspiciously” ultimately affirms (p. 69). In The Blazing World (1666), the Empress...