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  • Utopian Negotiation: Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish by Oddvar Holmesland
  • Diana Solomon
Holmesland, Oddvar. Utopian Negotiation: Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2013. 316 pp.

The two most accomplished female writers of seventeenth-century England have largely inhabited separate scholarly spheres. Given their stylistic gulf and their disparate biographies, such treatment has seemed justified, with the happily married aristocrat Margaret Cavendish apparently a world away from the single, necessarily professional Aphra Behn. Yet a handful of scholars have begun considering the two together, and Oddvar Holmesland’s Utopian Negotiation: Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish is the first book-length study. In examining the utopian visions present within their material, Holmesland observes a fundamental similarity: that such utopias depend upon negotiation rather than resolution. As opposed to other seventeenth-century English writers, Cavendish and Behn create utopias where idealism and rationality, pastoral and heroic, action and contemplation, and most importantly female and male must negotiate their coexistence. Rather than seeking resolution, Holmesland argues, both authors simply allow for these elements to negotiate their coexistence. This is an important insight. Different from other seventeenth-century utopic writing, this condition offers one answer to the question of why Cavendish and Behn periodically interject antifeminist elements into their texts. The imbalance of utopian discourse between the authors, however—utopia being a more significant topic to Cavendish than Behn—and the many stylistic difficulties, make the text of uneven value. The project, nevertheless, is a worthwhile one.

Utopian Negotiation argues that Behn and Cavendish care less about establishing codes of conduct and more about creating settings where various codes can negotiate with one another. Influenced by the work of Greenblatt and Louis Marin, Holmesland claims that utopian fiction has a special ability to unmask hidden ideologies at work. Through their respective utopias, Cavendish and Behn work to figure out how women and men can live more complementary lives. Thus in two of Cavendish’s earlier plays, Bell in Campo and The Female Academy, female warriors and students of public speaking discover their own strengths, yet also value conciliation with men even as men feel [End Page 202] threatened by their achievements. Such becomes the pattern of the book: Holmesland analyzes how some of Cavendish’s strongest characters (Lady Happy, Lady Victoria, the Duchess from The Blazing World) and Behn’s (Hellena, Oroonoko, the widow Ranter) pursue their own utopian visions, and how these visions challenge patriarchal systems yet require concessions from both male and female characters.

The book’s biggest contribution is its challenge to the idea of Cavendish and Behn as conflicted feminists. Countering critics such as Janet Todd, who questions whether Cavendish’s ambition accommodates feminism; and Katherine M. Rogers (with whom Todd concurs), who sees Behn as at times uncritical of female victimization, Holmesland argues that we should instead view their apparent inconsistencies as partly due to “their refusal to provide simple answers to complicated questions, and partly because arbitrating between fixed positions is precisely what they endeavour” (41). Ideas held sacred in their utopias, such as the complementarity of gender roles and the balance of heroism with gentleness and companionship, represent their efforts not to question the conservative nature of their society but rather to represent expanded roles for women within it. Cavendish’s Bell in Campo, for example, features some women joining the battle while others stay home and embrace traditional female roles; under the terms of Cavendish’s utopia, both can exist without one negating the other. Behn’s The Widow Ranter similarly contains both the conflicted heroism of Bacon and Semernia and the parodies of them through the widow herself. Rather than puzzle over apparent contradictions within the two authors’ texts, the book establishes the space for protofeminist activity within an overarching social conservatism, an approach that prefigures the modern idea that women get to choose their roles.

While much of it is illuminating, the book suffers from several stylistic issues. The issue that greets the reader almost immediately concerns the footnotes, which on several occasions take up more than half the page, a condition that only the King of the Dunces would appreciate. For some reason important discussions, like the various definitions...

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