Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics by Lisa Walters (review)

It is a pleasure to read a book on the work of Margaret Cavendish which needs no special pleading for its topic. This is largely thanks to the steady work over the last twenty years of the Margaret Cavendish Society, which through its scholarly network, annual meetings, and the books and articles of its members has multiplied the contexts in which the varied works of one of England’s most prominent women writers can now be situated — and understood. Lisa Walters is the society’s current president, as have been the authors and editors of previous books on Cavendish: Lisa Sarasohn, James Fitzmaurice, Brandie Siegfried, and Sara Mendelsohn. The Society’s annual international meetings have supported collections and monographs by many others, not to mention a body of periodical literature by ambitious historians and critics of the early modern, and chapters or sections of important monographs. Thus, I want to begin this review by congratulating the scholarly matrix which made possible Walters’s serious and wide-ranging contribution to a field one can now simply refer to as Cavendish studies. It was not easy to overturn three centuries of defensive and misogynist ridicule of Cavendish in order to find this gold mine and map the ways to it for the larger fields of early modern studies, history of the novel, feminist literary history, and the history of science. Walters’s incisive book is the fruit of that success and an example of the conceptual intricacy of its subject’s success as a thinker and experimental writer.

Anna Battigelli’s Exiles of the Mind (1998) was a major reorientation of Cavendish studies in its emphasis on the writer’s fascination with subjectivity and her experiments with representing it, described by Battigelli as “displaying a thinking life aware of its role as a thinking life” (10). The historian of science Lisa Sarasohn’s more recent Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish (2010) is a strong account of Cavendish’s “ironic” natural philosophy as a feminist contestation of the “scientific revolution.” Sarasohn points out that Cavendish’s Observations on Natural Philosophy has recently been included in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series — something which would have been unimaginable twenty years ago.

These works have been useful to Walters, but hers is even more synthetic than Battigelli’s. Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics is an effort to consider the whole opus, from Poems and Fancies to Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, both literary and philosophical (to the degree that they can be distinguished), as a kind of life-work investigating, critiquing, and reimagining an episteme, from a point of view Walters persuasively presents as both radical and modern. As she puts it more modestly than need be in the Introduction: “the aim of this study is to reconsider assumptions that Cavendish was a royalist” (5). Elsewhere: “The Blazing World explores free will alongside Paracelsian understandings of creativity and liberty, [providing] a . . . revolutionary and republican understanding of the individual’s relationship to the cosmos” (139); and “[f ]urthermore, Cavendish invests the poor with great agency and power within a commonwealth in her characteristic comparison of governmental policies with natural bodies. . . . The ‘meanest’ member of society can cause a revolution in the same way that ‘one single action’ of a body part can cause the death of the entire body” (94). And, finally, “Cavendish also widens the political scope and significance of emerging republican ideas, demonstrating how anti-monarchy polemics can equally apply to patriarchal modes of oppression and can reconceptualize female subjectivity” (196). Walters likens Cavendish’s insights to those of the contemporary epistemologies of Foucault and Butler: “Although Cavendish theorized in the seventeenth century, her science leads towards a . . . target [similar to Butler’s]. It places bodies or body parts that were often defined as inferior in early modern physiology within a different signifying chain, while radically questioning and altering what is a valued or non-valued body” (49...