“Lady Phoenix”: Margaret Cavendish and the Poetics of Palingenesis

A great deal of scholarship has recently appeared on Margaret Cavendish’s natural philosophy, in particular concerning how her metaphysics relates to her fiction and her views on the imagination. Even more specifically, scholars have documented important connections between Cavendish’s most sustained and mature articulation of her natural philosophy, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, and her fantastical travel narrative, Blazing World, which Cavendish published together in both 1666 and 1668. It is less well-known, however, that Cavendish may have planned to attach to Observations and Blazing World a third generic fashioning of her ideas, “A Piece of a Play,” which was never completed but published in Plays, never before printed (1668).¹ The two extant acts of the play center on an intriguing figure whom all the characters excitedly discuss and hope to meet: Lady Phoenix, who is said to be “coming to Town in such splendour, as the World never saw”; her train is “held up by the Planets,” while she is accompanied by “Blazing-Stars” and “fiery Meteors.”² I suggest in this essay that Lady Phoenix—and the classical image of the phoenix itself—has significant parallels with Cavendish’s views on nature (and in fact might even have informed these views). Like the immortal bird that cyclically regenerates, Cavendishian nature exists in a state of constant yet controlled flux whereby substances never disappear entirely but rather “translate” into other forms.³ The phoenix also suggestively connects to Cavendish’s materialist concept of the imagination, which entails the mind creating new ideas and images from its “own parts.”⁴ Finally, the phoenix might also be seen to symbolize Cavendish’s views on authorship: according to her materialist understanding of intellectual endeavor, she is physically embodied in her texts and again in our minds each time we read them. The final “translation” of Blazing World, Observations, and “A Piece of a Play,” then, is that of the “Authoress” herself, who initiates a process of productive regeneration that allows her to transform but never die.⁵

The myth of the phoenix is, of course, a relatively common motif in European literature.⁶ By most accounts, the phoenix has its origins in Greek mythology, although versions of an immortal bird exist across Greco-Roman and Egyptian iconographic traditions. In the Greco-Roman tradition, the phoenix regenerates by rising from the ashes of its predecessor. In most sources, the phoenix dies in a spectacular display of aromatic flames and then regenerates post-combustion; less commonly, the bird simply decomposes before rematerializing from its own decayed body.⁷ In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Roelof van den Broek has outlined, there was a great deal of humanist study of the phoenix as authors pondered the bird’s possible existence; this question “was reopened in 1633, in all seriousness” when Clement’s First Epistle was published and “taken as proof of the possibility of resurrection.” By the mid-seventeenth century the phoenix was still studied as a possibly real biblical creature, although as Van der Broek notes many of these discussions are concerned with the human world more than the animal one in that they explore “life beyond what is immediately apparent.”⁸ Cavendish avidly studied the classics and certainly would have been familiar with various descriptions of the bird; she might also have read contemporary discussions about its potential existence.⁹ More generally, Cavendish is deeply interested in substances that have near mystical power but are still explainable via material processes (and therefore accord with her materialist worldview). Given this context, and given her philosophical and aesthetic emphasis on transformation, it is possible that the functional mechanism of the phoenix informed and perhaps even helped Cavendish visualize her theory of the universe.

Two defining characteristics of Cavendish’s later natural philosophy correlate to the mechanism of the phoenix; both are outlined extensively in Observations (and, to a lesser extent, in Blazing World), and both are meant to undermine the viability of the mechanical and experimental program of the Royal Society of London. First, like Hobbes, Cavendish is dogmatically materialist and denies...