Margaret Cavendish, Then and Now

The prolific seventeenth-century natural philosopher Margaret Cavendish makes her appearance in two recent novels: Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World and Danielle Dutton's Margaret the First. In Hustvedt's book, Cavendish emerges from the notebooks of mixed-media artist Harriet Burden, who documents her own ideas as they emerge bright-hued and fascinatingly tangled (in the pleasurable manner of Celtic knots) from her readings in philosophy, physics, history, theology, and art criticism. In Dutton's novel, Cavendish is the central protagonist whose thoughts, often lyrical, reveal a blossoming poet/philosopher struggling to overcome her own initial timidity on her way to becoming a published writer. Both novels are well worth reading: each provides an ingenious, well-wrought narrative, and each has the added benefit of being useful in the classroom as a way to analyze literary history.

Hustvedt's The Blazing World weaves serious questions of aesthetics into the warp of meditations on ethics, often yielding particularly intriguing insights for thinking about how the property value of art relates to the experience of its production, reception, and possession. In this regard, the novel's frame is an especially smart choice. The story is developed through the fictional format of a scholarly edition of Burden's notebooks, which are of special interest, we learn, because the attribution of several of her finest works is in question. The character of the editor, I. V. Hess, provides an introduction to the volume, and fully glosses subsequent passages from Burden's writing with references not only to Margaret Cavendish (with whom Burden identifies), but also to other literary critics, historians of science, philosophers, and theorists such as Virginia Woolf, Lisa Sarasohn, Edmund Husserl, and Judith Butler. The "edition" is augmented by interviews with Burden's daughter, son, lover, two art critics, and three male poseurs (men who assume her artistic identity in public), each interspersed so as to amplify and contextualize the content of a given notebook.

The multi-vocal structure of this "scholarly edition" lends itself to an almost archeological suspense as the layer-by-layer excavation of Burden's psyche reveals unexpected intellectual treasure. In turn, the anticipation of Burden's slowly unveiling character is twined with carefully handled plot suspense as we await the results of her experiments in "cross-dressing": for each of her upcoming gallery shows, Burden finds a young man who is willing to pretend to be the artist of the collection on display. Her experiment is meant to measure the degree to which an audience's knowledge of the artist's gender predetermines the perceived value of the work. Suspecting that her own creations might be better valued were they believed to be works of male genius, she decides to "mask" herself, as she puts it, via the body and performance of an amenable young man. Burden's notes on the preparation and exhibition of her art, and her further observations on the resulting critical adulation of her (his) work, constitute some of the most intellectually adventurous episodes of the novel. Cavendish is key to Burden's thinking in this regard: "Cross-dressers run rampant in Cavendish. How else can a lady gallop into the world? She must be a man or she must leave this world or she must leave her body, her mean-born body, and blaze … Polyphony is the only route to understanding. Hermaphroditic polyphony." As Burden continues, we realize that our growing understanding of the novel's protagonist hinges on her own identification with Cavendish. "How to live?" Harriet wonders. "A life in the world or a world in the head? To be seen and recognized outside, or to hide and think inside? Actor or hermit? Which is it? She [Cavendish] wanted both—to be inside and outside, to ponder and to leap … I am a Riot. An Opera. A Menace! I am Mad Madge" (208). Those familiar...