The Well-Ordered Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish by Deborah Boyle (review)

It is fitting that any inquiry into the programmatic nature of Cavendish’s inquiries in natural philosophy should itself be well ordered. Exactly so, The Well-Ordered Universe considers her explicitly philosophical writing alongside her poetry, prose fiction, and other works to establish not only that the importance of order shapes Cavendish’s thinking across these different genres to a degree we have not previously remarked, but also that it has for her a normative function: that nature takes order and regularity to be desirable, and indeed that “each creature of a given sort has certain norms of behavior it is supposed to follow.”

This latter and bolder point is at the heart of Boyle’s important contribution to the existing scholarly conversation on Cavendish’s materialist notions and on their evolution during her lifetime. Chapter 1 contends that the apparent determinist leanings of her earliest known work, The Worlds Olio, should be regarded as something of an outlier in the light of her later commitment to the notion of self-moving matter. Boyle follows other scholars in distancing Cavendish from “Hobbes, Descartes, Robert Boyle, and others [who] conceived of matter as naturally inert, capable of moving only when moved by some external force, and certainly not intrinsically perceptive or knowing.” For Cavendish, by contrast—certainly in her later works—matter has a perceptual capacity that assists it in initiating action of its own accord. But Boyle takes pains in her first four chapters to emphasize that to cast matter as free in this way, she need not be as centrally preoccupied with freedom as other scholars have tended to suggest, and indeed that in her later works of natural philosophy she advances a form of vitalist materialism in which “the parts of matter are subject to certain principles dictated by Nature herself.” It is in the negotiation between these ordering principles and whether the parts of matter choose to observe them that Boyle is principally interested.

The broad scope and deep learning of Boyle’s study is in itself a strong argument that the complex position she claims for Cavendish can only emerge through wide and rigorously comparative reading of her works, reading from which critics have sometimes turned away in frustration at what they regard as her incoherence. And Boyle counsels persistence more explicitly too, asserting that a central “interpretive principle” of The Well-Ordered Universe is “that when faced with contradictory passages in Cavendish’s writings, we should seek to resolve the inconsistency, leaving as a last resort the conclusion that the tension is unresolved.” In crediting her with a capacity for more systematic, less erratic thought than is traditional in the field—and that her own contemporaries typically allowed her—Boyle joins a number of feminist scholars whose work in recent decades has had explicitly recuperative aims. Notably, however, she does not follow precisely in their footsteps; indeed, she wishes—on the basis of her larger claim regarding Cavendish’s commitment to order—to resist the tendency to regard her as formulating “early expressions of feminism or proto-feminism.” Instead, Boyle advances a valuable contention in chapters 6 and 7 that her natural philosophical commitments to order have social implications that tend rather the opposite way: she “endorse[d] very conventional seventeenth-century English views about social class” as well as about gender. That endorsement, however, does not prevent Cavendish from describing numerous departures from convention—by figures of her own invention as well as by entities with whom she has no personal or authorial connection. What is more, Boyle observes in chapter 7 that Cavendish likely saw herself as lacking in traditionally female behavior. Yet Cavendish’s emphasis on these departures, Boyle suggests, represents not a disorder in Cavendish’s method of argumentation but rather her acknowledgment that matter more broadly may pursue disorder. That every entity has an order prescribed for it in nature does not translate necessarily into its following that order. For...