Utopian Negotiation: Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish

1. Introduction: Negotiating Utopia

• 1 1 Introduction Negotiating Utopia Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) and Aphra Behn (1640–1689) are now celebrated as two of the boldest, most prolific women authors of seventeenth-century England. Their writings—prose narratives, plays, poems—seek to widen the narrow room granted women by patriarchal tradition. However, the question of female emancipation is complicated by their broader concern: a post–Civil War England unsettled by religious and ideological strife. The problem of faction always underlies their thinking about the Restoration. There were prolonged conflicts about issues of royal and aristocratic status, the nature of honor, social mobility , freedom, and toleration, not to mention women’s power and selffashioning . Behn and Cavendish realized how dedication to a cause tends to breed division and narrow perception of harmonious diversity. In their fiction they try to avoid one-sidedness, searching for more comprehensive answers. Their utopianism—a response to the times—involves agreement and equality between men and women, but also reflects the uncertainty of a new age looking for a direction. Natural philosophy provoked epistemological questions: is knowledge based in empirical observation, imaginative vision, or received authority? Behn and Cavendish seek to overcome their skepticism and restore some form of unity. Their realism vies with their idealism. They engage with competing and contradictory ways of understanding the problems of status, honor, power, love, and self-fashioning. Their approach is in 2 | Utopian Negotiation important respects dialectical—which will be the focus here. They may, for example, be angry about the constraints on female roles, yet their preference is to fulfill their capacities through fellowship with men. This might, of course, indicate their basic subservience to the patriarchal, yet they also present mutuality that depends on both men and women liberating themselves from accepted gender roles. Such utopian images typically contain incongruities. Behn’s and Cavendish’s idealization of a male-female common cause involves a patriarchal critique, yet, while seeking to redefine the heroic code of romance, they call for a femininity with heroic resources. Their image of gender in this way draws creatively on literary genre and ideology . To elucidate the intricate implications of their dilemma, this study provides a broader literary context for Behn and Cavendish than is usually given. The dialectical process involves what may be called “utopian negotiation.” • Trying to place Behn and Cavendish within a utopian literary tradition is important for understanding them. Different levels of utopianism need to be taken into account in tracing their notions of female fulfillment. This will define the scope of their idealism, but also the discrepancies in their utopian negotiation.1 Frank E. and Fritzie P. Manuel’s definition 1. Robert Appelbaum, for example, registers a common seventeenth-century utopian “disposition” toward “the earthly paradise, the millenarian future, the ancient Age of Gold, the happy constitutional democracy, the world turned upside down, the primitive Church, the ideally munificent court of the ideal monarch.” To Appelbaum, the genre reflects “not only contests over the content of the good life, but even contests over the nature of reality and ideality and the relation between the two were at stake when individuals participated in the discourse of ideal politics” (Appelbaum 2002, 2, 5). Even though utopia is in some ways a response to present reality, Marina Leslie thinks it “very unstable ground for charting out the relation of the literary text to its historical context,” which it is “variously assumed to escape, to challenge, to idealize, or to disguise” (Leslie 1998, 2, 6). Such contradictoriness is indicated by Thomas More’s Introduction | 3 of utopia, for example, contains a typical overlapping of the earthly and divine domains. Unification appears to rely on a trust in technological progress, improved organization and human enlightenment, but no less on personal virtues inspired by belief in a spiritual power and the image of a “heaven on earth.” And so the Manuels find it problematic that this vision presupposes “a measure of confidence in human capacity to fashion on earth what is recognized as a transient mortal state into a simulacrum of the transcendental.”2 Behn’s and Cavendish’s earthliness variously has transcendental overtones, which suggests that unity, for them, does not easily come about through political partisanship. Reform will only partially meet their desires. Ideal agreement involves a transformed state of mind in addition—a spiritual orientation as much as a social ordering. Behn and Cavendish approach this gap, trying to devise strategies and...