Utopian Negotiation: Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish

2. Bell in Campo and The Female Academy (1662): Female Wit in the “Theatre of Warr”

• 44 2 Bell in Campo and The Female Academy (1662) Female Wit in the “Theatre of Warr” A discussion of Cavendish’s utopian negotiation starts best with a study of Bell in Campo and The Female Academy. These plays clearly lay out the conflict of a group of self-fashioning women confined by male-defined gender roles. Cavendish queries the terms of a viable agreement. The women’s plight finds an analogue in much utopian literature: the desire for freedom, the attempt to open the mind to life’s variety and process, resisted by an emphasis on order and conventional thinking in a world of disorder. Cavendish has masculinized women emulate men at their own game, but as a step toward conciliation. Acting their natural selves, they hope the men will break out of their mental confinement and appreciate the women’s hidden capacity. For the men to open their minds in this way is ideally to be a catalyst to a transformed state—“a better way of being and living” (Levitas 1990, 7). Mutual recognition of equality is to be a basis for true partnership. To Cavendish, it is the flexible mind that potentially effects improvement in male-female relations, and in society. This is how she seeks to revitalize a desire that utopia traditionally tends to negate. Challenging male exclusionism through female heroism involves contradictions, however. These are hard to resolve without compromise. • The 1662 plays, written during the Interregnum, repeatedly reveal Cavendish ’s hope for a reformed state of mind. Changed minds will change Bell in Campo and The Female Academy | 45 society. From her withdrawn vantage point in France, she could look back as well as ahead and contemplate a course of conciliation for England. She treasured the distance afforded by exile. Writing her plays without expecting them to be staged, she could free herself from the strictures of dramatic convention. Instead she experimented with a form more in accord with her pacific temper. Trying to make her plays as she pleased, she asserts in a prefatory address to her “Noble Readers”: “I love ease so well, as I hate constraint even in my works” (Cavendish 1662b, sig. A4).1 She dreamt of a new sensitivity that would heal factionalism and create harmony between men and women. From her humanist perspective, she envisaged private and public well-being in a reciprocal relationship. By contrast, the plays that were performed despite the 1642 Parliament ordinance against stage plays, some illicitly and some with special permission, only maintained old attitudes and a deadlocked division in the country.2 This was also the case when the theaters were officially reopened after 1660. Aphra Behn in her Prologue to The Second Part of the Rover (1681) refers to “the Disease o’th’ Age”—cut-and-dried attitudes in art as well as in politics doing little to reconcile factionalism: Poets have caught too the Disease o’th’ Age, That Pest, Of not being quiet when they’r Well . . . Some for this Faction cry, others for that . . . In all ’tis one and the same mad Disease. (Behn 1996a, 6:231) 1. Cavendish designed her early plays to be read, and so to be enacted in the private imagination. This resolve grew out of the political situation during the Interregnum. In one of her addresses to her “Noble Readers,” she states she does not know when her plays will ever be acted, since theater performance was officially banned (Cavendish 1662b, eighth prefatory address to “Noble Readers,” no pagination). Assuming the unconstrained motions of nature, and so writing the plays to her own “pleasure and delight,” she seems to have imagined herself playwright, theater, and actress combined, as described in “The Dedication”: “For all the time my Playes a making were, / My brain the Stage, my thoughts were acting there” (Cavendish 1662b, sig. A2). 2. Jessica Munns states that “this was not a period during which many new plays were written: older plays were recycled, often as popular episodes stitched together” (Munns 1998, 82). 46 | Utopian Negotiation Cavendish’s approach was different: seeking to free her artistic mind from the unnatural hold of custom, she wanted to extend this principle so as to represent humanity in the image of harmonious variety. She remarks: “I would have my Playes to be like the Natural course of all things in the world.”3 To obey convention would distort the ease of her mind...