Utopian Negotiation: Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish

3. The Blazing World (1666): “Nature tends to Unity”

• 83 3 The Blazing World (1666) “Nature tends to Unity” Utopian negotiation takes place on a more comprehensive scale in The Blazing World than in Bell in Campo and The Female Academy. All three deal with female self-fashioning, but The Blazing World goes further and incorporates it into the extended arrangements of a utopian regime. There is another difference: the protagonist is a woman who has risen to power. Though a promoter of female desire and individual freedom, she must maintain public stability. Tension will occur on more levels than before, calling for solutions. The Blazing World is Cavendish’s most widely commented work, and she tends to be placed as either a custodian of order, in keeping with the classic utopia, or as the champion of an oppositional liberality, following feminist preferences. The present focus, however, is more dialectical. Cavendish targets divisive effects of dominant forces in society, referring political issues to the principle of interacting motions in nature. Nature is individually liberating, while simultaneously checking excessive singular and sectional aspiration. The Blazing World, moreover, engages with an ambitious prospect of the new science: to dominate nature. If given priority, this goal would work toward the effect of classic utopia: control of life. But Cavendish presents the scientific empiricism of the Royal Society as limiting, grounding her views in her natural philosophy. Her utopian project finally depends on the sovereign and subjects’ abilities to perceive an order of naturally agreeing motions beyond arbitrary 84 | Utopian Negotiation discourses, including that of science. But the images of nature can still not avoid ideological biases. • In The Blazing World, the motions of nature ideally recompose minds, bond man and woman, and ensure harmonious relations between individuality and communal order. Cavendish’s design for her utopian state offers recurrent clues that this is her fictional way of restoring equilibrium in an England in conflict with itself. The ideal principle of her creation is to redeem private and public fracture and ensure mutual freedom—a difficult balancing act. Cavendish does not define a political reform program , but lets the Empress of the Blazing World introduce some liberalizing changes, such as encouraging greater female participation in public life and scientific speculation about nature. The widened range for these groups brings conflicts of interests and opinions, however. Cavendish treasures freedom, but is aware that party-mindedness and immoderate individual ambition are apt to cause social unrest. Maintaining a stable order is important to her, which easily involves tension with personal freedom. The story gives contradictory signals as how to manage the claims of both individual freedom and public stability. It starts with a beautiful young lady being abducted by a lovesick merchant. Heaven avenges this outrage by having the miscreant and his crew seized by a tempest and carried toward the North Pole, where they freeze to death. The gods guide the virtuous lady safely to strange shores, where she transverses the poles of the Blazing World. She becomes acquainted with its anthropomorphic inhabitants, and they accompany her to “Paradise,” where she marries the Emperor. The new Empress is granted absolute sovereignty over his realm, using the visiting Duchess’s soul as an intimate advisor. Critics tend to come away from this story with different notions of how much rein Cavendish gives to female emancipation and its challenge to the traditional power structure. Her use of allegorico-romance is ambiguous. It may be read as a romantic tale of virtue rewarded within the parameters of a providential aristocratic ideology. The young lady’s inner nobility allows her to rise in the social hierarchy and become the Emperor’s trusted equal. This would be an instance of the establishment assimilating The Blazing World | 85 women through social mobility; it grants opportunity to women, but on the premise that the gender issue does not disrupt political stability. One might also question how real the Empress’s power is. Some critics think it is only delegated from the Emperor.1 This question is intricate; Cavendish in her nonfiction repeatedly confesses to women’s inherent limitations, apparently accepting patriarchal authority as sanctioned by nature.2 Yet Cavendish is not consistent. She also reveals her dream of emulating male power. Hence in her fictional works she creates romance visions of heroic female rulers. These figures of power and greatness might be a sign that she identifies with a masculine discourse. Claire Jowitt discusses the widespread seventeenth-century nostalgia...