Romancing Multiplicity: Female Subjectivity and the Body Divisible in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World
Wagner, Geraldine
Early Modern Literary Studies 9.1 (May 2003)
Abstract
By exploring the mutually constitutive relationship between the multiple selves represented in Blazing World, my essay argues that this text resolves a tension in Cavendish’s work between a female subject proscribed corporeally by societal expectations, and a female subjectivity that emerges through a recognition of the body’s textuality. I examine how this corporeal subjectivity is figured through the paradigm of romance, which provides an enabling structure for the transformative encounters that characterize the self-self relationships in this text.
Situating Cavendish’s concept of female bodiliness within her organic materialism, which defined nature as an infinitely divisible oneness, I consider how the textual body that Blazing World dramatizes defies dominant Early Modern patriarchal and androcentric ideologies. I do this by demonstrating how Cavendish’s philosophy finds its fullest expression in the somewhat homo-erotic friendship between Empress and Duchess, who, respectively, represent her fantasy and worldly selves.
Their growing intimacy is traced through a series of shared experiences culminating in a merging of Duchess and Empress that “gives birth” to a further self, a militaristic Goddess. I read the slippages between these personas and their narrator/author– herself a character within, and the manipulating pen behind, the text-as opening a literary space in which the limits of both relational and individualist models of identity are exceeded. Finally, I show how Blazing World‘s thematic exploration of infinite self-generativity is mirrored by its structural circularity.
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