5 - Ecology and Selfhood in The Blazing World

Summary

Abstract

This chapter scrutinizes the self/world dialectic in The Blazing World, a utopian prose text by Margaret Cavendish. Cavendish’s depiction of the human/nature relationship is examined in light of the burgeoning scientific revolution, developments that The Blazing World acknowledges and, at times, contests. Ultimately, The Blazing World offers a compromiseversion of the human, an ecological self, or eco-self, that both celebrates humans’ embedment in the surrounding world and confirms the necessity of periodically claiming some distance from it. This marks a significant departure from early modern tragedy, a genre that frequently evinces a reluctant ecology, mourning humans’ indistinguishability from the rest of nature. In making the case for certain proprietarily human needs, Cavendish offers important refinements to current ecological discourse.

Keywords: Biopower; Cavendish; ecocriticism; eco-self; Enlightenment; materialism

In contrast to John Webster, whose well-chronicled reveling in macabre nihilism emphasizes the fragility of the self, Margaret Cavendish promotes a radical individualism, a standpoint that some readers might consider strident or off-putting. Given her persistent attention to theories of personhood, Cavendish virtually demands inclusion in a biography of the self, particularly because she both records and resists some of the changes incipient or underway in her world, transformations that would have considerable implications for theories of humanness. Accordingly, this chapter focuses on Cavendish’s Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666), a utopian prose text that heralds the genre of science fiction.

The Blazing World aptly suits my aims; more generally, this text speaks to our current moment, as evidenced by the thriving critical response to it, especially over the last decade or so. As Bronwen Price succinctly notes, “There is good reason to be interested in the work of Margaret Cavendish at the present moment,” given that “her writing raises many of the questions which have concerned English studies in recent years” (127). Price meticulously details the nexus of gender and power in The Blazing World, observing how Cavendish deliberately engages the work of male colleagues such as Francis Bacon or Robert Hooke (131, 133). In brief, Price clarifies how The Blazing World outlines “the politics of speaking, writing and knowing” (141). Aaron R. Hanlon likewise takes up epistemological concerns relevant to The Blazing World in his recent essay on this text.