The Blazing-World By Margret Cavendish > Lecture
Notes
Lecture Notes:
Authorial identity
My expectations of Margret Cavendish: I was disappointed initially when reading
blazing world because i expected a more feminist, and slyly female impowering piece
of work. However having realised the position women were in at the time, it makes
more sense for this text to have the gendered standing it has.
Some of the cover pieces "frontist pieces" are pieces of art Margret commissioned to
be published with here work
Epithets afforded to her:
Proto-feminist? A feminist before feminism even became a thing.
Privileged aristocrat?
Monarchist?
Royalist?
Colonialist?
Scientific sceptic?
The first science fiction author?
A ‘mad, conceited, ridiculous woman’?
A ‘mighty pretender to learning’?
"can any Mortal be a Creator? Yes, answered the Spirits; for every
human Creature can create an Immaterial World fully inhabited by
Immaterial Creatures, and populous of Immaterial subjects, such as we
are, and all this within the compass of the head or scull"
o The entire book is a world building description.
o Emphasis on world building and fashioning and shaping a society
o Quote: imaginative worlds
o But does she have more tangible aims in mind?
"Iam not covetous, but as ambitious as any of my sex ever was, is, or can be;
which makes, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second,
yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First; and although I have neither power,
time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet
, rather than not to be mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would gives
ne none, I have made a world of my own: for which no body, I hope, will blame
me, since it is in everyone’s power to do the like."
The power of creation and imagination can not be contributed to anyone sex or
gender.
Throughout the text: there is an interesting relationship between the fantasy and the
reality.
Argument:
Margaret Cavendish creates a fantasy world – the
Blazing World – as a direct response to her historical
moment and personal circumstances.
Cavendish writes herself into the text as a character –
the Empress - and by doing so is able to live out,
through literature, other possible lives and
experiences.
A back and forth relationship between the real and the historical and the imaginative
and the fantastical.
MARGRET CAVENDISH (1623-1673)
Margret Lucas
Maires well and becomes The Marchioness of Newcastle upon Tyne
Husband got promoted so then she became The Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne
Note-able works
Poems and Fancies (1653)
A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life (1656)
Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1656)
Plays (1662)
Orations of Divers Sorts (1662)
Philosophical Letters (1664)
CCXI Sociable Letters (1664)
Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy (1666) + The Description of
a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666)
