The Blazing World and Other Writings (Penguin Classics) Read Online Free PDF

subverts its customary role in the patriarchal coding of a figure of woman. Here, the catalogue dwells on the account and itemization of costume, materials, colours and the emblematic accessories of power. It functions iconographically to ratify a seduction which has already occurred within the narrative – the seduction of the Blazing World by the young lady – and which is now extended to the reader. The blazon also serves to externalizeand further materalize a blazing virtue which has already literally preserved the heroine from rape and death by exposure.
    Though the rise to power of Cavendish’s Empress is staged through the authorizing gaze of men, her blazoning by the female narrator is at once a description and demonstration, for the reader, of the Empress’s absolute power over her new male subjects. It is a second moment of wonder and the point at which the young lady, now reconstructed as Empress, exceeds masculine ratification. The literal body of female virtue is never made available for representation. Indeed it is through the miraculous abandonment of corporeality that the souls of women are able to commune with each other as platonic lovers, and move freely and invisibly from one world and one body to another.
    ‘Margaret the First’ recuperates the blazon in a tableau of female investiture and, in doing so, stages a different power relation: the female author’s creation and description of an obscure imperial heroine as unnamed stand-in. Developing the story of reciprocal love and service of Travellia and the Queen of Amity in ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’,
The Blazing World
turns out to be a utopia compulsively interested in the erotics of female doubling and collaboration. The conventionally labyrinthine geography of the Blazing World is matched by the intricately recursive plotting of its narrative of mutually beneficial platonic love between women in the context of their enabling and prestigious marriages to largely absent husbands.
    Embedded within the romance plot of
The Blazing World
is a mirror-narrative of fortunate female:female abduction, of which none other than the ‘Duchess of Newcastle’ is the beneficiary. Through the introduction of ‘Margaret Newcastle’ as the Empress’s scribe, the Duchess as author-scribe of
The Blazing World
stages a self-confirming dialogue on the production of fictional worlds as an immensely pleasurable compensatory activity for women:
    The Duchess of Newcastle was most earnest and industrious to make her world, because she had none at present ( p. 98 )…which world, after it was made, appeared so curious and full of variety; so well ordered and wisely governed, that it cannot possibly be expressed by words, nor the delight and pleasure which the Duchess took in making this world of her own. ( pp. 100–101 )
    Like the body of the Empress, the Duchess’s world is not available for description, although its existence and excellence is verified by the Empress’s admiration.
    The Blazing World
offers an heroicized sexual allegory of Cavendish’s own life and times: ‘abducted’ by the course of the Civil War from the royalist kingdom of EFSI (England, Scotland, France and Ireland), she makes a brilliant marriage in exile. As a Utopian space of reparation, wish-fulfilment and plenitude triangulated by representations of pre- and post-revolutionary England (’EFSI’ and ‘E’), the Blazing World offers an imaginary vantage point from which to observe, critique and revise the course of history, the state of knowledge and the forms of power. Insofar as
The Blazing World
provides a space in which the historical Duchess of Newcastle can vindicate and demonstrate her infamous ‘singularity’, she also distinguishes between the Utopian properties of her fictional ‘description’ and the limited aesthetic compensations provided by the book in which it appears. Like all Utopian texts,
The Blazing World
cannot forget its place of origin, its ‘true