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

relation’.
    Cavendish’s final gesture, simultaneously inviting and defensive, seeks to ground the efficacy of her description in reception, in the seduction of readers. She extends to these projected subjects both a promise and a threat:
    if any should like the world I have made, and be willing to be my subjects, they may imagine themselves such, and they are such, I mean in their minds, fancies or imaginations; but if they cannot endure to be subjects, they may create worlds of their own, and govern themselves as they please. But let them have a care not to prove unjust usurpers and to rob me of mine … ( p. 160 )
    This uneasy dialectic between insolent self-sufficiency and the desire for ‘subjects’ whose existence will ratify her independent sovereignty, is characteristic of Cavendish’s authorial rhetoric and narrative projections. In such textual strategies it is possible to witness the simultaneously defiant and abject construction of the publishing woman writer and her implied readers, present and future. She emerges as an ironically self-designated hermaphroditic spectacle and as the self-proclaimed producer of hybrid creations and inimitable discourses. Such a claim to complete singularity, so often thematized in Cavendish’s writing, should be situated in terms of her experiments with the generic frames of feminized romance and masculinized utopia. The prose fiction included here represents a powerful negotiation of gender and genre, and of sexual ideology, privileging the hermaphroditic as an arena of mobility and supplementarity, particularly enabling to women. More straightforwardly, the proliferation of literal and figurative couples and doubles in these and other texts by Cavendish, and their actual or implicitly contractual basis, dramatizes an heroic figure of woman, who ingeniously turns patriarchalized scenarios of power and seduction to her own benefit.
    Cavendish’s narratives of female virtue rewarded are supplemented by complex authorial commentaries or meta-narratives. Through them she addresses the reader who, located in the world beyond the text, necessarily escapes her control. It is this extratextual, historically unspecific and mobile relation which constitutes the most important seduction of all, for it is the gaze of the reader which will guarantee the Utopian viability of the author’s signature, outside me closed system of the library catalogue or publisher’s list. My role as editor and introducer adds another level to this recursive process of female collaboration. On behalf of, and in the spirit of, Cavendish’s own authorial interventions and ambitions, this collection solicits new readers and new readings.
NOTES
    1 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Duchess of Newcastle’ [1925], in
Virginia Woolf, Women and Writing
, ed. Michele Barrett, London: The Women’s Press, 1979, 79.
    2 See Patricia Crawford’s invaluable, ‘Women’s Published Writings 1600–1700’, in
Women in English Society 1500–1800
, ed. Mary Prior, London: Methuen, 1985, 211–82. The only comparable figure is Aphra Behn, whose first play was produced in London in 1670. On sixteenth and early seventeenth century women’s writing, see Elaine V. Beilin,
Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance
, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987, and Ann Rosalind Jones,
The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric 1520–1640
, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
    3 For Cavendish’s relation to the new science see Lisa Sarasohn, ‘A Science Turned Upside Down : Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish’,
Huntington Library Quarterly
47 (1984), 289–307, Sylvia Bowerbank, ‘The Spider’s Delight: Margaret Cavendish and the “Female” Imagination’ in
Women in the Renaissance
, eds K. Farrell, E.H. Hageman, A.F. Kinney, Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 187–203, and Gerald D. Meyer,
The Scientific Lady in England, 1650–1760
, Berkeley: University of California Press,