#margaret cavendish
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1623-1673) was a scientist, prolific writer, and early feminist who wrote what was arguably the first science-fiction novel in the English language, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666). Her position of privilege and wealth gave her the means to publish her works under her own name – and to attend Royal Society lectures wearing a gown with an eight-foot train, a cavalier hat and a riding coat. She was eccentric and audacious, and many of the proto-feminist concepts found in her fiction were years ahead of her time.
Today I am not going to talk about her science-fiction novel, or her scientific leanings, or her ideas about natural philosophy. I am going to talk about her brilliant and bizarre allegorical romance, Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, first published in 1656.
Assaulted and Pursued Chastity was actually the novel that led me to pursue my master’s degree in renaissance literature. A lot of people think sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature is Shakespeare, tricky to understand, Shakespeare, religious, Shakespeare, and boring. The truth is that these days it is a field with an immense amount of feminist study and interest. As the years go by we are unearthing and exploring more and more work by women writers, and moving away from the concept of the English literary canon. We find women like Aphra Behn, the first English novelist; Emilia Lanier, the first Englishwoman to publish a collection of her poetry; and Katherine Philips, an immensely popular poet whose works explore love between women (a point of much debate in modern academia).
One of the core values that Cavendish sets into the novel is the concept that a woman cannot be chaste if her virtue is not actively challenged: a woman must live her life actively protecting her chastity for it to have true value, not sit at home passive and protected. Her heroine, Travellia, is an heiress who constantly endures the unwelcome overtures of a prince: when he attempts to sexually assault her, she shoots him with a pistol.
…but considering with himself that her words might be more than her intentions, and that it was a shame to be out-dared by a woman, with a smiling countenance, said he, you threaten more evil than you dare perform; besides, in the grave honour will be buried with you, when by your life you may build palaces of pleasure and felicity; with that he went towards her to take away the pistol from her.
Stay, stay, said she, I will first build me a temple of fame upon your grave, where all young virgins shall come and offer at my shrine, and in the midst of these words shot him…
The Prince sends Travellia away while he decides what to do with her, too admiring of her bravery to try again. Travellia, not sure if she will live or die, devours all of the scholarly literature that she can find. The Prince attempts to woo her – badly – and she slowly falls for him, but refuses to give in while he is still married and does not respect her own moral values.
So! She dresses as a boy and stows away on a ship travelling to a faraway land. Her good nature quickly finds her an adoptive father, but they are quickly catapulted into a grand adventure when they are shipwrecked and washed ashore on a new land. The people there lack any exact analogue to the races that Cavendish would have been familiar with: they are a deep purple, with white hair like wool, thin-lipped and sharp-nosed, with teeth and nails as black as jet. The aristocrats are tall and orange, black-haired and white-toothed. The land itself is hot and beautiful, filled with fantastical creatures and stunning architecture. I would like to say that this is a fairly positive representation of a foreign culture, but unfortunately they are also cannibals and practice human sacrifice.
Travellia, kept in captivity by their king for over a year, learns their language and talks her way out of danger, becomes a human god, reinvents their religion, and “civilises” them. (This is an unfortunate racist trend of works from this period, where foreign cultures are presented as primitive, decadent, and “barbaric”, and must be “civilised” by European contact.) After manipulating the country to her satisfaction, Travellia departs, and after a whirlwind of adventures including meeting and rejecting the Prince once again, she comes into the service of the Queen of Amity and takes on the role of her favourite. The Queen of Amity is at war with the King of Amour, who is pursuing her relentlessly in a mirror to Travellia’s own story. The Queen’s main reason for refusing to marry, though, is her desire to maintain her sovereignty and independence.
In deference to a long tradition, the Queen of course falls madly in love with Travellia, who is still pretending to be a boy. She is taken prisoner by the King, and Travellia takes on the role of general to get her back…while the Prince leads the King’s army against her. And penetrates her with his sword (to cap off a long series of metaphors) leading her army to rise up in vengeance and win the battle. The Prince is distraught, and eventually our entire cast congregates at the King’s palace. The Queen is greatly distressed by the reveal of Travellia’s gender and wishes that Travellia was a man, praying to the gods to transfer her affections to another…the repentant King. The story ends with our two opposing couples married, two kingdoms united, and the unsettling feeling that these women have made terrible matches indeed…but when we examine it through a seventeenth-century lens, we can also understand that by strong will and intelligence Travellia and the Queen have transformed their suitors into men worthy of them, who acknowledge women’s equal right to power and freedom. Cavendish works within the framework of her time, wherein a woman must come under a man’s protection, but still aims to subvert that convention by showing the power that they have within the private and public spheres.
Then there was a declaration read to the army of the agreement of peace: and when it was read that the Prince should be Viceroy in the Kingdom of Amity, all the soldiers, as if they had been one voice, cried out, Travellia shall be Viceregency; which was granted to pacify the. Whereupon there were great acclamations of joy.
But the Prince told his mistress, she should also govern him.
She answered, that he should govern her, and she would govern the kingdom.
If you want to read this text and form your own opinions, it is free to read online in a number of places including Google Books. My own copy of the text is found in the 2004 Penguin Classics edition of The Blazing World and Other Writings.
Assaulted and Pursued Chastity is certainly a problematic text, particularly when we begin to examine its representation of race and colonialism, but it is certainly a unique exploration of radical gender politics in seventeenth-century England. Another text that readers might want to examine for a (still problematic) deeper examination of other races and cultures is Oroonoko, by Aphra Behn.
