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Among early modern women writers who have been "rediscovered" in the last decade or so, Margaret Cavendish has attracted heightened critical attention, especially for the apparent contradictions in her self-presentations as royalist and feminist, as solitary genius and happy wife. In a now classic article on Cavendish, Catherine Gallagher has argued that "Toryism and feminism converge because the ideology of absolute monarchy provides, in particular historical situations, a transition to an ideology of the absolute self?" In examining Cavendish's authorship practices, James Fitzmaurice has shown how she carefully constructed her authorial persona as one devoted at once to "fancy" and the "family," in order to secure the protection she needed in "a society that tolerated women writing but was deeply suspicious of women publishing."2
Yet Cavendish's pervasive self-presentation as satirist has not received the attention it deserves; in fact, no critic, to my knowledge, has discussed this significant aspect of her work.3 This general neglect of Cavendish as satirist derives, I suggest, from her more noted self-representations as royalist apologist and a devoted wife and biographer of her husband, as well as from her reception by contemporaries and later literary history as the eccentric "Mad Madge."4 Both these self-representations and the reception history have tended to deny Cavendish the position of satirist who offers a serious and rational critique. Moreover, satire's generally aggressive hostility, its materializing tendencies, and the writer's engagement in the public sphere (in contradiction to both of Cavendish's self-presentations as "solitary genius" and "happy wife") all render satire a "masculine" genre supposedly unsuitable for female writers. I would suggest, however, that the very contradictions in Cavendish's self-presentations, elucidated by Gallagher and Fitzmaurice, enable Cavendish to deploy satire's ironic doubleness and its disjunctive form in negotiating the gaps and fissures of seemingly authoritative patriarchal structures.5
Cavendish's interest in satire is evident in many of her works; but perhaps most striking is the energetic critique in her play Matrimonial Trouble (1662) of the Petrarchan blazon, through an insistence on the materiality of the woman's body. Master Thrifty the Steward scolds Bridget Greasy the Cook: "in one place I find a piece of butter, and a greasie comb, full of nitty hairs lying by it; and in another place flour and old-worn stockings, the feet...