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MARGARET Cavendish was born into a transitional age when old assumptions were challenged and new certainties had not been found. In her nonfiction, she repeatedly confesses to women's inherent limitations, apparently accepting a patriarchal Toryism as sanctioned by nature.' However, she also reveals an antitraditionalist aspiration: to emulate men, as a philosopher and writer; to have a society in which women may achieve success and power. Hence, in her fictional works she creates escapist romance visions of heroic female scholars and rulers. Her ideological position appears contradictory, as is suggested in The Blazing World by her ambiguous use of allegorico-romance form. On the one hand, this is a tale of virtue rewarded within the parameters of a providential aristocratic ideology? On the other hand, the narrative may also be read as a feminine subversion of romance conquest, figuring a progressive woman who makes a masculine utopia her own. Cavendish's motive may have been to create a new order in which women's true potential is valued.' Interpretation is further complicated, however, by the fact that critics have doubted her feminist solidarity and stressed instead her craving for personal fame and singularity.' Such an approach makes her appear as a seeker of personal power and glory as ends in themselves.
This essay on The Blazing World takes a more sympathetic view. To Cavendish, greatness involves having the power of self-liberation and self-management; yet her pursuit of singularity is not confined to the self, but extends to a free, self-ordering course in nature. Her quest, moreover, can be seen to have an artistic as well as epistemological dimension. Singularity thus includes having the command of a free artistic space, as expressed in Cavendish's wish "not only to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole world." The latter is to be taken in a "poetical" sense (224). In her artistic vision, she explores a more natural Restoration world, expanded and complemented through the individual creative imagination. Her idea of an organic balance is what combines the singularity of the author and the sovereignty of the Empress in The Blazing World with a more communal form of feminism. The liberating light or reason is her inspiration, an attitude that she shares with the new philosophers of the seventeenth century. Still,...