Spectacles of Natural Philosophy in The Blazing World

Abstract

Margaret Cavendish’s utopian fantasy The Blazing World (1666), originally published as an addendum to her main philosophical work Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, enacts a unique critique of the early Royal Society natural philosophers, based upon her penetrating insight into the “spectacular nature” of both their experimentation and rhetoric of disinterested service. Sharply aware that experimentalists like Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke relied on the illusionist art of imitating “the act of unmediated seeing,” thereby naturalizing their art and intellectual hegemony, Cavendish has the philosophical Empress of the Blazing World stage a series of mock-spectacles that delude her subjects only by keeping them blind to the laborious maneuvers of her various natural and experimental philosophers. Moreover, the Empress’ spectacles closely refer to the most celebrated and sensational experiments of the Royal Society, many of which reappeared in contemporary anti-projector literature, and serve a proactively imperial agenda in Cavendish’s fiction. The Empress’ favorite stunts with the “Fire-stone” and overwater and aerial floating are imaginative transformations of experiments with the loadstone, terrella, air-pump, and various “floating machines,” verging on burlesque, due to disclosure of the hitherto unobserved drudgery of her various “men” philosophers. In staging philosophically-enhanced, imperialist spectacles, Cavendish effectively subverts the spectacle of non-partisan experimentalism as a whole and appropriates its naturalizing power for her own gendered fantasy of absolute female monarchy.