Through the Looking-Glass, and What Women Found There: Conway, Cavendish, and Specular Metaphors of Self-Knowledge for Early Modern Women

Abstract

Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1603) depicted Scienza as a female figure with a looking glass, largely in line with the age-old but ambiguous trope of epistemic pursuit as seeing (with the soul/‘mind’s eye’) through or in the looking-glass. Contemporary with Galileo’s telescopic discoveries and the heyday of Venetian glass-mirrors, Ripa’s image adumbrated the issues and disputes to proliferate around the specular metaphor/instrument over the course of the seventeenth century, what with the rise of Cartesian subjectivity and that of experimental philosophy. Against this backdrop, the present study explores Anne Conway’s and Margaret Cavendish’s writings, for their critical engagement with Cartesian and Hookean accounts of self-knowledge. Ripa’s was a mirror held up to nature, not for Scienza’s self-reflection, and it is Descartes who turned the epistemic mirror inward for the ‘mind’s eye’ to find a ‘clear and distinct’ thought of itself, as surety for all ensuing knowledge about the natural world. The Cartesian mind as ‘thinking substance’ is (impossibly) at once the eye and the mirror. Conway also depicts the soul’s self-knowledge in specular terms but predicates ‘all reflection’ firmly on a ‘certain opacity, which we call body’, and likewise, ‘all knowledge’ on a variety of such bodies as the ‘subject or receptacle of that knowledge’. Perfect retentivity being the attribute of female body, Conway’s ‘subject’ of knowledge is implicitly female, for the almost self-less self-knowledge that ‘I, for example, am a multiple being who receives many images from objects’. A staunch critic of optic glasses, particularly Robert Hooke’s microscope, Cavendish forgoes the glass metaphor entirely and instead has a ‘young Lady’ cross over to the Blazing World beyond the pole, as if ‘through the looking glass’ like Alice. Cavendish’s imagining of (female) subjectivity is resonant with Conway’s in that it is not reflexive but multiplicitous and relational, but for Cavendish (self-)knowledge is inherent, not retained, in body. Also, Cavendish’s subjectivity is individual, instead of generic, for the Empress and the Duchess are no mirror image of each other but each an author of her own world/mind.