Margaret Cavendish and the (Fe)male Subject of Fictions of Lunar New Worlds

Abstract

Margaret Cavendish’s A Description of a New World Called the Blazing World belongs in a tradition of early modern, ‘new philosophical’ fictions of lunar new worlds, but it also serves as a critical exception and response to such works by male philosophers. Francis Godwin introduced a narrative of the ‘man’ in the moon, a would-be philosopher and conquistador, parting ways with Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (Dream) that had granted significant female agency to the character of Fiolxhilde. The move away from Somnium marked a turn towards the exclusively male-centered ‘he’ philosophy of the Royal Society, interrupted by Cavendish’s intervention in The Blazing World. Early modern lunar fictions, from Somnium to Gulliver’s burlesque voyage to Laputa, form part of the debate on the nature and motion of matter against the backdrop of seventeenth-century ‘new philosophical’ thought. Cavendish’s ‘female fancy’ in The Blazing World defies both Aristotelian and mechanist views of inanimate/female matter. The abductee-turned Empress in Cavendish’s fiction proves herself not only a ‘self-moving body,’ capable of free and even out-of-bounds motion, but ultimately the subject that negotiates and produces new knowledge about the Blazing World and an infinity of (inner) new worlds, enabling her to speak despite the constraints established by the new experimental philosophy.