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

Abstract

This study explores Anne Conway’s and Margaret Cavendish’s critique of Cartesian and Hookean accounts of specular (self-)knowledge, at the intersections of three developments that precluded women further from pursuing knowledge in the seventeenth century: technical advances in glass mirrors and lenses, the emergence of Cartesian reflexive subjectivity based upon “double vision,” and a new partitioning and elevation of good/male over bad/female curiosity. Contemporary with Galileo’s telescopic discoveries and the heyday of Venetian glass mirrors, Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1603) depicted various female figures with a looking glass, adumbrating the issues and disputes to proliferate around specular metaphors and instruments with the rise of Cartesian subjectivity and experimental philosophy. It was Descartes, sceptic of mimetic mirrors, who turned the epistemic mirror inward for the soul, not eyes, to do the seeing, as surety for all ensuing knowledge. Conway refutes Descartes’s mechanist vision as incapable of seeing beneath the surface and predicates all reflection or seeing on reciprocation with objects. Unlike Descartes, Hooke was enthusiastic about the new optic glasses, to the extent of taking any glassy surfaces, including lifeless ommatidia, for the seeing eye. Cavendish defies and foregoes the Hookean glass metaphor entirely, as self-knowledge inheres in bodies, most notably, female bodies (including mermaids) in her fiction. Conway and Cavendish challenge the glasses of male curiosity, thus advocating self-knowing female bodies curious for further knowledge.