Desde lejos

Despite the kind reception she receives at her first encounter with the inhabitants of the Blazing World(in which she becomes the Empress), the Empress becomes secluded both as a woman with power and as someone ignorant of science who attempts without success to assimi- late intellectually with the society that has put her in a leadership position. Through her interro- gation of the scientists, the Empress demonstrates a strong undercurrent of distrust in scientific knowledge. For example, after the Lice-men, one of the many man-beast hybrids in the society, tell her they cannot measure everything within a “hair’s breadth,” the Empress “began to be dis- pleased, and told them there was neither Truth nor Justice in their Profession, and so dissolved their society” (188). When the Empress engages the man-beast scientists in these lengthy dia- logues, she does not understand the scientific advances presented to her, and this further sepa- rates and isolates her from her new home. She also orders scientific instruments destroyed, sug- gesting an attempt to suppress the spread of knowledge.

Emma Rees and Anna Battigelli have extensively explored the isolation experienced by female writers in the seventeenth century despite the literary circles to which they belonged.159 Indeed, isolation rested firmly in the minds of the English people during and after a Civil War that chased not only royalist supporters but also the sovereign himself into exile.160 The isolation felt by Cavendish and other lesser-studied women writers contemporary to her manifests in The Blazing World with a depiction of an all-powerful and clearly capable female sovereign who

159 _{Rees writes of Cavendish’s “singularity” in engaging with “archetypically masculine literary modes” (188).} Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind, p. 82.

160 _{Virginia Woolf writes, “What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind!”} (A Room of One's Own 74).

nevertheless finds herself adrift in a world of male-dominated scientific thought and revolu- tion.161TheBlazing World demonstrates Cavendish’s acute awareness of this movement that went on literally around her and her circle and shows how she, despite attaining a powerful posi- tion for a woman in the seventeenth century, sought to depict scientific thought as foreign to the female sphere.162

As a female protagonist drives forward the narrative of TheBlazing World, reading the Empress as a reflection of Cavendish’s own self-reflection naturally follows. Margaret Caven- dish’s psychological state has rightly received scholarly attention, as has the way in which it manifests in her writings.163 But as Cavendish sought her own personal subjectivity and empow- erment through the process of writing and publishing, the authoritarian nature of the Empress likely comes from the frustration Cavendish felt as a woman attempting to become part of the male world of literary authorship.164 Critics have naturally commented on the Empress’s au- thoritarian nature in TheBlazing World, but the society Cavendish depicts does not necessarily denote her opposition to such authoritarian rule.165

161 _{Robert Ignatius Letellier argues that “Cavendish’s own reaction to her effective exclusion from political power} and citizenship helped to form the basis of her feminine critique” (21). Megan Heffernan, however, argues that in

The Blazing World, Cavendish creates a subjectivity that is markedly more social than individual” (71).

162 _{Robert Appelbaum writes that “In Margaret Cavendish’s mind the two forms of alienation, on the one hand from} her country and on the other hand from the world of letters and fame, are inevitably coupled” (202).

163 _{See, for instance, Anna Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind, p. 82, and Emma Rees, p.} 177.

164 _{According to Keith Thomas, “For an exceptional woman like Margaret Cavendish, who unashamedly invaded the} masculine domain by seeking fame as a writer and thinker, and incurring much mockery in the process, it was a mat- ter of great distress that most of her sex were content to die unremembered” (255).

165 _{Catherine Gallagher claims that the Empress’s authoritarian rule grants subjectivity to Cavendish: “it was, para-} doxically, in the ideology of absolute monarchy that Cavendish found a model of the absolute, sovereign private self” (133). Gallagher similarly sees a “commitment to absolute monarchy” (138) that excludes female subjectivity. Although Bronwen Price asserts that, Cavendish commits a “liberating act” with the creation of the Empress, this act “still demands authoritarian devotion to her as the head of state and to God through her as head of church ("Journeys Beyond Frontiers: Knowledge, Subjectivity and Outer Space in Margaret Cavendish's the Blazing World (1666)" 138), John Rogers contends that The Blazing World presents an “anti-authoritarian perspective . . . in the decentral- ized government of Blazing World” (197). Carrie Hintz argues that The Blazing World “resolves the question of the place of dissent in a stable society by concluding (perhaps a bit wistfully) that the pleasures of diversity must give way to the exigencies of unity. In order to maintain a society worth living in, the vagaries of individual dissent and lively public debate must be sacrificed” ("'But One Opinion': Fear of Dissent in Cavendish's New Blazing World”

Through the Empress, Cavendish consciously depicts the alienation she experienced be- cause of her mental state and ambitions as a woman seeking authorial success and respect. Cav- endish’s choice to present her most obvious fictional alter ego in a “fantastic” narrative suggests her unconscious realization that her ambitions resided outside of normal expectations in the sev- enteenth-century world of publishing. Lacan argues quite simply that “Alienation is constitutive of the imaginary order” (Seminar III 146). The Imaginary, as distinguished from the Symbolic, the Law, the law-of-the-father, inherently departs from the structural order of the Symbolic and the result, according to Lacan, is alienation and even paranoia: “it is the imaginary ego which gives it its centre and its group, and it is clearly identifiable with a form of alienation, akin to paranoia. That the subject ends up believing in the ego is in itself madness” (Seminar II 247).166 In a well-known biography of Cavendish entitled Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Mar- garet, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by Her Pen, Katie Whitaker explores pre- cisely this undercurrent of “madness” in Cavendish’s life and writings.167 Cavendish thus found herself in a realm in which she confronted the patriarchal world of publishing and sought to de- pict a woman’s revenge on this male-dominated world, albeit through heavy-handed tactics and an ostensible Luddite attitude towards scientific advances.

Žižek argues that alienation in essence constitutes “getting lost” and thus ultimately has ethical implications:

25). Line Cottegnies takes this argument further by arguing that in The Blazing World Cavendish “reveals the true nature of her newfound ‘paradise’; an authoritarian (if paradoxically benevolent) regime based on secrecy and sur- veillance” (my emphasis 73). William Poole specifically locates the authoritarian nature of the Empress’s reign in her treatment of the half-man, half-beast scientists, arguing that the Empress “in using ‘science’ to quell political enemies and keep one’s subjects in awe, she merely invites renewed skepticism considering the inherent justification of politics and religion. Might’s helping hand ends up replacing right” (16). According Jay Stevenson, “the Em- press's discourse and staged self-display subjects the inhabitants of the Blazing world to her rule” (153).

166 _{Žižek points out that in psychoanalysis, “the first analysands were female hysterics; that is to say, psychoanalysis} was originally an interpretation of female hysteria” (Tarrying with the Negative 165).

167 _{Žižek likens submission to authority as what “became a favorite Soviet tactic against dissidents: anyone whose} political views differed from theirs was insane” (The Parallax View 302).

It is not that we are dealing here with the simple ‘Hegelian’ movement into al- ienation (getting lost) and recuperation of oneself (finding a firm position): the point is a more precise one: it is the very movement of ‘getting lost’ (of losing eth- ical substance) that opens up the space for the ethical work of mediation which alone can generate the solution. The loss is this not recuperative but fully assert- ed as liberating, as a positive opening. (The Parallax View, Žižek’s emphasis 127) Similarly to many other utopian narrative protagonists, the Empress in The Blazing World literal- ly becomes “lost” at the inception of the narrative, and in essence this constitutes “losing ethical substance” which she pursues through her immediate promotion to Empress upon entering the Blazing World. But, as in Lacan’s notion of the Imaginary, the Empress succumbs to the narcis- sistic pull of the Imaginary, and thus fails to resituate herself within an acceptable ethical frame- work.