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ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS

Cavendish Sessions in RSA 2012, Washington DC

Margaret Cavendish I: Gender and Social Class
Sponsor: Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (EMW)
Session Organizers: James Fitzmaurice, University of Sheffield, and Lisa Sarasohn, Oregon State University
Chair: Geogianna Ziegler, The Folger Library
Respondent: Alexandra Bennett, Northern Illinois University

Shawn W Moore, Texas A&M University
“Of Femal Kind” and “a Masculine Mind”: Gender Hybridity in Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure
Cavendish creates a complex hybridized gender identity in which the feminine body is articulated through a masculinized intellect in order to challenge the normative political gender constructions in place within The Convent of Pleasure. By utilizing this construction, Cavendish critiques the unstable notions of femininity and masculinity, through visual performances of cross-dressing and the use of her contemporary’s political rhetoric, and challenges the dominant social restrictions that bind particular gendered bodies. Scholars like Erin Lang Bonin have examined the discursive uses of hybridized notions of “place, body, language, and being” at work in Margaret Cavendish’s dramatic works. I engage her work and argue that to theorize Cavendish’s dramas in this way is to argue for a re-reading of hybridity as a particular identity formation and as a way of challenging the normative gender construction within her political environment.

Nathaniel Stogdill, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Margaret Cavendish's Spectacles of Severalness and Restoration Sociability
William wondered that "in her self so many Creatures be,/ Like many Commonwealths, yet all agree," and John Evelyn marveled she "together" in herself all learned women. For contemporaries and modern audiences alike, Margaret Cavendish is a site where "many Creatures" are unexpectedly "summed together." This paper argues that Cavendish fashioned this self-styled many-ness in order to intervene in Restoration debates about indemnity. By creating in herself and her texts a spectacle of severalness, she sets off her "mixt nature" as something that deserves the special attention of her audieces. This attentiveness to her "mixt nature" prepares readers to consider the mixed nature of a Restoration society that had suddenly summed in itself so "many Commonwealths." I focus on The Blazing World, itself a hybridized text that contains many hybrids, as a work that invites Restoration readers to admire and enact the sociable severalness that it represents.

James Fitzmaurice, University of Sheffield
Social Class, Nature's Pictures, and Pieter Breughel's Peasants
Margaret Cavendish lived in an environment suffused with the visual arts when she was resident in Antwerp during the 1650s. The heritage of the Brueghel family was everywhere to be seen in copies of the elder Pieter Breughel's paintings. In this paper, I will establish connections between treatments of subjects like peasant dancing and noon meals during harvests on the one hand and depictions of similar subjects in Nature's Pictures (1656). I will argue that Cavendish is fascinated with the details of peasant dress and felt a genuine bond with the rural lower classes, especially the women. Although her male narrator eventually abandons his farm, Cavendish does not endorse his choice. Indeed, what remains in the reader's mind is her depiction of peasant life. Cavendish is sometimes understood as a pampered aristocratic lady who had few interests beyond the limits of her social class. Such is not the case.

Margaret Cavendish II: Narratives of Science
Session Organizers: James Fitzmaurice, University of Sheffield, and Lisa Sarasohn, Oregon State University
Chair: Brandie Siegfried, Brigham Young University
Respondent: Sara Mendelson, McMaster University

Emily Griffiths Jones, Boston University
Empirical Providence in the Romances of Margaret Cavendish
Cavendish reworks the concept of providence in her romance narratives, redefining the genre's traditional reliance on providential teleology away from a zealous Protestant interpretation and toward her definition of providence in The World's Olio: the human ability "to observe the Effect of Things, and to compare the past with the present, as to guess, and so to provide for the Future." While the former understanding of providential romance involves perceiving the divine order within seemingly random events, Cavendish's protagonists accept these events as random and rely on empirical observation to construct order from them. The heroines of The Blazing World, The Contract, and Assaulted and Pursued Chastity survive their trials and arrive at happy endings not through their faith in a divinely-structured narrative but through their ability to analyze the patterns within atomistic contingency. Rather than inhabiting a predestined sacred narrative, they create their own narratives out of apparent chaos.

Julianne Werlin, Princeton University
Time, Matter, and Social Change in Grounds of Natural Philosophy
Much has been written about Margaret Cavendish's use of the Royalist literary virtue of variety. But variety, I suggest, may have more ambiguous political implications. It need not merely mean copia, but in temporal terms, is tantamount to change; using variety in this sense, Cavendish develops a theory of the transmutation of one society into another. Indeed, Cavendish suggests that time itself is a function of such variety: "Time [is] only the Variation and Alteration of Nature." Focusing on Cavendish's appendix to the Grounds of Natural Philosophy, I propose that even her definition of matter-in terms of divisibility rather than, say, extension-is designed to accommodate a theory of social change. In concentrating on the temporal dimensions of variety, I shall make use of research on the oral context of Cavendish's work, for read aloud many of Cavendish's works would present fantastic metamorphoses rather than diverse tableaux.

Lisa T Sarasohn, Oregon State University
"Diseased, Swell'd and Tumid Bodies': Insect Sexuality in Margaret Cavendish's Observations Upon Natural Philosophy and the New Blazing World"
Robert Hooke, in his 1665 Micrographia, the first graphic description of the findings of the Royal Society's microscopic program, included engravings of a huge louse and a giant flea, which have become iconic in discussions of the Scientific Revolution. Cavendish responded to his investigations by condemning experimental science as delusional, but also as dangerous, particularly to women. In my paper I will discuss the sexual meanings of vermin in the seventeenth century and the ways in which Cavendish implicated the experimentalists as sexual voyeurs or even sexual predators. The new science and pornography shared a fascination with the graphic depiction of objects. Cavendish saw that to magnify something is to objectify it, a threatening practice for women.