Upon an Indifferent Ascent

“Upon an Indifferent Ascent”: Cavendish and the Superiority of Female Divinity

    The ambition of Margaret Cavendish is no secret throughout The Description of a New Blazing World. At various points in the narrative, Cavendish introduces herself as a character who expresses interest in becoming a princess and empress; she compares herself in penmanship to several ancient and contemporary philosophers; she does not shy away from praising herself through the mouths of fictional characters. In case these instances of ambition were not clear to readers, Cavendish uses her epilogue to make sure her intentions are unmistakable: “my ambition is not onely to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole World; and that the Worlds I have made…are framed and composed of the most pure that is, the Rational parts of Matter…which Creation was more easily and suddenly effected, than the Conquests of the two famous Monarchs of the World. Alexander and Cesar” (178). Unabashedly, Cavendish’s desire is for goddesshood—to ascend as a woman into a position of power equal to that of a god, to create a rationale and a model for the necessity of female divinity in a time where a woman’s place in religious, spiritual, and authoritative matters was severely limited.

    This desire is explored and communicated throughout Blazing World as Cavendish uses her central character—called Empress—to work through issues of masculine and feminine authority, the creation of uniquely female authoritative spaces, and eventual ascension into the proposed female divine. While some scholars have analyzed Cavendish’s perspective and treatment of gender and divinity in Blazing World (e.g. Duxfield argues for “Nature” as a female form of divinity that contrasts the Christian male God), little has been done to analyze the contours of Cavendish’s ambitions and how they articulate her unique views on feminine authority and the building of utopias. In this essay, I will examine how Cavendish uses the fictional character of the Empress to create spaces of authority for her concept of the female divine in three progressive stages: the first stage I call accession, the second transmutation, and the third ascension. Ultimately, I will argue that Cavendish’s slow claiming of authority and power through her fictional Empress in these three stages is an acclimatizing process meant to slowly bring the contemporary reader into not just a recognition of inherent female divinity, but an acceptance for how the female divine’s existence outside of social structures makes it superior to the mainstream male divinity of her time and a necessary to creating utopian societies.

I. ACCESSION

    Cavendish’s first step in constructing the divine woman is accession, which is defined as “the action or act of joining something to something else,” typically by addition to preexisting groups and coming from an external source (OED). This stage consists of the first twenty or so pages of the book, during which Cavendish uses preestablished structures of social power to give authority and credibility to her main character—and herself. The “Empress” begins the story with no name, but the information we do get allows the audience to understand where she stands within the social and economic power structures of her world: a travelling merchant who lusts after the Lady is described as being “beneath her, both in Birth and Wealth,” telling us that she already poses some level of prestige or power (11). It would not have been difficult for contemporary readers of Cavendish to accept this heroine, as in England there were already social, political, and economic hierarchies that granted women status of high birth and associated them with wealth, whether through their fathers, husbands, or other male family members.

    Established comfortably within recognized systems of power suitable for her gender—and with emphasis placed on the “light of her Beauty, the heat of her Youth” as feminine qualities—the unnamed Lady is whisked away into an unknown world. During this first part of the narrative, a glimpse is given of the strength of her intellect when Cavendish describes how the Lady “had pretty well learned [the] language” of the animals, but other than that she mostly spends the introductory pages expressing little agency (24). This changes when she is brought before the Emperor of the Blazing World, who initially confuses her with a Goddess and even offers to worship her—an early hint at Cavendish’s ambition towards female divinity. After the Lady insists on her own mortality, the Emperor proceeds to “[make] her his wife” and Empress over the entire Blazing World. In this move, Cavendish continues to placate the audience as she shows the Empress’ power and authority originating from a male figure—the Emperor first makes her his wife, then gives her “an absolute power to rule and govern all that World as she pleased” (24). Her ability, her right, and her authority have not come from within herself, as Cavendish will later argue—rather, the Empress has merely accessed a pre-existing system of male authority, and thus poses no threat to established masculine power.

    This placation continues as the Empress begins to explore the world of her new (borrowed) power. In the paragraph immediately following her accession, we get a description of her royal clothing, which includes “a Buckler, to signifie the Defence of her Dominions” and a “Spear made of white Diamond, cut like the tail of a Blazing Star, which signified that she was ready to assault those that proved her Enemies” (24). The Empress appears to be trying on, as it were, the trappings of traditionally male military power—while less common than women of high Birth or associated wealth, this image would not have been entirely unfamiliar to Cavendish’s audience, as less than a century before the publication of The Blazing World, Queen Elizabeth I visited the British troops at Tilbury, where she proclaimed “I am come amongst you…to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people…I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field” (British Library). As with Elizabeth I, the Empress still sees fit to enact the roles of a traditional masculine leader as she claims this additional militaristic authority—her power is not demonstrative of inherent femininity or female power. She is still a woman in a powerful position acting as a man, rather than a woman in a powerful position acting as a woman.

    The final accession the Empress makes is a move into religious authority. This accession comes directly from the Empress’ political power as, for Cavendish, political and spiritual authority are inseparable. This perspective is evident as we examine the Empress’ first inquiries upon her ordination: “But before all things, she having got a Soveraign power from the Emperor over all the World, desired to be informed both of the manner of their Religion and Government” (26). Clearly, the Empress believes that to hold political power is to hold spiritual power, a belief which is confirmed by the priests and statesmen of the Blazing World when they declare that “a Monarchy is a divine form of Government, and agrees most with our Religion” (27). This connection is confirmed throughout the novel as the Empress uses her political sovereignty to direct the spiritual lives of her subjects, often appearing together. At the end of consulting all her scholars, the Empress cements the connection: “wherefore, confine your disputations to your Schools, lest besides the Commonwealth of Learning, they disturb also Divinity and Policy, Religion and Laws, and by that means draw an utter ruine and destruction both upon Church and State” (74). Cavendish’s argument is certain; where there is political power, there is spiritual power. Still, this claim to religious authority is an act of accession—her religious power is folded into her political power, which came from a man. And while one of her first acts as Empress is to question her subjects about why there are no women in their congregations, she is yet unwilling to make any changes, allowing it to remain a masculine space (for now).

    Cavendish, however, is unwilling to allow the Empress to remain in this state of accession for long. Once the Empress is successfully entrenched within male systems of power, Cavendish begins to dispose of the accessed male authority figures. At the same time the Empress is beginning to exercise her newfound power, the Emperor begins to fade from the narrative. Having passed on the sovereign mantle, the Emperor is not mentioned again for nearly eighty pages, during which pages the Empress exercises full control over the kingdom. And when the word “Emperor” is mentioned in the latter half of the narrative, it is often used as a gender-neutral term for the ruler of a world. In the few instances where the character of the Emperor reappears in the narrative after seceding his power, it is to enact the part of a spouse to the Empress rather than an authoritative figure. With a woman having fully accessed male power and with no male authority left to regulate the accession, Cavendish and the Empress can move into a demonstration of transmutation on their path to uncover the female divine.

II. TRANSMUTATION

    In this next stage of acclimatization, Cavendish uses the Empress’ established place to begin converting male spaces into female spaces, which become a necessary balance to male authority. I encountered some difficulty in what term I would use to represent this second stage, and ultimately settled on the word transmutation, which is the “change of one thing into another; conversion into something different; alteration, transformation” (OED). However, even this term word does not completely convey what Cavendish is doing during this second stage—she is not simply enter male spaces and recreate them as her own. To say so would imply that Cavendish is eliminating the male space in order to make room for the female, which she does not do even as she might criticize male authority. Rather, for both science and religion, Cavendish enters male spaces of power and uses them as templates from which she can develop and create a separate space of female power. In this way, she maintains an equilibrium between the sexes and their places of power, while also offering critiques of established male systems. It is this process of copy, paste, and revision that I refer to as “transmutation,” and which I will examine as a necessary step in Cavendish’s argument for the female divine.

    One of the first tasks of transmutation the Empress undertakes is to create literal female spaces within her religion, resolving “to build Churches, and make also up a Congregation of Women, whereof she intended to be the head her self, and to instruct them in the several points of her Religion.” Once the Empress is successful in using her political/religious authority to create all-female congregations, Cavendish uses the imaginary structure to hypothesize what women might accomplish if they were given a chance to create female religious spaces: “the Women, which generally had quick wits, subtile conceptions, clear understandings, and solid judgements, became, in a short time, very devout and zealous sisters” (75). Moving out from strictly female religious spaces, the Empress is quick to enact other transmutations in the church. Within a short period of time, she successfully converts all the peoples of the Blazing World to her own religion and devises a manner of discourse whereby she “kept them in a constant belief” (78). One of her methods includes transmuting spaces of worship through the use of magic stones. In one chapel she places a stone that causes the room to appear as if it burned with hellish fire, to cause her subjects to realize that to sin would cause them to “be tormented in an everlasting Fire” (76). In the second chapel, the Empress places a stone that gives the room a celestial appearance, shedding “a splendorous and comfortable light” (77).

    C. Perrin Radley points out that while the concept of stone-lit rooms for the purpose of conversion are borrowed from contemporary religious and occult lore, the Empress has her stones rotating counter-clockwise, which “was the direction taken either to undo some spell or to bring about an untoward end” (162). I suggest that this counterclockwise direction represents Cavendish’s attempts to transmute female spaces from male ones; an undoing of the religious wrongs that masculine authority has committed and a reestablishment of female authority within the realm of spirituality. The Empress’ orbit is willing to run against the grain of current traditional belief, thereby allowing for the “constant belief” of her people. In allowing her to make these changes and other criticisms of contemporary religious practices, Cavendish presents us with the image of a woman with religious power who does not only do what a man can do, but how a woman might function in this capacity and why it might be better. The Empress (read: Cavendish) has cast off her Spear and Buckler and transmutes the limiting mantle of masculine power as she comes into her own sense of feminine authority.

    In the scientific realm as well, the Empress is unafraid to make observations and changes as she demonstrates intellectual study as a woman’s domain. Speaking through the Empress’ intellectual authority, Cavendish offers up criticisms of men’s technical domains—for example, of architecture she says, “our Modern Buildings are like those Houses which Children use to make of Cards, one story above another, fitter for Birds, then Men” (21). She is also unafraid to make scientific observations, using every opportunity to offer up some insight—when regarding the diverse skin colors of the Emperor’s people, she wonders about the nature of light and color, “whether they were made by the bare reflection of light, without the assistance of small particles; or by the help of well-ranged and order’d Atoms; or by a continual agitation of little Globules; or by some pressing and re-acting motion, I am not able to determine” (25).

    However, scientific hypothesizing is not Cavendish’s primary motivation here—particularly since most of her observations appear in Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, which was printed in conjunction with Blazing World. The purpose of replaying her conversation about the blackness of coal (Observations 51-56; Blazing World 41-42) is that it creates an authoritative female voice who makes science her own domain. The Empress is not merely learning from her scholars; she is engaging them in dialogue, offering up her opinions, commanding and directing them to follow some inquiry, and ultimately demonstrating what a female scientific community might look like. At one point during her discussion with her scholars, the Empress proposes breaking the microscopes and telescopes of the Bear-men, stating that they will have more knowledge of Truth if they look at things with their own two eyes. The Bear-men are “exceedingly troubled” by this concept of Truth, arguing that “were there nothing but truth, there would be no occasion to dispute, and by this means we should want the aim and pleasure of our endeavors in confuting and contradicting each other; neither would one man be thought wiser then another, but all would either be alike knowing and wise, or all would be fools” (40). Through this argument, Cavendish paints masculine scientific communities as spaces dominated by society rather than any loyalty to reason, research, or Truth. In contrast, the Empress’ representation of the feminine scientific space is one where the observations and collection of Truth rises above all else, without a need for social responsibility.

    In this transmutation, we begin to see the shape of female divinity that Cavendish is proposing. Woman runs counterclockwise to man, she runs against the grain of expectation, she runs independent of social expectations. This image is supported during another scientific conversation the Empress has with the Bird-men, where she commands them to “give her a true relation of the two Cœlestial Bodies, viz. the Sun and Moon” (30). The Bird-men’s response genders the sun as a divine “He” and describes him as “a firm or solid Stone…of an extraordinary splendor,” whose light moves in a regular arc across the sky. The femininized moon is described in contrast to the Sun: “although she looked dim in the presence of the Sun, yet had she her own light, and was a shining body of her self, as might be perceived by her vigorous appearance in Moon-shiny-nights; the difference onely betwixt her own and the Sun’s light was, that the Sun did strike his beams in a direct line; but the Moon never respected the Centre of their World in a right line, but her Centre was always excentrical” (30). Here, Cavendish is sure to point out that the strength and quality of the two lights is equal—the (male) sun does not shine any brighter than the (female) moon, despite common perceptions or beliefs that the moon is dimmer. The only difference Cavendish can find is their orbits, for while the (male) body revolves around the Earth, the (female) body is described as eccentric. The Bird-men’s word choice reveals a double meaning. When referencing heavenly bodies, the OED states that excentrical means “Moving in an orbit deviating (more or less) from a circle,” but contemporary uses indicate that it also meant something “regulated by no central control” (OED; eccentric). Similar to her argument against the Bear-men who Cavendish saw as being limited by social constraints or purposes in scientific pursuits, Cavendish’s description of the sun illustrates a male divine who is limited by a focus on the Earth or the World or social responsibility. In contrast, a woman’s center of power has no responsibility to the world. The female divine is unregulated, without constraints, without a tether, and therefore more free to exercise that light and power which is equal in strength to the male divine.

III. ASCENSION

    Having established this perspective of the independence and importance of female divinity, Cavendish maneuvers herself and the Empress into a final process of ascension, or rise into the superiority of goddesshood[1]. Whereas both accession and transmutation required pre-existing structures to deliver authority, ascension has no reliance of outside power.

    This potential for female ascension is hinted out throughout the early parts of the narrative, such as when the priests’ and statesmen’s say women are not allowed in congregations because “It is not fit…that Men and Women should be promiscuously together in time of Religious Worship; for their company hinders Devotion, and makes many, instead of praying to God, direct their Devotion to their Mistresses” (28). Now, however, hint becomes literal fulfillment as the Empress communicates directly with the Spirits of her world, inquiring how she might create her own cabbala as an extension of her religious authority. When the Empress asks what kind of cabbala she should create, she is advised that she should “make a Poetical or Romancical Cabbala, wherein you may use Metaphors, Allegories, Similitudes, &c. and interpret them as you please” (108). Thus, rather than creating a system to interpret the mystical aspects of God’s Word, she is encouraged instead to create her own words, a system of religious interpretation that will mold itself to her will. Having perfected the preaching of her native religion, the Empress is now taught to create a Word of creation, just as God used the Word in the beginning. When the Empress begins to understand the possibility of her own ascension, she asks, “Can any Mortal be a Creator?” The spirits reply, “Yes…for every human Creature can create an Immaterial World fully inhabited by Immaterial Creatures, and populous of Immaterial subjects, such as we are…” (112). No longer are there structures around which the Empress must work in order to exercise her authority—she has moved directly into the realm of a god, able to create with a poetical or romancical word her own interpretations of religious reality.

    At this point in the narrative, Cavendish demolishes the barrier between fiction and reality as she introduces herself as a character, who together with the Empress learns how to create her own World. Her process further highlights the distinction between male and female creation: she begins by trying to make her world according to the ideas of several male philosophers (beginning with Thales, moving through Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Des Cartes, and Hobbes) and finds each of them to be unsuitable for her creation. Ultimately, she resolves to “make a World of her own Invention, and this World was composed of sensitive and rational…Matter” (117). In ascending to divinity, Cavendish finds that male philosophy is unsuitable for her, and unable to create the world she desires—she then must ascend to divinity of herself, as a woman. This sequence of world-creation further develops the idea that the female divine’s lack of social responsibility makes it superior to the male divine. Cavendish bears no responsibility to take on the ideas of men, whose ideas have possibly been deluded by the “aim and pleasure of [their] endeavors in confuting and contradicting each other” as the Bear-men did (40). This lack of sociality within female authority is further highlighted by the separation between the Empress and Cavendish as they create their internal worlds, as the two women “did also part from each other, until such time as they had brought their Worlds to perfection” (114). Lacking social responsibility to either men or other women during their process of creation, the two women are able to establish perfect utopias in their internal worlds. Just as the Empress was able to create a utopic religion through her counterclockwise rotations and discover Truth through her solitary scientific studies, Cavendish argues that a utopic society (or a utopic world) can only be created through the eccentric female divine. Perfection then can come only through a socially disengaged perspective, one that Cavendish may have considered a unique part of femininity at the time given women’s isolated domain of the household.

IV. CONCLUSION

    Female isolation then is the key to the ascension that Cavendish proposes. In demonstrating the Empress’ accession to a place of male power, Cavendish establishes her authority in relation to her contemporary audience’s beliefs. In allowing the Empress to transmute the spaces of male power she encounters, Cavendish begins to demonstrate the current vacuum of female influence in positions of religious and scientific spaces. And in finally allowing the Empress to step free of the pre-existing masculine structures of authority and ascend into goddesshood, Cavendish argues not only for the individual creatorhood of all women, but also for the plausible necessity for a female divine that is unrestricted by the world. Despite the isolation required in this argument, through the lens of ascension Cavendish’s argument becomes a rallying cry for the women of her time—to see the power in their position of socially isolated domains, to rely no longer on desires to access male structures of power, and to extrapolate that utopic societies are an impossibility without feminine power.

    Perhaps Cavendish’s ultimate ambition is not for herself to become the creator of a world, but to have that ambition be shared by other women, each in her own indifferent sphere.

Works Cited

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[1] Cavendish would no doubt be disappointed that over three-hundred and fifty years later, Microsoft Word still underlines “goddesshood” in read as an illegitimate word, whereas “godhood” is not corrected.