“Mad Madge’s Bestiary: Philosophical Animals and Physiognomic Philosophers in Margaret...

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39

2Mad Madge’s BestiaryPhilosophical Animals and Physiognomic Philosophers in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World

Dan Mills

Species reeks of race and sex: and where and when species meet, their heritage must be untied and better knots of companion species attempted within and across differences.1

The first item in Robert Pepperell’s “The Posthuman Manifesto” reads, “It is now clear that humans are no longer the most important things in the universe. This is something the humanists have yet to accept.”2 As the governing intellectual element of the early modern period, human-ism played an essential role in the intellectual history and literary out-put of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, but according to Juliana Schiesari, “anthropomorphic humanism” of the period would lead to “ethnocentrism, nationalism, racism, and sexism.”3 The first of these great early modern English humanists, Thomas More, left the world his Utopia, a text first printed in 1516 that has not ceased to elicit scholarly attention. Following More, empiricist Francis Bacon created his utopian society Bensalem in the 1624 text, The New Atlantis. Neither More’s nor Bacon’s text have garnered widespread critical consensus on any of the issues they raise. In response to More and Bacon, Margaret Cavendish created her utopian vision of a fictitious society without leaving any definitive “meaning” or commentary on whether or not the “utopia” she depicted constitutes a perfect, idealized society. Similar to More’s and Bacon’s utopian texts, Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World has received critical attention seeking to label the text as utopian, dystopian, science fiction, or some kind of hybrid.4 This essay will demonstrate that Cavendish’s The Blazing World constitutes a dystopia in which the subjectivities attained by the Empress and the half-man, half-beast inhabitants of the Blazing World

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40 The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, II

reflect the negative psychological impact of oppressive social forces inherent in the society.5 As Bruce Boehrer notes, animals in the early modern period at large play a key role in examining interpersonal inter-action, oppression, and cultural hegemony.6

The most philosophical section of The Blazing World depicts the Empress engaging these half-man, half beast characters in quasi-Socratic dialogues concerning a wide range of philosophical issues. Examining the “man-beasts,” as Cavendish calls them, in The Blazing World from the perspective of cultural attitudes and common understanding of animals and animal imagery and symbolism in early modern England highlights the importance of these unnamed characters’ identities to understand-ing their role in the dialogues they have with the Empress. I wish to take particular issue with Bruce Boehrer’s assertion that the Blazing World “does not present nonhuman animals as literary characters [and] the tale’s animal men – like its endless scientific ruminations – are largely beside the point.”7 On the contrary, Cavendish very calculatedly depicts the man-beast characters, and, while not fully characterized, these char-acters serve vital functions in Cavendish’s utopian project.8 Analyzing The Blazing World through theories of subjectivity and posthumanism will demonstrate Cavendish’s aim to depict a dystopian society that both critiques and undermines authoritarian rule. At the same time, however, Cavendish indicts the notion of a “classless” society by basing the Blazing World’s social structure on a system of obligatory equality. Cavendish thus presented posthuman sensibilities long before the “early modern” period ended and before the “modern” period began.9

A great deal of posthumanist criticism has focused on the cyborg or the hybrid, with particular emphasis on humanity’s increasing merge with technology. Andy Clark, for instance, argues that the cyborg holds importance in the late twentieth century because it elicits images of “human-machine hybrids” and “physical merging of flesh and electronic circuitry.”10 But Clark also locates the cyborg primarily in the realm of science fiction.11 Katherine Hayles focuses on cyber-netics in How We Became Posthuman,12 and founding posthumanist critic Donna Haraway examines what she calls “animal sociology” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. For Haraway, cyborgs appear in myth at the site of the transgression of the animal/human border and, instead of creating a new boundary between people and other life forms, they announce “disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling” and suggest that bestiality holds a new place in the “cycle of marriage exchange.”13 In addition to posthumanism discourse, I wish to add to the work of Erica Fudge, who in part argues that literal “bestiality”


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Philosophical Animals and Physiognomic Philosophers 41

amounted to an assault on both the institution of marriage and the very notion of humanity itself.14

Along with cultural critics such as Clark, Hayles, and Haraway, post-humanism has garnered attention from continental philosophers. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben examines posthumanism from the perspective of the Hegelian master–slave dialectic, equating the anthropomorphous animal with the body of the slave.15 Animals serve as the slaves in Agamben’s model, and the line dividing ani-mality and humanity constitutes something of an aporia. Agamben also argues that conceptual “bestiality” spawned from overlaying the human object and the animal object results in a similar conundrum, because superimposing human and animal life would result in a return and challenge to the pre-historic line dividing human from animal.16 Agamben suggests that the arrival of “posthistory” has allowed for the very concept of posthumanism. He distinguishes between the humani-zation of the animal and an animalization of the human, drawing a distinction between an external ontology that results from a denial of the internal and the animalization of the human (the modern subject) and the reverse. In the reverse, internal ontology comes about through an embrace of the external and the humanization of the animal (pre-modern or non-modern). The pre- or non-modern correlates with not only the “man-ape” and feral human but also the Other, whether it be a slave, barbarian, or foreigner: an animal, in other words, that appears in human form.17 Agamben’s argument elucidates the trou-blesome relationship between man and animal in the posthistorical notion of posthumanity, but like most other posthumanism models, Agamben’s model does not make the final step to interrogate a literal man and animal hybrid. H.G. Wells engages with a more fully realized notion of literal miscegenation of animal and man in his 1896 novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and incidentally does so with the trope of a utopic desert island.

As with Clark, Hayles, Haraway, and (particularly) Agamben, phe-nomenology plays an integral role in posthumanist thought, and Martin Heidegger’s Dasein has provided a useful object against which to test posthuman theories. Jacques Derrida problematizes Heidegger’s Dasein and its lack of relevance to posthumanism, arguing that Dasein’s movement relates to “beings as such” and transcends the “animal in its drives or its appetites.” Because the animal cannot transcend like Dasein, according to Derrida, the animal’s transcendence is based on the presence of a “world as totality of beings as such.”18 Dasein, in Derrida’s terms, assumes humanity as the only locus for subjectivity in a manner


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similar to the oft-dismissed Cartesian cogito. Julian Yates similarly takes issue with Heidegger’s homocentric Dasein, arguing that the posthuman demands a human Dasein it cannot obtain, resulting in semiotic confu-sion.19 For both Derrida and Yates, any inherent human “humanity” comes wrought with phenomenological problems and contradictions, which posthumanism seeks to address. Cavendish humanizes the man-beast scientists with a (somewhat limited) phenomenological subjectivity that resides outside of Dasein’s powerful, yet limited, anthropocentric definition in Husserl, Heidegger, and their posterity.20

Appended to Cavendish’s 1666 text entitled Observations on Natural Philosophy, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World prin-cipally addresses science as it relates to natural philosophy. The Blazing World begins with a seaman’s love for and abduction of a woman from a higher social class.21 After the abduction, the mariner sets sail but meets with a violent storm at the pole of “another world,” killing all onboard except the unnamed lady, who “by the light of her Beauty, the heat of her Youth, and Protection of the Gods, remain[ed] alive.”22 “Bear-like Creatures” rescue this noble lady and take her to an island in the Blazing World where the Emperor resides.23 The name “Blazing World,” the reader learns, comes from its bright stars. Once on the island, the man-beast crea-tures take the lady to “Paradise,” the “Imperial city” on the island. Some of the island’s human inhabitants include priests, governors, princes with “Imperial Blood,” eunuchs, and others of “several Complexions; not white, black, tawny, olive or ash-coloured; but some appear’d of an Azure, some of a deep Purple, some of a Grass-green, some of a Scarlet, some of an Orange-colour”24 The rest of the inhabitants of the island consist of half-man, half-beast creatures who inherit their profession upon birth. The narrative offers no gender identification for the man-beast inhabit-ants of the society, but as Fudge notes, many early modern texts refer to animals by masculine terms such as “he” and “man.”25

The inhabitants of this “Blazing World” become so enamored with the narrator that they immediately crown her as Emperor of their society. The newly crowned Empress engages the man-beast native inhabitants of this world in a series of question and answer dialogues in which the Empress stubbornly refuses to accept any of the scientists’ discoveries, knowledge, or experiences. Despite becoming Empress, the protagonist remains secluded and becomes marginalized in The Blazing World and attempts without success to assimilate intellectually with the society that has made her Empress simply because of her grace and beauty.26

The Empress largely uses her power, and by association, language to oppress and tear down the scientific activities of the man beasts, and


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she exhibits marked hostility and skepticism towards science during her interrogations of the scientists. For example, after the Lice-men tell her they cannot measure everything within a “hair’s breadth,” the Empress becomes displeased and attacks their profession before killing their society.27 At one point, the Empress even orders the scientists to smash scientific devices. The Empress then turns her attention to religious reform and constructs holy places for multiple faiths and denomina-tions. As she seeks spiritual enlightenment and self-exploration, some of the Empress’s spiritual advisors suggest bringing the Duchess of Newcastle into the Blazing World as a more useful ally and advisor. As the Duchess, Margaret Cavendish inserts herself into her own narra-tive and ultimately advises the Empress to retreat into her own mind and create numerous blazing worlds inside her own imagination. The Duchess character, Margaret Cavendish herself, proposes a utopia of one, a utopia of complete isolation that reflects Cavendish’s failed attempts to assimilate into intellectual circles.28

The intellectual centerpiece of The Blazing World depicts the man-beast scientists responding to various questions and requests presented to them by the aggressive Empress.29 Cavendish demonstrates this kind of “imaginary” aggressivity through the Empress, who, despite her apparent authority position, experiences some self-initiated margin-alization during her question and answer session with the man-beast scientists. Cavendish’s treatment of the man-beast scientists implicitly and explicitly demonstrates not only a negative attitude towards sci-ence but also an undercurrent of racism.30 The lengthy list of scientists is summarized in Figure 2.1.

Cavendish identifies all of the man-beasts only by their racial make-up and their profession, which they inherit upon birth. For Cavendish’s supposedly utopian society, inherited identity and social class serve as the sole determining factors for the lives of all of the “racially diverse” inhabitants of the Blazing World.31

The Empress does not merely illustrate a conception of an early modern tyrant, however. Through the Empress, Cavendish also seeks to undermine the male dominated world of seventeenth century empirical science through the Empress’s stubborn interrogation of the scientists.32 In doing so, the Empress displays hostility towards things she does not understand in a manner that calls to mind the behavior characteristic of totalitarian regimes. Hannah Arendt identifies totalitarian power with the repression of intellectual achievement, arguing that such regimes replace real talent with uncreative and unintelligent “crackpots and fools” whose only contribution lies in their loyalty to the regime.33


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Incidentally, Arendt also argues that Nazism, the ultimate manifestation of fascist, racist, and despotic rule, attempted “to change man into a beast.”34 While the Empress never replaces the scientists she attempts to undermine, she nevertheless demonstrates hostility to what Arendt calls “everything they cannot understand,” that is, everything the Empress cannot understand, which amounts to virtually all of the scientific advances and innovations presented to her by the man-beast scientists. Cavendish’s depiction of the authoritarian Empress relates directly to her commentary on female subjectivity.35

The Empress essentially experiences what Jacques Lacan would label a “misrecognition” in the Symbolic domain, which, according to Lacan, results in entry into the Imaginary, or a “fantasy.”36 The Empress’s interrogation of the scientists indeed challenges a Symbolic relation, as she meets the presumably rational scientists with irrational and “imaginary” knowledge, or rather a lack of knowledge that constitutes a “fantasy.” The “imaginary” or “fantastickal” realm of the mind, accord-ing to Fudge, serves as the site for true differentiation between man and animal in the early modern period.37 By contrast, Lacan’s Symbolic domain implicitly includes logic and reasoning in the same vein as the thought of Francis Bacon, but according to Robert Pepperell’s manifesto for posthumanism, “Logic is an illusion of human imagination. Truth and falsity do not exist in nature – other than in human thought.”38 The Empress’s stubborn dismissal of scientific advances and knowledge resides in a realm completely outside of Lacan’s notion of the Symbolic,

Fly-men Natural PhilosophersWorm-men Natural PhilosophersFish or Mear-men Natural PhilosophersAnt-men Natural PhilosophersGeese-men Orators, logiciansSpider-men MathematiciansLice-men MathematiciansFox-men PoliticiansApe-men ChemystsJack-daw-men Orators and LogiciansMagpie-men Orators and LogiciansParrot-men Orators and Logicians"Satyrs" Galenick Physicians"Gyants" Architects

Figure 2.1 Cavendish’s man-beast scientists


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which follows certain rules and “laws” because it houses language and by association subjectivity. The Empress never enters into the Symbolic order in The Blazing World, and firmly situates herself in the Imaginary through her refusal to follow the “laws” of science, and by association, the Symbolic order and language. Pepperell also claims that the post-human rejects intrinsic, natural law, while it simultaneously does not merely rely upon imagined laws to replace natural laws.39 Cavendish’s choice to publish her utopian The Blazing World in the same volume as her work on natural philosophy illustrates this definition of the posthu-man perfectly: she offers commentary on the intrinsic laws of nature in Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy juxtaposed with the “fantas-tickal” utopian text, The Blazing World.

Cavendish’s inclusion of man-animal hybrids adds to a long tradi-tion of animal lore in the early modern period.40 As critics have noted, Cavendish would likely have had these conventions of animal imagery in mind when she composed The Blazing World.41 Indeed, in early mod-ern art animals took on sentient features as well as serving symbolic and allegorical functions.42 Much of the formulation of animal symbol-ism and imagery in Renaissance England came from widely available editions of William Caxton’s Aesop’s Fables, first printed in English in 1484, and thus animals in the early modern period also served as a site for moral instruction.43 Aristotle’s The History of Animals similarly played a role in the formulation of early modern ideas about animals. Early in this text, Aristotle interestingly claims that new and different animals result from the coupling of similar creatures, such as in the case of Laconian dogs resulting from breeding dogs and foxes and Indian dogs resulting from breeding dogs and tigers.44 Aristotle’s account of cross-breeding animals could almost be considered “post-animal,” but most of The History of Animals merely describes physical and biological features of animals known in Aristotle’s time. Cavendish, however, cross-breeds humans and animals, and focuses the description of her hybrid creatures on their words, actions, and professional activities and not on their physical appearance.

In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Haraway logically examines several studies of social psychology that focus on primates. Cavendish makes apes, the animals whose social interactions most commonly resemble that of humans, into the Ape-men, who serve as the chemists in The Blazing World. Caxton’s version of the fable “the Ape and of the fox” tells of an ape who asks a fox to give him his tail to cover his buttocks but the fox refuses, saying that he would rather see it destroyed on him than see it on the Ape’s foul buttocks. This fable depicts the most


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human-like of all animals as foul and dirty. Apes were also frequently described as facetious and imitative; Cavendish therefore seems to have characterized chemists as closely resembling humans, but generally arrogant.

Cavendish’s Fox-men, unsurprisingly, serve the Blazing World as politicians, who all play a courtier-like role for the Empress. In Caxton’s version of “The Fox and the Grapes,” a hungry fox reaches for grapes hanging on a vine but cannot get them, leaping with all of his strength. The fox ultimately leaves and says to himself that the grapes are not ripe enough to eat anyway. The moral is of course that people should not speak disparagingly of things that they cannot attain. In modern psychoanalytical terms this constitutes a “self-serving bias,” a self-rationalization process by which the subject explains away his own failure by explanations other than the subject’s own inferiority. In Caxton’s “The Wolf, the Fox, and the Ape,” a wolf calls a fox before an ape and accuses him of being a thief. The fox denies the charge, but the ape, acting as judge, sentences the fox to split the stolen goods with the wolf. The moral here is that a man that does wrong will be followed by that bad deed and even if he does a good deed it will not erase the wrong. Frequently known for their craftiness and slyness, foxes also served as the prey for aristocratic hunts that almost always resulted in the fox being run to ground.45 Additionally, early modern English readers likely knew the medieval bestiary tale Reynard the Fox, which typically depicted the clever Reynard getting into trouble and talking his way out of it. Early modern readers would have had familiarity with the quick-witted double-talking fox through readily available English versions of the Reynard tales. Additionally, in The History of Animals, Aristotle claims that foxes are “cunning and evil-disposed.”46 The physical appearance of Cavendish’s Fox-men is also important; a text entitled “Physiognomics,” once mistakenly attributed to Aristotle, tells the reader that large and thick ears denote a foolish person, a person with a poor memory, or a person with poor comprehension.47 This text also asserts that bushy-tailed animals are aggressive48 and that “tawny-coloured hair” denotes bravery, while red hair denotes bad character.”49 In other words, Cavendish’s bushy-tailed Fox-men, the courtiers and politicians, call to mind people with little intellectual skill and bad character.50

Cavendish makes the half-bird creatures in the Blazing World – the Geese-men, the Jack-daw-men, Magpie-men, and the Parrot-men – orators and logicians. Along with the Fish-men, the Geese-men represent the only food animal hybrids in The Blazing World. In addition to the


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“Goose that Laid the Golden Egg” fable, Caxton’s Aesop’s Fables includes a version of “The Beasts and of the Birds,” the moral of which is that one can serve two masters at once when the two masters oppose each other. In other words, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. In the early modern imagination geese were typically depicted as drinking as deep as the gander, or rather, self-serving and frivolous.51 In “Physiognomics,” the reader learns that long necks denote an unyielding person amenable to both good and evil.52 Cavendish’s inflexible Geese-men make perfect orators because, as in Aesop, they strive to serve two masters, while at the same time they paradoxically serve themselves without yielding.

In contrast to the other birds Cavendish uses for hybrids, parrots had a long history of depiction in medieval and early modern art and litera-ture. Boehrer traces the evolution of the parrot from the late medieval period through the Renaissance, noting that parrots in the Middle Ages typically had a “wondrous” character while in the early modern period, parrots were “flattened” and had become the “mindless prattling” birds of the modern era.53 Early modern depictions of parrots also frequently portrayed them as birds attempting to imitate human speech.54 In The Blazing World, a Parrot-man delivers a complicated and pedantic speech only to have the Empress interrupt him and ask that he speak plainly. As a result of the parrot’s ability to mimic the human voice Aristotle notes that “the parrot, [has] a tongue like a man.”55 The Blazing World’s orator and logician Parrot-men, possess positive and negative qualities, as their human tongue, whether in appearance or in ability to reproduce human speech, allows for both providence as well as vanity. The other Bird-men orators and logicians are Jack-daw-men, with jack-daws known for sim-plemindedness; and the Magpie-men, with magpies known for scolding and merry chattering. Again, Cavendish gives the lie to orators, as the bird hybrid characters do not fare well in Cavendish’s utopia.

Even the hybrids that ostensibly reflect Cavendish herself do not fare well, as in the case of Cavendish’s natural philosopher Fly-men and Ant-men. Caxton’s moral of “The Ant and of the Fly” fable urges against boasting and bragging. In “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” a grasshop-per sings away spring and summer while the ant stored food for the winter. When winter arrives, the grasshopper becomes hungry but the ant refuses to share his stored food. Flies in the early modern period were typically depicted as being insignificant and frequently “flying about the fire until the wings are singed.”56 Ants conventionally, on the other hand, displayed industriousness and providence. In his chap-ter in this volume, Joseph Campana argues that, although ostensibly insignificant, small winged creatures threatened sovereignty through


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their potential manifestation as swarms. Cavendish’s curious selection of small winged insects as natural philosophers paradoxically suggests Cavendish’s preference of natural philosophy over other disciplines. In other words, Cavendish depicts natural philosophers as small, seem-ingly insignificant creatures who nevertheless find strength in swarms and through persistence.

Cavendish’s Fish-men and Mear-men, the other food animal human hybrids, also serve as natural philosophers, but the Empress merely asks them to wait on her undersea while the fly and bird men wait on her in the air. Cavendish’s sense of humor comes through here as the Empress has already shown herself to have no belief in science or the supernatu-ral. The moral of Caxton’s version of “The Fisher and of the Little Fish” is that men should not leave what is sure and certain for what is uncertain, and likewise early modern depictions of fish held that they were known for being deceived and caught with a baited hook.57 Aristotle labels fish as “gregarious.”58 In this depiction of natural philosophers, Cavendish reflects on the discipline she has chosen for herself, in essence calling herself both easily fooled and gregarious, a strange attribute considering Cavendish’s reputation as an introvert.

Cavendish depicts other animal hybrids in The Blazing World that do not appear in Caxton’s Aesop’s Fables. The Blazing World’s experimental philosophers are the Bear-men (bears were known for licking their new-born cubs into shape); the Bear-men also help rescue the Empress early in the narrative and thus represent one of the few positively-depicted hybrid characters in the narrative, although as Sylvia Bowerbank notes, they are “hack workers on detail” who merely provide fodder for the Empress to create her own conclusions.59 Her mathematicians are the Spider-men (spiders were known for spinning a web to trap the fly) and the Lice-men (lice were known for worthlessness and infesting habits). The Worm-men are natural philosophers (worms were known for their lowliness and destructiveness). Some of the hybrids have no clear profession, such as the Moth-men (moths were known for consuming of fine cloth), the Flea-men (fleas were known for insignificance and provocativeness) and the Gnat-men (gnats were known for insignificance). Cavendish has thus created a wide-ranging early modern bestiary based on a large tradition of depictions of animals.

The significance of Cavendish’s choice not to name the man-beast scientists lies in her aim to question both the classless nature of her uto-pian society and the autocratic submission of the nameless populace to an Empress. The only named character in the text appears near the end of the narrative when Margaret Cavendish herself enters the text and


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convinces the Empress to create utopia in her own mind. By her political self-immolation, the Empress places herself in the same category as the populace who asked her to rule them. This populace, that now includes the former sovereign, constitutes an egalitarian social class that paradoxi-cally leaves the populace and the ruling body isolated while nevertheless standing to be counted as one of many equals.

Alain Badiou’s set theory provides a useful model with which to examine what Cavendish attempts to accomplish with her man-beast scientists. The man-beast scientists constitute one “set” in Badiou’s terms, made up of smaller sets distinguished by their species and pro-fession.60 For Badiou, this kind of belonging results in a transcendence of the set itself because the capabilities of a set (a multiple or a com-munity) surpass the capabilities of the individual subject in the set and counting (to assign individuation) this subject must confront another, second subject from which to differentiate itself. In other words, the collective set makes each of its members more powerful as subjects than the subjects would be independent of the set.61 For Badiou, multiple belonging, that is to say, an individual belonging to more than one set, is the only way a subject can overcome the confines of the set to which he belongs; the tension Badiou describes results from the possibility of a “power-set” that “tolerates” multiple belonging. Lacan similarly sees a necessary “toleration” for human individuation, claiming that a subject’s “perception consciousness” lies solely in the ego’s recognition of itself through the perception of another fellow, identical being62. Similarly, in his chapter in this volume, Yates notes that human sub-jectivity relies upon its own self-recognition as a “self-identical being.” But Lacan relies upon the recognition that occurs in the mirror-stage and thus requires another Other that paradoxically serves as the means by which the subject finds an identity and subjectivity. Cavendish’s unnamed man-beasts only exist as subjects or individuals because of their likeness to each other, which Cavendish bases solely on inherited identity.

The beings in Cavendish’s The Blazing World complicate Badiou’s notion of set belonging, however. While Badiou seeks to allow for both belonging and individuation, Cavendish’s man-beasts belong only to their hybrid “race” and its associated profession. Derrida sees a similar kind of “set” as Badiou that complicates subjectivity, but he refers to the collectives as species and communities that are collectives, or sets, of “beings-with-one-another.”63 But the man-beasts can never truly enter into the Symbolic domain. While they clearly have “intelligence” in the sense that they can communicate and understand the discipline


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of scientific research they have inherited as their profession, they never have a true “choice” in terms of what their area of mastery becomes because they inherit it upon birth. Cavendish almost seems to associ-ate animal instinct with the scientific impulse in seventeenth-century England that resulted in the Royal Society. As the Royal Society based its study on the scientific method as introduced principally by Francis Bacon, Cavendish clearly aims to equate the members of the Royal Society with the man-beast scientists, who exist with only partial “human” individuation, subjectivity, or free will.

Derrida also requires that human individuation rely upon not only the presence of the animal instinct, but also the recognition and sub-version of it and returning it to the defective state of “animality” that lies with the conscious ego. Humanity resides with the unconscious and the law of the signifier.64 But such a postmodern notion of man’s animality stands in stark contrast to much of what historians and lit-erary scholars have determined about early modern attitudes towards animals, and specifically how animals existed merely to serve man. German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) expresses a common seventeenth-century attitude towards animals in his Theodicy (1710), arguing that because animals cannot self-reflect they also cannot experience grief, pain, joy, or pleasure. Men behave like beasts, according to Leibniz, when they act on instinct or as a reaction to sensory input and in these cases experience little pleasure or pain.65 Leibniz suggests that men too can act merely on “instinct,” although humans still retain the ability to “reflect”; in other words, men can instinctually act in a way that does not involve reflection, but nevertheless they can still possibly reflect on these instinctual actions. In light of this attitude towards animals, Cavendish’s decision to create man-animal hybrids demonstrates an almost iconoclastic gesture towards the scientific community to which she desperately wanted to belong. Cavendish literally and symbolically reduces the man-beast scientists to their animal “half” and, by subjecting them to the Empress’s interrogation, denies any subjectivity they may have as “humans” or “men.” But the individuation of man lies in his use of language, his ability to comprehend, his passions, or his creativity, all of which animals do not have.66 Although they can speak, Cavendish denies the man-beast scientists any “human” attributes such as passion and building.

Derrida also sees man as a being that engages in art, but he describes this art as a failed attempt at the true natural art that Thomas Hobbes claims only God can create. Man’s failed attempts at natural art amounts to


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merely a mimetic fabrication of an artificial animal, much like the giant man on the frontispiece of Leviathan.67 In other words, man creates a false “animal,” a political graven image that only approximates man and/or beast but does not constitute either. Hobbes’s Leviathan in Derrida’s reading reduces absolute sovereignty to a kind of animality that man must accept, as God created the inferior sentient being of “man,” and man can only create a further inferior being, a beast. Cavendish’s man-beast hybrids have neither the wisdom of man nor the majesty of beasts and as such they reflect the impossibility for the Blazing World as a society to allow for any true subjectivity.

Human subjectivity through language plays a prominent role in Hobbes’s understanding of the difference between man and animal; Hobbes notes that God taught Adam how to name animals through a language that God later took away from man at the tower of Babel.68 For Hobbes, language begat Adam’s human subjectivity, but Adam lost the Edenic language for the transgression against the covenant.

In addition to linguistic subjectivity, Hobbes explores two “human” attributes – prudence and understanding – to synthesize his notion of human individuation. Hobbes writes that human reason does not beget prudence because it is present in beasts as well, and prudence is merely a function of memory of past events that omits most details and thus frustrates the most prudent man; reason, according to Hobbes, does not produce anything but “generall, eternall, and immutable Truth.”69 Prudence does not distinguish man from beast, according to Hobbes, because an infant beast can demonstrate more prudence than a ten-year-old child.70

Hobbes in other words draws a fine line between seemingly human behaviors and attributes and those that animals can approximate or simulate.

In contrast to prudence, Hobbes sees understanding as innate and unique to man, along with ideas and thoughts and metaphoric and figurative use of language.71 In other words, naming plays a prominent role in human subjectivity. The power to name, to determine the word or words that will apply to an animal, vegetable, or mineral, implies an unquestionable authority that man has over those animals, vegetables, or minerals. But this authority remains in the mind of man, as animals can attack and kill humans, poisonous vegetables can kill humans, and earthquakes can level towns and cities full of humans.

Cavendish eventually invokes Hobbes to create one world, and pre-sents the most pessimistic view of the formation of state power. When the Duchess dissolves the first world she creates and makes another in


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the image of Hobbes’s society, she creates something horrific, creating beings that look like a pack of “Wolves that worry Sheep, or like so many Dogs that hunt after Hares.”72 Horrified when she sees what has happened, she experiences pain in her head, and thus decides to “make a World of her own invention,” a world “composed of sensitive and rational self-moving Matter; indeed it was composed only of the rational.”73 The Empress creates an ideal, orderly, perfect world that governs with no secrecy and that engenders no “ambition, factions, malicious detractions, civil dissensions, or home-bred quarrels, divi-sions in Religion, foreign wars” where everyone lives in peace and “Religious Conformity.”74 The Empress here has resolved the problems in the society that originally served as the setting for The Blazing World and in doing so has possibly created a true utopia. But repairing a bro-ken system of governance or society comes with problems. Through the Imaginary domain, in Lacan’s terms, Cavendish has altered the Symbolic order that dominated these former systems of governance and society. Lacan labels the damage done to the subject in the Imaginary domain as “lesions” on the body.75 The Empress’s horrific creations indeed seem like “lesions,” as well as eventual trauma.

Cavendish’s insertion of herself into her own fiction precisely depicts a post-subjectivity similar to Lacan’s mirror-stage, a revelation that comes from a recognition of his own material body that creates a false sense of mastery of his body that is premature to a legitimate mastery of the body.76 Cavendish’s placement of herself in the text betrays her desire to have more control over herself as a woman and her career as a publishing writer, and such a desire on the part of Cavendish-the-author can only find satisfaction through her union with the Duchess-the-character, whom Lacan would label as “libidinalised” and “narcissised” in the Imaginary.77 As a result of her “libidinalised narcissism,” the Duchess constitutes Cavendish’s Other in the same manner as Lacan’s famous phrase, “Desire is the desire of the other,” which is to say, the Duchess desires to have the knowledge she does not have while at the same time this lack of knowledge has been the vehicle through which she has exerted her authority. Furthermore, Lacan likens this kind of Freudian narcissism as the intersection of the human and animal world, which suggests that humans through their narcissism establish the differentiation between man and animal, which explicitly contradicts posthuman theory.78

The Blazing World resembles its most prominent utopian predeces-sors of More’s Utopia and Bacon’s New Atlantis in several ways. As in More’s Utopia and Bacon’s New Atlantis, Cavendish’s society exists


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self-sufficiently and cut off from the rest of the world.79 Like More’s Utopia, The Blazing World’s native inhabitants essentially inherit their profession, and by implication, their role in the society. As in the case of the European sailors who discover Bensalem in Bacon’s New Atlantis, the protagonist Empress discovers the Blazing World by accident. The details of the Empress’s discovery, however, do not get any sig-nificant attention in Cavendish’s narrative. Also like More and Bacon, Cavendish divided her prose utopia into two clearly separated sections. And finally, Cavendish consciously follows the leads of More and Bacon by not definitively depicting her society as either a utopia or a dystopia.

The Blazing World differs from More’s and Bacon’s texts in impor-tant ways, however. As Sara Hutton points out, the inhabitants of the Blazing World have no parallel in More’s Utopia or Bacon’s New Atlantis.80 Cavendish also creates a more ambiguous commentary on the utopian genre than her predecessors did, certainly a result of her joining a conversation rather than starting it as did More. Unlike the politically successful authors More and Bacon, Cavendish also seeks more notoriety from her utopia than her predecessors. Cavendish ends The Blazing World concisely by stating, “my ambition is not onely to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole World.”81 Cavendish here must make a claim to her authority to authorize the society to hold the character-istics it does. Cavendish does seem concerned with the progress of gov-ernmental rule and presents a more optimistic vision of the possibilities of an ever-progressing societal model, but she does go through revisions to attain her perfect world. To Cavendish the ideal society appears in the distant horizon, to take place after much turmoil and strife. In a way Cavendish’s work acts as the conclusion of Francis Bacon’s unfinished New Atlantis, in that it addresses concerns that Bacon left untouched.

Notes

1. Donna Jeanne Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 18.

2. Pepperell, The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain (Portland, OR: Intellect, 2003), 177.

3. Juliana Schiesari, Beasts and Beauties: Animals, Gender, and Domestication in the Italian Renaissance (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2010), 12. Erica Fudge notes that the “anthropomorphizing” of animals lead to a “fixed and stable concept of the human.” See Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 109.

4. For readings of The Blazing World as a utopia, see Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder & Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell


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University Press, 2004), 17; Elizabeth Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 23; Marina Leslie Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 124; and Mary Baine Campbell, “Literature,” in The Cambridge History of Science. Volume 3: Early Modern Science, eds. Katherine Park and Loraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 770. For critics who read The Blazing World as a dystopia, see Line Cottegnies, “Utopia, Millenarianism, and the Baconian Programme of Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666),” in New Worlds Reflected: Travel and Utopia in the Early Modern Period, ed. Chloë Houston (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010); Christopher Hair, “The Flaw in Paradise: The Critique of Idealism in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World.” Renaissance Papers (2007): 55–67; and Erica Lang Bonin, “Margaret Cavendish’s Dramatic Utopias and the Politics of Gender,” in Margaret Cavendish, ed. Sara H. Mendelson (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 340. For a reading of The Blazing World as science fiction, see James Sutherland, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 218. For a reading of The Blazing World as a hybrid, see Leslie, Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History, 120, 123. Paul Salzman claims that “The Blazing World may irritate students of serious utopias.” See English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700: A Critical History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 295.

5. Holly Faith Nelson reads Cavendish’s zoological exploration in The Blazing World as an indictment of early modern subjectivity and social hierarchies. See Nelson, “‘Worms in the Dull Earth of Ignorance’: Zoosemiotics and Sexual Politics in the Works of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle,” English Language Notes (June 2002): 12–13.

6. Bruce Boehrer, “Introduction,” in A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance, ed. Boehrer (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2007), 22.

7. Bruce Boehrer, Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 196.

8. Nelson refers to the “subjectivity and … epistemology of animals” as “distinct sign systems” in The Blazing World. 16.

9. Fudge argues that contemporary studies of animals in the early modern period constitute more of a “post-Cartesian” understanding than posthu-man. See Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 178.

10. Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5.

11. Ibid., 16.12. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,

Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).13. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

(New York: Routledge, 1991), 152.14. Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English

Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press), 68.15. Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

2004), 12.16. Ibid., 21.17. Ibid., 37.


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18. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 226.

19. Yates, “It’s (for) You; or, the Tele-T/R/Optical Post-Human.” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 1.1–2 (2010): 223, para. 4.

20. Yates claims that posthumanism makes an “overwhelming call to the puta-tively human dasein” that cannot be refused. See Yates, “It’s (for you; or, the tele-t/r/opical post-human,” 224.

21. Margaret Cavendish Newcastle, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, in Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, eds. Sylvia Lorraine Bowerbank and Sara Heller Mendelson (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2000), 154. All citations of The Blazing World refer to this text.

22. Ibid., 154.23. Ibid., 157. Leslie notes that Cavendish does not find rescue from a human

or supernatural force but by Nature in “elemental and personified” forms of “sentient, speaking, and civilized animals.” See Leslie, “Mind the Map: Fancy, Matter, and World Construction in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World.” Renaissance and Reformation 35.1(2013): 89.

24. Ibid., 163. Sujata Iyengar points out that the princes’ rank is not inherited as they are eunuchs. See Iyengar, Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 232.

25. Erica Fudge, Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 39. Schiesari also sees early modern attitudes towards animals as concomitant with the status of women. See Schiesari, Beasts and Beauties, 8.

26. Cavendish was, after all, known as “Mad Madge.” According to Michel Foucault, in the Renaissance “madness” became synonymous with “animality.” See Foucault, History of Madness (New York: Routledge, 2009), passim.

27. Cavendish, The Blazing World, 188.28. Todd Andrew Borlik, “The Whale under the Microscope: Technology and

Objectivity in Two Renaissance Utopias,” in Philosophies of Technology: Francis Bacon and His Contemporaries, eds. Claus Zittel, Gisela Engel, Romano Nanni, and Nicole C. Karafyllis (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2008), 241.

29. Aggression, according to Jacques Lacan, resides in the imaginary domain as an “existential act.” See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954, trans. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1988), 177.

30. Iyengar believes that Cavendish’s text reinforces hierarchal standards while at the same time undermining standards regarding race. See Iyengar, Shades of Difference, 222. Christina Malcolmson argues that Cavendish’s depiction of the scientists in effect suggests the dangers of a miscegenation between Europeans and non-Europeans. See Malcolmson, “‘The Explication of Whiteness and Blackness’: Skin Color and the Physics of Color in the Works of Robert Boyle and Margaret Cavendish,” in Fault Lines and Controversies in the Study of Seventeenth-Century English Literature, eds. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 202.

31. Iyengar, Shades of Difference, 221.32. Cottegnies, “Utopia, Millenarianism, and the Baconian Programme,” 91.33. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), 339.


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34. Ibid., 179.35. John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of

Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 197.36. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III: The Psychoses, trans. Jacques-

Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1993), 15.37. Fudge, Perceiving Animals, 69.38. Pepperell, “The Posthumanism Manifesto,” 179.39. Ibid., 180.40. Scholarship on animal imagery in early modern literature has had a long his-

tory. See William Meredith Carroll, Animal Conventions in English Renaissance Non-Religious Prose (1550–1600) (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974); Emma Phipson, The Animal-Lore of Shakespeare’s Time, Including Quadrupeds, Birds, Reptiles, Fish and Insects (New York: AMS Press, 1973); Audrey Yoder, Animal Analogy in Shakespeare’s Character Portrayal: As Shown in His Reflection of the Aesopian Tradition and the Animal Aspect of Physiognomy (New York: AMS Press, 1975); Alan Dent, World of Shakespeare: Animals and Monsters (New York: Taplinger Pub. Co., 1973).

41. Lisa T. Sarasohn, “A Science Turned Upside Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish,” in Margaret Cavendish, ed. Mendelson, 53.

42. Benjamin Arbel, “The Renaissance Transformation of Animal Meaning: From Petrarch to Montaigne,” in Animal Turn: Making Animal Meaning, eds. Linda Kalof and Georgina M. Montgomery (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 66.

43. Peter Harrison, “The Virtues of Animals in Seventeenth-Century Thought.” Journal of the History of Ideas 59.3 (1998): 465.

44. Aristotle, History of Animals, in 10 Books, trans. Richard Cresswell (London: G. Bell, 1878), 227.

45. Charles Bergman notes that increasingly the early modern aristocratic hunt became synonymous with tyranny instead of privilege. See Bergman, “A Spectacle of Beasts: Hunting Rituals and Animal Rights in Early Modern England,” in Boehrer, ed., 55.

46. Aristotle, History of Animals, 6.47. Aristotle, “Physiognomics,” in ed. W. S. Hett, Minor Works (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1936), 85–137. For a discussion of the use of physi-ognomy in Renaissance Italian art, see Schiesari, Beasts and Beauties, 54–72.

48. Aristotle, “Physiognomics,” 107.49. Aristotle, “Physiognomics,” 127.50. It should be noted that Ben Jonson’s comedy, Volpone (first performed 1606)

is also known as The Fox, and that “volpone” itself is Italian for “sly fox.”51. Carroll, Animal Conventions, 105.52. Aristotle, “Physiognomics,” 113.53. Boehrer, Animal Characters, 75.54. Carroll, Animal Conventions, 112.55. Aristotle, History of Animals, 211.56. Carroll, Animal Conventions, 95.57. Ibid., 103.58. Aristotle, History of Animals, 4.59. Sylvia Bowerbank, “The Spider’s Delight: Margaret Cavendish and the

‘Female’ Imagination,” in Margaret Cavendish, ed. Mendelson, 403.


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60. Eve Keller argues that “The Blazing World manifests [the autonomous self] by multiplying the selves who people its multiple worlds.” See “Producing Petty Gods: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Experimental Science,” in Margaret Cavendish, ed. Mendelson, 463.

61. Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2007), 85.62. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and

in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, trans. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1988), 120. Conversely, Schiesari argues the early modern humanism sought to find similarities between man and animals instead of the differences. See Schiesari, Beasts and Beauties, 6.

63. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, 198.64. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 132.65. G.W. Leibniz, A.M. Farrer, and E.M. Huggard, Theodicy (New York: Cosimo,

2010), 281.66. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, 287. Fudge notes that for

Montaigne animals do not lack language, but rather humans cannot under-stand their language, which makes animals “unreasonable.” See Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 118.

67. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 49.68. Hobbes, Leviathan (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1968), 100–101.69. Ibid., 682.70. Ibid., 98.71. Ibid., 93–94.72. Cavendish, The Blazing World, 215. Yates addresses Thomas More’s discus-

sion of sheep individuation, separation from the flock in Utopia. See Yates, “Counting Sheep: Dolly does Utopia (again),” rhizomes 8 (Spring 2004): 42 para. In their discussion of the “Becoming-Animal” Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari claim that animals by definition all belong to some kind of a “pack.” See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 239.

73. Cavendish, The Blazing World, 215.74. Cavendish, The Blazing World, 216.75. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,

1959–1960 (New York: Norton, 1992), 106.76. Lacan, Seminar I, 79.77. Ibid., 153.78. Lacan, Seminar II, 166.79. For similarities between Cavendish’s utopias and those of More and Bacon,

Bronwen Price, “Journeys Beyond Frontiers: Knowledge, Subjectivity and Outer Space in Margaret Cavendish’s the Blazing World (1666),” in The Arts of 17th-Century Science: Representations of the Natural World in European and North American Culture, eds. Claire Jowitt and Diane Watt (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002), 131.

80. Sarah Hutton, “In Dialogue with Thomas Hobbes: Margaret Cavendish’s Natural Philosophy,” in Margaret Cavendish, ed. Mendelson, 170.

81. Cavendish, The Blazing World, 250.


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