Margaret Cavendish – The Blazing World

In this text, driven by her desire to be in control of a world and solve the world’s ills by conforming it to one language, religion, and culture, Cavendish creates not only one world, the Blazing World, but infinite worlds that exist alongside Earth. The story starts with the Empress being kidnapped by a man and taken in a boat towards the North Pole in a ship, but the men all die and she lives. The Empress is rescued by the bear-men who take her to the fox-men, who in turn take her to the Emperor as a gift. He, of course, marries her and makes her Empress over the whole world.

She uses the beginning of her reign and the majority of the book, to question the different populations and societies of the Blazing World. Each group, from bear-men to worm-men have different specialties and inform their new Empress as best they can. A good deal of her questioning centers around government, religion, and language as a means to try and understand the best form of government. Cavendish seems to be imparting her own bias here and her personal narrative can be read against the text with the backdrop of the English Civil War and the exile of her husband.

In many ways the entrance of the Duchess, a version of Cavendish, can be seen as way to deflect issues of religion (ie; the cabbala the Empress wants to write first as a Jewish cabbala) into the realm of the literary. By first making this move of the cabbala being an “imaginative” cabbala and then later following this up with the “perfect” world of the Duchess which has one religion.

This can be seen as a work of Utopia fiction then, but one that is fixated on forms of knowledge production, dissemination, and the ability for women to move in these spaces. Rather than other works of Utopian fiction, such as More’s Utopia, for example, the conversations the Empress has and information she has gathered allow her to actually change the government of the Blazing World. Htholoday, in Utopia, is an observer rather than a holder of power, but here the Empress worries about her subjects and desires to do what she think is best for them (as didactic as that may be).

Some of my own personal interests in the text surround the ways nature is seen, both in the animal-men who dominate so much of the text with their conversations about forms of knowledge, and also in the ideas of Paradise as a real place.