Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), Early Modern Feminism, and Female Friendships

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Date

2016-05

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The Ohio State University

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Abstract

Many male authors in seventeenth-century England wrote of the ideal woman as someone who was silent, obedient, below her husband, and without lasting friendships with other women. But female writers such as Margaret Cavendish help to portray different realities. Cavendish’s still-understudied works offer insight into the roles of women in this period and important correctives to the story we hear from male voices. Her novel The Blazing World imagines a utopia with female protagonists in which one of the female characters becomes Empress over this new world. Dedicated to finding the truth about all aspects of science, Cavendish’s novel proves that despite what male writers would have us believe, women did in fact believe in the social and political power of strong female friendships. By using resources such as the digital database Early English Books Online to compare The Blazing World to conduct books and the limited scholarship on Margaret Cavendish, I have identified Cavendish’s feminist intervention into discussions of the value of women’s same-sex friendships—both within literary utopias and without. Cavendish’s own life demonstrates the power of female friendships through her alliance with printer Anne Maxwell. I argue that by studying the portrayal of female friendships in Cavendish’s The Blazing World together with its history as a product of a real-life female alliance, as I have done, scholars can better understand women’s roles in the time period and how they broke away from the standards portrayed by male voices.

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Denman Undergraduate Forum--3rd Place


Award for Outstanding Student Scholarship in the Ohio State Mansfield Undergraduate Research Forum--3rd Place

Keywords

early modern, feminism, Margaret Cavendish, female friendship, woman writer, The Blazing World

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