Possible worlds and the concept of fancy in the works of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

Possible worlds and the concept of fancy in the works of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Jorge Jiménez Rodríguez Dir. Juan Antonio Prieto-Pablos Escuela Internacional de Doctorado de la Universidad de Sevilla Programa de Doctorado en ESTUDIOS FILOLÓGICOS Línea de Literatura y Cultura en Lengua Inglesa Tesis presentada para la obtención del Título de DOCTOR DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA (LITERATURA INGLESA Y NORTEAMERICANA) UNIVERSIDAD DE SEVILLA Sevilla, 2022. Acknowledgements. This study could not have been possible without the research fellowship granted by the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (FPU16/05434), as well CASA (Consortium for Advanced Studies Abroad), which provided the funding for a short stay at Cornell University during the summer of 2018. I owe special debts of gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. Juan Antonio Prieto-Pablos, who not only encouraged the subject and scope of this present dissertation, but also believed in my vision and methodology and helped contain this expansive fancy into something readable; and Ana Luisa Martín Bejarano, who has always provided invaluable help in almost any bureaucratic matter. I would also like to thank my teachers and mentors, Profs. Vicente Chacón Carmona, Juan Carlos Hidalgo Ciudad, Mª José Mora Sena, Manuel José Gómez Lara, Mª José Gómez Calderón and Leticia Álvarez Recio for the support and feedback they have provided me throughout these years. Along the way, I have enjoyed the companionship of many, whose contributions to this study should not go unmentioned. I want to thank Dr. Justin Begley for his indispensable advice in approaching such a complex and multifaceted figure as the Duchess of Newcastle; Dr. Carmen Haro, who provided invaluable methodological help and offered her own PhD experience as guidance; Dr. Lucas Ramada Prieto, who introduced me into the fascinating works of Lubomír Dolezel; Dr. Diego Mejía-Alandia, whom I owe most of the theoretical refinements I have applied to my own analyses, largely as a result of our coffee break discussions. This book could not have been written without long and gripping conversations with Marina Aguilar, Miguel Ballarín, Enrique Leal, Antonio Sancho, Miguel Rodríguez, Manuel del Moral, José Ramón del Pino, Nahid Steingress, Nora Rodríguez, Marta Jiménez, María Benages, Sara González Ángel, Pedro Carrillo, Mónica Fernández, César García, Rubén Reina, Santiago Martínez Pais, Bernardino Sañudo, Enrique Suárez, Clara García, Guillermo Palacios, and of course without the support of both my parents. Table of contents. Introduction 1 ....................................................................................................................... 1. Towards a poetics of fancy 13 .......................................................................................... 1.1. Defining fancy, from Plato to Hobbes 15 ............................................................... 1.2. Fancy and variety 51 ............................................................................................... 2. Possible-worlds semantics 61 ........................................................................................... 2.1. Possible-worlds theory 63 ...................................................................................... 2.2. Early modern notions of world-making 82 ............................................................. 2.3. Genre and fantasy 95 .............................................................................................. 3. Poems, and Fancies (1653) 111 ....................................................................................... 3.1. Speculative poems 124 ........................................................................................... 3.2. Allegorical poems 134 ............................................................................................ 3.3. Fictional poems 150 ................................................................................................ 4. Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies, Pencil to the Life (1655) 159 ................................. 4.1. Framed tales 165 ..................................................................................................... 4.2. Fantastic tales 173 .................................................................................................. 4.3. Romances 185 ......................................................................................................... 4.4. Allegorical tales 206 ............................................................................................... 4.5. Genera mista 215 .................................................................................................... 5. Dramatic folio collections: Playes (1662), Plays, Never before Printed (1668) 221 ....... 5.1. Imaginary spaces: The Convent of Pleasure (1668) 230 ........................................ 5.2. Fanciful characters: The Presence (1668) 245 ....................................................... 6. The Blazing World (1666) 257 .......................................................................................... Conclusion 317 ..................................................................................................................... Works Cited 325................................................................................................................... So that this world that we imagine in this room might be used to gain access to other rooms, to other worlds…previously unimaginable. ––– Lana Wachowski’s HRC Visibility Award Acceptance Speech, 2012. faultlining, and as covert Republican sympathies as worst. On the other hand, 7 Trubowitz (2012) draws attention to the ways in which Cavendish’s negotiation with vitalist ideas is coincidental with the crisis of the Protectorate, in such a way that it allows her “to take comfort in Nature’s peaceful resolution to disturbances caused by her moving parts” (657). On a similar note, Rogers (1996) argues that the lack of a centre of command in Cavendish’s natural philosophy should not lead us to identify a clear-cut political commitment, but precisely it is “the attribution of sovereignty to each individual element in a society that marks the dialectical construction of liberalism at its mid-seventeenth century inception” (197). According to Mascetti (2008), her idiosyncratic and largely original natural philosophy is rather “a result of her overlapping conceptions of matter, gender, and space” (13), while Boyle (2018) claims that her views are characterised by a common concern with the question of order and regularity, which betrays “a certain unity to her philosophical positions” (11) in what she sees as a disparaged set of claims about the subjection of women, sympathy for animals, political freedom and male hegemony. For Begley (2021), her writing exposition is complicated by this attempt to capture Nature in all her variety, which “often left her no choice but to list and catalogue exhaustively the traits and motions of living beings before delving into the precise causes of natural functions” (320). Indeed, contrary to Cunning’s (2016) and Boyle’s projects of systemic Recent voices seek to highlight a loose political commitment informed by proto-feminist 7 epistemologies. Smith (1997) questioned the ways in which Margaret’s political views might have differed from those of her husband. Walters (2014) has taken Smith’s argument further, reading her as a “revolutionary” and republican-leaning figure through a reverse parallel with Katherine Philips. Thus she observes that even if Cavendish is often “identified with Royalist politics, to examine Cavendish’s science and pluralistic methodology is to see a political thinker who is more closely aligned with republican ideology, and at times is even sympathetic to the most revolutionary ideas emerging in print during the civil war” (11). In my view, Walters lays the groundwork for her argument by destabilising the notion of a monolithic Royalism or Republicanism, whose moderate or radical gradients are often neglected, but ends up affirming political commitments which are largely missing from her body of work. 7 reconstruction, Stevenson (1996) had already claimed that “in a period notable for obsession with order and dread of chaos, Cavendish stands out as an anomalous champion of randomness” (527). As this study reveals, the conceptualisation of fancy within Cavendish’s own system complicates the dichotomy between order and chaos, system and play, science and opinion, as fancy seems to be both endowed with its own inner logic while remaining a quintessentially anti-teleological operation, which, in appealing to the principle of variety, continually opens up several spaces of possibility that become potentially manifest in her writings. The role of fancy has traditionally been treated as a poetic companion piece to Cavendish’s own philosophical works, but its role within her system as a logical progression from her materialist epistemology has been largely overlooked. In a more 8 sympathetic light, Sarasohn (2010) argues that “while her contemporaries eschewed hypothesizing beyond the observed facts, Cavendish embraced speculation, which combined reason and fancy” (106). Yet, we should bear in mind that the notion is undergoing a radical semantic specification at the time, and its meanings and social considerations are not as fixed. For Habinek (2018), this suggests “both fancy’s selfgenerative potential and the pleasure it takes in its act of creation” (148), taking delight in the sheer multiplication of models and vantage points which reflect Nature’s fecundity. Thus, echoing Sidney, “fancy can delight in its very disconnection from truth, for that very disconnection lies outside of the truth/error opposition” (148), but is also able to create different realms or models where the products of Nature can be For instance, Whitaker (2002) places the two appart when discussing young Margaret’s habit of setting 8 up fictional debates, thus claiming that “her more poetical side led Margaret into what she called her ‘fancies’, her imaginative life of storytelling and fantasy that would be revealed in the fiction and poems she published in later life” (19). Boyle (2018) carefully separates the fanciful from the philosophical when discussing her earlier work, claiming that “some of the poems in Poems, and Fancies present an atomistic theory of matter, and some are playful stories of fairies” (13). 8 authenticated, linked or tested. Ultimately, Cavendish’s “championing of the infinite fecundity of natural wit or fancy rests on a thirst for liberty rather than truth […] in the sense that she seeks an unfettered freedom to apply her reason to natural phenomena in spite of the dictates of ‘Authority’” (Clucas, 207). This study will argue that a reevaluation of fancy implies a poetics of the possible, which not only expands early modern notions of referentiality, but informs our views on the emergent status of fiction and fantasy as worlds posited and accesses through imagination. The operation becomes significant in what Waller (2020) sees as a moment in which “the boundaries between science and imagination, which in characteristic Baroque manner she provocatively blurred, had become more settled into what becomes a characteristic Enlightenment dichotomy” (255). This interplay of possibilities for both philosophical models and fictional realms largely explains Cavendish’s reevaluation of the role of fancy as empirically grounding, hosting and multiplying imaginary worlds, which attest to a broadened view of Nature’s scope and operations. It is not the case that fancy opposes reason, but that “in a sense, then, reason’s pursuit of truth becomes another iteration of fancy’s production of fiction” (Smyth, 46). Chapter I explores the place that fancy occupies across several discursive fields up to the mid seventeenth century. Situated as a midway point between sensation and intellection, this core ambiguity leads to a terminological transfer across disciplines and fields of inquiry, which places the imagination at the centre of late modern accounts on human perception, cognition and poiesis. By endowing fancy with a capacity for multiplying its own referential domains and move across them, Cavendish’s answer to Hobbes’ mechanistic view of the imagination paves the way for the use of fancy as a 9 poetic category. The principle of variety serves as an aesthetic marker which connects her textual praxis with her philosophical views on the fertility and boundlessness of Nature and the plurality of worlds. Her works might be approached through possibleworlds semantics, a suitable theory for exploring the shared counterfactual nature of both fiction and competing philosophical models, and how they might constitute a virtuous cycle in the context of a poetics of scientific exposition. Conceiving Cavendish’s privileging of fancy as a means of manipulating generic expectations and philosophical conceits, we might attest to the emergence of the fantastic as a textual mode which highlights fancy’s capacity to create self-sustained realms of referentiality while drawing on empirical modes of textual presentation. The functions of fancy in each of these textual iterations are explored from Chapter III onwards, focusing on the way fancy accommodates and works upon each of these generic configurations. Chapter II explores Cavendish’s first published folio collection, Poems, and Fancies (1653), in which she presents and manipulates atomistic hypotheses to describe a vast array of phenomena. Using possible-world semantics, we can account for a variety of domains which manipulate language’s referential functions, either to furnish a possible version of the actual world according to philosophical models, or to illuminate unexpected connections or allegorical constructions within its bounds. Cavendish also manipulates fictional and mythical materials in her fairy poems, expanding upon wellestablished genres and strategies in order to broaden the domain of the possible through fictional speculation, thus assisting the emergence of the fantastic as a textual mode which bears an uneasy relation with the faculty of fancy itself, intertwining both myth and demystification. 10 Chapter III discusses Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancy, Pencil to the Life (1655), a miscellaneous compendium of fictional tales in which she explores Civil War and moral themes by means of a cornice, allowing her characters to argue in utramque partem through the projection of fictional universes which are designed to illustrate a moral position. However, by the Second Book, she drops the cornice entirely and explores more fanciful ways of world-building in tales such as “The Speculators” or “The Travelling Spirit”, tinted with supernatural themes that manipulate their own alethic constitution. Cavendish also includes two Heliodoran romances, “The Contract” and “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity”, in which textual expansiveness prefigures both the world of conflicting agential constellations and the topological saturation implicit in the notion of fictional world. Through the inclusion of genera mista, Cavendish collapses fiction and philosophy in “The She-Anchoret”, which reimagines the implausible position of a woman-philosopher as that of a Catholic martyr, while in “The Dialogue of the Wise Lady, the Learned Lady, and the Witty Lady”, Cavendish reassesses fancy’s capacity to create a world out of nothing in order to stress her own singularity. Chapter IV explores her dramatic folio collections (1662, 1668), focusing upon two of her 1668 pieces, The Convent of Pleasure and The Presence, as fictional expansions of two of the themes explored in her previous collection. The first dramatises imaginary spaces of retreat, where imagined communities might be constructed in order to test its limitations, while the second explores the faculty of fancy in characters that easily get carried away by their own mental projections, with the implicit threat of political turmoil associated with unrestrained forms of imagination. This implies a differentiated treatment of fancy, as a textual strategy and as a character trait subject to humoural 11 typology, while revealing a common disregard for the unities which grounds her dramatic production on both the imagination’s projective capacity and its referential discontinuity, in a attempt to develop a dramatic style that captures more faithfully the conflicting natural motions in the dispositions of her characters. Chapter V discusses her 1666 utopian romance, The Blazing World, in which the principles of fancy and variety determine the very possibility of manipulating an alternative referential domain for discussing and testing philosophical ideas. The tendency has been to either polarise reason and imagination drawing on Cavendish’s famous 1667 visit to the Royal Society, or to argue for textual hybridity without taking into account her growing confidence and her bold manipulation of fictional discourse as a means to divulge her views on natural philosophy, as well as the changing contexts where natural philosophical inquiry might be institutionally validated. Moreover, The Blazing World explores how fancy’s self-recursivity problematises both a vantage point from which to project imaginary spaces and the stability of the imagining subject itself. 12 1. Towards a poetics of fancy. As indicated above, this chapter explores the place that fancy occupies across several discursive fields up to the mid seventeenth century. Imagination and fancy develop in chiefly medical and philosophical contexts before being subject to the rearrangement of the scientiae in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when educational reforms in both the Catholic and Protestant worlds brought about a wide categorial transfer across the disciplines. One of the main problems in historicising imagination (and the myriad terms it encompasses and subdivides into) is that, as Sepper (2013) points out, it cannot be understood as anything less than an entire economy or a “conceptual topology”, which “provides a place where the psychic powers co-operate in locating the possibilities and the faces that the world presents” (9). According to Schlutz (2009), one simply “cannot hope to establish a stable meaning for the concept of imagination through a study of its history” (5). Moreover, imagination was also “embedded in a system of metaphysics, epistemology, and psychology which differs in a number of very important respects from the one we use today” (Castor, 12). Thinking of the imagination as a conceptual and topological field proves advantageous because, as Smid (2017) points out, the early modern view is “enveloped by a cloud of synonyms, such as fantasy, fancy, conceit or sensitivity” (38), with each of these synonyms acquiring more positive or negative connotations while sharing an overall slipperiness. Thus, Nauta & Pätzold (2004) conclude that there can be “no such thing as the history of the imagination”, but rather “many conceptions and uses” (xiii), while 13 Brann (1991) simply states “that the imagination in philosophy has no linear development” (33). By the end of the eighteenth century, Kant famously systematised imagination as an autonomous creative force which is separated from the faculty of reason (albeit equally crucial in the process of knowledge acquisition). Kant dignified imagination in the epistemological plane by endowing it with an inner logic based on the qualities of spontaneity, intuition and a capacity to add or subtract from a multiplicity of sense data, while poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge would propose a similar role in their preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800). They helped construct a lasting distinction between a primary and a secondary imagination, or as between imagination proper and fancy. The former is conceived almost as an unconscious process, whereby conceptualisation and sense-perception are made possible, while the latter “‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates’ the concepts and elements of the world around us so as to recreate something new with them” (Wolf, 58). This chapter traces first the developments of 9 fancy from Antiquity up to the sixteenth century, before delving into the ways it was received, understood and rewritten by Cavendish in the mid seventeenth century. As Bundy (1927) noted, the use of imaginatio to translate to translate φαντασία instead of εἰκασία 9 “tended to substantiate the distinction between the faithfully imaginative and the fanciful […] and is the origin of the critical commonplace of the nineteenth century” (278). Sumillera (2011) brings to our attention the fact that “sixteenth-century dictionaries often viewed imagination and fancy or phantasy as synonymous” (310), while Smyth (2017) draws on Dryden and Davenant to identify a mid-century semantic shift whereby “these two influential writers represent Fancy as autonomous and with its own distinct identity invested in aesthetic form and variety” (43-44). Inserting Cavendish into this process of terminological specification, Aït-Touati (2017) claims that, for her, “fancy is distinct from the faculty of imagination because it can create out of nothing” (497). Many of the misconceptions regarding pre- Kantian views on the imagination come from a tendency to totalise the faculty without looking at its own context of development 14 1. 1. Defining fancy, from Plato to Hobbes. Before such a distinction could be drawn, the imaginative faculty was not always split in two, or conceived as entirely mental. The imagination, prior to the differentiation and disembodiment proposed by the Romantics, derives from the Greek term φαντασία, which in turn stems from the verbal form φαντάζω (“to make something come to light”, “to force something to reveal itself”), related to both φάος, “light”, and other derived terms like φαινόµενον, or “that which makes itself manifest”. Within the context of 10 early Ionian physiology, the imagination “arose in Greek thought as part of the effort to understand images” (Sepper, 103), however, Sheppard (2014) warns us that “in ancient thought the concept of phantasia, even when thought of as inspired, hardly appears in discussions of poetic and artistic inspiration” (88). In this sense, Schlutz (2009) informs us that “the notion of imagination as a creative capacity involved in the artistic endeavor of producing alternative aesthetic realities and autonomous works of art has no precedent in classical thought and should not be connected with phantasia” (16). There is no consistent discussion of the poetic mind in Antiquity, partly because poetry was linked to divine inspiration, and partly “because the Greeks had focused their attention on the link between poetry and external reality, and not on the axis uniting the mind of the artist with the artistic object” (Sumillera, 6). Reflecting on the multi-layered complexity of the term as used by Plato, Mascetti (2008) claims that his notion of φαντασία gave rise to three differentiated semantic As Schoefield (1992) informs us, the verb φαντάζω is “found only in its middle and passive forms 10 before the Hellenistic period, which means ‘to make apparent’, ‘to cause to phainesthai’” (251). Its passive quality means that before Aristotle, “we read not of persons making things appear thus and so, but of sights, dreams, etc. being presented or presenting themselves to persons” (251). 15 fields: First, “the external object and perception thereof, either as pure sensation or as sensation combined with judgement”; second, “the mental image and the act of imagination which produced it”; and third, “the artificial production of images” (5). Therefore, the positive (or at least descriptive) aspect of φαντασία, as well as its more negative dimension understood in terms of delusion or artificiality, is first laid here. Plato’s view raises suspicions inasmuch as images lack an ontological plane of reference or Form per se, but the picture gets more complicated as it moves across ontology, epistemology and the representational arts. Thus, φαντασία is identified in 11 the Theaetetus (c. 369 BC) with sense-perception or the way things “come to light” (φαίνουσῐ) before our senses, which for Plato could never imply a total identification between what is and what seems to be. In the famous “Divided Line” argument in The Republic (c. 375 BC), he distinguishes and evaluates between different manners of perception according to their remoteness from the plane of Being, where Forms might be apprehended by the intellect. He separates such plane of Being from the plane of Becoming, which comprises the material world, and ascribes two different mental operations for each: eikasia (εἰκασία) and pistis (πίστις) for Becoming, dianoia (διάνοια) and noesis (νόησις) for Being. Thereby, eikasia or “thinking through pictures” can be defined as “the lowest form of knowledge regarding existence, akin more to opinion (δόξα) than certitude or science (ἐπιστήµη)” (Butler, 3). It produces images (εἰκόνες) which can be subdivided into shadows (σκιά), or copies of Forms and phantasms (φᾰντᾰ:σµᾰτᾰ), copies of shadows or second grade copies of Forms, where art, understood in the sense of τέχνη (encompassing different forms of material According to Cocking (1991), Plato’s φαντασία has not yet distinguished between sense-perception and 11 disembodied copies of sense-data in the mind, because “Plato’s aesthesis, which is the word often translated as ‘perception’, can include awareness of dreams as well as of waking reality” (8). 16 φαντασία (apprehensible phantasia) for those mental images of which real referents can be asserted and communicated, that is, “when the images conveyed from the physical world appear at the threshold of mind” (Sepper, 270). By means of such distinction, they separated “phantasiai deriving from the perception of some real object or from reasoning (termed katalēptikai) from ‘figments’ such as dreams or the illusions of madness, which can be termed phantasmata” (Webb, 116). In this scheme of things, 15 imagination transcends time, “and its unique ability to bring acute sensory realism to its representations makes it particularly precious tool to neutralize time and chance” (Lyons, 17). This capacity is further stressed in Epicurean thought, in which special epistemological intent is given to the term “φανταστικές επιβουλές της διανοίας” (representational projections of the mind), which “applies especially to the appreciation of temporal and spatial infinity” (Sedley, 4). Thus, according to Watson (1988), the Epicureans conceived that “a phantasia is not, then, just one likeness but a collection of them in the case of normal perception where the senses are, naturally, involved” (39). As Brann (1991) summarises, “mental images are in principle the same as the material visions that ‘take possession of the eyes’”, implying that “perception nad imagination is not an activity […] but a condition of being invaded, penetrated or irritated” (48). According to Schlutz (2009), we can find precedents in Classical Antiquity of φαντασία as an aesthetic marker; however, “one must shift the focus of investigation from philosophy to rhetoric” (30) even if they arise out of “contexts where the syncretising philosophy of the period had been at work” (Watson, 60). Roman rhetoricians tended to slightly displace φαντασία, translating φάντασµα as visum (with Thus, “the Stoics required phantasia to do much of the work accomplished by nous in the Platonic 15 scheme, in other words, by the mind’s rational capacities like reason and understanding” (Flory, 151). 23 the plural φαντάσµατα as visiones) or using compounds such as the oculus mentis; or the clause ante oculos ponere, as it was caught in discussions on ἐνάργεια (vividness). In this sense, it “takes on the technical aspects of the orator’s craft that in Aristotle remain restricted to the processes of mimesis” (Schlutz, 31). The development of the classical corpus of rhetoric was heavily influenced by the Stoic reception of Aristotle’s Rhetoric (4th c. BC) and the idea of “mastering the imagination” to attain a chiefly ethical goal. Since Roman rhetoricians place special emphasis upon the notion that “in the absence of eloquence, even the wisest reasoning can never hope to prevail” (Skinner, 93), the mastering of the rhetorical arts is tightly linked to civic duty and the capacity for good citizenship, the ideal of vir civilis. In this sense, the image-making capacity is displaced from the ontological and epistemological planes and studied mainly as an ars, as the technical aspects of the orator which could be cultivated through practice. As Sumillera (2019) points out, “in the Latin rhetorical tradition, phantasia became a standard term alluding to the power of the mind to envision the unsensed and the ability to convey it to an audience” (109). Even if Cicero upholds in De Oratore (55 AD) an Aristotelian understanding of thinking through images as key to epistemological processes, he maintains a more Platonic outlook regarding the dangers of its excesses. Thus, the power of φαντασία “emerges as a not uncommon term in 16 rhetorical discussion that describes the orator’s ability to visualize specific images and present them so vividly to his audience as to convince them that they and the orator are actually seeing the same ‘real’ thing” (Schlutz, 30-31). He summarises the famous “Then we must see that the resemblance is not too far-fetched: ‘the Syrtis of his heritage’ I should 16 rather call the ‘rock’, and for a Charybdis of wealth’ I should prefer ‘whirlpool’; for the mind’s eye is carried more easily to things we have seen than to things we have heard of. And as perhaps the highest merit in the employment of metaphor is when the metaphorical expression directly hits our senses, one must avoid all unseemliness in the things to which the comparison will lead the hearers’ minds.” (De Oratore. III.163. 127-128) 24 doctrine of the loci communes or commonplaces in the image of the “palace of memory”, implying that φαντασία can be understood chiefly as a mnemonic function which assists us in the construction of images to be used in pleading causes. As Flory 17 (1996) puts it, it was Cicero’s insistence on the central role of the mind in creating the images of oratory which “set the stage for those rhetoricians who later explored the role of phantasia in creating art along Stoical lines” (152). This view can also be observed in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (c. 95 AD), where the psychological or cognitive centrality conferred by the Stoics is completely subordinated to judgement. Thus, Quintilian draws limitations for φαντασία and confines it “to the mental and verbal representation of absent things because it is this aspect of imagination that falls within his conception of the orator’s profession, one requiring art and training” (Lyons, 25). In order to conjure up vivid new images in the minds of the audience, φαντασία becomes a required ability, that of creating a phantasm of the events, settings or actions we wish to instill in the minds of the assembly. Therefore, he conceives a powerful imagination to be “a capacity to put together composite images of things seen and remembered in such a way as to create novel visions in the mind’s eye” (Skinner, 183). Even if Quintilian defines this faculty as an “animi vitium” (6.3.30) or a defect of the soul, yet it is one that the orator should be able to manipulate to his own advantage if he wants to picture something effectively, with “It has been sagaciously discerned by Simonides or else discovered by some other person, that the most 17 complete pictures are formed in our minds of the things that have been conveyed to them and imprinted on them by the senses, but that the keenest of all our senses is the sense of sight, and that consequently perceptions received by the ears or by reflexion can be most easily retained in the mind if they are also conveyed to our minds by the mediation of the eyes, with the result that things not seen and not lying in the field of visual discernment are earmarked by a sort of outline and image and shape so that we keep hold of as it were by an act of sight things that we can scarcely embrace by an act of thought. But these forms and bodies, like all the things that come under our view require an abode, inasmuch as a material object without a locality is inconceivable.” (De Oratore. II. 357. 469) 25 the implicit assumption that it will aid in winning the hearts of the audience. In a sense, as Webb (2009) puts it, “words, in Quintilian’s discussion of enargeia, serve simply to communicate the orator’s internal image, his phantasia, of a scene to the audience” (113). Skinner (1996) summarises thus the compound understanding of a proper use of φάντασµα in rhetorical arguments: A man of good fancy or imagination is accordingly seen as the possessor of two closely connected abilities. He is skilled at conjuring up images or pictures in his mind’s eye. But he is also skilled – in consequence of this clarity of mental vision – at communicating these images in correspondingly incisive figures and tropes, and especially in fresh and illuminating similes and metaphors. By his use of similes, he prompts his hearers to see that unfamiliar things are similar to things they already know about, thereby enabling them to grasp the unfamiliar with a new sense of understanding and clarity (187-188). Thus, the syncretising impulse of the Hellenistic and early Roman period marks “the process whereby the Greek word φαντασία was extended in its meaning from a term practically confined to technical philosophical debate in epistemology into something more like ‘phantasy’ […] which can include in its range of meaning the notion of the creation of an unreal and even ideal world” (Watson, 59). According to Cocking (1991), φαντασία underwent a radical redefinition in Neoplatonic thought, whereby the raft between intelligible Forms and sensible shadows was bridged through the theory of emanation. Thus, “since, in the psychological tradition springing from Aristotle, 26 phantasia is the intermediary between sensation and mind, in the theology of emanation it becomes the intermediary in the reverse process; the divine mind, creating, changes from pure Intelligence through imagination into sensible substance” (31). Plato’s imprint on the Neoplatonists stems from his devaluation of the world of sensation and the plane of Becoming, in which φαντασία is located. In this respect, Aristotle’s hierarchical division of the soul served to overcome this radical distinction, as it was based on the mind’s capacity to apprehend Forms in images, it “offered a naturalistic account of the ascent from the sense-apprehended material realm to the intelligible realm of mathematics and ideal forms” (Sepper, 170). In its syncretism of Platonic and Aristotelian sources, Plotinus and his followers still maintained a rather negative view of everything sublunary; however, the φαντασία could now “serve as a bridge from the realm of the senses to the world of pure intellect” (Schlutz, 22). According to Sumillera (2011), his emanation theory prioritised the intelligible, thus regarding φαντασία “as the intermediary between the divine mind and the sensible substance” (303), which accounts for the possibility of prophecy and divination. This was mainly achieved by duplicating the faculties of the lower soul in a way that allowed Plotinus to retain Aristotle’s tenet that there is no thinking without images while avoiding a conflation of the sensible and spiritual domains. Thus, this duplication is overcome by Plotinus when he claims that “when the two phantasiai are in agreement and the two faculties of phantasia united, with that of the higher soul in control, there is only one phantasmata or mental picture just as a weak light is contained within a stronger” (Watson, 102). On the other hand, Plato’s distrust of enthusiasm as an irrational (albeit “valid”) form of knowledge influenced several Neoplatonists like 27 Proclus, Iamblichus and Plutarch of Athens in establishing a sort of “soundness of imagination” (Cocking, 36) that accounts for the view that the images presented to us through φαντασία might be intuitions of intelligible Forms rather than imperfect copies of them. Plotinus, in following Plato’s distinction between a “lower” and “higher” form of soul in the Timaeus, claimed that “while it is the lower form of phantasia that threatens to imprison us in the realm of the senses, its higher version can nevertheless serve as a means of becoming aware of the higher souls’ true locus even while this perception is clouded through our contamination by the sensual world” (Schlutz, 22-23). In summary, Plotinus “placed an Aristotelian division of human psychological powers within a Platonistic metaphysics of emanation” (Sepper, 271). The syncretising impulse of Neoplatonic, Stoic and rhetorical sources of the Second Sophistic is patent in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana (2nd–3rd c. AD), which involves a discussion of φαντασία as self-recursive and inward-looking which can be contrasted with the use of mimesis (6.19). Philostratus claims that what made Phidias’ images of the gods unique was his reliance on images created in his mind, that is, the fact that “for Philostratus phantasia differs from mimēsis not because it can create something new but because it can reach a divine realm beyond the world of senseperception” (Sheppard, 81). A parallel move can be appreciated in Dio Chrysostom, whose Orations (1st c. AD) also resort to φαντασία to dignify the status of the poets. This reappraisal of φαντασία is still bound to the strictures of Neoplatonic emanation, so that the appeal to φαντασία serves rather to mount “a claim for the artist’s share of the philosopher’s superiority” (Schlutz, 32); however, it also marks that a point in which 28 φαντασία is conceived as able to “produce what the senses have never experienced, but the mind has conceived” (Flory, 150). Closely following Neoplatonism, the early Christian synthesis of Hellenistic sources also established a tendency to discriminate between the terms used to describe sensible and intelligible images, whose “long-term result is the use of ‘fancy’, ‘fantasy’ and the associates of these in a number of European languages for the freer, more subjective and more vaporous creations of the mind” (Cocking, 44), as well as less acceptable in moral terms. Due to a strong Neoplatonic imprint, St. Augustine (amongst other post-Nicene Fathers) fully adheres to a view in which “the temptations of phantasia are regarded as enticements to sinful acts and hence as obstacles on the path to salvation” (Schlutz, 21). According to Eden (1986), Augustine deemed that “even the senses are more trustworthy than the imagination, which not only retains the impressions of sensory experience, but fabricates for the mind additional falsehoods not directly generated by sensation” (122). Augustine distrusted the imagination “for being a source of deceit, sin and error due to its creative abilities and its contact with the sensible world” (298). Thus, by translating φαντασία as imaginatio, Augustine “did not merely mean sense images, but also included imagined conjectures of future events, imagined speculations on what persons of things unknown may look like, creative imaginings of things or events that do not or cannot exist” (Veenstra, 2). Augustine’s connection of the imaginative faculty with sin is also derived from his conception that “the human imagination does not take on creative powers but merely limits itself to reflect that which already exists” (Sumillera, 299), and the doctrine that God manifests his agency in the order of Creation, which means that reality cannot possibly be corrected by the 29 human mind. In this sense, imagination must abandon its claims to create ex nihilo and limit itself to reflect, like a mirror, whatever is already created in the world. Even if fantastic or counterfactual images are subject to suspicion, “this means that a region of autonomous imaginative activity was marked out and circumscribed more sharply that was possible in Greek thought”, so that “the clear idea of a fictional event, a bounded mind-made field, is ultimately the product of Christian epistemology” (Berger, 11). For Cocking (1991) it is also the case that the general Christian distrust for the imaginative faculty largely results from doctrinal requirements, as “reason becomes analytical and interpretative rather than speculative; knowledge is primarily knowledge through authority and a steadily hardening body of fundamental doctrine” (46). The debate on the faculties of the mind was also influential in Galenic medicine, which considers “to be no radical distinction of type between the physical and the mental (or more properly, the psychic)” (Hankinson, 199). It was Galen who linked specifically the Aristotelian understanding of the soul with “an appeal to the four elements to explain the basic properties of bodily constituents an the association of life with heat” (Hatfield, 341). Galenism gradually emerged as a coherent medical body of knowledge that would be subject to several modifications throughout the Middle Ages, but his innovations had rather to do with enlarging the Aristotelian corpus based on description and visual evidence, which made him relocate the faculties of the soul away from the heart, explaining the bridging between the soul and sensible bodies in the fact that they can be embodied or located as a physical organ within the “cerebro-ventricular system” (López-Muñoz et al, 162). Galen laid out a theory of the faculties which was chiefly goal-oriented, conditioned by the different activities of bodies, which also 30 defines a medical practice based on the identification of the malfunctioning of such activities. For Habinek (2018), the model reconfigures Aristotle’s tripartite division in positing that Vegetable spirits (created by the distillation of food and responsible for basic life functions such as digestion, growth and reproduction) are sublimated into the thinner and more active vital spirits, which drive the motion of a body; the vital spirits are further refined (in the rete mirabile of the brain) into animal spirits, which obey the soul and are responsible for sensation, perception, and rational thought (127). The canon of ancient thinking passed on to Islamic thinkers and was substantially expanded, chiefly by Avicenna, who provided a systematised physics of the soul and its faculties. However, “the Western reception of Avicenna’s philosophy did not end with 18 the Middle Ages” (Bertolacci, 243), with several editions of the Canon printed in sixteenth-century Italy which ensured its continuity well into the following century. In a way, early modern understanding of medical science and the innovations put forth by Vesalius, Harvey and Descartes were informed by this continuity in such a way that they “seem more like a renaissance of ancient thought than a basic change” (Temkin, 134). Medieval literature of the soul was itself split between a via philosophorum, which largely derived its precepts from Aristotle, and a via medicorum, which was mainly based on Galenic sources. Giglioni (2011) observes that such line of demarcation Notably in both his Canon of Medicine (al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb) (c. 1025) and his encyclopaedical work, 18 the Book of the Cure (Kitāb al-Shifāʾ), especially the Al-Nafs, or section on the soul (c. 1027). Some sections of Avicenna’s works were translated by both Gundissalinus and Gerard of Cremona by the second half of the twelfth century, from which they were received and substantially expanded by St. Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas. 31 responds to the view that the soul and its seat corresponded to two different ontological domains, even if “the one was somehow mediated with the other through a seamless series of ascending and descending degrees” (21). For Park (1988), such systematisation efforts put forward an hydraulic model, “based on a clear localisation of psychological function by organ or system of organs” (469), so that the human soul could be divided into the external senses and the “inward wits” or internal senses, each located in one of the three ventricles of the brain. External senses include the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, which were linked to the internal senses via phantasia. The phantasia was further subdivided into sensus communis, which monitors and coordinates the external senses, and phantasia proper, which retains what has been presented before the senses and communicates with the central and hindmost ventricles. Thus, the rational soul could be divided into three or five sections depending on whether we follow a medical or philosophical classification. However, this tripartite system could be also accommodated to prior philosophical schemes, as “more refined theories of internal sense functions could subdivide them as needed” (Sepper, 272). The 19 common threefold division includes phantasia, the virtus cogitativa or imaginativa, occupying the central ventricle and defined as “a composite power, which manipulates phantasms in isolation of sense experience” (Roychoudhury, 7), and the virtus memorialis or conservativa, located in the hindmost ventricle. The virtus imaginativa recombines and discerns between the forms of phantasia in that “it merely joins up images, making ‘imaginary’ compounds like a flying man, or an emerald mountain” For instance, Averroes would revert Avicenna’s fivefold distinction of the faculties in an attempt to 19 adhere more closely to Aristotle’s position in De anima. If there was no consensus as for the number of human faculties, their positioning within the ventricle system was normally arranged “front to back, according to their distance from the physical world” (Roychoudhury, 30). In a similar fashion, scholastic adherents of the via moderna like Jean Buridan and Albert of Saxonny also tended to reduce Avicenna’s fivefold distinction into the triad of common sense, imagination and memory. 32 As Bacon’s scientist comes closer to the magus in his manipulation of the forces of Nature and imagination for the benefit of mankind, we come to understand that natural magic and natural philosophy share common assumptions and overlapping epistemologies, even if “the underlying science to which experiment contributed was viewed very differently” (Webster, 56). What is often overlooked is that the whole Baconian project of the Instauratio magna is informed precisely by this wide cultural context of Neoplatonic and Paracelsian revitalisations of magic in order to overcome the fallen state of man by mastering nature, as “the doctrine of the Fall of Man is of cardinal importance for Bacon’s view of the history of philosophy and science, and hence for his programme of present action” (Walker, 128). According to Rees (1975), Bacon’s cosmology, though he never presented in a systematic way, brought together “a dynamical theory partly adapted from natural-magical tradition and, above all, a chemico-physical theory whose origins are to be found in Paracelsian thought” (81). Bacon’s proto-experimentalism is based on the principle that “knowledge of nature brings with it the possibility of its manipulation, in the sense that once the cause of a phenomenon is discovered, its reproduction becomes possible” (Rusu, 23). Cocking (1991) also points to Bacon’s familiarity with Ficino and Paracelsus, which shows how “it was out of these Neoplatonist and Renaissance views of the imagination that there arose the belief in imagination as another kind of messenger, capable of communicating truths and insights which are irrational” (164). For Bacon, the imagination is a nuncius which carries information from the senses, an intermediary faculty which is susceptible 39 of failing. Partner (2018) draws attention to the fact that Bacon’s doctrine of the Idols, 25 and particularly the “Idols of the Theatre” indicate that the misconceptions resulting “from the weakness of the senses could be counteracted, amongst many other measures, by the neutrality of experimental instruments” (71), but his views on the significance of the imagination in scientific pursuit are often contradictory. For Preston (2015), Bacon’s railing against excessive ornament in natural philosophy does not suggest a disaffection with the powers of language as such, “but instead a just recognition and admiration of its capabilities, and a commensurate concern about linguistic misappropriation or impropriety” (15). Thus, natural philosophy came to be viewed as an attempt to constitute an all-encompassing science of the interpretation and manipulation of Nature for the benefit of human society, while in a parallel development, “poets and men of letters began conceiving of their work as a mentally demanding activity that was not necessarily related to the theories of inspiration but was based instead upon the complex mechanisms of the human brain” (Sumillera, 275). For Aït-Touati (2017), Bacon managed to “equate scientific invention with the discovery of the new, whether this be a discovery within the domain of nature or that of art” (491), thus turning the rhetorical principle of inventio into a principle of naturalphilosophical inquiry, which also endowed it with the criterion of novelty. According to Rusu (2013), “Bacon transplanted typically rhetorical concepts into the field of natural science […] seduced by a vision of logic assisting in the classification of instances: the art of memory and the method of places” (19). This semantic shift is registered in “It is true that the Imagination in both Provinces, ludiciall and Ministeriall, performes the Office of an 25 Agent or Nuncius, or common Atturney. For Sense sends over all sorts of Ideas unto the Imagination, upon which, Reason afterwards sits in Iudgment: And Reason interchangeably sends over selected and approved Ideas to the Imagination, before the Decree can be acted” (On the Advancement and Proficience of Learning. Fifth Book. I, 218). 40 Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (c. 1580), which grounds poetic creations in the powers of the human mind. The grounds for the cross-fertilisation “associating faculty psychology with rhetorical theory […] had been developing during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Boswell, 237). Sidney’s Defence was largely the result of a century-long 26 process which “resulted from many Renaissance critics’ attempts to metamorphize the Medieval rhetorical notion of inventio into a creative capacity through its combination with the faculty psychology of the same period” (Flory, 161). As Bicanová (2013) observes, “Renaissance treatises on invention – one of the five parts of the art of rhetoric – tend to identify wit with the ability to discover and amplify new subjects” (33). On a similar note, Sarkar (2014) insists that the seventeenth century saw a renewed emphasis on knowing as “predicated on making”, so that it was only natural that world-building categories used for natural philosophy entered the field of literary invention. For Castor (1964), the anti-poetic sentiment fostered by theologians like Tyndale and Calvin, and against which Sidney conceived his Defence, was based on “the possibility, and even the probability, that imagination would ally itself with desire, and that the combination of these two powers would overrule reason and thus disrupt the orderly functioning of the mental processes” (156). Berger (1988) adds that in the 27 process of negotiating the limits of fiction-making, sixteenth and seventeenth-century critics conflated two prevalent views. First, the idea of “an intuitive wisdom, a rare ideal This is traceable in the works of Huarte de San Juan, who in his Examen de ingenios (1575) devised a 26 “correspondence between the several faculties and an aptitude for the various pursuits of life” (Thorpe, 45). As Sumillera (2019) points out, “precisely because its power is seen as extraordinary, it is distrusted on 27 the grounds that it has enormous potential to lead reason astray, given its association with the fallen senses and its inclination towards falsehood and deception. The discourse of the English Reformers makes it an ally of Catholicism; by extension, poetry is distrusted as well” (107). 41 state of consciousness which transcends ordinary modes of experience” (6), and, more importantly, the assumption of an unbroken harmony “in which opposites are at once distinct and reconciled, an experience in which the mind reveals not only the ability to organize the diversity of existence into a unified whole, but also the ability to fix and vividly convey this whole in the immediacy of a visual or aural image” (7). As poetry came to be closely associated with the imagination’s capacity to create spaces where unity might be reconstituted, one possible solution to counter anti-poetic sentiments was to defend its more positive aspects. Sumillera (2017) claims that in negotiating the limits and moral status of poetry, the imagination could be defended on the grounds that, if disciplined and subjected to a moral purpose, it was not entirely detrimental. Thus, the faculty becomes “in the poetic context, the means of constructing plausible imitations of life that unmask the truth beneath appearances” (118). By contrasting the task of the poet and that of the historian or the philosopher, Sidney vindicates the capacity to produce ‘golden worlds’, a possibility which “demonstrates the power of an art that uses unhistorical events or unempirical methods to promote ethical change in the real world” (20). Even if we cannot find in Sidney a clear vindication of the imagining faculty, he conveys its functions as a result of a moment of terminological transition which reflects a deeper conceptual shift, one in which the imagination and its products were gaining currency. As Sumillera (2019) points out, “the conceptualisation of the process of poetry writing in terms of imagination responded to a growing interest in understanding how the mind of the poet operated”, in an attempt to provide an explanation on “how the poet’s mind functioned in such a way as to allow the production of a superior golden world” (125). 42 This instability in the conceptualisation of the soul and its faculties also points to the fact that the “modern philosophical discourse about subjectivity is inextricably linked to the concomitant discourse about imagination” (Schlutz, 6). As Berger (1988) points out, “what leads to peculiarly Renaissance strategies of self-limitation is this awareness that the mind need not consider itself passive to dogma, tradition, and perception; it may actively choose, and reveal itself as actively choosing, the elements of its environment” (55). This is the key to understand Montaigne’s involvement with the perils of imagination in his essay “De la force de l’imagination”, as he conceives the faculty to be “a mental capacity of diverse creatures, in constant and erratic movement within the ambit of one’s experience (especially bodily experience)” (Macguire, 35). In this sense, the imagination “came to stand increasingly not for knowledge but rather for the limits of knowledge, nor for categories but for the transmission of categories, not for an idea of cognition for the ongoing negotiation of that idea” (Roychoudhury, 19). As Gal (2017) points out, the idea of the imagination that arose in Montaigne and others can be summarised as a means of collecting sense-data in order to be compared and reshaped to furnish new images, warning that it posed a challenge to human understanding inasmuch as “the imagination could not be trusted not to confuse the mind with novel images created by false combinations of bits in the memory – phantasms, whimsies, and chimeras” (65-66). For Montaigne, the perils of the imagination are associated to the idea that the “imagination stimulates desire, and it might almost be said that desire is formed, is given a definite shape, by the picturings of the imagination” (Castor, 158), but the centrality conferred to its activity also points to the possibility of positing a “knowing self” aside from the world assumed by the senses. This constitution of the self 43 “both has an initial need for a magnification of imaginative power and must subsequently assign limits to imagination in order to sustain the ambitions – historical, scientific, eudaemonic – that required a powerful imagination” (Macguire, 35). In Montaigne’s view, the imagining faculty “is always a first-person sense, it always has a point of view, for it does not give us a general idea of smell or taste but rather the very precise knowledge ‘I am tasting…’ or ‘I have tasted…’” (Lyons, 35). The widespread popularity of François de Sales’ L’Introduction à la vie dévote (1609) and Le Traité de l’amour de Dieu (1616) posited the imagination as the intermediary between the inner and the outer worlds. In this conception, “imagination is here established as a practice, as something that one deliberately does, and not as an affliction that one suffers” (66). This notion of imagination as both nuncius and pathway towards self-cultivation would influence French Baroque culture, specifically in Descartes’ idea of the imagining subject. The Cartesian view of the mind and its faculties, as developed in his 1626-40 unpublished writings, depends heavily on Aristotelian and Galenic models, that is, “on the ways in which a subtle fluid called ‘animal spirits’ flows through the ducts that constitute the nerves” (Clarke, 9). However, as Schlutz (2009) points out, Descartes tried to banish the imagination from his account of the cogito, as “in order to provide a point of certainty upon which a stable philosophical system might be built, the cogito necessarily excludes imagination from its definition” (36-37). For Descartes, the imagination is caught up in this dual valuation, as on the one hand it is bound with the senses and the body (and we might here recall that his whole philosophical project depended on rejecting the evidence of the senses as potentially deceitful), and on the other it constitutes “the inner sense 44 responsible for all mental representation by way of images and figures, upon which any consideration and even awareness of the possibility of objects exterior to the mind itself and of the images of these objects in the mind is dependent” (38). Descartes’ departure from Aristotle is marked by the uncertain status of these mental representations, and the impossibility to secure a direct correspondence to the external world or discern dreams from waking reality. Following Bacon’s definition of inductive logic as ars or instrumentum, Descartes proposed to overcome the unreliability of the senses by devising an analytical method which he exposed in his Reculae ad directionem ingenii (c. 1628) and the Discours de la méthode (1637), revealing that mental images ultimately referred to universals or simple natures. However, as Hatfield (1992) observes, Descartes’ medical writings discussed mental phenomena “in ways that should be distinguished from his purely mechanistic physiology on the one hand and from his concern with the status of sensory knowledge on the other” (340). By the time he published Les passions d’âme (1649), he could conceive the imagination “as an act closer to will than to intellection”, whose main task is “to help manage the feelings, emotions, and passions, with the goal of not suppressing them but rather of learning to use them” (Sepper, 268). Similarly, the radicalisation of the via moderna and the new impetus latent in late scholastic thought was channelled through Hobbes, for whom “in its widest sense, the fancy or imagination is the image-making faculty of the mind” (Hinnant, 20), one without which there would be no possibility of intellection. Partner (2018) observes that Hobbes’ early “First Draught of the Optiques” (1646) advances “his fundamental conception that all natural phenomena could be interpreted as the motion of material 45 bodies originated in his exploration of light and vision”, which highlights the mediatory role of the fancy “in the interlinked processes of perception and cognition” (67-69). Insomuch as the imaginative faculty is what allows Hobbes to distinguish between vital and voluntary motions, he ends up collapsing faculty psychology altogether and elevating the image-making power to the status of efficient cause of a diverse array of mental phenomena such as memory and dreaming. In his motion-based physiology, 28 such images are rooted in external inputs, and as such can only be seen as “decaying sense”, as fading impressions which wane overtime “in part, due to the constant stimuli of the mind by external movements” (Schwartz, 159). According to Leijenhorst (2002), Hobbes resorts to the principle of conservation of motion to explain the waning of images in the mind long after being perceived by the senses. In Hobbes’ account, “phantasmata existing within the imagination wane with the course of time as a steady input of new motions coming forth from external objects obscures our old perception” (90). The mechanisation of the imaginative faculty implies that the mind’s capacity for generating mental images does not mean “spontaneous, creative generation, but rather a process of historical recollection; a ‘fancy’ is ‘a relique’ of a prior sensorial experience” (Prakas, 127). What emerges is a view of the imagination that grounds in the 29 As Lukac de Stier (2011) notes, the imagination is entirely responsible for differentiating one from the 28 other, as “the vital motions do not need imagination, whereas the voluntary motions always depend on the way in which they have been previously imagined in our minds” (79). She notes several points of confluence with Aquinas’ commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, namely “that incorporeal objects cannot be imagined and that imaginations proceed from sensation […]; that imaginations are states of the mind where the object of sense-perception can be absent […]: that imagination as a cognitive power stands between mere sense and understanding” (90). On the contrary, Hobbes denies that the understanding is able to separate the essence from the materiality of an object, as he denies the existence of universals outside language in nominalist fashion. Even so, in later sections of Leviathan (1651) he concedes that: “Whereas a man can fancy shapes he 29 never saw; making up a figure out of the parts of divers creatures; as the poets make their Centaures, Chimaeras, and other Monsters never seen: So can he also give Matter to those Shapes and make them in Wood, Clay or Metall. And these are also called Images, not for the resemblance of any corporeall thing, but for the resemblance of some phantasticall Inhabitants of the Brain of the Maker” (1032). 46 regularities and irregularities of motion the common assumption that “while the imagination can be constructive and constitutive of knowledge – and is, in fact, a precondition for any kind of knowledge and understanding in general – it is also responsible for its unstable nature” (Schwartz, 60). In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes further psychologises two rhetorical concepts that had crossed over to the field of natural philosophy and attaches them to specific functions of the mind. In this picture, the fancy or imagination “is related to metaphor; judgement to definition” (Hinnant, 18). Hobbes defines wit as a Celerity of Imagining (that is, swift succession of one thought to another” and “steddy direction to some approved end” (104). These two necessary components, as Skinner (1996) shows, are derived from sixteenth and seventeenth-century debates on the proper uses of figurae sententiarum, whereby “if our use of figures and tropes is to have its fullest emotional impact, two constraining requirements must be satisfied”: The first being “that the orator must never look for his imagery too close at hand” (188), with the second consisting in “knowing how to range freely without getting lost” (190). If both are correctly combined, it results in a proper use of the faculties which could be referred to as wit, or the orator’s capacity to read each situation and temper the farfetchedness of the fancy with the soundness of judgement accordingly, lest it strays too much and loses its effectiveness. As Milburn (1966) explains, one of the results in the confrontation between rhetoric, poetics and reevaluations in faculty psychology, by the mid-seventeenth century was a debate over “whether wit was a product of judgment or of the imagination” (78). Bicanová (2013) identifies a progressive conflation of wit and fancy as the Italianate connotation which links wit with “the intellect in general, in opposition to ‘will’”, whereby from the onset 47 of the seventeenth century onwards, “wit was associated with the imaginative or rather fanciful element in poetry” (21). Hobbes had already defined wit in The Elements of Law (1650) as being composed of two elements: a “quick ranging of mind” and a “curiosity of comparing […] in which comparison, a man delighted himself either with finding unexpected similitude in things, otherwise much unlike, in which men place the excellency of FANCY” (38). According to Skinner (1996), it follows that even though “the qualities of fancy and judgement can both be described as forms of wit, they remain opposed faculties” (365), which behave as antithetical principles in a mechanised picture of the mind. Thus he explains the imagination’s tendency to go astray in terms that imply forces and counterforces: “Without Steddinesse, and Direction to some End, a great Fancy is one kind of Madnesse; such as they have, that entring into any discourse, are snatched from their purpose, by every thing that comes in their thought” (106). Hobbes had also dealt with these two components from the perspective of inventio in his “Answer” to Davenant’s preface to Gondibert (1650) precisely by stressing the link between fancy and the senses through memory, serving as the storehouse where: The Fancy, when any work of Art is to be performed, findeth her materials at hand and prepared for use, and needs no more than a swift motion findes her materials at hand and prepared for use, and needes no more then a swift motion over them, that what she wants, and is there to be had, may not lye too long unespied. So that when she seemeth to fly from one Indies to the other, and from Heaven to Earth, and to penetrate into the hardest matter, and obscurest places, into the future, and into her selfe, 48 work of fancy to the organization of decaying sense” (Hequembourg, 175). This proliferation of possibilities is linked both to the rhetorical usage of commonplaces and to a vast redefinition of what becomes possible when the concept of nature is radically expanded. As Sarkar (2014) puts it, Cavendish “turns to nature’s variety and changeability as sources of imaginative creation” (276). First, we explore how the principle of variety already operates in mid seventeenth-century poets and storytellers, before observing the form it assumes in Cavendish’s own textual production, which, as Shanahan (2002) has observed, is linked to her own theories of substance and perception in providing “a different account of what is probable based on another vision of what is natural” (256). The principle of variety has a complex genealogy, which Fitzgerald (2016) has linked to the Greek adjective ποικίλος (“variegated”, “of various colours”). He traces the life of the word in the writings of Roman orators, for instance, whereas varius can be applied to “denote a color that can’t be exactly specified, or shifts as we look at it”, it can also be applied in the negative sense “to fortune, to war, which is notoriously unpredictable and fluctuating, and to the wavering or uncertainty of opinion, or the unreliability of a tradition” (19). H. V. S. Ogden (1949) linked the notion to patristic 39 writings, the idea that Creation out of God’s “goodness” involves “making the world a suitable and beautiful dwelling place for man by making it diversified” (161). This Christian optimism merges with the rhetorical tradition in the writings of Pontanus and Vida [De Arte Poetica, 1527], only to be later intertwined with the principle of contrast For instance, in commenting Catullus’ use of variabunt in “Peleus and Thetis”, Fitzgerald (2016) 39 identifies that a disjunction is created in order to remind the reader “that there are two sides to a war, two opposite perspectives on the same event”, and thus might be characterised as varius “by virtue of its unpredictability and fluctuations” (26). He wonders if whether we might identify “this play on two senses of the word (roughly ‘variegated’ and ‘changing’)” as “a topos of the varietas complex” (29). 55 whereby “variety consists of a series of paired contraries” (169). In classical rhetoric, variety is taken as the complement of copia (abundance), “not of unity, and sometimes it even appears to be the means of achieving copia” as it operates “as a principle of nonassimilation, or more positively, as a perceptual field where one element sets another off, rather than complementing or completing it” (10). Clucas (2003) link this notion of variety to a widespread mid seventeenth-century notion of the way in which nature’s infinite variety precludes a holistic understanding, which implies that any individual’s thoughts “are simply a limited and particular set of patterned motions and variations of parts”, and therefore “every theory – or momentary configuration of rational parts in the brain – must necessarily be contingent” (205). Thus, if Aristotelian poetics places its emphasis on the fact that its components might be apprehended in wholes, “the experience of variety is quite the opposite: without the orientation of a beginning, middle, or end, center or periphery, the eye is caught now by one thing, now another, or it passes over a single element […] registering its many shades” (Fitzgerald, 10-11). The link between the distractedness associated with the imagination and its products is thus established, and might be observed in Montaigne, the quintessential early modern practitioner of the miscellany form. As Demonet (2002) has shown, in “De l’Oisiveté”, Montaigne “retourne la critique horacienne des monstruosités poétiques pour l’appliquer à son écriture ‘échappée’, sans règle, et surtout sans autre sujet que luimême” (179). In John Florio’s 1603 translation, we find echoes of those anxieties later described by Hobbes: As Montaigne goes home to rest his mind, hoping “to entertaine him as he best pleased”, he finds instead that Uariam semper dant otia mentem (“leisure always offer varied thoughts”) […] and begets in me so many extravagant Chimeræs, 56 and fantasticall monsters, so orderlesse, and without any reason, one hudling vpon an other” (14). Under the rubric of variety, these orderless monsters might be aesthetically cohered under a poetics that makes varietas and non-assimilation their governing principles, and which “favours instead the metaphor of the ‘olio’ […] a word derived from the Latin olla (pot) and signifying a dish of many, varied ingredients, all cooked together, which because of the variety of ingredients, suits all tastes” (Fitzgerald, 166). Of course, Cavendish is familiar with the conceit and names her first collection of essays, The World’s Olio (1655), accordingly. In this respect, Chalmers (2003) draws attention to the way that a privileging of varietas and a poetics of “largesse or riches” has political implications, inasmuch as her volumes aspire to become “a notional substitute for the aristocratic rites of hospitality that political circumstances have denied the Newcastles” (130). Accordingly, Cottegnies (2016) signals the way in which 40 Cavendish’s writings could be considered “as a form of dematerialized cabinet of curiosities”, and adds that “the paratactic nature of her style of writing, which tends to juxtapose fragments, forming, to use one of her favourite culinary metaphors, an ‘olio’ or a ‘hodge podge’, could be analyzed along those lines” (100). Moreover, the concept of varietas is strongly suited to the development of rhetorical declamations in utramque partem, that is to say, the presentation of both sides of an argument, normally as rhetorical exercises which Skinner (1996) connects to the humanist notion that “in debates about justice and policy, it will always be possible to construct a ‘probable’ argument […] and that the involvement of our passions and Observe William’s prefatory verses: to the Worlds Olio, we invite you / And hope these several Cates 40 they may delight you, / It is the Mistris of the Feast her Wish, / And all these various Sorts cookt in Wits Dish; / For several Palats here is of the best […] An Olio of Confections, not refrain; / For here’s a Sumptuous Banquet for your Brain: / And this Imaginary Feast pray try” (A6r). 57 interests will be such that we can never hope to avoid such arguments or finally resolve them with anything approaching demonstrative certainty” (299-300). This principle operates in the practice of compiling commonplace books, which by the seventeenth century “began to merge with encyclopedias and miscellanies in the perception of advocates and critics alike” (Moss, vii). Following the popularity of Erasmus’ Adagia (1500), these books were “collections of quotations, observations, and reflections drawn from the author’s reading, and often intended only for the author’s use without any principle of order – miscellanies reflecting the tastes, opinions, responses, and thoughts relating to whatever it is that might ‘come up’” (Fitzgerald, 3). Begley (2019) finds ample reason to believe that The World’s Olio “actually began as a commonplace book that Cavendish used to organise material that she distilled from her diverse conversations and readings under memorable headings” (186). He also identifies Cavendish’s arguing both sides of a question with Bacon’s section on “Antitheta Rerum” in De augmentis scientiarum (1623, translated into English by Gilbert Wat in 1640), as she “regularly abstracted from individual views to generate commonplace claims that she then structured according to a pro/contra style” (187). Drawing on her view that mental images as composed of matter, these conflicting sides in Cavendish’s texts literally take a life of their own, providing her own thoughts with ontological depth, sensation, feeling, even inserting orations and exhortations delivered by them in a style highly reminiscent of Prudentius’ Psychomachia (5th c. AD). By allegorising her 41 own thoughts as representatives of conflicting positions, she points to “a writing style For instance, her Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668) includes fifteen sections “concerning 41 Restoring-Beds, or Wombs”, in which a dispute is staged between Cavendish’s own thoughts, for which occasion “they agreed to divide into Minor and Major Parts” (212). The argument proceeds in the manner of “Antitheta Rerum”, poking fun at both Descartes’ medical theory and the proceedings and reunions of the Royal Society by having some of her thoughts pull others “of their Pulpit, the Glandula; and not only so, but put them out of their Society, believing they were a Factious Party” (222). 58 that calls into question the very authority of her discourse” (Stevenson, 532), which destabilises the opposition she draws elsewhere between solitary contemplation and sociable conversation by depicting the former as a conversation amongst thoughts, and the latter as a clash of quasi-monads. As Battigelli (1998) puts it, writing in the context of a developing notion of inwardness, Cavendish was “unguarded and open in acknowledging and exploring the fluid, elusive, and erratic shapings and reshapings of the self” (10), or, as Walters (2014) argues, her concept of mind can be seen as “a decentralized entity that is indefinitely fracturing into different forms of vitalistic agency” (165). Unable to differentiate between her authorial persona and the products of her agency, Waller (2020) observes that Cavendish inscribes “a series of selves into both her writings and her broader lifestyle, subverting any possible stability or continuity, let alone a single identity” (237). In a way, Cavendish “presents her writing self as a subjectivity in commotion” (Mann, 197), pointing to the fact that she “cannot, and does not desire to ‘give a final description’, but yearns instead for infinite descriptions, each as subtle and as various as the figures and motions of innated matter itself” (206). As Sarkar (2014) sees it, for Cavendish, “variety does not dissolve into chaos”, but instead “nature generates new orders of existence by manipulating the particulars of an extant world” (282). Thus, we turn to possible-worlds semantics as a suitable framework for exploring and cataloguing Cavendish’s multiplication of possibilities, whether outward or inward, drawing special attention to her “simultaneously proliferating and recursive” writing style, “which circles around its key images, amplifying them with figurative detail before returning at last to the initial trope” (Mann, 191). 59 2. Possible-worlds semantics. In order to explore the counterfactual nature of both fiction and natural philosophy, we turn to possible-worlds semantics, which can be defined as “an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that has its roots in philosophical logic” (Raghunath, 27). It originated in mid twentieth-century developments in modal logic, which were largely built against two main assumptions. First is what Doležel (1988) refers to as “one-world semantics”, a view on referentiality stretching back to Frege (1892) and Russell (1919) which raised numerous problems in the validation of truth conditions for counterfactuals or those which refer to fictional entities. Second is what Pavel (1986) termed “classical 42 segregationism”, which Ronen (1994) summarised as “the will to separate fiction from other non-actuals” (31), either by identifying the intrinsic “literariness” of a text, or positing distinct operators or markers of fictionality. A one-world model is thus “based on the assumption that there is only one legitimate universe of discourse (domain of reference), the actual world” (Doležel, 2), and that therefore any proposition that cannot be validated in such domain must be either considered false or at least lacking truth value or reference. The basic principle of possible-worlds semantics is that the felicity conditions of these kinds of propositions can only be validated if we take them to refer Some theorists working in possible-worlds semantics like Pavel (1986) and Ryan (1991) have drawn 42 attention to alternative views on referentiality which run parallel to the Russell-Frege tradition, such as Alexis Meinong’s concept of Sosein (such-being), which entails that objects like fictional entities have to be provided with characteristics before they are attributed the property of existence or non-existence. In discussing Meinong’s theory, Brann (1991) claims that “it is possible to have objects in mind, to think of or imagine things, that are rich in characteristics or properties but are not real […] even in order to deny them their existence it is necessary to get a handle on them, so that they must somehow be” (429). 61 to a possible world where these conditions may be met. Any proposition can be 43 conceptualised as “necessary” if it entails no contradiction in every possible world, and therefore its truth conditions can always be met, while it remains “possible” if they can be satisfied only in some possible worlds, and “impossible” if they cannot be met in any of them. The terminology developed in modal logic thus supplies “logical categories (such as necessity and possibility) with semantic content, and conversely, possible worlds supply semantic and syntactic categories (such as tenses, modalities and conditionals) with logico-ontological content” (Ronen, 72). Behind developments in 44 possible-worlds semantics for both logic, linguistics and their application in literary studies, there are ultimately two competing views on language, defined by Hintikka (1997) as the opposition between language as universal medium and language as calculus, the difference consisting in the recognition (or lack thereof) of the possibility of a metalanguage. Put it differently, the question seems to be: “can we or, can we not ‘escape our language’?” (Doležel, 52). Two papers by Kripke: “A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic” (1959) and “Semantical 43 Considerations on Modal Logic” (1963) are taken as the starting point in using possible worlds as models for resolving these problems in reference, later to be developed into modal operators by philosophers of language in the analytic tradition. Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1972) became a landmark publication in dealing with the accessibility relations between our “actualised” world and the set of all possible worlds by introducing the concepts of transworld identity and rigid designation. Rigid designation was introduced to address the referential problem of whether names are able to refer both to actual world entities and those which inhabit a possible state of affairs. He concluded that names, through an initial “baptism which is explained in terms either of fixing a reference by a description, or ostension” (97), are able to rigidly designate its reference across worlds, thus making the possibility of trans-world identity possible and logically sound. This trans-world identity implies that “individuals must be able to exist in different worlds and to preserve their identity even when the states of affairs pertaining to them are quite different” (Brann, 431). Different innovations in modal logic were put forth by Georg Henrik von Wright (1963), Alvin 44 Plantinga (1974, 1976), Bradley & Swartz (1979), David K. Lewis (1973, 1978, 1986), M. J. Cresswell (1988) and Jaako Hintikka (1989) over the course of the late twentieth century. Of course, the idea can be traced to Leibniz’s famous dictum in his Essais de Theodicée (1710) that “one must think of the creation of the best of all possible universes, all the more since God not only decrees to create a universe, but decrees to create the best of all” (249), even if some possible-worlds theorists reject any affiliation with his modal-metaphysical argument. Moreover, Leibniz’s vision would still be considered as a one-world cosmology, as “the less perfect worlds are denied existence” (Ryan, 7). Kripke did not refer specifically to Leibniz, but he recognised the prehistory of the concept in Naming and Necessity (1980). 62 2. 1. Possible-worlds theory. Even if the logical term is not directly translatable to the domain of literary studies, literary theorists interested in modal logic “use the achievements of logical investigation to establish a base for fictional reference” (Fořt, 274). As Ronen (1994) observes, the interdisciplinary exchange between modal logic and literary theory commences as soon as we realise that philosophers of language “continue to deal with fiction with relaxed concepts of reference and meaning in order to separate the logic of fiction from other logics”, while literary theorists “refer to philosophical concepts in the hope of incorporating fiction into a general semantic theory” (45). In the field of literary 45 criticism, Pavel (1977), Vaina (1977), Eco (1979) and Maitre (1983) were amongst the first to adapt and expand concepts in modal logic to the study of fictional worlds, allowing them to overcome what Pavel (1988) saw as a “moratorium on representational topics” (6) fostered by formalist and structuralist schools, for which literary works were to be understood and analysed largely as self-contained language constructs. He also pointed to their “semantic fundamentalism”, or “a principle of ‘text closure’, which asserts that all the elements necessary for the understanding of a text are contained therein” (8). Ronen (1994) informs us that, in such view, fictionality was often interpreted as “an inner type of organization, largely disregarding the fact that being fictional, by definition, refers to the relations between a world and what lies It was Kripke’s (1963) claim that “Holmes doesn’t exist, but in other states of affairs he would have 45 existed” (85) which lead to “a vigorous debate about the ways in which fictional characters might resemble the inhabitants of logically possible worlds” (Gallagher, 354). In Naming and Necessity (1973), Kripke would redress that view according to the laws of rigid designation, as it gave “the erroneous impression that a fictional name such as ‘Holmes’ names a particular possible-but-not-actual individual” (158). Yet, for Pavel (1986), Kripke’s statement was rooted “on a common aesthetic intuition that takes for granted that things found in novels are in some way compatible with real life” (46). 63 beyond its boundaries” (1). Ultimately, what possible-worlds brought to the study of literature was an understanding of fictionality as a dual property of texts: On the one hand, fictionality is “accessed through semiotic channels”, that is, “because of the semiotic mediation, accessibility is a bidirectional, multifaceted, and historically changing commerce between the actual and the fictional” (Doležel, 20). On the other, it acknowledges that discourse itself “creates an object that exists in some logical space, allowing us to refer to it and to make true assertions about it” (Ronen, 39). In this view, “such alternative worlds become accessible through language” (Martin, 143) on condition that we reject a strict referential view or “one-world semantics” and accept that fictional reference cut-crosses several domains or even serves to generate the not-yets of possibility. According to Doležel (1998), “by refining the old idea of imaginary worlds, the macrostructural concept of possible worlds inspires a theory of fictionality that does not rest on isolated, ad hoc selected examples”, but one which treats fictional entities “as constituents of a higher-order ‘emergent’ structure, the fictional world” (15). Taking into account that fictionality can be defined as a semantic phenomenon operating on the axis between world and representation, we might affirm that the existence of fictional worlds is “textual, stipulated by nothing other than the existence of the corresponding texts” (Doležel, 195). Contrary to the possible worlds of modal logic, fictional worlds emerge as being “constituted by the mutual relationships of particular elements” (Fořt, 276). Thus, “for narratologists, possible worlds can be treated as what is known in philosophy as a theoretical fiction (an imaginary entity postulated for its explanatory power)” (652), which can be used to analyse fictional state of affairs, offering “a study of formally organized meaning” (Doležel, 193). 64 genres, however, one should be wary they are sometimes undecidable or subject to historical change. 50 By framing possible worlds in fiction as an alternative modal system, literary theorists are able to analyse the way in which modal operators shape and create narrative structures. A basic differentiation should be made between two kinds of statements that are subject to different conditions for truth-valuation or, as Wolterstorff (1980) has it, “between the action of fictionally projecting a world, on the one hand, and the action of describing the contents of an already projected world on the other” (108-09). In fictional worlds we might find I-texts or world-imagining texts, which make claims about the actual world, and “as representations of the actual world are subject to truth-valuation” (Doležel, 24). A special case of I-texts are I-digressions or imaging digressions, which are “embedded in the fictional text but express opinions (beliefs) about the actual world” (27), and which Ronen (1988) relates to the field of allegory in that “universal statements can either correspond to or divert from the meaning recovered from the narrative-concrete sentences of the text” (106). On the other hand, we find C-texts or world-constructing texts, which Doležel (1990) sees as providing the set of “emergent properties, that is, the properties of the whole that cannot be derived from the properties of the parts” (23). As such, they provide the basic constituents for a fictional world to emerge. This differentiation responds to the fact that “pure” fiction is a logical impossibility, in that it would require “a hypothetical fictional world that would have to explain everything that it constructs, perhaps also teach the languages that it uses” (Mikkonen, 113). On the contrary, Maitre (1983) stresses the For instance, both Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626) and Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666). could be read 50 as flouting F/taxonomy in introducing ships that could go underwater, which of course can no longer be read as lifting that specific accessibility relation. 71 radical inseparability of the two, as the linguistic utterances constituting fiction proper “have the same form as descriptions of the actual world, that is, accounts which are making truth claims about the actual world” (34). Doležel (1998) identifies these basic constituents of any fictional world as world of states [W(S)], nature forces (NF or N- forces) and the category of person (P), the latter introducing interaction in the world and serving as the basis to differentiate between one-person and multiperson worlds. Moreover, C-texts are subject to modal constraints which arrange their constituents in order to effect the formative operation that “shapes narrative worlds into orders that have the potential to produce (generate) stories” (113). As Hidalgo-Downing (2000) points out, possible-worlds semantics “provides the means of dealing with the conflictive relationship between different different ‘realities’ by accepting that each world has its own internal configurations and laws” (11). Both Ryan (1991) and Doležel (1976a, 1976b, 1998) list four main modalities operating in the generation of stories within fictional worlds: alethic, epistemic, deontic and axiological operators. These 51 operators might be codexal or subjective depending on whether they affect the fictional world at large or are restrained to certain characters, events and states of affairs. That is, they can be either “relativised” or “subjective” if they pertain to an agent in the story (with the possibility that several agents might be in discord), or codexal, that is, assigned to a certain codex “which defines the ‘outside world’ (for example, the social Doležel (1976a) had defined modalities operating in fiction as “semantic concepts which form a 51 logically homogeneous system”, and which “can be represented as operators, i.e. as expressions attached to propositions: it is possible that it rains; it is known that it rains; it is good that it rains, etc.” (6). In “Narrative Semantics” (1976), he clarifies that “modalities and systems of modalities are abstract semantic concepts which can be established and studied independently of their particular manifestations” (142). For Ryan (2006), possible-worlds semantics provides “a map of narrative universes that connects the factual to the nonfactual and the physical to the mental”, integrating modal systems into the narrative only requires that we “apply the label of ‘world’ to the set of propositions in the mental life of a character that fall under the same predicate or propositional attitude” (648). 72 milieu) in which the relativized ‘worlds’ of the agents are embedded” (Doležel, 149). As Al-Jasim (2014) summarises, just the imbalance between codexal and subjective modalities has the potential to generate a conflict, for instance when “what is codexally impossible or forbidden is subjectively necessary or obligatory” (101). A story can be conceived as atomic (A-story) if it can be defined as “a string of motifs, characterized with the property of modal homogeneity” (144), namely if they are regulated by just one modal system. Generally, narratives tend to incorporate several modal systems in order to create complex interrelations that generates the motivations and conflicts which set the story in motion. Doležel (1976a) also arranges each of them into “triplets of semantic concepts which have been interpreted as logical modal systems” (7). First is the set of alethic modalities, which furnish a fictional world according to the semantic constraints of possibility, impossibility and necessity. As Ronen (1994) observes, the adoption of alethic modalities responds to the fact that “the actuality of fiction is privileged with an essentiality of its own” (54). Codexal alethic constraints operate in introducing physically impossible places or beings, while subjective alethic constraints render characters in a given world normal, hypernormal or hyponormal, depending on whether their alethic endowment is above, below or conforming to the human standard. For instance, worlds were supernatural beings communicate with mortals through the character of a medium can be described as a world whose alethic constraints operate both codexally, and through a hypernormal character, subjectively. As Doležel (1998) points out, “the tension between fixed macroconditions and unruly subjective potentialities is the source of a large family of alethic stories” (119). 73 Second, we find the set of epistemic modalities, which constitutes the primary subset of the textual actual world and regulates the constraints of knowledge, ignorance and belief. The epistemic system “holds the character’s representation of the entire system […] of both the actual world and the private world of the other characters”, yet, “from the character’s point of view, this image is the actual world itself” (Ryan, 649). The epistemic system is inherently ambiguous, as subjective knowledge worlds “may be either complete or incomplete with respect to the reference world, but never mistaken, since we have no external access” (Ryan, 115). Thus, their narrative power results rather from “uneven distribution of knowledge among the fictional persons” (Doležel, 126). The codexal epistemic world of a story defines which of its propositions can be reappropriated by fictional characters and authenticated, and which others cannot be either authenticated or disauthenticated. For Doležel (1998), “codexal epistemic modalities are expressed in social representations, such as scientific knowledge, ideologies, religions, cultural myths”, while subjective epistemic operators “define a personal epistemic set, an individual’s knowledge of any beliefs about self and world” (126). Third is the deontic system, which regulates the triad of prohibition, obligation and permission. For Doležel (1998), deontic constraints “are binding either as tacitly accepted conventions (such as are customs of a culture) or as explicitly promulgated rules, regulations, and laws” (120). Ryan (1991) defines the deontic system as an obligation world, which constitutes “a system of commitments and prohibitions defined by social rules and moral principles” (116). Their main characteristic is that obligation worlds are “interactive and mutually dependent” (117), as once deontic operators are 74 introduced into the fictional world, “all actions performed in it are subject to deontic assessment”, that is, “under different deontic conditions, one and the same action can have a completely different status and consequences” (Doležel, 121). The interactivity between subjective and codexal deontic operators is also one of the most fertile sources of narrative action, inasmuch as “the person’s attitudes towards the codex range from conformity to innovation to rebellion” (122). As Ryan (1991) also points out, “an individual who belongs to a number of different groups may be subjected to incompatible systems of rules” (117). Fourth, fictional worlds might include an axiological system, which serves “to transform the world’s entities (objects, states of affairs, events, actions, persons) into values and disvalues” (123) and regulate what is considered good, bad or indifferent. In my view, they can never be entirely codexal, as they can be better described as unstable, competing systems of valorisation, with one dominating over others. It is rather difficult to posit a codexal axiological operator regulating what every character considers to be good or bad, without falling back into what constitutes a deontic field. Ryan (1991) already points to such complexity when she claims that the flexibility of wish worlds “suggests that the axiological operators ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are not binary categories, but the poles of a continuum” (118). The relation between the axiological and deontic systems is itself complicated, as they seem to form a feedback loop whereby social valorisation might give rise to legal constraints, while legal constraints might in turn generate codes of conduct that are axiologically charged. Given that deontic constraints shape axiological valorisation and viceversa, one could rather speak of a mutual codependence. For Ryan (1991) wish worlds can be subdivided into codexal and 75 subjective substrata, because “while moral laws define goodness and badness relatively to the community, the law of desire defines these predicates relatively to the individual” (117). Of course, outside A-stories, modalities interact with one another, with the conflict between obligation and wish worlds (or duty and desire) being perhaps the most common source of narrative action. Moreover, Doležel (1976a) also identifies a series of intermediate worlds which “share some modality distributors (states and events impossible in the basic world are possible in dream and madness”, while in the basic world “they share the relationship of correspondence to the actual world – dreams and madness can be experienced” (11). Ryan (1991) terms these subworlds F-Universes or fantasy universes, which are not simply possible worlds surrounding the textual actual world, but complete universes which are reached through an internal act of recentring. She defines them as private spheres in which an internal act of recentering occurs, including dreams, hallucinations of embedded stories told by the characters, while “the basic identity of the subject is preserved through the relocation” (119). They are prone to recursive embedding, as they also contain their own set of modal subsystems and are alethically connected to the textual actual world. For Al-Jasim (2014), F-Universes can only be subjective, and relate to all other modal systems in that they “can be conceived as either images of the factual domain […], as models of what the textual actual world should be […], or as escapes from our true alternatives to the actual world of the narrative universe” (101-02). However, in my view, Doležel’s listing of modal operators does not fully reflect the way that alethic operators are themselves the precondition for epistemic operators, 76 which in turn predetermine axiological operators that might form the basis of deontic constraints or viceversa. This hierarchical structure derives from Ryan’s (1991) realisation that “while the operators of the alethic system relate AW to TAW, the other operators relate TAW to the private worlds of characters” (111). She goes on to establish a gradient of co-determinations: alethic constraints determine what is known, which in turn lay the ground for the axiological valorisation that might form the basis of deontic systems or the other way around. Of course, Doležel (1976a) warns us that modal systems “apparently operate jointly”, as “every human action is determined by natural possibilities (agent’s abilities to perform certain actions), deontic norms (legal, moral, etc.), by social or individual values (desires) and by the agent’s knowledge and beliefs” (7). Modalities can combine and form dyadic worlds, which create “a split between the fictional world effected by the redistribution of codexal modalities of one and the same modal system” (128). He gives us the mythological world as an example, which redistributes obligation and permission across a natural-supernatural boundary, or the axiological dyadic world of national conflicts, in which “what is value in one domain (for one group or culture) turns into disvalue in the other domain” (129). Moreover, a fictional world can be described through paraphrase, its extension being “the meaning constituent of a linguistic sign that directs the sign toward the world” (Doležel, 136). For instance, we could describe Cavendish’s Blazing World in terms 52 that denote the set of actions involving such and such characters, the situations to which they are drawn etc., but the specificity and texture of the literary text would be lost in Doležel (1979) analyses hermeneutic procedures which assign entities in the narrative world to a 52 secondary world of “actants”, “functions”, “motifemes” etc., drawing attention to the way in which “interpretative systems of narrative semantics are mappings of one extensional world into another extensional world” (200). He thus defines extension as “the set of compossible agents” of a fictional world, including “the action scopes and property sets in the form of propositional functions” (203). 77 the process. On the other hand, we find that intension can be defined as functions extending from extensional meaning to texture, thus “extensional meaning is aesthetically neutral; only on the level of intension is aesthetically effective meaning achieved” (Doležel, 138). He proposes to approach the macrostructure of fictional world rather through intension, that is, through structuring patterns operating at the level of texture which create constraints and regularities, as “one and the same extensional primary world can be projected into many possible intensional worlds by the application of different intensional functions” (202). He identifies two distinct functions that can be derived from a close analysis of textures: authentication and saturation. The authentication function “operates in all narrative texts as a basic world-forming procedure” (Doležel, 204), insomuch as it regulates truth conditions in a given world if the world is created and accessed semiotically. As Pavel (1986) puts it, ontological 53 complexity in fiction can also “originate in one character’s idiosyncratic organization of the universe, as opposed to the actuality-in-the-novel; or else in the vacillation of the narrative base itself between two different ‘actualities’” (63). For instance, in the case of an Er-form (comprising different degrees of third-person narration), the actions and states of affairs in a given fictional world are authenticated by fiat, as for Doležel (1979), “the ‘objective’ Er-form narrative has the highest, absolute authentication authority”, while on the other end of the scale, ‘subjective’ speech-acts of narrative agents show the lowest degree” (206). In an Ich-form (comprising various forms of first-person narration), the narrator is also an actant immersed in the fictional world, and This function serves to discriminate between events and actions which are “authenticated” in the world 53 and those which are discredited as false within the fictional world. Don Quixote’s windmills episode can be thus seen as an archetypal example of a narrative event which is authenticated by a character but that can otherwise be disauthenticated in the macrostructure by attending to regularities in texture, or by other characters as well. 78 must in turn earn the reader’s trust. Apart from these two poles, the cases of subjectivised Er-forms and impersonal Ich-forms require that “we must employ a different authentication scheme, graded authentication” (Fořt, 275), functioning as a scalar framework for authenticating different fictional constituents. On the other hand, the saturation function controls how densely populated a given world is, and how much can be reconstructed from the information presented in the text. Hayot (2012) sees the category of “world” as emerging “most often from the collective expression – or impression – of the work as a whole, and a function of all the rules that govern what the work does not include as well as what the work includes without mentioning it” (50). Based on the fictional encyclopaedia, the saturation function arranges the text’s density by regulating the amount of information given according to three degrees of texture: “the explicit texture constructs the determinate domain, the implicit texture the indeterminate domain, and zero texture the domain of gaps” (Doležel, 182). It does so by projecting regularities on textual gaps, implicatures, degrees of completeness and the interaction between fictional and real world encyclopaediae, in a way serving to “guide the recovery of implicit meaning in fictional texts” (181), for instance in redistributing different zones of ambiguity. As we will observe, fantastic texts codetermine a richly saturated texture whose authentication strategies will make use of what Capoferro (2010) sees as a mediation between “an inclusive, extremely flexible conception of nature […] which does not categorically debunk the notion of supernatural, regarding it as a means to account for phenomena that cannot be directly perceived” (61). 79 Thus, possible-worlds semantics offers us a set of building blocks for thinking alongside Sepper’s (2013) view of the imagination as something “unreal […] because the object aimed at does not yet exist”, thus linking the faculty with modal content in that “imagination anticipates the new, the not-yet” (3), as well as the ways in which something could be or could have been. Ryan (1991) seems to problematise the existence of a point of origin, inasmuch as no one is really able to “distinguish the real world from my representation of it”, in that “the internal perspective classifies epistemic worlds as actual, while the external perspective classifies them as possible” (20). She advances a view which Raghunath (2020) has recently tried to amend by means of introducing a reader-knowledge world that destabilises the idea of a unitary indexical point of reference, consisting of “propositions that they know about the actual world” (64) and functioning under modal epistemic operators rather than full correspondence with the actual world. This has certain implications for the whole theory of genres based upon accessibility criteria, as “the identification of what is considered ‘realistic’ in a fictional text depends very much on what is considered ‘real’ in the non-fictional world” (Abellán-García Barrio & Encinas Cantalapiedra, 176). Ronen (1994) already anticipated this problem in claiming that literary theorists, “having fiction as its primary object of study […] can regard fictional beings and deal with the problem of reference in fiction in a way that might suggest a conflation between the fictional and the real, but this conflation does not emerge necessarily from any clear notion of what the real is like” (113). This points to Ryan’s (1991b) view that not only “recentring”, but also textual convention is constitutive of what one perceives as fictional. 80 models and second worlds was the chief role of interpretation, the surest discovery procedure” (59) was widely promoted. As Duprat (2010) remarks, we are drawn to pay attention to “l’usage proprement littéraire qu’y fair Descartes de la notion d’‘espaces imaginaires’, qu’il détourne de leur emploi scolastique pour en faire l’instrument d’une énonciation paradoxale qu’il emprunte aux conteurs de fables” (153). It is precisely in this sense that Descartes could bypass theological implications and present his own system of natural philosophy by incorporating modes of presentation that pertained to fiction, or, as Reiss (1982) points out, he would “refer to Le monde as a fable at the outset, only to conclude that it corresponds precisely to the real world” (236). Berger (1988) draws attention to the fact that in the fifth section of the Discours, Descartes “tells us that to philosophize without being burdened by traditional terms, concepts, and controversies he resolved to make a new start by creating as a second world his own hypothetical model of the universe” (60). In turn, Ramachandran (2015) points to the way Descartes could exploit “the energy of narrative unfolding, thereby suggesting that the world has an aesthetic order that could only be revealed through literary figuration” (153). This widening of the concept of possibility, inflected with new topographical considerations, paved the way for the “Leibnizian conception of fictionality”, whose stimulus came from Leibniz’s modal-metaphysical argument which posits a plurality of world in which only one is actualised. Leibniz’s views inspired “a bold reformulation of the relationship between art and world” (Doležel, 39) which can be observed in a letter to Louis Bourguet dated 1712, in which Leibniz answers the question of whether a pastoral work like d’Urfé’s L’Astrée (1607-27) is “possible”. He says that to determine its status, it would be “necessary to know its connections with the rest of the universe”, 87 but whether the ‘Astrea’ is possible in an absolute sense is another question”, a question which he answers positively inasmuch as “it does not imply any contradictions” (661). 57 Almost every possible-worlds theorist links the positing of possible worlds to the activity of the imagination, and thus “the conception of possible worlds as products of the imagination suggests an association of these worlds of literary fiction” (Ryan, 8). Rescher’s (1973) actualist position, in fact, defines possible worlds as constructs resulting from mental activity, stating that “by the very nature of hypothetical possibilities, they cannot exist as such, but must be thought of […], hypothesized, or imagined, or assumed, or something of this sort” (214). Thus, hypotheses are “inherently mind-related”, as “the hypothetical cannot just ‘objectively be’ the case” (218). In other words, in owing their existence “to an act of the mind, the entities found exclusively in possible worlds differ in ontological status from the objects of the actual world” (Ryan, 20). As Lyons (2005) puts it, “through imagination we can have inside our mind a world that is much richer than the world outside at any given moment, for we can create an infinite number of alternative and past realities” (21). Although Ryan & Bell (2019) will grant Rescher’s position the property of being “the most intuitive for literary scholars” (6), it presents some shortcomings with respect to the property of completeness that most possible-worlds theorists attribute to them, namely that “the mind can contemplate individual possibilities, but it cannot construct a complete possible world that attributes a truth value to every proposition” (7). Pavel (1986) draws As early as the 1670s, Leibniz had anticipated an understanding of fictional entities in terms of possible 57 worlds. For instance, in a short c. 1679 essay edited as “De libertate”, he claims that “it cannot be denied that many stories, especially those we call novels, may be regarded as possible, even if they do not actually take place in this particular sequence of the universe which God has chosen – unless someone imagines that there are certain poetic regions in the infinite extent of space and time where we might see wandering over the earth King Arthur of Great Britain, Amadis of Gaul, and the fabulous Dietrich von Bern invented by the Germans” (263). 88 attention to the way “societies tend to develop characteristic imaginary spaces that inform both social life and cultural production”, whereby “members of the society judge fictional texts in accordance with the prevailing general laws of the imaginary” (99). In this sense, Doležel (1998), paraphrasing Kripke, further clarifies that possible worlds “do not await discovery in some remote or transcendent depository, they are constructed by the creative activities of human minds and hands” (14). For Maitre (1983), the role of the imagination in the construction and reception of fictional worlds is twofold: On the one hand, the role of imagination is continuous with its function in perception and explanation, for it posits non-actual state of affairs for consideration; but it is discontinuous with these functions insofar as the understanding we gain of fictional worlds is not necessarily in accordance with the coherence criteria of the actual world. We can understand a world which differs considerably from the actual world and use that understanding to adjust our view of what is or could be the case in the actual world. The other role which imagination plays is to make possible for the reader participation in the states of affairs presented in fictional world, both in terms of his own identity and in terms of the imaginatively assumed identity of the characters of such world (18). Aït-Touati (2017) asks whether “the evolution of the concept of fiction is tied to that of the perception of the imagination (however ‘material’ the latter is considered to be)”, and concludes that such link explains the insistence on “the rational and yet subtle nature of ‘fancy’, which can do without the materialist philosopher’s matter, and is able 89 to create a world […] without any preceding model” (497). Campbell (1999) stresses the fact that the early modern period is marked by “the creation of an ‘inside’, characteristically located in those others crowding the world ‘outside’ the sensorium, or nation, or species of the writer, and generating for its literary environment the novel” (12). For Cullhed (2015), it is ultimately the Cartesian notion of separating the subjective imagination from external reality, that is, the “radical distinction between the human mind (res cogitans) and nature (res extensa), typical of the Gutenberg era”, which eventually would “make it feasible to construe fictionality as potential (or nonactual) states of affairs” (18). It is precisely this interrelation of imagination, world-creation, modal thinking on necessity and possibility, involuntary processes and outcomes which shapes Cavendish’s complex, imaginative and intuitive variety of textual gestures. Smyth (2017) makes the crucial claim that her “strange materiality allows not only for a novel view of nature but of fiction” (126), while Pohl (2003) stresses how Cavendish “vindicates a writing strategy that creates these ‘personal’ texts”, which “should be imaginative and spontaneous, open and non-exclusive in structure and language” (63). 58 Conceiving the role of the imagination in natural philosophical inquiry and fictional world-making in terms of possibility and necessity proves useful inasmuch as, like Cooke (2000) shows, for Cavendish, the poet and the natural philosophers “can give a different perspective on nature” (137). As Weitz (2003) observes, Cavendish repeatedly “turned to narrative frames that contained multiple and competing perspectives, no one of which can be identified unproblematically with Cavendish’s own” (145). Waller As Cavendish herself puts it in the mouth of one of her storytellers in Natures Pictures (1656): “For 58 Phancie’s quick and flies such several waies, / For to be drest in words it seldome staies; / Phancy is like an Eele; so slippery glides, / Before the tongue takes hold, away it slides” (113). 90 (2020) sees Cavendish as one of the primary examples of “the characteristic Baroque capacity to remain open to explore multiple ways to discover or create knowledge through varieties or story-telling” (30-31) or, in other words, a link between the possible and the verisimilar effected “par la rhétorique: c’est elle qui aménage les modalités logiques, comme le possible, en eikos, vraisemblable ou probable, pour les adapter au discours civil, à la prose d’art et à la création poétique” (Demonet, 132). Yet, Cavendish’s own view on subjectivity complicates matters further, as, in Cartesian terms, she “challenges the possibility of a stable, integrate self”, inasmuch as “like the object of its study the self for Cavendish is irregular, prone to contradiction, and nondiscrete” (Maxwell, 117). 59 Cavendish’s own substance theory supplies the ontological side of modal speculation, inasmuch as “the belief that we are continually surrounded by living, conscious matter implies infinite perspectives abounding throughout our universe: the multiplying points of view of humans (men and women) as well as animals, rocks, plants, earrings, and so on” (Smyth, 217). With Semler (2011), we might contend that fancy’s juxtaposition of orders opens up before her “like mental doors onto new imaginative spaces, into which her fancy steps and confidently sets about creating unique poetic artefacts” (72). In Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668) she claims. that: The Parts of the Mind have greater advantage than the Sensitive Parts; for the Mind can enjoy that which is not subject to the Sense; as those things The debate was in fact sparked by William Cavendish in 1645, the same year that he and Margaret got 59 married. William invited both Hobbes and Bramhall to his Parisian salon, after which “Newcastle asked them to send him written statements setting forth their positions” (Chappell, ix). From William’s participation we can infer that, “while there is no evidence that Margaret Cavendish read any of those pamphlets, it seems likely, given the connection between the authors and her husband, that she knew of Hobbes’ and Bramhall’s views” (Boyle, 32-33). 91 Man names, Castles in the Air, or Poetical Fancies; which is the reason Man can enjoy Worlds of its own making, without the assistance of the Sensitive Parts; and can govern and command those Worlds; as also, dissolve and compose several Worlds, as he pleases: but certainly, as the pleasures of the Rational Parts are beyond those of the Sensitive, so are their Troubles (103). In this, she differs from Hobbes as well as Sidney, in claiming that the faculty of fancy can not only escape the constraints of referentiality, but create and sustain an entirely autonomous domain. For Aït-Touati (2017), in her works, “invention is no longer just a discovery of that which already exists, but a creation ex nihilo”, signalling that “Cavendish’s fictional world is made out of nothing, a hyperbolic invention in that every part of it is born of her ‘creating fancy’” (492). What we already saw in Sidney is self-consciously felt by Cavendish, the fact that fancy (understood as the motions of self-moving rational matter, and thus indistinctive from understanding in terms of the actions of the will) is part of our conceptual topology, and as such serves to elevate ourselves from the realm of particulars to make propositional claims. In terms of fictional non-referentiality, the Cyrus Sidney creates combines, through imagination, the particularities and concepts to model “a replicable figure that will result in ‘many Cyruses’” (Sarkar, 24). As Berger (1988) notes, “the particular virtue of the imaginary world lies in its being, since it is neither actual nor ideal, potentially an image of either or both” (15). Most views on Cavendish and world-making tend to emphasise a compensatory aspect to it. Todd (1985) claims that even if Cavendish “was not the first woman to 92 publish fictional material and she was certainly not the first to publish”, she was however “the first to use published fiction to create a fantastic, wish-fulfilling, compensatory world” (68). Cunning (2016) has also drawn attention to her materialistic theory of the plenum, the fact that the nonexistence of a vacuum implies that the whole structure of the world is interrelated and codetermined, as informing her views on the imagination. He connects her views on the imagination to the safeguarding of Royalism through her de facto acceptance of the world as it is, allowing for modal speculation from the safety of a divinely instituted order, thus “if the plenum is recalcitrant to our desires and goals, we do not owe it the courtesy of attending only to the images that it produces”, as “we would be better off to focus on images that are sometimes more faint but that are more pleasant and satisfying” (266). Yet, the intricacies of world-making in connection with changing views on the imagination, fiction-making and Cavendish’s own philosophical position have not been yet fully explored. Throughout this research, I have only come across a few sources that link Cavendish to possible worlds, either explicitly or tangentially, most of them taking The Blazing World (1666) as an early modern theory on subcreation and self-recursivity. One is Gallagher’s (1988) seminal essay, “Embracing the Absolute: Margaret Cavendish and the Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England”, in which she discusses the Duchess’ and the Empress’ nested acts of subcreation as instances of imaginary worlds displaying “the same infinite recessiveness that Cavendish, anticipating Leibniz, believed existed in every particle of nature” (143). Nicole Pohl’s (2003) “‘Of Mixt Natures’: Questions of Genre in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World” also links Cavendish with Leibnizian philosophy through the concept of the fold, which poses “a reconciliation 93 between continuity and multiplicity with singularity and individuality” (52). Mark J. P. Wolf’s (2014) Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation takes possible-worlds semantics as the starting point for discussing imaginative worldbuilding, remarking that Cavendish offered a rare example of “two subcreators who discuss world-building, examine each other’s worlds, and in a later section, discuss the Primary World in relation to the secondary worlds” (238). Debapriya Sarkar’s (2014) doctoral dissertation, “Possible Knowledge: Forms of Literary and Scientific Thought in Early Modern England” (2014), discusses Cavendish’s Blazing World at large, but also her Poems, and Fancies (1653) as instances of what she terms “possible knowledge”, or the way in which early modern poetics evolved to broaden its notion of referentiality, and how in turn this shaped an understanding of the vastness of the world as encompassing the infinitely possible. Thus, by insisting on poiesis, or art understood as making, early modern writers could “engage in an open-ended activity that brings forth possible worlds, adapting denotative or circulating notions of reference” (19). Recently, Nathaniel Likert’s (2021) “The Counterfactual Fictions of Margaret Cavendish” applies Lewis’ (1973) counterpart theory to Cavendish’s materialisation of fancy and the inclusion of fictional versions of herself and William within the story, with interesting explorations of pre-Leibnizian modal thinking. Through a possible-worlds lens, we might attend to Cunning’s (2018) remarks that Cavendish “exercises a kind of agency in taking a stand and making a record of the lives that she would live instead” (210), without reducing the role of the imagination to a Stoical retreat from the actual world. 94 2.3. Genre and fantasy. Possible-worlds semantics allows us to address such inherent instabilities by conceiving of early modern genre theory in terms of the ways in which accessibility relations intermingle with available encyclopediae, which in turn shape or flout the expectations raised by the texts. In them, fancy’s capacity to sustain a counterfactual space (where the constituents of the world might be different from the ones we know) also depends on generic expectation for authenticating their very existence. For Ryan (1991), accessibility relations “are involved in the differentiation of genres”, but do not “necessarily correspond to the generic labels in use in a given culture” (43). Such accessibility relations are dual in nature, as, on the one hand, they point to the immanent fictional construction of generic conventions, while on the other they build bridges towards available encyclopediae, where genres are culturally determined and historically constructed. As McKeon (2002) observes, in structuralist-leaning literary histories, “there is at least the suggestion that it is not that history happens to form, but that form happens in history; and that ‘genre’ is the principal category by which we acknowledge the inescapable historicity of form itself” (6). In Collie’s (1973) formulation, it is often the case that within emergent genre-systems, “a literary kind stands for a kind of subject, a kind of content, literary and intellectual; and also that some references to a subject or content may be taken as metaphors for a whole kind” (114). As Rees (2003a) notes: ‘Genre’, then, is an inherently unstable and mutable category, particularly so in the unsettled years of the mid-seventeenth century. Generic 95 parameters are constantly changing and, over time, an inverse relationship often emerges between a text’s utility, and its literariness. Put another way, early modern scientific theories may since have been entirely discredited on scientific grounds, but retain a poetic or literary quality. Cavendish’s play with genre is interpretative: highly imaginative and creative. In her hand genre is less a prescriptive force than a modulation which alters the generic code form which it is a departure, or of which it is a version (10). Even if Ryan (1991a) recognises that epistemic worlds seen from the outside might be considered possible worlds from which “we not only form beliefs about reality [but] also reflect on the possible worlds created by the mental acts of other individuals” (20), she assumes a relatively stable notion of the actual world for indexical reasons. Of course, an indexical theory accounts for the way in which textual actual worlds internalise modal systems which must necessarily be different from those governing the actual world, but that seems to be valid for a restrictive set of texts. Ronen (1994) also warned that each culture assumes relative criteria of classification, thus “some texts are viewed as fictional but only relative to texts that are considered within this same context to be non-fictional” (10). Doležel (1998) also warns us that fictional worlds “are not constrained by requirements of verisimilitude, truthfulness or plausibility; they are shaped by historically changing aesthetic factors, such as artistic aims, typological and generic norms, period and individual styles” (19). Much has been written already on Cavendish’s experimental writing style, blending genres, spaces and textual strategies, normally in ways that take literary experimentation 96 Fables, antiquated Romances, and the Traditions of Nurses and old Women, that he may fall in with our natural Prejudices and humour those Notions which we have imbibed in our Infancy. For, otherwise, he will be apt to make his Fairies talk like People of his own Species, and not like other Setts of Beings, who converse with different Objects, and think in a different manner from that of Mankind (570). Addison thus acknowledges the close connection between the imaginative faculty and a form of storytelling which finds no pattern in nature to imitate, and therefore must rely upon purely fanciful content to secure its referentiality. This somehow hearkens back to folk tales and romance, to a kind of collective mental world rooted in the margins of social life, which both points towards generic formation and a gendered audience. To Pask (2013), it is the transformation of religious enthusiasm associated with Puritanism into a purely poetic inspiration which “allowed the emergent discourse of aesthetics to claim poetic fictions and fancies as objects of secular knowledge” (58), a process in which Cavendish (alongside other Royalist writers like Herrick and Lovelace) played a bridging role. By the turn of the century, the fairy way of writing identified with the popular elements of late Elizabethan folk beliefs was “aligned with neither empirical actuality nor religious truth, neither modern (novelistic) fiction nor inspiration” (66). Furthermore, the identification between fancy and a feminine readership, certainly inherited from the element of romance and the set of moral concerns it raised, is made explicit both in Dryden’s preface (specifically by identifying the Duchess of Monmouth as the ideal reader of such stories) and in Cavendish’s prologue entitled “To All Noble and Worthy Ladies” in Poems, and Fancies (1653), in which she asserts that: 103 Poetry – which is built upon fancy – women may claim as a work most belonging most properly to themselves. For I have observed that their brains work usually in a fantastical motion, as in their several and various dresses (in their many and singular choices of clothes and ribbons and the like), in their curious shadowing and mixing of colors, in their wrought works and diverse sorts of stitches they employ their needle in, and many other curious things they make […] And thus their thoughts are employed perpetually with fancies. For fancy goeth not so much by rule and method as by choice. And if I have chosen my silk with fresh colors and matched them in good shadows, although the stitches be not very true, yet it will please the eye (61). In this sense, Rosenthal (1996) sees that amidst traditional accounts of the rise of fictionality in connection with originality, Cavendish’s championing of a singular voice may appear as a sort of displaced Romanticism, but it begins to make sense if seen as “a gendered alternative to imitation as well as a privileged assertion of the capacity to possess” (64). This correlation between the fairy way of writing, the faculty of fancy and early modern visions of femininity interests us inasmuch as Cavendish both provided philosophical insights into the imagination, caught in the tension between the natural-philosophical (as well as allegorical) quest for meaning and the temporal joys of storytelling. For Cavendish, this sometimes does not merely imply fictionality, but 63 Similarly, in another of her prefatory materials (“An Epistle to Lady Toppe”), Cavendish integrates all 63 the characteristics we have seen in discourses on the imagination to the mental structure of women: “For the truth is, our sex hath so much waste time (having but little employments), which makes our thoughts run wildly about” (64). As Maclean (1980) notes, the prevailing humoural scheme understood the imagination “to be stronger in woman because cold and moist objects are subject to metamorphosis”, and thus, “another form of metamorphosis is found in mental changeability, manifesting itself in deceit, inconstancy, lack of stamina, infidelity, but also inventiveness” (42). 104 also an actual philosophical inquiry into a vision of nature as “a force that can easily transcend human understanding” (Capoferro, 87-88). Pask’s secularised vision of the fantastic as a release from the burdens of the emerging logico-analytical or “probabilistic” worldview is not yet that of Cavendish’s fairyland. In fact, Cavendish’s fairies, hybrids and supernatural beings creep up in contexts of natural philosophy, but in any case we should be aware of the complaints that Doodey (1996) has levied against most accounts of the development of prose fiction, the view of the “absorption into literary theory of the idea of ‘progress’ […] as well as Enlightenment ideas about emancipation”, producing critical accounts in which “the Novel replaces the Romance as Reason replaces Superstition, and as the Model T-Ford replaces the horse and carriage” (3). To Capoferro (2010) the emergence of the fantastic has to be understood in terms of the appearance of a “compound structure, overtly incorporating empirical and non-empirical elements” (85). Generic readings of the fantastic have abounded since Addison’s initial remarks. For instance, Todorov’s (1973) famous approach in terms of a “hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (25) falls under that which Jackson (1981) identified as a tendency to define fantasy “understood through its relation to realism” (26). On the contrary, Hume (1984) identified the mimetic and the fantastic as twin impulses in the Western construction of literature. Both rest in a continuum and their interplay has shaped four main stages of literature: from a common mythology to the realisation that a faithful representation of reality is itself illusory, a void which fantasy can help us circumvent. She claims that “fantasy is not a separate or indeed a separable strain, but rather an impulse as 105 significant as the mimetic impulse”, but ultimately defines it as “the deliberate departure from the limits of what is usually accepted as real and normal” (xii). However, her approach is key in moving away from understanding fantasy in terms of genre and toward a view of fantasy as a textual mode, in the same vein that Fuchs (2004) understood the romance as “a concatenation of both narratological elements and literary topoi, including idealization, the marvelous, narrative delay, wandering, and obscure identity” (9). This shift from generic expectations to textual strategies is particularly useful for delimiting a poetics of fancy in the seventeenth century, when such generic formations are themselves being renegotiated. McKeon (2002) already points toward a dialectical construction of the emergence of new textual forms that would crystallise in the eighteenth-century novel, itself a set of confluences which cut across socio-political and epistemological divides. Take for instance Rankin’s (2007) remarks on tragicomedy as a form which “does not describe a move from one form to the next”, but rather as a “properly hybrid form which remains deliberately undecided” (198). Genre-based approaches to fantasy such as Todorov’s (1973) tend to become the more slippery when dealing with periods in which generic construction is always a critical reconstruction. Even so, Hume’s (1984) argument still rests ultimately on what Doležel (1998) terms “one-world semantics”. Even if she categorises the fantastic by dividing the referential world between world-1 (“the world surrounding the author”) and world-2 (“that enfolding the reader”), pointing toward a definition which centers on interplay between the actual and the possible (rather than a departure from conventional mimesis), by defining it as departing from consensus reality she falls prey to the misconception related to the fact that “verisimilitude is a requirement of a certain 106 poetics of fiction, not a universal principle of fiction making” (Doležel, 17). To Martin (2019), possible-worlds semantics “allows us to move beyond the metaphors of ‘world’ and ‘otherworld’ that fantasy critics sometimes use simply to denote other images of our world” (210). Here, I propose to use a possible-worlds approach to a moment where a set of textual strategies seem to coexist in a state of flux. Not only the category of fantasy as a distinct label poses all sorts of taxonomical problems when we try to envelop it within generic bounds such as “fairy tales” and “romances”, but in the context of a poetics deeply informed by a natural philosophical inquiry (and within Cavendish’s own fallibilistic epistemology) this will result inevitably in further confusion. Ryan & Bell (2019) thus claim that “in fantasy, authors show what could be and could happen according to the probabilities and necessities of their own making” (34). This points to what Semino (1997) understands as one of the main problems of any possible-worlds approach to fiction, namely that the notion of actual world, which is taken as the privileged standpoint from which fictionality is constructed or accessed, is itself an unstable notion: “what is taken as ‘actual’ is not an absolute notion, but is dependent on historical, cultural, and ideological factors” (84). Moreover, the relationship between fiction and non-fiction is barely accounted for, as “fantastic worlds can be used to comment directly on the actual world” (84), and sometimes, real world institutions are keen to ground their existence in fiction. For Doležel (1998), 64 ultimately, the fantastic involves that “the visitor has to learn the encyclopedia of the In fact, Joseph Glanvill referred to Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626) both in his address “To the Royal 64 Society” included in Scepsis Scientifica (1665): “You really are what former Ages could contrive but in wish and Romances; and Solomons House in the NEW ATLANTIS, was a Prophetick Scheam of the ROYAL SOCIETY” (23). Likewise, in Plus Ultra (1668) he stressed that Bacon “desired, and form’d a SOCIETY of Exprimenters in a Romantick Model” (88). 107 alien world” (179). Observing the interconnection between possible worlds and the seventeenth-century debate on the plurality of worlds also helps us contextualise the historical emergence of the fantastic, less to be seen as a conscious departure form consensus reality and rather as the complex interplay of processes of secularisation and reenchantment through fiction. As Doležel (1989) points out, “possible-worlds semantics does not exclude from its scope fictional worlds similar or analogous to the actual world; at the same time, it includes without difficulty the most fantastic worlds, far removed from, or contradictory to ‘reality’” (231). As Demers (2005) puts it, “such a cunning amalgam of high and low styles, of realistic and consciously fantastic representations, of obliviousness and concern about reception, is the ideal embodiment of Cavendish’s own prolific and provocative art” (234). The main problem one encounters when approaching Cavendish through possibleworlds semantics is of course her blending of philosophical, scientific and literary strategies, which poses certain problems as to the consistency of such “worlds”. What her early atomistic poetry or her later romanticised utopia precisely shows, are competing notions and projections of what the actual world might or might not be, that is, what might be possible or necessary for the actual world. As Maitre (1983) points out, “if fantasy worlds operate at the limits of intelligibility, one of their functions is to bring home to use that the actual world also operates at the limits of intelligibility” (75). Even if approaching genre through accessibility relations still depends on a certain degree of relativity, as “our opinion of physical laws and of taxonomic classes are less unanimous” (46), it does not capture the ways in which philosophical worldviews compete among themselves in what Shapiro (1985) has identified as “an increasing 108 dissatisfaction with the traditional pattern that distinguished science or knowledge from opinion” (15). Treating philosophical discourses as a set of competing possible worlds of course involves recognising an inherent fictionality qua textual artefacts. In fact, in involves assuming one of the dreaded consequences of post-structuralism, the constructed and relative quality of fictional texts, against which possible-worlds theorists had framed their own approach. In this respect, Cunning (2016) takes 65 Cavendish’s “fallibilism” to be an idiosyncratic feature of her system, and reminds us of the fact that she remains fallibilistic “with respect to the philosophical theses that she defends” (11). However, Clucas (2003) contextualises this attitude by pairing it with those of Boyle, Glanvill and Charleton, concluding that “when viewed alongside other natural philosophers who cultivated an undogmatic and unsystematic approach, Margaret Cavendish’s works seem less problematic than they might at first appear” (200). One possible approach often pursued by Cavendish scholars is to maintain a strict demarcation between her explicitly philosophical and literary output, but that does not seem to work well. Maitre’s (1983) notion of genre-shift as “the process of replacing the coherence and plausibility expectations appropriate to one type of world by those of another type” (80) might account for some instances of Cavendish’s sheerly Even if, according to Lavocat (2016), “la théorie des mondes possibles appaure comme une alternative 65 aux impasses du formalisme” (378), we feel that possible-worlds semantics, as noted by Ronen (1994) and Fořt (2016) is more heavily indebted to structuralist semantics that some of their proponents might want to acknowledge, even if it “clearly remained at the fringes of narrative models” (Ronen, 168). In fact, Ryan (1991a) recognises that a modal semantic approach to literature originates within French structuralism, specifically in Todorov’s Grammaire du Décaméron (1969) and Bremond’s theory of “possible narratifs” in both “La logique des possibles narratifs” (1966) and Logique du récit (1973), as well as Greimas’ “Elements of a Narrative Grammar” (1977). These studies introduced “modalised” statements, that is, not actualised by the characters in any given work of fiction, realising that they might affect the development of the plot. Simultaneously, Fořt (2016) points to certain developments in the Prague structuralist school, particularly in the works of Felix Vodička, who develops the notion of outer world, “not only a material environment but also the whole social, mental and ideological atmosphere in which literary characters and also plots take place” (98). 109 experimental manipulation of reader’s expectations, her blending of several textual strategies etc. In this sense, what this study seeks to follow is precisely Sherman’s (1994) intuition that “if one can speak of a ‘self’ anterior to a text, one must also, as in current literary theory, approach the self as a construct entirely of language”, a crux in which “Cavendish opens up the possibility of both” (185). As Berger (1988) points out, the truth-claims made by the poet depend ultimately on establishing alternative conditions where they might be met, that is, “the logical first moment of fiction consists in a framing or bounding gesture of this sort” which establishes “the counterfactual nature of fiction” (8). Ultimately, as Sarkar (1994) points out, “because Fancy is predicated on ‘Choice’, she can perfectly align the ‘Fantasticall motion’ of the brain and the woman writer, who seems best suited to take advantage of variety” (290), thus actively engaging in a poetic exercise based on the multiplication and juxtaposition of different realms of referentiality. 110 3. Poems, and Fancies (1653). Cavendish’s Poems, and Fancies (1653) perhaps proves more than anything else in her corpus that a privileging of fancy results in a proliferation of referential domains, which in turn generate various lenses for describing and hypothesising about the actual world. Her poetry manipulates fancy’s capacity for multiplying spaces in which possible images of the natural world combine with allegorical and fictional images which in turn serve to enrich her own theories of matter and motion, pointing both to the flimsiness of those imaginary spaces and of their possibility contained within the very idea of Nature. Scott-Baumann (2013) shows precisely how discussions on the nature of language and observation imply that her model of authorship “emerges from a specific moment in seventeenth-century literary, scientific, and philosophical culture”, in a way that enabled her to present “her ‘fancies’ as naturally generated by her brain” (59), within a poetics of variety that tends to multiply versions of the actual world. Partner (2018) points out that mid-century definitions of fancy also refer us to “an impromptu musical composition – an idea that resonates with Cavendish’s unrevised verses”, as well as with her later section entitled Fancies, which “consists of extended figurative comparisons” suggesting “that she associated the concept in particular with the nonpropositional inventiveness of poetic metaphor” (58). By privileging the workmanships of the fancy and “pushing the limits of what is possible, the fictions Fancy creates also create knowledge about the world” (Smyth, 126), broadening our notions of order and Nature to encompass unexpected relations and non-perceivable phenomena, which might contain alternative models of organisation. 111 Most early scholarship assumed that Cavendish’s first publication fully engages with the 1640s revival of Epicureanism, going as far as Kargon (1966), who identifies her as one of its entry points into British philosophy. Cunning (2019) recognises an early engagement, where “she flirts with the view that the universe consists of indivisible atoms and void” (11), even when only around 45 pages of the first section are devoted to the discussion of atoms. Yet, as Begley (2016) notes, “the supposed Epicurean-Lucretian atomism of Cavendish’s first publication has guided scholarly outlooks on her philosophical output” (34). Today, most scholars since Battigelli 66 (1998) identify a progressive disenchantment with atomism as an explanatory framework, which grew out of the problems of vacuum, motion and transference of qualities, as well as her interest in medical theory “within a philosophical framework which opposes itself to the simple mechanism of ‘classical atomism’” (Clucas, 260). However, this allowed her to retain atomism as a metaphor for the disintegration of the body politic in a very much Hobbesian fashion. 67 Contrary to Siegfried (2018), who suggestively sets Cavendish in dialogue with Lucretius and even identifies some parallel structures between her work and De rerum natura (1st c.), Begley (2016) argues that many of the members in her milieu had absorbed atomistic ideas eclectically, through a different number of texts like George Schiebinger (1991) for instance conflated her early atomism with her later views, claiming that for her 66 “nature is composed of an infinite number of ‘intelligent’ atoms, each with self-knowledge and selfpropulsion” (7). On the contrary, Bowerbank (1984) reads her disenchantment with atomism as a “response to the more restrictive intellectual climate of the Restoration” (399), overlooking the emendations she made as early as Philosophical Fancies (1653), and the repudiation of the theory in “A Condemning Treatise on Atomes”, appended to her Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655). Other scholars like Semler (2012) reject the disenchantment hypothesis, and defend that “vitalism pervades not merely the latter but also the former” (355). For Battigelli (1998), her fascination with atomism “was less an interest in physical theories of matter 67 than a fascination with a metaphor that served to explain political and psychological conflict; by questioning the validity of sensory perception” (49). In the same sense, Goldberg (2009) suggests that even if Cavendish is not strictly Epicurean, “even when she breaks entirely from atomism, she is still dealing with issues raised by atomism” (149). 112 illuminate conceits and supply explanations of natural-philosophical phenomena. In this sense, Dodds (2021) speculates that “collectively, however, these poems are about nothing less than the nature of reality” (140), but their ephemerality and organisation also qualify as to the hypothetical nature of Cavendish’s versification o scientific theories, and the tacit acceptance that if they prove to be quickly discarded, at least they might offer the reader some ‘variety. 75 In addition, such exercises are re-conceptualised within a wider framework where a general impulse of variety becomes the governing principle of her verse collection. Chalmers (2003) compares the use of variety with Herrick’s Hesperides, inasmuch as both “engage a familiar paradox in which variety is regarded not as the root of disintegration but as an essential basis of order” (134). In Herrick’s poetics, Schwenger (1979) identified a principle whereby “a wide variety of parts is brought together in the context of their common quality […]; unlike a real mosaic, the individual pieces or parts never blend into one entity, but assert their diversity and multiplicity at every turn” (46). As Lobis (2015) observes, in Cavendish’s view “the greater chain of being remains intact; it is not only unbroken but also unbreakable” (73). Here we do not find Donne’s laments for a broken ontological order, but a tacit acceptance of the principle of concordia discors, order through chaos, which also informs her wider views of Nature in terms of harmonious motions. For Boyle (2017), Cavendish’s natural philosophy “and her ethical and political views were all informed by an underlying concern with order”, inasmuch as “order is achieved when the parts of Nature behave in certain designated ways”, and, even though “the parts of Nature possess the freedom to choose Of course, this is also part of her strategy to anticipate a negative reception of her work, which she 75 deploys in a significant number of prefaces and statements knowing that in printing poems concerned with natural philosophy she had “usurped male preserves” (Walker, 26). 119 not to follow those principles, they typically do behave as expected” (8). Whichever views we might want to attribute, the fact remains that Cavendish included as many possible views and counter-views as possible, revealing “the multifaceted nature of thought or imagination, the ‘fancy’ which she regards as essential nourishment for the pleasures of variety offered by poetry” (Chalmers, 125). Maitre (1983), who explored accessibility relations between possible worlds, made some interesting remarks on the parentage between fictional distancing and hypothesismaking, placing special emphasis on the fact that both activities involve the use of imagination in “positing non-actual states of affairs which are components of possible non-actual worlds” (40). However, Ryan (1991) is hesitant as to the applicability of a possible-worlds framework to lyric poetry, on the grounds that “in antiquity, poetry was often closer to modern scientific discourse than to any kind of fiction” (84). Thus, Poems, and Fancies would fall under the category of “literary non-narrative nonfiction”, a classification which really amounts to mechanisms of canon formation. Her 76 argument echoes Sidney’s hesitations whether to include natural and moral philosophy, as well as history, written in verse into the definition of poetry as such: The second kind of them that deal with matters philosophical, either moral, as Tyrtaeus, Phocylides, Cato, or natural, as Lucretius and Virgil’s Georgics; or astronomical, as Manilius and Pontanus; or historical, as Lucan: which who mislike, the fault is in their judgement quite out of She also includes examples such as La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims (1665) or Pascal’s Pensées (1669), as 76 well as “some classics of science or philosophy honored as literature, such as the writings of Freud and Rousseau” (1), while taking De rerum natura and Virgil’s Georgics (c. 29 BC) as texts that do not involve an act of fictional recentring, that is, neither do they constitute an act of pretense nor involve the positing of a possible world. In Ryan’s (1991a) parlance, “both works present a version of AW (TRW = AW), conceived by a member of AW” (84). 120 taste, and not in the sweet food of sweetly uttered knowledge […] But because this second sort is wrapped within the fold of proposed subject, and takes not the course of his own invention, whether they properly be poets or no let grammarians dispute, and go to the third, indeed right poets, of whom chiefly this question ariseth: betwixt whom and these second is such a kind of difference as betwixt the meaner sort of painters, who counterfeit only such faces as are set before them, and the more excellent, who having no law but wit, bestow that in colours upon you which is fittest for the eye to see (80). For Sidney, true poets deal with the embellishment of nature in the light of art (Ryan’s “act of pretense”), nor mere description but mimesis, the positing of a textual world which expands our knowledge and experience of the actual world. In this sense, Miroslav Červenka (2006) did consider the idea of fictional world in lyric poetry on the grounds of an “intuitive notion of world as something stratified, variable, articulated – in short as a complex” (241). This idea rests on Doležel’s (1989, 1998) notion of a 77 one-person world: “if there is just one agent in the world […] then this agent’s domain is equivalent to the fictional world” (234), which Červenka couples with the authentication function of lyric poetry being automatic “on the grounds of the act of verbalization only” (242). For Hayot (2012), the notion of literary world can be applied to lyric poetry in that “its world is simply the total unity created by the arrangements of its references (or refusals, in some case, to refer), and by the generic necessities of its season words, turning points, and syllabic length” (44). Against Ryan’s banishment of Červenka’s posthumously published paper, “Discovering the Fictional Worlds of Lyric Poetry” (2006) 77 expanded on his 2003 monograph Fikční světy lyriky [The Fictive Worlds of the Lyric]. 121 lyric poetry on the grounds that its semantic domain does not constitute a modal universe, Červenka resorts to an altered version of Wolterstorff’s (1980) notion of “strands”: I see the “strand” as a state of affairs in the mental world of a subject, a state that has been delimited by the text of a poem from the predominant darkness of the presupposed subjective fictional world, illuminated for a moment and exposed to the reader’s observation, empathic experiencing, play, and contemplation. The result of such an activity is not the realization of all possible inferences but a controlled, deliberative extension of this illuminated area; only to be added are elements that have been immediately required by the elements explicitly present and by the rules of the given genre and, generally, relevant rules of poetics (245). Thus, Červenka conceptualises lyric poetry as a momentary glance at the one-person world of the speaker, whose mental states offer a peripheral description which selects which entities will remain known or hidden. Thus, strands evolve into “zones” being gradually illuminated and authorised by speaking voice of the poem. As Ronen (1994) puts it, “dramatic texts as well as lyrical poetry and narrative prose all construct worlds or fragments of worlds” (13), which is further complicated by what Semino (1997) stresses as an inherent quality of poetry, that is “to remain ambiguous as to its faithfulness to the actual-world detail, particularly when it comes to the relationship between the I of a poem and its real-life author” (95). If we invert Doležel’s (1998) claims that “the authors conceive the fictional world first as an extensional structure 122 […] then, by writing a text of a particular texture, they give an intensional shape to the world” (142-3), we can conclude that poetry presupposes an intensional construction as something prior to any world-building, and the latter can only be inferred either through the partial zones which are illuminated or through the available encyclopediae providing interpretative guidelines. Thus, while one might be tempted to observe an emerging world-structure, we should note that in lyric poetry “new constellations of shapes are projected, often without any respect for the consequences for the coherence of the fictional world” (Červenka, 246). Cavendish’s poetics do not sit comfortably with Sidney’s understanding of art as an enhancement of nature, as her approach “represents an internally consistent poetics that echoes a clearly discernible sense of the importance of invention in both classical and Renaissance thought” (Chalmers, 132). Thus, fancy is thus not only connected with the imaginative construction of the world as such, but also conceived of as the faculty which enables us to rise from unverifiable sense-data and provide general (if hypothetical) explanations and analogies of what might lie beyond. However, at this stage, she is still privileging free play and an open assimilation of the ideas discussed in her milieu. Thus, Cavendish makes sure her poetic practice not only describes but mirrors Nature’s infinite capacity for generation and fertile recombination, precisely by embracing its radical pluralism. This pluralism and anti-propositional quality are perfectly suited to explore modal content in a constant act of perspectival multiplication throughout her poems. My contention is that, if we take her “proliferating style” (Stark, 279) as a corollary of the privileging of the fancy in poetic creations, we might attest to the coexistence of several textual strategies and modal systems, constituting in turn 123 several textual worlds throughout her volume. This coexistence partially explains Cavendish’s refinement of her mechanistic-atomistic hypotheses later in the same year. Seeing Poems, and Fancies less as an exposition of mid seventeenth-century atomism and rather as a compendium, a “cabinet of curiosities” of sorts, also reflects her own eclectic reception of philosophical and literary materials. For the purposes of this chapter, different types of possible worlds within Poems, and Fancies have been identified even if they remain in a state of flux, often showing overlapping characteristics that we might classify as speculative, allegorical and fantastical. 3. 1. Speculative poems. One of such worlds in Cavendish’s miscellany, perhaps its fundamental gesture, is the set of “speculative” possible worlds whereby the world of the poem pretends to be equivalent to the actual world, setting alethic and epistemic constraints which articulate a natural-philosophical description according to available model encyclopediae. These gestures of speculative world-building can be observed in sections 3-91 of the First Book in Siegfried’s 2018 edition, which uses Cavendish’s third revised edition (1668) as copy text. For Sarkar (2014), her poetry (and specifically that which engages in encyclopaedic and eclectic modes of presentation) can be thus conceived as a discourse “that produces idealized and possible fictions, which furnish unique methods and replicable models for action in the real world” (20), deploying her idiosyncratic understanding of atomism “to generate a comprehensive theory of possible worlds that emerges from her ‘natural phancies’” (291). In the speculative sections of Poems, and 124 Fancies we might assume that the I of the poem is analogous to the I of the natural philosopher, who exposes a possible version of the actual world. Speculative texts, regardless of their form, involve keeping the actual world as its centre, therefore the main problem in adopting a possible-worlds approach for describing philosophical systems is that fictionality is not an inherent feature of philosophy (although it can be used for constructing exemplifying thought-experiments). Philosophy as a textual gesture consciously strives for coherence and referential accuracy, that is, full correspondence with the actual world, that is, “non fictional texts describe a system of reality whose center is occupied by the actual world” (555), even if indistinguishable from our representation of it. In this sense, Raghunath’s (2020) criticism of Ryan’s loose use of the label “actual world” seems most pertinent, as she uses “an already established term ‘actual world’ to refer to an individual’s subjective construction” (60). If we partially adopt, as Ryan herself does, a modal realist perspective and conceive the actual world as a non-privileged, ontologically separable possible world to which we can apply the same analytical tools, each inhabitant will possess their own epistemic world from which to reconstruct a tentative point of departure. This epistemic imbalance poses certain questions regarding the applicability of a possible-worlds approach to natural philosophy, which does not involve a conscious departure from the actual world, but the projection of a possible world which pretends to hold a rigid correspondence with it. In terms of strict accessibility, the poems pretend to maintain B/same inventory even when they also involve lifting E/natural laws (the atomist hypothesis postulates a different functioning of Nature), F/taxonomy (given that other philosophical systems deny the existence of atoms and vacuum) and H/analytical 125 (as phenomena like air or fire are described according to the atomist model). Seeing natural-philosophical discourse itself as a result of recentring involves that the possible world of a given system like atomism becomes the point of departure, which presupposes that the modal universe it creates holds true for our actual world. We cannot take these speculative worlds as a “conscious departure”, even when they involve specific intensional qualities due to the versification of their strict philosophical propositions, as it is precisely the actual world what is being negotiating. Through possible-worlds semantics, we might therefore identify scientific and philosophical theories as “discourses” without committing to the strict reduction of discourse to textuality. These recentred textual worlds attest to the possibility that the actual world might correspond to them, hence, we use the category of possible actual world to account for how “the poet is drawing an analogy of world-building rather than speaking about the particular elements themselves” (Sarkar, 295). As Maitre (1983) puts it, “when one uses hypothesis one is searching for an explanation which will ‘fit’ some actual state of affairs […]; these pre-determined expectations have been formed as a result of the total picture we have of the possibilities for the world in question” (25). This common ground between fiction and hypothesis serves to contest Ryan’s rigid use of an actual world and her radical separation between fictional and non-fictional gestures. Even so, the faculty of fancy is thus pivotal to its sheer expositive qualities, because as Rees (2003a) points out, “in loosely Baconian terms, Lucretian atomist doctrine in the mid seventeenth century is a philosophy which must remain unable to be proved, since it is 126 experimentally unverifiable” (58), that is, to the construction of possibility. As Barbour 78 (1998) observes, “the very pursuit of invisible parts was known to be difficult and abstract, ironically parallel to the search for those occult mysteries and subtleties that atomism was in large meant to supplant” (25). The new hypothesis required a kind of mathematical reasoning which Cavendish masterfully combined with associative conceits, as exemplified in poems like “The Circle of Honesty Squared”, which discusses human virtues in the terms of Henry Billingsley’s tridimensional models included in his 1570 translation of Euclid. Seeing the atomism of her collection as one kind of available encyclopaedic material also reaches out to her probabilistic approach, and her eclectic and wide-ranging absorption of theories in circulation. 79 In poems which are constructed like philosophical statements such as “All Things Are Governed by Atoms” or “In the Center Atoms Never Separate”, we find no modal content other than that which is bound to necessity, inasmuch as lines like “Thus life and death, and young and old, / Are as the several atoms hold” (98) can be seen in terms of positing a textual world which pretends to represent the way things work. In Doležel’s (1998) terminology, this world would be non-personal: that is, it would be based solely on a world of states (WS) and a nature force (NS) which “causes specific changes in the states of the world, called nature events (N-events) […]; a model of What emerges is that Cavendish’s reevaluation of fancy might also be a strategy to exploit is negative 78 connotations to argue in favour of women’s venture into print. Rees (2003b) explains that “Cavendish’s writing is seen as the natural, almost inevitable, consequence of having an active imagination which might turn to less proper thoughts and activities if not occupied” (173). This yields a striking parallel with the role of the faculty in Leviathan, whose reduction of the social contract to its very constituents must be necessarily imaginative, as the body politic cannot be dissected at will, nor can the observer be detached from the matter of observation. Her involvement with Galenic and Harveian hypotheses in currency amongst the members of the Royal 79 College of Physicians is much more prominent in Philosophical Fancies (1653) and the subsequent first edition of her Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655), which reprinted the first 71 pages of the former. It testifies to one of her reasons for dropping atomism as a natural-philosophical model, as it seemed “reductive and incapable of accounting for the complexities of animal psychology and physiology” (Begley, 90). 127 actual nature, the universe of discourse of natural science and the world of nature poetry, art, and music” (32). Worlds generated by these poems would be, according to him, “below the threshold of narrativity” (33), as persons operating in worlds are what generate stories. This possible actual world is furnished by atoms, void and properties like the shapes of each atom corresponding to the different set of elements. One could even say that Cavendish’s speculative poetry would involve, in Ryan’s terminology, an accessibility relation seemingly based on lifting C/expanded inventory, but it involves further criteria inasmuch as the hypothesis is supposed to shed light on members directly transferred from the actual world, for instance, fire would be composed of atoms which are “long, sharp at each end” (15) in “Of Atoms That Make Flame”. At first glance, these worlds seem unpopulated, consisting merely of atoms and void, but we can at least posit the category of person (P) as embodied in the speaking voice that authenticates the facts presented, following Ryan’s (1991a) idea that “every text has an implied speaker (defined as the individual who fulfils the felicity conditions of the textual speech acts)” (25). This voice might be located within the text’s own referential system, thus constructing a dyadic epistemic world in which the speaking voice serves as a mediator. Thus, epistemic operators constrain the world of the poem, whose alethic values will be fragmentarily illuminated in zones according to the idea of an “interplay with the fictional world as independent semantic factors” (Červenka, 246). Modal content features most prominently when she assumes that “everything is thought and that thought is the tangible figment of its own imagination” (Stevenson, 144). This manner of proceeding can be observed in “The Motion of Thoughts”, which Sherman (1994) characterises as involving a universe which is “plastic, reimagined as a 128 order in the textual world is what animates Cavendish’s experiments on metaphysical wit in much of the Third Book. Thus, as she “transforms an atomistic understanding of the universe into a theory of poetic world-making, she uses atoms to explain the origins or operations of a range of things, from sickness to death to the sun and stars” (Sarkar, 292). As Barbour (1998) explains, the early Stuart revival of atomism refigured a theory which was “so controversial and malleable as to be subjected to allegory, appropriation, and myth – in reverse of the demystifying Lucretian claim that mythological personifications of the earth are useful yet finally trivial next to the ‘true’ understanding of atomic phenomena” (27). In Canfield’s (2003) analysis of “On a Melting Beauty”, he draws attention to the ways that both her and Katherine Phillips “infuse some of their supposed ‘new rationalism’ with striking metaphysical conceits”, which suggests an “insistence on female agency in a fundamentally materialistic world” (41). Waller (2020) also draws attention to this metaphysical influence in a series of “mixed metaphors that sound like parodies of Crashaw’s blending of blood, ice, tears and dust” (236). A. J. Smith’s (1991) seminal study on the metaphysical and metaphorical wit of seventeenth-century poetry lays the ground for an understanding of “wit” as claiming “metaphysical truth to the extent that it seizes upon the links between created things, coupling objects from distant categories of being and even different orders” (19). He distinguishes it from a chiefly continental metaphorical variant which “simply measures the distance between one order of being and another” (83). In analysing the poetry of Donne, Vaughan and Herbert, Smith (1991) draws on Walter Benjamin’s understanding of Baroque allegory in his Origin of the German Trauerspiel (1925). For Benjamin, 135 seventeenth-century allegory differs substantially from its Medieval counterpart, in that “in the Baroque, nature is considered as functioning for the purpose of expressing its meaning, for the emblematic presentation of its sense, which, as an allegorical presentation, remains irreparably severed from its historical realization” (179). Baroque allegory does not stand as a symbol for something, but rather “in it, transience is not so much signified, allegorically presented, as – itself signifying – presented as allegory” (254), constructing meaning in terms of a derelict referent which can be flimsily observed at the intersection of two orders of being brought together, but never resolved into a compact unity. Thus, our capacity to “perceive and relate the properties of things 82 across the categories of matter, as it were by repossessing ourselves of correspondences which are already occultly there” (44), entails that these connections are sound at the level of the “world” which can be partially reconstructed when they are yoked together. As Zimbardo (1986) puts it, “because the universe is seen in terms of structures it is possible for the human craftsman to imitate the shape of reality itself” (4-5), the basic assumption being that there is an underlying structure attainable through our connective capacity, which roughly equates to the fancy when tempered with judgement. This general assumption “that the creation is ordered in a universal network of correspondences between the qualities of things which stand in unlike categories of Both Benjamin (1925) and Smith (1991) trace this undestanding of early modern allegorical forms to 82 the reception of Egyptian hieroglyphs in mid sixteenth-century Italy, marked by the scheme of the Hieroglyphica Horapollonis. The Hieroglyphica dates from the fourth century and was first published in Venice by Aldus Manutius in 1505. Hieroglyphs were considered by scholars like Bolzanio a sort of condensed “hidden truths” to be interpreted according to the precepts of hermetic, cabbalistic and neoplatonic natural magic, in the belief “that everything in the cosmos is mysteriously connected to everything else, and thus to the divine principle” (Cocking, 38). According to Praz (1964), the fashion for hieroglyphs amongst Florentine humanists like Ficino also helped popularise the emblem with the fashion of the motto, following the “crystallization of ancient ethics in those collections of proverbs and maxims (chiefly Cato’s Moral Distichs, Erasmus’ Adagia and Stobaeus’ Anthology) (25). Collie (1973) also points at Alciato, which “began simply by combining two short forms, adage with epigram”, but informs us that it was his publisher “who conceived the idea of adding figures, or woodcut pictures, to make the idea of the emblem easier to grasp for readers with small Latin and less Greek” (36). 136 being” (Smith, 37) led to a sort of vogue for the use of “wit” understood as the capacity to reconstruct a fragmented totality, which can be appreciated for instance in the development and popularisation of the emblem book. However, according to Bicanová 83 (2013), “in the nearly three decades following 1615 wit mutated more and more toward association with anagrams, acrostics, quips and other poetic forms” (13). The emblem tradition represented by Francis Quarles’ Emblemes (1634) is significant as it shows concerns about the role of the imagination and the interpretative faculties of the reader while also assuming the imagination to be “the recombinant faculty in the brain, for its primary role and purpose is to incorporate images from the sense and the memory and mingle them to create newness” (Smid, 154). The faculty of imagination becomes key in the interpretation of poetic and visual riddles in the way it allows to assume that the possible actual world and its surrounding possible worlds share A/properties and B/ same inventory, inasmuch as, even if fragmentary, its is an ontopoetic exercise which pretends to recompose a stable point of reference whose existence cannot be guaranteed. Rather, the reference is constructed in its intension, in the very poetic exercise of “symilizing” and uniting the fragments, resulting in a quite precarious picture of the actual world. On the contrary, as Sawday (1995) suggests, Cavendish’s “symilizing” poems are “not an appeal to Neoplatonic reasoning (though it could certainly be read as such)” Not without reason, Praz (1964) named the metaphor “that mother of the emblem” (17), whose 83 genealogy can be traced back to Castiglione’s praise of acutezza recondita [recondite wit] and “as a humanistic attempt to give a modern equivalent of the hieroglyphs” (23). This understanding of hidden truths attainable to wit survived as late as Dryden’s preface to Tyrannick Love (1670): “By the Harmony of words we elevate the mind to a sense of Devotion, as our solemn Musick, which is inarticulate Poesie, does in Churches […] which while it is charmed in a silent joy of what it sees and hears, is struck at the same time with a secret veneration of things Celestial” (109). As Praz (1964) observes, English seventeenth-century poetry “abounds in conceits, and, on the other hand, the greatest collectors of emblem books were later to be found in England” (Praz, 157). 137 (254), however in poems like “Man’s Head Symilized to the Globe of the World”, her description of a possible actual world, in this case with respect to her view of the human mind, is barely definable in extensional terms. Poems like “A Comparison between Gold and the Sun” incorporate common Royalist tropes which refer us to the doctrine of correspondences, whereby the scala naturae allows for shared sets of properties among the prime members of each domain of Creation and facilitating the reconstruction of a possible actual world, for instance by appropriating the voice of gold itself: “And as the sun is chief of planets high, / So on the Earth, the chiefest thing am I” (262). Other connections are less constrained to the purpose of defining her own natural philosophy, for instance “The Action of the Mind Similized” exploits the link between Nature’s fertility and that of the imaginative faculty itself: “Imaginations high, like cedars, show, / Where leaves of new inventions thick do grow” (256), which are in turn nurtured by thoughts as “gentle winds” and contemplation, causing the leaves of imagination to sprout. A less rationalistic view of the mind is offered in “Fancies Similized to Gnats”, which depicts the faculty not as a unified centre, but as an incontrollable swarm whose constant buzzing forces the poet to seek a cure: “Naught can take out this burning heat and pain, / But pen and ink, to write on paper plain” (261). The section composed by “The Circle of the Brain Cannot Be Squared”, “The Circle of Honesty Squared”, “The Same Circle Squared in Prose” and “The Trisection” develops such connections into long disquisitions on virtue. Cavendish presents the old mathematical problem of squaring the circle: “But none hath yet by demonstrations found, / The way by which to square a circle round” (144). The poem combines the 138 speculative and the allegorical, serving her to display her familiarity with the debates of the age. The speaking voice constructs a possible actual world in which geometricians like Euclid and Archimedes have tried to solve the squaring of the circle, but it has been all in vain in spite of their operations. Cavendish then provides her own explanation for the impossibility of such task: because the brain is round and its figures cannot agree among themselves, epistemic operators articulate this kind of world in which the problem is defined as impossible, and yet a solution is still sought after: “For such is man’s curiosity, and mind. / To seek for what which hardest is to find” (134). The subsequent sections fuse this speculative inquiry with a moral allegory illustrating that even when we cannot “square” the circle, we can do so with the moral virtues. In “The Circle of Honesty Squared” she identifies each ends of the figure with a cardinal virtue, whose intersections represent wisdom and truth. She exposes the underlying connection through a change of register in “The Same Circle Squared in Prose” and “The Trisection”, in which she states her comparison in prose. This section, partially constructed against Hobbes’ and Descartes’ ideal of erecting a geometry of human psychology, signals a move away from a fragmented or broken state of nature, as it is the very process of squaring he circle of honesty which might break its continuity and integrity. As discussed above, Cavendish’s speculative worlds are presented in the two companion poems which open the First Book, “Nature Calls a Council” and “Death’s Endeavor to Hinder and Obstruct Nature”, which function as “both creation myth and theodicy” (Dodds, 143). Thus, these poems transcend their sheer natural philosophical quality, that is, they construct a hybrid mode between the speculative and the 139 allegorical, as nature forces are introduced as characters forming an agential constellation in which Nature, Motion, Life, Form, Matter, Death taking different, even antagonistic courses of action. For Hequembourg (2011), this tension “between a monist materialist ontology and metaphor is a legacy of Lucretius, whose poem celebrates and invokes great figures like Venus and the Earth Mother as it simultaneously seeks to eradicate every shred of ancient superstition” (70). Her moral dialogues, while also engaging in psychological speculations involving the positing of hypotheses whereby men and beasts might both be capable of reason, in which man is not the centre of creation etc., also point to a second set of “allegorical” possible worlds chiefly characterised by emitting axiological and deontic judgements. I call them allegorical inasmuch as they use personification allegory as a macrostructural organising principle, which establishes a special accessibility relation unable to project fixed deontic and axiological constraints onto the possible actual world but that is circumvented through allegory’s oblique referentiality. In order to assess her use of allegory, Pavel’s (1986) can prove quite useful in his characterisation of fiction as a salient structure, constructing “dual structures in which the primary universe does not enter into an isomorphism with the secondary universe, because includes entities and states of affairs that lack a correspondent in the former” (57). According to Begley (2016), by including her initial representation of atoms “before constructing allegories, analogies, and vignettes of the observable world – Cavendish hoped that her reader would keep in mind the material base that sustained many of these subsequent descriptions” (58). According to Ronen (1988), allegories construct worlds in which “universal statements (morals) are not pronouncements of the generalized meaning of the 140 allegorical text […], they rather form an integral part of the fictional world” (107). This bridges the gap between her more speculative outlook and the use of allegorical characters, but also points to the irreducibility of one to the other, as “to exist fictionally means to exist in different modes, ranks, and degrees” (Doležel, 147). For instance, in the lines “And Figure draw a circle, round and small / Where, in the midst, must stand a glassy ball, / Without convex, but inwardly concave, / And in its middle, a round small hole must have” (76-77), the character of Figure is conceived as an agent, which for Dodds (2021) depicts how “when Figure combines with Motion, Figure’s stasis becomes change and variety in an union that provides Motion with delight, and more importantly, ensures the productive and reproductive creativity of form itself” (146). Motion and Figure function as cosmological deities who decide to create the world, but it is to be noted that “the alethic (natural or supernatural) definition of a fictional world, is irrelevant to the ontological considerations of allegories” (Ronen, 112). Contrary to Ryan (1991), who sees allegory strictly in terms of accessibility relations, i.e. as flouting psychological credibility and categorial compatibility, allegory itself can be thought of as a minor salient structure, insomuch as it employs oblique relations of correspondence and impose its own sets of constraints. It is in this tension between a possible world 84 with fixed modal operators (Figure, Motion or Death stand for a single idea) and another where we find flux and narrative agency that both sets of modalities might pass between the threshold, strengthening “the power of representation in the process of In line with Max Black’s (1955) classic discussion of metaphor, if we describe a battle in terms of the 84 vocabulary of chess, “these latter terms determine a system of implications which will proceed to control my description of the battle”, for instance, “the enforced choice of the chess vocabulary will lead some aspects of the battle to be emphasized, others to be neglected, and all to be organized in a way that would cause much more strain in other modes of description” (288-89). Maitre (1983) also refers to Black’s view of metaphor in discussing how fantastic worlds and the actual world situate themselves in a “reciprocal interaction” (67). 141 comprehending natural causes” (Begley, 82). At first sight, the use of prosopopoeia for natural philosophical speculation might find itself at odds with the desire for clarity, but as Crawford (2017) observes, “the dynamics of disenchantment are in fact closely related to the dynamics of allegory” (11). For instance, commenting on Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1604), a Janus-faced play which looks back to its Medieval past while introducing modern strategies for character development, Pavel (1986) remarks that “ironically, allegory becomes a way of asserting the literality of the world; everything being just the way it is, with no possible alternative” (83). This dual movement in which allegory “yokes together the opposed orders of narrative and of significance” (Crawford, 17) is reflected in Cavendish’s use of allegory as a rhetorical strategy for the fixation meaning, that is, “as an authorizing vehicle for the dissemination of cultural values” (Melion & Ramakers, 13). Throughout Poems, and Fancies, allegory rests in a continuum and constitutes an intensional structuring device which ripples on the very possible actual world which tries to construct. Much as in speculative poetry, allegory functions by referring to a possible actual world, but we should also bear in mind that they “do construct worlds with a special ontological status since these worlds are universal in nature (a status superseding the distinction between the natural and the supernatural)” (Ronen, 99). For instance, “Nature’s Cabinet” inaugurates a section explicitly called Fancies, in which the connections of her “symilizing” poems are woven into richly saturated allegorical textures. In them, Nature is personified as “the defiantly modern mistress of a substantial estate, with her own agency, responsibilities, and power” (Cawthorne, 188). As Scott-Baumann (2013) observes, these fancies might be seen as “whimsical witty 142 poems, often extended similes about objects both natural and man-made”, in which she “seeks to ‘unlock’ Nature’s secrets by comparing them to familiar, man-made or domestic items” (35). For Partner (2018), this section entitled Fancies “consists of extended figurative comparisons, suggesting that she associated the concept in particular with the non-propositional inventiveness of poetic metaphor” (58). The sequence is followed by poems such as “Nature’s Oven”, “Nature’s Garden” or “Nature’s Prospect”, which construct a one-person world that presents its own intensional structuring, one which resists what Merchant (1980) saw as the gendered implications of post-Baconian science. In presenting Nature as a housewife engaged in domestic activities, Cavendish is putting forth a different view which does not imply “constraint of nature in the laboratory, dissection by hand and mind, and the penetration of hidden secrets” (171) which also rests on an implicit characterisation of Nature as female. Siegfried (2003) points out that, by endowing Nature with female qualities, she is alleviating “the culturally perceived perils of a woman engaging in the speculative art of natural philosophy by making it an extension of traditional women’s roles” (65). However, the inclusion of Motion in the first cosmological poem, where Nature is also a character, and in poems like “Atoms and Motion Fall Out” or “Motion Directs While Atoms Dance” suggests rather that they cannot be entirely separate domains. It is however possible that the atomistic hypothesis is laid out in terms of a nested act of subcreation meant to serve as a test. In “Nature Calls a Council”, she consults with other foces “how it might be made” (75), which suggests that these allegorised characters might occupy the domain of the “mythological world” (itself a dyadic alethic structure), 143 in which “the natural world is brought into existence as the offspring of the primordial supernatural world” (Doležel, 130). Nevertheless, we should also attend to allegorisation itself in close connection to the stylistic encyclopaediae which inform her collection, for instance in the reinterpretation of convenions drawn from Jonsonian court masques, whose structure was built “around a group of figures capable of entering into dramatic conflict while retaining their symbolic value” (Orgel, 120). In “The Clasp/Phantasm’s Masque”, written in heroic couplets in imitation and manipulation of Sidney, she puts forward the notion that “interiority may be entirely hidden and yet still exist, for the lyric contains the implied author, whose presence is manifested in the racked metaphor and the allegorical references to Cavendish herself” (Low, 156). The section opens with the presentation of several descriptive tableaux with stage directions: “The scene is poetry. The stage is the brain whereon it is acted” (266). By embracing the sheer allegorical character of the masque, she is also denying that “unifying factor” of the occasion while maintaining the belief that transcendental meaning “united religious and political abstractions with the persons of the courtiers” (Norbrook, 235). Yet the poems in the section which refer us to episodes from Cavendish’s life constitute an appropriation of ocasional literature for the downright purpose of self-fashioning by drawing attention to autobiographical details (highlighting her own escape, rather than Queen Henrietta Maria’s). Here 85 allegorisation serves to project axiological judgements onto the possible actual world: “At last a storm of poverty did rise, / And showers of miseries fell from the skies; / And Waller (2020) draws attention to the way in which Henrietta Maria’s masques capitalised on the self- 85 display of female courtiers while promoting “that court ladies were required to embody extreme demands of both transcendent beauty and unimpeachable chastity, while at the same time being expected to display their bodies in ways that outside the court would have been seen as reprehensible” (172). 144 adamant in thinking that “it is more pleasure for any person to imagin themselves Emperour of the whole world than to be so” (183). 134 The fanciful Lady Contemplation is largely reworked for The Presence (1668) but with a different twist: the F-Universe materialises and drives the main romantic plot, which constructs its premise upon the possibility and actuality of the imagination. The story revolves around a Princess who “is in love with an Idea she met with in a Dream in the Region of her Brain; and unless she may enjoy this Idea, not only awake, but embodied, she cannot be at rest in her mind” (7). Its subplot involves the Lady Bashful, a lady-in-waiting struggling to maintain her reputation in the corrupted world of the court. Battigelli (1998) sees the two contrasting figures as generating a debate “over the proper relation between mind and world” (35) tinged with autobiographical elements. 135 Both stories are framed in a “Shakespearean-style new comedy (with touches of Fletcherian tragicomedy), in which the Princess’s love for an ‘Idea’ is resolved by a traditional comic ending and a full complement of Fools, twins, and cross-gender disguise” (Dodds, 193). The first scene serves as a general introduction to the play, in which two gentlemen discuss the fashions and trends of post-Restoration play-going. The whole section is designed to negotiate between Cavendish’s two folio collections, Such passages have lead scholars like Cunning (2016) to read the reflections of her characters on 134 imaginary worlds as a sort of Stoical retreat: “the next best life is the life of contemplation – is the non- Platonic way that Cavendish conceives it – and below both of these is a life in which we depend for our pleasure on the behavior of the bodies that surround us” (266). However, Contemplation’s remarks on projecting F-Universes, such as “the greatest pleasure is in the imagination not in fruition” (183) are used as a character trait that marks her as a humoural type contrasted to the Lady Visitant: “I had rather have the Material World, than you Airy Fictions” (184). Taking bashfulness as its core motif, Williams (2000) sees the play as “not simply autobiographical, 135 but an attempt to stage this gender position within the claustrophobic confines of a court setting” (114). Whitaker (2002) observe its autobiographical imprints in instances which show that Cavendish, as a ladyin-waiting, “shared even her bedchamber with another maid of honor” (51), specifically referring to I. 5. when Lady Wanton informs Wagtail to be “so jo’yd, when I heard you were allotted to be my Chamberfellow, for I was so afraid of that clod of dull Earth, the new come fellow; for it is reported that she makes Conditions not to be with such a Chamber-fellow that sits up late, or hath much Company” (63). 247 as one of the gentlemen defends Seneca, who “doth express Moral Virtues, and Machiavillian Policy, better and more properly then Dramatick Poetry” (2). Of course, her 1662 volume included long disquisitions and passages discussing several philosophical questions which largely resemble Seneca, such as Lady Sanspareille’s orations in Youth’s Glory and Death’s Banquet, or the exercise orations included in The Female Academy. One of the gentlemen provide definitions of wit, by which he means “symilizing, and distinguishing of Words and Things”, and humour, which signifies “the Behaviours, Dispositions and Practices of Mankind” (56), which anticipate the thematic division of the play across its dyadic structure. Namely, it projects a corrupt courtly world which defiantly manipulates its axiological valorisation according to selfpromotion, set against a nucleus of strong deontic codes represented by the Emperor and the Princess. As Bennett (2033) observes, Cavendish uses these contrasting plotlines “to examine the nature and effects of different forms of agency” (186). 136 The second plot is here introduced by the parallel figures of Bashful and Spend-all, both newly arrived at the court and uneasily adapting to its general mores. This serves Cavendish to construct an agential space in which she “anatomizes the social lives of courtiers, men and women” in a post-Restoration setting, thus offering “a satiric account of Hobbesian narratives about human psychology and the source of political authority” (Dodds, 202) in which each work for his or her own advantage. Throughout its 137 Battigelli (1998) sees an inherent politicised aspect in this dyadic construction, as “the Princess’s 136 indulgence in her imaginative life poses a potential threat to political stability” (35-36), chiefly because all the ladies in the court might also become dreaming lovers. However, as Bennett (2003) observes, “the idea of universal traits, abilities, or ideals is deliberately countered in her intermingling of diverse situations, each of which brings out different dimensions in the others” (183). Dodds (2013) also links Cavendish’s development of her own theory of voluntary motion and 137 causation via “patterning” to her use and critique of Hobbesian ideas on self-interest in the play. For instance, the scenes in the Lady Bashful subplot “translate the motivation that Hobbes identifies in the state of nature to the civilized milieu of the court” (210). 248 intertwined subplots, the play makes clear that “The Presence” of the Emperor is offbounds for the courtiers seeking promotion, with each of them acting as informants whose credentials cannot be verified. Meanwhile, the Princess is shown discussing 138 with the Governor whether her love for her own idea is genuine given such small acquaintance. She defends herself by quoting Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598): “who ever lov’d, that loves not at first sight!” (60). By invoking Marlowe’s verses, the play signals its “concern with the problem of desire”, while also “works structurally and thematically to define an alternative to the relentless sexual and economic striving that is represented as the norm in the fictional setting of the play” (Dodds, 193). Meanwhile, the courtiers mock the new fashion at court while betraying the fear that their dreaming might thwart their advancing stratagems. Dodds & Ferguson (2017) read the subplot by drawing comparison to The Sociable Companions (1668) in the way it anticipates “a Restoration comic mode in which men and women seek their own self-interest in a world where values that were once stable have been thrown into question” (592). For instance, Spend-all capitalises on the new trend, wishing to be come that idea everyone is dreaming of so that he shall possess all the ladies in the kingdom. On the contrary, Bashful is shown as unable or unwilling to adapt, contrasted with the more forward Lady Wagtail who is presented as eager to learn the stratagems of the court and readily presenting her services to the ladies Self-conceit and Quick-wit. In the middle of discussing love and melancholy, a Fool becomes an informant carefully positioned “on the boundary between the court and the external world and on the boundary between the two heroines’ competing philosophies of mind” (Battigelli, Williams (2000) draws attention to the fact that the title of the play “refers to the presence-chamber 138 and is also a verbal joke about the stage absence of the Emperor, which leaves his daughter the Princess as court authority” (114). 249 37). The Fool tells them of strange monsters and sights he has dreamed of, “Men with strange Heads”, such as an ass’, a goose’s or a jack-a-nape’s, other men with heads “like a Stagh, with a large pair of branched Horns” with woodcock wings and other compounded creatures, women who appear like inverted mermaids with heads of fish, chameleon-like bodies and crocodile eyes. To Battigelli (1998), “the extravagant mismatching within the Fool’s dream echoes the opening paragraph of Horace’s Ars Poetica, in which Horace describes a painter joining ‘a human head to the neck of a horse’ and others acts of poetic license” (36). The Fool’s comments represent the tendency of the imagination to become extra vagans, and thus, by highlighting its potential chaos, he emphasises “the dangers of insisting that the product of an unbridled imagination be imposed upon the real world” (36). Upon asking him where did he see those creatures, he informs them that he has observed them while asleep, something which serves Lady Quick-wit to remark that he must have a Fool’s head attached to his body. The subplot scenes involve Spend-all and Conversant discussing the advantages of marrying old women. For Dodds (2013), Spend-all, who has been denied a position at court in favour of other courtiers, is led “to identify marriage as a profitable opportunity for personal gain” (211), but his position is disauthenticated by his sheer inability to woo any of the court ladies. When Bashful appears onstage, Spend-all suddenly forgets his design to marry an old woman and tries to woo her, but observing that his advances fall short, he repeats the formula with Quick-wit and Self-conceit throughout the play. As the very embodiment of the mores of a corrupt court, Monsieur Mode is introduced in II. 5. as one who has “the art to Court two or three Mistresses at one time” (48), 250 trying to school Spend-all in his ways. When Bashful appears onstage, Quick-wit, Selfconceit and the other ladies try to make fun of her, even threatening to send servants to her chamber so she might be courted, and concluding that “she is fitter for a Nunnery, then a Court” (37). The Fool tells the men that finally, “the Princess has spi’d her Idea, and will marry him, and so will be cured of her Melancholy, and be well; but he is a poor Mariner or Sea-man, and that will make the Emperor sick” (53). In a parallel move, Bashful’s marriage to Lord Loyalty is announced in III. 2. amidst a discussion of which of the two has been more unwise, Bashful for marrying a ruined man, or Loyalty for marrying such a dull lady. Bashful’s marriage prompts the ladies at court to reject prospects for their own, dramatising what Dodds (2013) perceives as a gendered asymmetry in the construction of court libertinism. Namely, the ladies, following the logic of the court, have assumed that their freedom rests on remaining single, but this can only be taken by the men as an invitation for conquest. Indeed, in IV. 1. and 2., each of the ladies will be ill-matched by Monsieur Mode to one of his many acquaintances: Quick-wit will choose an evil and ill-favoured man, Self-conceit will be married to a man of decent fortune, Wagtail will take a self-conceited fool, while Wanton will be engaged to a debauched husband, whose value is increased by the fact that the has the French pox. This gender imbalance is felt most acutely when Mode returns from the Continent and informs the courtiers that he has altered his design and resolved to settle with an old woman as well. As they all expose their marriage prospects, Spend-all sighs because his own design to win all the ladies at court has been thwarted. 251 The axiological valuation of the court world is thus strongly contrasted with the separate sphere of ideal mores embodied by the Princess and her transcendent idea of love. The Mariner who embodies the Princess’ idea is introduced in III. 1. However, the Emperor denies suit to the Princess and decreed that the Mariner would have to abandon his dominions lest he shall lose his head. The Princess and the Mariner discuss a possible elopement, but he is beaten, captured and thrown in jail by the guards. On the day of his execution, it is discovered to be not only a woman in disguise, “but a Princess her self; being a Daughter to the Emperor of Persia” (80). Monsieur Mode informs the courtiers of the late discovery, eliciting further gossip and reports such as the Emperor being in love with the Princess. Ultimately Battigelli (1998) concludes that one might read the two contrasting plots as representing “Henrietta’s and Margaret Cavendish’s respective philosophies of mind” (37), but from a position which highlights the ambiguity inasmuch as it both foregrounds the dangers and pleasures implicit in unrestrained forms of fancy as well as unrestrained forms of self-interest. The point of confluence is wholly made clear in IV. 10., when the Princess confesses that she remains constant even if the Mariner has proved to be a woman: “My Melancholy is past, but not my Love; for that will live so long as I shall live, and will remain pure in my Soul”, because even if the Princess of Persia was a dream, “many Dreams are Prophetical” (84). The final act in the play ties up the main plot by introducing the twin Persian Princes as a deus ex machina, which Sanders (1998) links to the character of Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night; or What You Will (c. 1601-02), defining it as a “crossdressing and twin-soaked play” (297). The Fool lets the actual Prince of Persia know 252 that “your Twin Sister who is as like you as a Pea to a Pea […] is now the Emperor’s admired Mistress” (87). The Fool urges the Mariner to discover himself before the Emperor, but the information had been revealed to the courtiers by Spend-all in the previous scene: “Why, the Sailer that was a Man, and the Man that was proved a Lady, and the Lady a Princess, is now proved no Lady, but is a Man again, and a Sailer” (84). The courtiers speculate that he might possess the ability to shape-shift, thus bridging the two opposing worlds of the play together as they claim such ability to be useful for their courting purposes. We are told that the Mother of the maids had secured the marriages of Quick-wit and Conversant, as well as Observer and Self-conceit, whose bridal dances take place in the final scene. Dodds (2013) draws attention to the way in which the traditional comic ending sits uncomfortably with the development of its characters, suggesting “that marriage accommodates the worst in men and women rather than the best” (211), while asking “whether the Princess’s Idea is merely another version of the deluded self-conceits suffered by the other characters in the play or whether it is an appropriate foundation for the sexual renewal and restoration of order that typically concludes a comedy” (220). Moreover, immediately after The Presence concludes, we are presented with a series of excluded “Scenes” which expand on the subplots or introduce entirely new characters and situations into the fictional universe. Venet (2003) considers Cavendish’s use of fragmentary scenes “do not bring coherence to the mood or themes, but seem to be only occasionally used as a basis for pathetic episodes, themselves discontinuous” (219), but does point to a world-based conception of her stories which can always be reused, expanded and rewritten. For Williams (2000), this editorial decision “functions to offer 253 two possible performance texts of The Presence, cut or complete, indicating a flexible and opportunistic approach to performance length” (114). Thus, Bennett (2003) thinks that her “appropriation and manipulation of the dramatic form and rejection of the stylistic manners and conventions of her time enabled her to make use of fragmentary, seemingly disjunctive pieces to craft a remarkably accurate picture of her culture” (190), while for Dodds & Ferguson (2017) their fragmentary character reflects how they “construct competing account of cultural change and competing accounts of women’s agency and sovereignty” (597). Cuder-Domínguez (2011) has raised the concern that, according to most studies of Cavendish’s dramatic works, “her plays do not yet rate quite as highly as her prose and poetry in the critics’ estimation” (35), even if “her dramatic oeuvre represents the most important body of work by a female dramatist before Aphra Behn” (Dodds & Ferguson, 577). As Peacock (2003) argues, it was not Cavendish’s form which barred her from the Restoration theatrical world, but “her representation of gender and women’s ability to control their position in society by separation, withdrawal, or controlled display” (100), which might have posed problems for any of the companies which considered staging one of her pieces. For Venet (2003), the following sets of plays, represented thematically by The Convent of Pleasure and The Presence, “could be read as two paroxystic responses to the challenge of generalized failure or two paradoxical answers, both again antithetical to each other and yet pointing in the same direction”, in the way that both display “worlds of seclusion and exclusion” (222). As Rapatz (2020) points out, Cavendish “asks us to imagine a space where women have agency over their own containment, where they have the potential to transform the gilded cages of patriarchal 254 institutions into new orders from within” (102), be it the existing possibilities in the agential world of the court, or the possibility of entirely new spaces. In both solutions, fancy’s world-creating capacity proves central, either for strategies of self-fulfilment or imagining possible alternatives for aristocratic women, while bridging the gap of our actual and the fictional world’s shared axiologies and deontic operators. 255 certainty of instrument-based (prosthetic) perception” (182-83). To Capoferro (2010), 152 these are indicative of “a tension, charged with political implications, between the valorization of individual agency in the production of knowledge, itself partly inspired by empiricism”, and “a more conservative view, which values authority and rejects an excessive reliance on subjective perception” (167). As Prieto-Pablos (2006) explains, the main point of Cavendish’s criticism is “the observer’s attempts to reproduce what he has seen”, both visually and verbally, “since both needed to rely on a person’s mental reconstruction after the object had been observed from a variety of positions” (269). In short, as Begley (2021) points out, Cavendish criticised the failure of natural historians “to ascend from minute particulars to general truths” (319), but at least conceded that “the experimenters do produce a kind of second order of natural effects” (Sarasohn, 157). Both Cavendish and the Greshamites believed that knowledge production needed to be centralised and regulated in order to avoid factionalism, and Civil War by implication. Both built their own systems against “Platonism”, widely understood as the belief in immaterial substances. Most importantly, both tried to establish a clear line of demarcation between the rhetoric of scientific inquiry and that of poetical expression, and both upheld a probabilistic approach to natural philosophy by using textual modes In this sense, microscopes “only enhance our knowledge of the surface of an animal or object, and 152 they distract from more serious learning” (Smith, 42). Cavendish objects that, “in attempting to reveal the interior of natural things with their microscopes and telescopes, experimenters only distort Nature and her creatures” (Sarasohn, 159). For Hutton (2003b), her Observations “takes as its starting position the view that knowledge derived via the senses is unreliable”, and that “observation is not an adequate basis for investigating the nature of things” (162). Partner (2018) even adds that Cavendish “believed that the generation of the magnified image depended upon the same interpretative vicissitudes of the ‘Brain and the Fancy’ that Hooke claimed his device could evade” (80). 263 of detachment. Most views tend to consolidate a clear-cut antagonism without 153 observing several points of confluence, not to mention the fact that the Duchess herself asked to be formally invited, and the fact that, after witnessing the displays arranged for her, “she retreated professing herself ‘all admiration’ and afterwards muted her criticism of the new science” (Harris, 210). Cavendish’s critique of the experimental programme is by no means a solitary effort. Wallwork (2011) indicates that Cavendish’s voice “may not have been subversive but indicative of a polytheism of practices not yet concealed by history” (52), something which Acevedo-Zapata (2017) has termed “pluristylistics” in scientific composition. Her attack must necessarily point to the rules of sociability governing the constitution of natural philosophy, which, in fact, as Dear (2007) reminds us, ridiculed experimental projects like Hooke’s on the grounds that they deviated from modes of discourse that were more suitable for natural philosophy. Cavendish’s main objection against the Society had to do rather with the nature of “art” and experiment, with implications of sociability, membership, the setting of rules for discourse, in the sense that Shapin & Schaffer (1985) identify as “crystalizing forms of social organization […]; a means of regulating social interaction within the scientific community” (14). She believed that Hooke’s claims did not produce a language of Nature, but just another language game And perhaps, most tellingly, the Cavendishes were not only interested in optical instruments, but also 153 collected the very best sort. As Partner (2018) observes, “from 1648, the Cavendish brothers had begun to amass an exceptional collection of telescopes. Two examples were acquired from ‘the famous Torricelli’, court mathematician to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and four more from the Roman workshop of Eustachio Divini, who was known for producing especially large lenses. Sir Kenelm Digby sent a glass made by Fontanus as a gift whilst on an embassy in Rome, which at eighteen feet long, was reputed to be the maker’s best instrument. An additional device was also expected from the German Capuchin friar and astronomer Schyrlaeus de Rheiter, who had been the first to combine four convex lenses to produce a large, righted image” (59). Manuscript evidence (Hartlib Papers, 31/22/23A) supports that Margaret owned an eighteenth-inch microscope with “suggests one of the more advanced compound or ‘double’ microscopes of the period” (60). Begley (2016) suggests that William’s loan of his optical instruments to Hobbes as a pawn in 1648 is indicative of the fact that “William and Margaret became increasingly disinterested in these subjects after Charles’ death” (228). 264 that might or might not refer to Nature, something she even might have conceded to her own speculations even if she “did think some opinions were more reasonable than others” (Boyle, 231). In this sense, “it is not so much that optical apparatuses supply less ‘true’ images in an anthropomorphic sense, but rather that they can tell us very little about the natural world as humans usually observe and comprehend it” (Begley, 226). However, even if Cavendish’s scientific writings share certain characteristics with the Society’s appeal to purge the language of science, “she was increasingly drawn to acknowledge the shift in power implied by the new linguistic norms” (Waller, 258). Levitin (2015) reminds us of the fact that “opposition to the Royal Society came not from an ingrained anti-progressive attitude, but from institutional jealousies and insecurities on the part of certain members of the universities and the College of Physicians” (15), to which Cavendish had previously aligned herself. As Clucas 154 (2003) puts it, her work is not as idiosyncratic or eccentric as it appears to be, if set in relation to some of the aesthetic and philosophical trends of the mid seventeenth century, or, “if not normative, then at least canonically comprehensible” (13). However, Cavendish’s critique of experimental science in a post-Restoration context as a potential site of political upheaval should not strike us as a surprise given her Baconian One could also think of Henry Stubbe’s response to Glanvill’s apology, The Plus Ultra reduced to a 154 Non Plus (1670); or Samuel Butler’s satirical poems on figures such as Walter Charleton in “An Occasional Reflection on Dr. Charlton’s Feeling a Dog’s Pulse at Gresham College” (1665), and Paul Neile in “The Elephant in the Moon” (c. 1676), which even if “none of these appeared in print until 1659, […] circulated widely in manuscript” (Begley, 250). Butler’s Theophrastan Characters (1667-69) also included those of “A Virtuoso” and “An Antisocordist”. Interestingly, Wilkins (2014) has also drawn attention to John Locke’s and Thomas Sydenham’s early paper entitled “Anatomica” (1668), which criticises the science of micrography in similar grounds and largely echoes “Cavendish’s view that microscopes failed to reveal the internal workings of organisms” (4). 265 undertones. In this respect, Leslie (2012) observes that Cavendish “is more Baconian 155 than poststructuralist in her analysis of the human limitation of perception, representation, and convention to attaining a true understanding of nature” (104). This reassessment of Bacon is significant, especially at the onset of the constitution of the Academies as social spaces of inquiry. Even if Bacon “had guaranteed the reliability of experiment by restricting the experimenter’s reliance on the senses and expanding commensurately the role of the experimental instrument” (Keller, 433), his approach to natural philosophy as a whole was being largely constructed as empirical or protoempirical by its early followers, largely shaping subsequent histories of science. The first apologists of the Royal Society constructed an image of the Lord Councillor as marking “the exorcism of fables from the scientific project” (Butler, 17), set mainly against the competing Neoplatonic, Paracelsian and hermetic traditions. This is largely indebted to what Giglioni (2013) identifies as a set of horizons of expectation marked by A shift from ‘mechancick’ to ‘mechanical’ [which] occurred almost insensibly in the early phases of the reception of Bacon’s philosophy. It transformed a metaphysics of nature that Bacon had conceived of as a precondition for taking control of the natural appetites of matter (its ‘secret motions’) into an investigation seen as a preliminary stage in a Taking Reiss’s (1982) words into account: “[Bacon’s] concept of experiment is derived, nor from some 155 concept of human relations with nature, but from the domain of political affairs, and Bacon seeks to explain his epistemological abstraction by referring to the activities of government: just as if some kingdom or state were to direct its counsels and affairs not by letters and reports form ambassadors and trustworthy messengers, but by the gossip of the streets; such exactly is the system of management introduced into philosophy with relation to experience” (VIII. 133-34: NO, I. xcviii). In this matter certain texts of Galileo assert nothing else than what we can see here. The Italian scientist constantly insists that what he calls ‘raw experience’ is absolutely useless. ‘Experience’ is only usable when it has been ordered beforehand by a mental calculus” (202-03). 266 general program for mechanizing qualities and reducing natural phenomena into patterns of corpuscularian motions “for the effecting of all things (50-51). Cavendish’s status anxiety and her warnings against factionalism are often overlooked as well. We should bear in mind what Mendelson (1987) sees as a fundamental question in her engagement with the experimenters, namely that science at the time “included practitioners of widely varying qualifications” (36-37). What her critique reveals, according to Begley (2016) is rather that “the fragmentation of a more holistic approach to learning over the course of the 1660s meant that Cavendish increasingly idealised the Republic of Letters – a sizable constituency of which was based on Royalist networks and familial bonds – as having provided the proper social basis for a multiplicity of intellectual endeavours” (16). In other words, as Wallwork (2011) notes, the changes effected in the intellectual space by the emergence and operation of experimental sciences also prompted a semantic shift in the meaning of the activity itself. Sarasohn (2010) explains that by attacking the honour of the experimenters, Cavendish was also drawing attention to the way “honor was established through patronage, the informal system of interlinking and mutually beneficial relationships that held together the social structure of the time” (150). As Whitaker (2002) shows, old royalists were suspicious of the Society’s rhetoric, “which smacked of the Interregnum parliamentarian reformers who had indeed inspired many of them” (281), and were certainly upset by the support granted by the King to the Royal Society and, particularly, by the speedy access of some of its members to the privileged positions in both the Church and the State administration. As Prieto-Pablos (2006) observes, the 267 confusion Cavendish perceives “is the inevitable result of the experimental presupposition that anyone can acquire knowledge by the simple means of observations […] In this manner, scientific discourse necessarily acquires political implications” (275-76). In this sense, we are reminded of what Schiebinger (1989) sees as conflicting models in the way natural philosophy, as a new enterprise in the seventeenth century, sought to create more responsive institutions, and the gendered implications these entailed. For instance, “when science emerged from a social setting – the Renaissance court […] – where high-ranking women held power and prestige, that prestige carried them into the world of natural philosophy in much the same way it gave them (often limited) rights to rule entire lands […]; in a world organized on the basis of birth, wellborn women simply outranked scholars” (12). In her view, natural philosophy spans through a variety of social sites, which means that “women’s involvement in scientific enterprises depended on their position in the social setting from which the new science emerged” (17), with the conversational rules of court settings being generally more open to female participation, although “they were more commonly reduced to the subordinate position of asking questions” (19). 156 Seen in this light, The Blazing World has often been read in isolation not only from its philosophical companion piece, but also from a short theatrical piece titled A Piece of a Play and included in her 1668 volume, “a beast-fable along openly Jonsonian lines” (Sanders, 296) clearly modelled upon Volpone “for this incisive critique of the follies of Green & Broad (2006) have drawn attention to the fact that, “from the fifteenth to the seventeenth 156 century, the philosopher’s role changed from that of a courtly moral adviser, patronised by a prince, towards that of proselytiser for a new scientific attitude, increasingly distanced from theology” (231). They question whether such shift in the end proved advantageous for aspiring women scholars. 268 fashionable society” (Williams, 121). In A Piece of a Play, the reader is presented 157 with some of the species populating the world beyond the North Pole, many of them described in terms that remind us of the courtiers of The Presence. The short piece opens with one Sir Puppy Dogman asking Monsieur Ass about a proper definition of wit, leading to a differentiation of different modes: “Gulling-wit”, “drolling and raillery Wit”, “Libel-Wit”, etc. Monsieur Ass is careful to distinguish Gulling-wit from “Poetical Fancies”, although he recognises that “it expresses much fancy to make lies […] for they are Pictures of Ideas in the Mind”, which are to be radically separated from those which are “to abuse the Generality, by making of News, and several reports of Peace, Wars, State-affairs of great Monarchs, and their Councils, and so of all things, and of particular persons” (202). Throughout this piece, Cavendish appends the word “Mode” to different kinds of social institutions and characters: Mode-Gallants, Mode- Husbands and even Mode-Plays, which points at the growing conventions of urbane sociability which every town gallant should strive to imitate. She mentions a series of commonplaces associated with Restoration London: “I have been at a Coffee-house, and a Tavern, and have entertained a Mistress, and in a short time I hope I shall be able to brag, not only of several Lady-Mistresses, but that I have the Pox” (207). To these characters, Cavendish contrasts the figure of the absent Lady Phoenix, which Thell (2016) reads as her own conception of Nature as self-regenerating, and to her As the “Advertisement to the Reader” announces: “[T]He Reader is desir’d to take notice, That the 157 following Fragments are part of a Play which I did intend for my Blazing-World, and had been Printed with it, if I had finish’d it; but before I had ended the second Act, finding that my Genius did not tend that way, I left that design” (201). By the end of The Blazing World, in discussing the writing of plays, the character of the Duchess remarks that “no world in nature had fitter creatures for it than the Blazing World; for, said she, the louse-men, the bird-men, the spider- and fox-men, the ape-men and satyrs appear in a farce extraordinarily pleasant” (106). The Emperor and the Empress of the Blazing World decide to employ her to write farces and plays to be acted in their stages, contrasting plays that can only be judged according to the mode of the age to those in which natural wit is above the rules of art, so that Cavendish’s works “may be acted in your Blazing World, when they cannot be acted in the Blinking World of Wit” (106). 269 “materialist concept of the imagination, which entails the mind creating new ideas and images from its ‘own parts’” (129), and imposing its own, self-legitimised realm of authentication by fiat. Lilley (1994) stresses this dichotomy by highlighting how “the extreme practice of living singularly, rather than ‘in the Mode’ or according to ‘custom’, is troped as cognate with the singular practice of (utopian) writing – despite the fact that their projects are antithetical” (122). Lady Phoenix is then defined by a singularity set against social conventions which proceed “through displays of the communal basis of its generation and evaluation” (Shapin & Schaffer, 78), dictated by “mode”, enhancing her authority precisely by being withdrawn from the epistemic worlds of the characters, which can only project their own expectations and speculations onto her. The ultimate paradox, as exposed by Prakas (2016) is that “the activity of imaginative textual world-building becomes useful and liberating for Cavendish when she uses it to set up – and set her herself atop – structures of hierarchical authority” (125), moving her closer to an ideal of a model society both governed by sympathy and the strong bonds of absolutism. My contention is that Cavendish’s reevaluation of fancy should be mainly set against developing discourses on post-Restoration sociability, centred around the ideal of a witty conversation and which not only encompasses the Royal Society’s desires for clarity in both association and language, but also the worlds of the court and the theatre. These seemed to exist in a deontic imbalance that could 158 be capitalised by both moralists and disenfranchised Royalist supporters. William’s estrangement from the restored court of Charles II and the fact that Margaret “was not fitted 158 for social success at the précieuse Court of Henrietta Maria”, being “unaccustomed to sociable discourse” (Mendelson, 17) heightened this sense of isolation. Thus, Battigelli (1998) observes that both William and Margaret “lived out the rest of their lives as conscious symbols of a past order, one that existed chiefly in the communal realms of the mind” (11). 270 All of the modes which Cavendish had hitherto explored seem to converge in The Blazing World, both formally and thematically. To Dodds (2013), it “combines philosophy, satire, and romance in an inventive, if unstable, narrative with links to utopia, the imaginary voyage, philosophical dialogue, autobiography, political allegory, and science fiction” (123). As Partner (2018) observes, her opposition to optical micrography had a fundamental impact on the “blurring of epistemological distinctions that other of her contemporaries believed to partition fact from fiction, and truth from fancy” (82), thus constituting a remarkable episode in the emergence of a distinct and self-contained realm for fictional practice. Cavendish’s story still offers an interpretative labyrinth, as each of its manifold generic modulations seem to make “its own claims of interpretation and each orienting the reader to a different understanding of the text’s setting, structure, and central project” (Leslie, 86). This illustrates Maitre’s (1983) view of a double proceeding in anchoring the imagination to processes of world-creation: To put it another way, the author does not know in any detail what the subject matter of his fictional world is going to be until he attempts to express it in a public medium; for during this act the fictional world is made by filling out the detail of some items, creating additional ones and dismissing others. […] Another way of putting this would be to say that possibilities ‘unfold’ as the novel progresses and are dependent at each stage on what has gone before (50). A few examples include Robinson’s (2003) reading of female desire, which highlights how the text “solicits intentionalist reading precisely by frustrating it: offering 271 contradictions and confusions, advances and retreats, tantalizing possibilities of daring hidden meanings that cannot be conclusively pinned down” (156), as the text pursues different sets of textual strategies in a way that ‘maximizes possibilities and minimizes consequences” (160). For Price (1998), “we are offered several texts in one; a number of possible courses which intersect with each other, but which do not necessarily lead in the same direction” (24), while Wagner (2003) sees it as a text which “explores alternative, internal avenues to self-fulfillment”, and that is “at once a utopian experiment, a romance adventure, an unconventional autobiography, and a philosophical/scientific exposition” (3). Thus, The Blazing World can be seen as a text where every aspects of its many I- digressions and A-stories are subsumed to the principle of varietas as they shape-shift across generic boundaries, a constant movement in which “multiplicity characterizes both macro- and microcosmic figurations” (Khanna, 19). Variety subsumes its fragmentary iterations in terms of genre, but also ends up consuming the writing subject, which, as Lilley (1992) points out, “revels in design, ornament, rhetorical description and amplification”, constituting “a material and linguistic opulence which is self-consciously extravagant and excessive, even parodic” (119). The fictional world constitutes a series of nested boxed with small alterations., which for Wagner (2003), implies an “outer box” which “contains the controlling fiction” (3), exemplified by the fact that the Empress’ world is contained in Margaret’s mind, who in turn becomes a visitor to the Empress’ world. For instance, much of the first part describes a multiperson world that is deontically and axiologically treated as a one-person world, in which its absolute ruler controls every aspect of it, until the protagonist is herself folded 272 as “less interested in narrowly defining history as a category of truth untainted by probability than she is in sorting out the varieties of truth to be had in multiple modes of experience” (353), which she relates to the blending of generic modes she advertises in her preface. Cavendish’s work has often been read as a forerunner of the science-fictional utopia with links to the emergence of the fantastic as a distinct textual gesture. Capoferro (2010) claims that, in “fully freeing the imagination and its creations”, The Blazing World also generically “testifies to the emergence of the fantastic as a recognizably literary mode that highlights, and shortens, the distance between the empirical and the non-empirical” (171). Its authenticating force rests on what Thell (2008) sees as one of the main features of the travel narrative, the fact that “the traveler controls her own tale by maintaining an almost unchallengeable position” (455), however, the narrative veers towards the graded authentication force where “markers of subjectivity accumulate in a higher or lesser ‘dosage’” (Doležel, 153). As to questions of referentiality, for Lilley (1992), “utopian writing offers a critique of the world as it is, and also of representation as it is” (107). Campbell (1999) includes Cavendish’s text amongst a number of texts from different fields of inquiry which share: Preinstitutional uses of now-familiar novelistic conceptual structures and language habits: the first-person protagonist-narrator; the value of individual experience; minutiae of description; the rhetoric of facticity; the reportability of bodily sensation and the reader’s discovery of the sensational as pleasure; ‘verisimilitude’ (‘Truth’s greatest enemy’, said Richard Flecknoe in 1656); the importance of identification in the reading 279 experience, the ‘suspension of disbelief’; the exoticization of distance and the ratio of distance to the importance of belief; the salience of individual persons (characters) unaffiliated genealogically with protagonist, author, or implied reader; the fascination with internal states unmarked or disguised by describable exteriors of costume, carriage, or behavior (and the faith in their knowability); the conceivability of alternative cultures and environments (the assumption of what we might call the ‘versionicity’ of the universe) […] These are the materials of worldmaking as we know it now (12-13). Watson (2018) argues that The Blazing World can only be read as a world-imaging text, that is, as a representation of a pre-existing world whose propositions can be subject to truth-valuation. He reads it as “an attempt at world creation that failed”, because Cavendish made “no attempt at all to generate a symbolic economy within her text, and as such there is nothing for the reader to use to ground any kind of movement into the Blazing-World” (108-09). However, he sees The Blazing World as one of “the earliest texts to explicitly describe world-building in the philosophical terms that would become central to the understanding of the question” (13). Nevertheless, he overlooks how Cavendish’s Observations tells us why it “failed”: the world remains unstable because “her vertiginous interweaving of what is real and what is imagined […] in conjunction with her multiplication of worlds and personas, therefore constitutes her most powerful refutation of Hooke’s attempt to liberate empirical procedure” (Partner, 85). Cavendish’s created world is ultimately about the impossibility of assessing the actual world without endlessly multiplying its possible counterfactuals, or, put it wholly in 280 Sidneian terms, without a poiesis that “has to be simultaneously prescriptive and possible” (Sarkar, 26). But possibility is itself complicated by inhabiting Lucian’s “tantalizing mixture of non-sense and gravity” (Hutton, 2003b, 171) or what Bakhtin (1984) terms “the realm of the serio-comical” (106), which simultaneously posits stable references and thwarts them. To Holmesland (2013), Cavendish’s method can be thus defined as one in which the key is “to blend established genres and categories into a new order” (100), and not only so, ut as one which “translates divine mysticism into supernaturalism and magic, which are presented as being within the range of rational probability, but not, unqualifiedly, as the effect of natural self-motion”, insomuch as “it takes an authoritative master creator” (109). However, Cavendish’s poetics of fancy also means letting some degree of 161 vagrancy, of infection in the classical sense of the imagination, that is, letting referential domains proliferate so as to thwart any attempts at establishing a single stable point, even that of the subject who creates the world. 162 Cavendish declares in her preface entitled “To all Noble and VVorthy LADIES”, that The Blazing World “was made as an Appendix to my Observations upon Experimental Philosophy; and, having some Sympathy and Coherence with each other, were joyned together as Two several Worlds, at their Two Poles” (A3r). Thus, this intersection of science and utopia “might be viewed as a late version of the general Bolander (2004) draws striking parallels between Cavendish’s sociopolitical views and her substance 161 theory, in that “instead of showing nature as ‘democratic’ and disorderly, Cavendish places a monarch (the Empress) at the head of her political model in Blazing World and presents nature as fitting ruler over her elements in her theory of matter, held together through a hierarchy of matter in which the rational subdegree rules” (53). In this sense, Lobis (2015) reads Cavendish’s idea of sympathy, partially drawn from Bacon, as 162 connected to her theory of perception, that is, as “a universal principle to the extent that it applied not only to nature and society but also to genre, unifying the ‘various forms’ of her writing” (82). 281 Renaissance interest in mixed modes”, resulting not so much in a distinct form of fictional narrative, but in “a specifically productive yoking of fiction with something else” (Salzman, 44). For Bolander (2004), “this image of the two worlds of her narrative become metaphors for the two written works, both created out of the rational faculty: the first for philosophical contemplation and the second for its figurative implementation of the philosophies of the first” (47). In other words, both texts are cojoined, “not to polarize them but to reconsider their points of conjunction and correspondence” (Leslie, 104). In this sense, I object to Chao’s (2012) claim that “Observations was written for philosophers while The Blazing World was for female readers” (65), although I concede that Cavendish saw a potential female readership and decided to republish it separately. Still, one of the most overlooked aspects in 163 Cavendish’s preface is the way she clearly gestures to separate the referential domains of natural philosophy from those of fiction, even if the text itself “suggests that Cavendish has no real interest in disentangling her philosophical notions from her fictional productions” (Mann, 194). Thus, for her: 164 The end of reason, is truth; the end of fancy, is fiction: but mistake me not, when I distinguish fancy from reason; I mean not as if fancy were not made by the rational parts of matter; but by reason I understand a rational Uman (2016) declares that both Cavendish’s The Blazing World and Aphra Behn’s translation of 163 Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686) “serve as invitations to other women, similarly excluded from sites of formal scientific education and experimentation, to learn about contemporary debates about the nature of the universe and to imagine themselves as active participants in conversations on these topics” (171). However, one should rather conceive of Shank’s (2005) view of the Entretiens and other similar texts as suggesting “a synthesis of the learned and the popular rather than a translation (read: popularization) of learned culture into the language of the wider public” (90). On the contrary, Partner (2018) argues that “Cavendish’s optical theories underpinned her refusal to 164 endorse any absolute distinction between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’, an idea that is also expressed in the form of her writing” (52), demonstrating a “belief in the ultimate lack of distinction between reason and the imagination and so between philosophy and fiction” (70). For Waller (2020), the joint publication of both pieces was conceived “as if they represented complementary ways of approaching. truth” (243). 282 search and enquiry into the causes of natural effects; and by fancy a voluntary creation or production of the mind, both being effects, or rather actions of the rational part of matter; of which, as that is a more profitable and useful study than this, so it is also more laborious and difficult, and requires sometimes the help of fancy, to recreate the mind, and withdraw it from its more serious contemplations (5-6). She clearly differentiates The Blazing World from her Observations on the grounds of being fictional, which, as Blake (2017) emphasises, it is not that reason (the principle governing sound natural philosophy) should be conceived as a fiction of sorts, but that “the ground of fiction is rationality: fiction is one action that rationality sometimes takes” (9). In other words, the faculty of fancy “is not irrational but rather represents a different way of using reason” (Fletcher, 135), insisting that, contrary to a panfictionalist reading of her texts, the ends to which the rational matter is put in motion mark their terminological differences. When the rational matter is concerned solely with itself, we might say with Cavendish that “fictions are an issue of man’s fancy, framed in his own mind, according as he pleases without regard, whether the thing he fancies, be really existent without his mind or not” (5). The Blazing World not only complements the critique offered in the Observations, but substantially expands it in a way that becomes “not simply a fictional text, but itself a philosophical work” (119), or, as if “the two cojoined worlds of The Blazing World fold in and out of each other” (Waller, 249). Cavendish creates such split, “only immediately to break down this distinction and affirm the value of combining fancy with reason and truth with fiction” (Hackett, 187), 283 in a new “dramatisation of the relationship between aesthetic sense and the process of knowledge-making” (Siegfried, 76). Moreover, Habinek (2018) reads this gesture rather as “a preemptive strike against anyone who would not read her philosophy as philosophy” (146), and to highlight that “error […] is not to be associated with any particular genre of writing, be it fiction or philosophy, but results from the very ‘material’ of reason, that fallible operation of the soul” (147). Using the tools of world-building, Battigelli (1998) sees this separation as a means of countering the sources of scientific discourse, as “by claiming the Blazing World as an exclusive product of her brain and fancy, Cavendish locates it within the subjective realm of her imagination, thereby guarding herself from making Hooke-like claims of objective certainty” (105). However, this separation, “with its playfully deceptive introduction, confounds the reader’s expectations of oneness by making claims about philosophy and fancy that the narrative belies and subverts” (Wagner, 3). For Leslie (2012), she is not “in the end, defending poetry so much as anatomizing it and, in the process, enlarging the domain of fancy beyond its fictional effects or artifacts” (88). In this sense, both Rosenthal (1996) and Waller (2020) concur in seeing Cavendish’s fancy as the vehicle for the creation of a new or a different nature rather than for imitating it. In Cavendish’s view, “Nature’s internalism, as well as its relative freedom to order and compose, serves as the foundation for her invention and poetic production” (Sarkar, 280). The first part of the story conforms to what Doležel (1976a) identifies as an alethic story, which “consists solely on actions of observation which can be supplemented by actions connected with reaching the other world” (12), and which begins by 284 manipulating the expectations raised by generic encyclopediae. The first part revolves around a young lady abducted by a merchant who had fallen madly in love with her, but the affront is punished by the gods who raise a tempest so that their boat “was carried as swift as an arrow out of a bow, towards the north Pole, and in a short time reached the Icy Sea” (7). The world projected by the text thus far incorporates some elements of Heliodoran prose narratives with the inclusion of wandering heroes encountering a variety of situations and unexpected turns of events. Cavendish introduces the “storm topos” (Pearl, 46) that she had already employed in “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity”, only to twist its outcome by having all of her captors killed because “the cold having a double strength at the conjunction of those two Poles, was insupportable” (8). In this sense, Capoferro’s (2010) account of the emergence of the fantastic as a mode in which empirical epistemologies supersede the marvellous as plausible explanatory frameworks can be observed in Cavendish’s inclusion of detailed speculation to characterise the alethic constraints governing her Blazing World. For instance, she provides an explanation of why it cannot be accessed from the equator or why the suns of these worlds cannot coincide at their point of juncture. 165 Thus, romance motifs set the storyworld in motion, but for Leslie (2012), “no sooner are the generic expectations of romance invoked than we seem to travel beyond their horizon” (89). Bolander (2004) shows how the romance A-story is employed so that “the reader is quickly acquainted with the problems that ensue when one disrupts Cavendish observes that “motion is so just and exact, that neither can hinder or obstruct the other”, and 165 even if they did, the closeness of our sun would prevent us from noticing the suns of other worlds, “except we use very good telescopes, by which skilful astronomers have often observed two or three suns at once” (9). It is likely that Cavendish has Galileo’s description of Saturn as a tripartite body in mind, as Letters IV, V and VI of the final section of Philosophicall Letters (1664) show her familiarity with the works of the Italian astronomer. For Partner (2018), this observation “suggests at the outset that the internally governed production of visual experience gives rise to confusion between observation, optical illusion and fantasy” (83). 285 the ‘natural’ […] order of social class” (50). The lady is quickly found by a group bearlike creatures, and who “spoke to each other in a language which the Lady did not understand” (9). Initially, the story seems to take the form of the epistemic alien; however, she quickly finds out that the hybrid creatures treat her with respect, as “they intend to make her a present to the Emperor of their world” (10). Thus, the lady’s epistemic imbalance is gradually lifted through a series of I-digressions explaining that she found herself “not only safe but very happy in their company: by which we may see, that novelty discomposes the mind, but acquaintance settles it in peace and tranquility” (13). The presence of hybrid animal-men proves significant insomuch as Capoferro (2010) recognises that “in the seventeenth century, concomitant with the rise of modern science, hybrid creatures can, however, work as messengers even without God’s explicit direction” (89-90). Cavendish introduces an expanded inventory of creatures, which 166 keeps growing to the point of saturation by presenting us with bird-men, “satyrs” (identified in the seventeenth century with great apes) and men “of a grass-green complexion” (10), even clarifying at the level of texture those moments in which the inventory departs from our own. As we know from stories like “The Speculators”, “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity”, or Letter 195 of 166 CCXI Sociable Letters (1664), in which she describes a female performer as a “Dog-like Creature” (206), Cavendish was interested in hybrids and monstrous human-like creatures, but the extent of their significance is often subject to debate. For instance, Cottegnies (2010) notes how Cavendish’s presentation of the bear-men’s customs in the frozen region, including houses made of ice, “is reminiscent of the Esmiko’s – even down to the bearskin apparel” (75). She might have read Martin Frobisher’s relation publicised in Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1589). Other creatures are reminiscent of this Protean blending of proto-empirical science, imaginary voyages and the literature of wonders. On the contrary, Capoferro (2010) draws the link to her broad conception of Nature by pointing out that in texts and pamphlets like John Hare’s The Marine Mercury; or, A True relation of the strange appearance of a Man-Fish […] Credibly Reported by six Saylors (1642), the narrator “implies that nature is infinitively productive: the sea, he states, produces a variety of exceptional creatures, and those who will not believe him ‘beleeve no further then their weake sight can discerne’”. Thus, “the novelty of a creature […] constitutes evidence of its existence, because nature’s creativity transcends our narrow human scope” (90). Similarly, Sarkar (2014) notes the gradual process whereby “natural philosophers came to understand wonders, marvels, and accidents not merely as signs or portents but singular entities or events that actively demanded scrutiny” (5). 286 The Lady’s entourage proceeds towards the chief city, named Paradise, described with all manner of opulence as composed of several cities of gold, amber, alabaster etc. As she meets the Emperor, he decides to take her as his wife and grants “an absolute power to rule and govern all that world as she pleased” (15). For Thell (2008), this elevation serves to authorise her protagonist “through her initial lack of agency (making her future conquers fate, not ambition) through men (they must abdicate power since they are immoral, she must accept power since she is moral), and through Providence itself” (449). This entails “a deconstruction of the romance plot and the image of woman as simple object of male desire” (Khanna, 18) in elevating the unnamed protagonist to the status of Empress. This strategy suggests upward mobility along 167 gender lines, “as the emperor gives away his crown in reversal of the usual strictures of marriage where the woman loses control over her property and her person” (Wood, 146), but it also signals the closure of the alethic alien story, moving the narrative closer to the epistemic quest. The romance plot is first concluded with the nuptials, yet they “signal a new beginning” (Leslie, 90) marked by the tension found in Cavendish’s juxtaposing of “mutually exclusive systems of interpretation of the world without really contrasting According to Salzman (2002), Cavendish “offers an antidote to Bacon’s masculine society by way of a 167 society in which the Emperor is a cipher who allows the Empress complete domination over his world” (45). In this sense, Price (2014) remarks that, contrary to More’s and Bacon’s previous models in which the visitor remains an observer, “Cavendish’s protagonist is allowed not only to become an agent of action, having been a puppet of fate, but also a sovereign self” (2). Her rise of status is, in fact, signaled by manipulating the blazon so that her newly acquired imperial attire might be best described, as consisting of precious stones, carbuncles, pearls, diamonds etc., “building on a consciously anachronistic Petrarchism” which presents her as “a kind of warrior queen, Elizabeth redivivas […] for whom marriage is not a problem” (118). Similarly, Cottegnies (2010) draws attention to the millenarian associations of the “Mercurial Monarch” in both Bacon’s and Cavendish’s texts in order to highlight that “the Empress is clearly being described as a magus, a messianic figure who is given rule over a universal monarchy, except that her appearance owes nothing to magic” (85). Associations with Christina of Sweden are also apparent, as Cavendish “would have known that Christina abdicated and converted to Catholicism in 1654 in the hope of fostering a universal monarchy that would bring about peace in the world, as this event was the talk of the day” (6). 287 them” (Cottegnies, 112) by having Paradise simultaneously described as an ideal of universal happiness with a materialistic account of its details (even of the longevity of the imperial race), which makes it “not so different from the country she has left” (113). For Dodds (2013), the inclusion of Paradise “represents both that which utopia 168 aims to achieve and also that which it must reject”, namely it tries to solve the problem of social reproduction while at the same time having the actions of the Empress “multiply the narrative ends of utopia”, bifurcated in “disappointed retrenchment, imaginary fulfillment, and romance adventure” (124). Contrary to the uniformity found is most early modern utopias, The Blazing World “embodies a range of fragmented, self-contained domains, comprising many islands of different climates that […] are inhabited by a wide variety of beings with different interests and perspectives” (Prince, 4). Echoing Hobbes, Cavendish’s concerns with status and factionalism can be inferred from the deontic constraints she imposes onto the inhabitants of her world, for instance in the prescription that none but the imperial race is allowed to wear gold. In fact, the imperial race, consisting of governors and eunuchs, is cut off from the rest of the hybrids, each fulfilling a distinct social role and “followed such a profession as was most proper for the nature of their species” (18). 169 Her linking of caste, natural form and profession reveals her anxiety regarding the Rogers (1998) observes that through her omission of the figures of Paradise, “Cavendish invites our 168 identification of the Empress with Eve, an Eve who in the powerfully utopian space of Cavendish’s fictional and scientific writings has been left to govern Paradise alone” (178). Similarly, Robinson (2003) sees the Emperor as Adam, the Empress as a redeemed Eve, and suggests that Cavendish’s self-inclusion within the narrative might be seen as a temptress figure like Lilith. Cottegnies (2010) refers us back to Raleigh’s condemnation in his History of the World (1614) of the vast amount of relations and travelogues which located a prelapsarian Paradise in the New World, and reminds us that Cyrano too had located it on the surface of the moon. As James (2019) notes, Cavendish’s references to eunuchs, caste systems and the Grand Signior’s 169 seraglio (which is mentioned several times) is indebted to both Plato’s envision of his Republic, and to Robert Wither’s A Description of the Grand Signor’s Seraglio, or Turkish Emperor’s Court (1650), which “describes both the role of eunuchs and various conventions designed to prevent faction among the members of the royal family” (17). 288 The discussion concerning the congelation of water and the production of gold by artifice introduces her chemists or ape-men, who explain such phenomena in terms of the triad of Paracelsian/Helmontian constituents: salt, sulphur and mercury. Again, Cavendish uses this occasion to disqualify the alchemical search for first principles in natural bodies and validate her own view that “nature is but one infinite self-moving body, which by the virtue of its self-motion, is divided into infinite parts” (40). Here, she also introduces the possibility of a fantastic rejuvenating balm reminiscent of the philosopher’s stone. The Empress inquires about the longevity of the imperial race, 174 and the ape-men quickly inform her of a certain stone which produces a gum used to make the elixir of life, with purging effects that cause vomits and excretions until it makes “the body break out into a thick scab, and cause both hair, teeth and nails to come off” (40-41). The patient is then laid in a cocoon for nine months and, after the process is completed, the body “will appear of the age of twenty, both in shape and strength” (42). For Dodds (2013), the whole description indicates that “the physical immortality provided by the world’s paradisal heritage contributes to the social and physical reproduction of society” (140), without altering its fundamental constitution, trying to reconcile its utopian setting with materialistic explanations of immortality. The Empress assembles her satyrs, or Galenic physicians to ask them about the causes and effects of several drugs and plants, establishing a radical contrast with their predictable effects and the uncertainty of men’s opinions which are indicative of Cavendish’s interest in the elixir of life can also be observed in the last section of her Grounds of 174 Natural Philosophy (1668), which concerns the possibility that “restoring-beds” might exist in Nature. Cottegnies (2010) draws attention to a similar balm found in Campanella’s Civitas solis (1602), one of Bacon’s sources for his New Atlantis. The elders of Solomon’s House mention “fair and large baths, of several mixtures, for the cure of diseases, and the restoring of man’s body from rarefaction” (178). She takes Cavendish’s comparison with the philosopher’s stone as pointing toward “a Paracelsian source, for the idea of a universal cure and of a substance that would allow the prolongation of life can be found in most Paracelsian writings of the period, as in Van Helmont” (82). 295 inherent factionalisms of art vis-à-vis the variegated harmony of self-moving natural elements. It is also significant that the Empress discriminates between “serious discourses” and the divertissements offered by her mathematicians, geometricians and logicians; for instance, one of the parrot-men delivers an oration which quickly disintegrates into endless syllogisms, subsections and divisions which end up incurring in nonsense because they follow the rules of art too closely. Art, being irregular, tends to confound the natural reasoning capacities of men, which can only aim at probable descriptions of an infinite natural world. The authenticating force of fictional discourse is used to validate world-imaging propositions as well, referring ultimately to a possible version of the actual world. Even throughout the exposition of the several professions and sciences, “no sooner is one position established than it is unsettled by another possibility through the perpetual rearrangement of the terms of representation” (Price, 34). In discussing the creed of the Blazing World, Cavendish echoes many arguments levelled at dissenters and non-conformists, particularly with respect to the participation of women in congregations, as “it is not fit, said they, that men and women should be promiscuously together in time of religious worship” (20). As much as the Duchess will later engage in alethically modifying world components, the Empress, finding it defective, undertakes several deontic modifications regarding the religious settlement of the Blazing World. She resolves to conduct a series of moral reforms, which includes setting up and leading a congregation of women, but “fearing that in time they would grow weary, and desert the divine truth, following their own fancies” (49), she resolves to lure her subjects into her own form of worship by having two magnificent chapels 296 built. For Cottegnies (2010), her “purely political conception of religion is based on elaborate theatrical performances, complete with fine Baroque machines” (87), as one of the chapels, representing eternal damnation, is lit by a fire-stone, while the other, representing comfort, is illuminated by a star-stone. Significantly, the perennial peace of Paradise will also be eventually disturbed by the Empress’ venture into her home world, in which the military uses of both stones proves significant. Thus, the Empress manages to convert the inhabitants of the Blazing World with the force of spectacle, “without enforcement or blood-shed; for she knew well, that belief was a thing not to be forced or pressed upon the people, but to be instilled into their minds by gentle persuasions” (51). Even if section illustrates how female utopian writing “has tended to focus strategically on the possibilities and problems of gendered social life and the weight of custom […], while declining the burden of representing a fully articulated model of a new political order” (Lilley, 116), it does hint at such model by pushing the boundaries of its utopian settlement. Thus, we might observe a dyadic deontic structure emerging between the customs and laws of Paradise and the political experiments of the Empress in matters of religion and state, re-enacting the absolutist models of social organisation through ritual. In it, the Empress “rediscovers Paradise as a ‘worldly’ and mutable site, capable of change and reform” (Leslie, 93) and, from this moment on, the text signals how the fictional utopian world is reaching its own limitations through proliferating schemes brought about by the Empress’ restless pursuits, as “this society’s order is instantly destabilized by the Lady’s/Empress’s entrance […]; not only is she, as a woman who comes to power, an exception to the rule in this society dominated by males, but the convocation she initiates and chairs immediately threatens order by introducing the 297 spirit of argumentation and divisiveness” (Wagner, 6). Moreover, this episode and its later restoration also serves to characterise the Empress as a harbinger of Nature’s designs, “manipulating this variety to emphasize her own capacity for change […], imposing her will by moving between extremes” (Fletcher, 134). Having reformed her dominions in matters of state, the Empress decides to learn more about the condition of her home world with the help of immaterial spirits. The host of spirits had been introduced in the story by the worm-men, upon the Empress’ questioning of the existence of non-beings below the surface of the earth. The whole section dramatises what Traill (1996) sees as a process, spanning many centuries, whereby “spiritualism was reshaped by the very scientific discoveries that had sparked its resurgence” (21), but in the context of Cavendish’s debates with other thinkers, their inclusion points explicitly to Henry More. For Hutton (2003a), Cavendish’s inclusion of spirits serves to indicate that their very existence is imposible, as “they can only ‘exist’ as imaginary beings – that is, as fictions” (195). After speculating on the existence of such spirits, she concludes that, since they are clothed in air, fly-men are most suited to deliver her invitation. The narrator avoids discussing the exact nature of spirits, who presented themselves before the Empress “in what shapes or forms, I cannot exactly tell” (52). Thus, she is ridiculing More’s proofs in favour of their existence in The Immortality of the Soul (1659), while the majority of their replies “match Cavendish’s critique of More in Philosophical Letters” (Hutton, 2003a, 193), as “it is with consummate irony that Cavendish has her Empress consult spirits, whose very existence as incorporeal beings is impossible according to her own philosophy” (194). Moreover, Cavendish’s source for the story of the spiritual conversation is that of John Dee and 298 Edward Kelly, as told in Méric Casaubon’s A True & Faithful Relation of What passed for many Yeers Between Dr. JOHN DEE (A Mathematician of Great Fame in Q. Eliz. and King James their Reignes) and Some Spirits (1659). Begley (2016) illustrates how Cavendish draws on Casaubon’s caricaturised distinction between Platonists and Aristotelians (based on their ability to discern between material and immaterial substances) in order to shape Dee (and consequently More) as “an over-enthusiastic Platonist” (159). Cavendish puts forward a radical separation of the fields of natural and theological speculations, for instance in differentiating between the area containing “the lucid natural orbs […] by mortals named Heaven” and the “beatifical Heaven” (58). She also uses the opportunity to attack the belief in immaterial substances by having her spirits confess their dependence on corporeal vehicles, thus indicating “that even the champion of immaterialism is obliged to make concessions to materialism in order to make his system work” (Hutton, 2003a, 194). Their dialogue quickly moves into a series of questions designed to negotiate the areas in which natural philosophy and theology might contradict one another, for instance questions regarding whether matter has itself evolved or whether it has always remained as such, whether there might have been divine decrees that excede the six days in the Biblical account of creation, whether animals might possess intelligence and a soul etc. She also tries to effect a series of reductiones ad absurdum designed to demonstrate her own version of materialism against More’s view, in a way that “everything that More explains as the results of the actions of spirit, Cavendish explains as actions of (refined) matter” (Hutton, 2003a, 190). For instance, regarding the doctrine of Purgatory by a haphazard accommodation to her own materialism, which aims at 299 revealing that theological considerations cannot trespass into the field of natural philosophy. On a similar note, she contests the doctrine of transmigration by having her spirit admit that “if there be a multitude of souls in a world of matter, they cannot miss bodies; for as soon as a soul is parted from one body, it enters into another” (62). This poses the question of “whether all matter be soulified” (62-63), and whether, if so, such distinction would hold. The spirits disqualify the numerological interpretations of the 175 Cabbala, as philosophers encroaching upon divinity, with their “antidotes” against atheism, are rather presented as the reason why atheism grows by complicating matters of faith. This reconciles both ends of their discussion, as multiplication ad infinitum is something that clearly corresponds to “God’s creation, being an infinite action, as proceeding from an infinite power” (59). Cavendish’s notion of world is also introduced as the Empress asks them if they come from a different sort of realm, to which they reply that “the word world implies a quantity or multitude of corporeal creatures, but we being immaterial can make no world of spirits” (61), which poses a seeming contradiction inasmuch as she had severed the ontology of the Blazing World within her own head, yet thoughts remain thoroughly material. It seems that this dialogic section, inasmuch as it forces the Empress to discuss claims which might or might not apply similarly to the textual world, questions their validity without problematising her fanciful realm as a space from which to make such claims, contrary to the already charged modes of sociability prevalent in the construction of scientific matters of fact. This section refers implicitly to More’s adoption of Cartesian tenets into a theological/Platonist view 175 in which “spirit, like body, is spatially extended and all corporeal things require the intervention of spiritual agency to give them life and movement”, as “the entire universe, for More, is ensouled” (Hutton, 2003a, 188). 300 As the Empress expresses her desire to make the Jews’ Cabbala, the spirits vanish all of a sudden, prompting her to think that they might have been punished for their answers. After locating them, a nimble spirit assures the Empress that souls can occupy living bodies, as, “according to Plato’s doctrine, there is a conversation of souls, and the souls of lovers live in the bodies of their beloved” (67), thus manipulating some of the precepts of the philosophy she had just ridiculed. This seems to mimic More’s metaphysical reasoning, invoking Plato’s authority to take the doctrine of transmigration for granted. The Empress considers summoning the spirit of one of the ancients or the moderns to serve as a scribe, but the nimble spirit suggests avoiding such self-conceited writers that would “scorn to be scribes to a woman” (68) and seek the help of the Duchess of Newcastle. As Hackett (2000) puts it, “just as we might have been thinking that the Empress was some sort of fictional projection of the author herself, she meets and forms a firm friendship with the Duchess of Newcastle, exploiting the hall-of- mirrors potential of fiction to create multiply (sic) reflexive images” (189). Cavendish’s self-inclusion within the narrative is read by Prakas (2016) as a sophisticated critique of the “altruistic intent”, implicitly questioning the idea that “the acquisition of knowledge offers universal benefits […] and instead highlighting the essential self-interest at the heart of such knowledge acquisition” (134). This division between two female agents might respond to Goldberg’s (2009) contention that Cavendish is presenting herself as a split, illustrating how “the parts of her mind, called here fancy and memory, do not work in tandem; the process from mind to hand is anything by straightforward” (134). Moreover, Wagner (2003) reads this separation as dramatising the principal dichotomy of the story, in which “the Duchess of Newcastle represents the more conformative 301 social construction of female selfhood, while the Empress of the Blazing World figures a transgressive selfhood born of authorship and the imaginative life of the mind” (1). For Maxwell (2019), this duplication of the main character signals the way the very notion of selfhood is problematised in the text, “by the fact that it is possible to read both the Empress and the Duchess of Newcastle as proxies for Cavendish herself, as both separate and the same” (125). However, we should be wary of conflating the Duchess and the Empress too much, as “the apparently separate first-person narration might slip into an identification of protagonist and author or elide narrator and author” (Khanna, 31). Still, we might concede a strong degree sense of self-fashioning in the character of the Duchess; for instance, as soon as she is presented, she assures that she can write “not so intelligibly that any reader whatsoever may understand it, unless he be taught to know my characters; for my letters are rather like characters than well-formed letters” (68). The Duchess talks the Empress out of her desire to make a Cabbala, first by insisting that it would have been more proper to summon the spirit of Moses for such task, then claiming that even if instructed by spirits, they lack an absolute knowledge. She advices her to make “a poetical or romancical Cabbala, wherein you can use metaphors, allegories, similitudes, etc. and interpret them as you please” (69). Thus, 176 once a fanciful world has been established as a separate, self-sufficient referential domain from which to make world-imaging predicaments, the text allows for exploring The three different kinds of cabbalas proposed by the Empress (philosophical, moral and political 176 Cabbala) follow closely those proposed by Henry More in his Conjectura Cabbalistica; or, a Conjectural Essay of Interpreting the Minde of Moses according to a threefold Cabbala, viz. Literal, Philosophical, Mystical, or Divinely Moral (1653). Wagner (2003) points out that the “romancical cabbala” is here used “loosely to refer to imaginative, other wordly adventures described through figurative, analogy-laden, literary discourse having multiple layers of meaning, which require deciphering” (24). Ultimately, this “romancical cabbala” points to the fact that Cavendish’s own creation can be seen as such, as “giving voice to the familiar hyperbolic Baroque insistence on metaphor and story as revealing deeper truths than empirical observation and measurement can provide” (Waller, 244). 302 the more negative connotations associated with unbridled forms of fancy, including Platonism and the Cabbala. As Thell (2008) observes, the split must be taken as “a signal that the fragile division between the real and imaginary is about to disintegrate completely” (456), thus dramatising how in the process of imaginary world-building, “one makes oneself an object to oneself” (Maitre, 46). Moreover, the overall effect is 177 that of mise en abyme, in which “a character named for the author encourages another version of herself to compose another version of the romance we are already reading” (Mann, 196). The Empress makes the Duchess her favourite and thus, “their meeting did produce such an intimate friendship between them, that they became platonic lovers, although they were both females” (70). The introduction of the Duchess and the Platonic love- 178 friendship she forms with the Empress are related to the texture of the story, as Price (2014) shows how “the image of two self-contained worlds cojoined is central to early modern accounts of friendship and their classical antecedents, providing a figure for the concept of ‘one soul in bodies twain’ or ‘Two friends, one soul’” (3). Gallagher 179 (1998) had advanced the view that Cavendish’s absolutistic model, “with its implicitly Wagner (2003) draws attention to the fact that The Blazing World is “not the first text in which 177 Margaret splits herself into two physically and intellectually separate personae” (1), pointing to the unnamed correspondents of both Philosophical Letters (1664) and CCXI Sociable Letters (1664). Robinson (2003) reads a lesbian form of desire between both characters, based on the common sexual 178 and homoerotic assumptions of the image of the seraglio, and the text’s goal “to destabilize the term ‘platonic’ (and by extension the terms ‘immaterial’ and ‘spiritual’) on which the text ostensibly relies to defend it from being read as depicting lesbian eroticism” (147). On the contrary, for Rosenthal (1996), much as in The Convent of Pleasure, Cavendish is exploiting precisely “the ‘(in)significance of ‘femmefemme’ love in order to make some gender trouble, both for its own sake and as an imaginative way to reconfigure the property relations so profoundly intertwined with reproduction” (76-77). Thus, in Letter 158 of CCXI Sociable Letters (1664) she addresses her imaginary correspondent by 179 discussing the utopian possibility of female friendship: “But Madam, I have often Observed, that Women with Women seldom Agree, for our Sex is so Self-loving, as we cannot Indure a Competitor, much less a Superiour, especially for Beauty, Wit, and Worth; Birth, Title, and Wealth are somewhat Easier to Indure, yet neither so well, but that we are apt to look a Squint upon them that Surpass us therein, and therefore, the less Acquaintance we have with each other, the better unless they be Chosen by an Immaculate, and Pure Sympathy, and Honour Knit the Knot of Friendship” (170). 303 image of the self as a microcosm, leads in Cavendish’s works to a multiplicity of subjectivities” (142). As Campbell (1999) points out, this constitutes “a picture of infinite regression”, as “the self must appear as ruler within a microcosm which is also a representation of the self, and of which she is just only a part requiring the generation of yet another microcosmos” (209). Through the Duchess’ self-inclusion, we might observe how the dyadic world is complicated by the instabilities brought about by the new scientific discourse, as the construction of a possible actual world itself necessitates the existence of possible states of affairs, of other versions of the self for authenticating its truth-claims within a referential domain that remains potentially infinite. Even if the Duchess is given “special permits” that make the cross-worlds journey possible, as we shall observe, she cannot authenticate the truth-claims about the Blazing World, nor can she allow any passage into her own possible England. As Habinek (2018) points out, “her self-multiplication depends upon eliding distinctions among herself, her ideas, and her works, and, in a reverse-birth, this hybrid of three is reborn in the brains of her readers” (119). During one of her visits, the Duchess tells the Empress of an extreme melancholy proceeding from her ambition to become a great princess and ruler, drawing attention to Sarkar’s (2019) realisation that in early modern world-making it is often “impossible to untangle imaginative projections from fantasies of power” (180). The Empress summons her host of spirits for advice and asks them whether there be only three worlds (namely ESFI, the Blazing World, and the Duchess’ home world), and they assure her that “there were more numerous worlds than the stars which appeared in these three mentioned worlds” (71). The Empress requires to know whether any of these worlds 304 changes she had brought into the religious settlement of the Blazing World. Being aware of her own arbitrariness and of the change she has brought about, she fears that the many factions, divisions and animosities she has observed in the Duchess’ home world will “break out in an open rebellion, and cause a great disorder and the ruin of the government” (87). The kernel of Cavendish’s Royalist vision is contained in the Duchess’ advice to the Empress, namely “to introduce the same form of government again, which had been before; that is, to have but one sovereign, one religion, one law, and one language, so that all the world might be as one united family” (87). It is in this sense that Holmesland (2013) reads her 1666 texts as “a dialectical form in which selfaggrandizing motives engender a communal, natural corrective” (105), that is, in which a strong authority modelled on absolutism becomes the very precondition of a stable diversity. This restoration of the natural law of the Blazing World creates a dyadic deontic structure whose split is mirrored by the division of the protagonists, which, for Battigelli (1998) is indicative of the fact that “once the Duchess enters the narrative as a character, she quickly puts a stop to the Empress’ utopian and millenarian vision” (108). For Thell (2008), this strategy “offers Cavendish a way out of her own text”, as he narrative “has perhaps become too similar to the real world”, and the Empress “too similar to the author and too powerful for her real audience” (461). Thus, as Johnson (2004) observes, “Cavendish must disturb the systems of authority enough to establish herself within while simultaneously maintaining order in the primary institutions (government, religion, science or how we understand the world, thus avoiding anarchy” (20), so that the restoration of order is structurally required. If we take Pavel’s (1986) idea that “consistent worlds originate in a strong idealization” (50), the inconsistencies 311 and contradictory elements in Cavendish’s Blazing World point rather toward an attitude of negotiation, which for Holmesland (2013) might represent “the disparity between an ideal body politic founded on unifying natural motions and the discordant state of post-Cromwellian England” (93). On the contrary, for Uman (2016), this reveals Cavendish’s most notorious contradiction, as “she reinforces her hierarchical vision of society and imagines herself as the pinnacle of that hierarchy […] while simultaneously demonstrating a democratizing intent to invite other women to participate in scientific conversations” (175). After reverting the series of reforms, the Empress receives information that the kingdom of ESFI in her home world “was embroiled in a great war, and that most parts or nations thereof made war against that kingdom” (90). Here, as Sarkar (2019) puts it, we “confront the logical end-point of unbridled imagination, which aims to turn readers not into fiction-makers but into shapers of actuality who colonize ‘brazen’ realms” (182). Moreover, it marks the moment in which her text becomes again a romance, “in the much more traditional sense of a narrative series of quest-like adventures of virtue at war with vice, and of the search for one’s identity” (Wagner, 15). The Emperor and the Empress resolve to send for the Duchess to assist them in discussing the possibilities of assisting ESFI and, after strong deliberation, she devises a plan to “make such ships as could swim under water” (92) in order to transport several creatures through the narrow passage. She insists that the Empress should also go in person and use the telescopes of her bear-men to locate enemy ships, so that her bird-men can drop firestones found in the Burning Mountains of the Blazing World and which were used to build the firestone chapel. By turning the experimenter’s tools to a military use, she is also commenting on 312 their position, not as an outside from which science can be produced, but as “in some sense part of nature”, which “can even be useful in the right circumstances” (Sarasohn, 157), while also bypassing her epistemological concerns “by bringing the telescopes smoothly into the service of the Empress’ military agenda” (Prakas, 133). In this sense, “all of the powers she has harnessed – travel, religion, science, the colonial impulse, and patriarchal-displacement – converge in a scene of incredible domination” (Thell, 459). Being unable to locate the source of the attack, the enemy stands still while the Empress sends envoys to the captains and generals of ESFI in order to make her presence known, until she appears above her fish-men “so that she seemed to walk upon the face of the water” (95-96). Wagner (2003) reads this passage as “depicting identity as agentic, externally generated and theatrically produced” (16), as the Empress is blazoned in the fashion o the woman-cavalier and delivers an oration of war. She declares her intention to make ESFI, “the most powerful nation of this world” (96) promising to remain there until the remaining nations recognise ESFI’s sovereignty over the seas, ushering absolute destruction by hiding firestones below the houses so that they will combust when it rains. As the enemies are defeated, the Empress declares the king of ESFI “head-monarch of all this world” (102), which Holmesland (2013) sees as the way “monism is restored to the mother country and its dominions, modeled on the Blazing World” (107). Before returning to the Blazing World, she receives the princes of several nations in the open sea by asking them to form a circle with their ships, so she might appear in the middle wearing her imperial apparel. The princes of her home world “believed her to be some celestial creature, or rather an uncreated goddess, and they all had a desire to worship 313 her” (101). In this way, “her identity is metamorphosed both within the domain of friendship and without it, enabling her to act out the role of public saviour by giving her agency within her native world where before she had none” (Price, 17). For Thell (2008), this mediated absolutism “directly answers the powerlessness that initiated the narrative […] in a magnificent completion of Cavendish’s power cycle, the Empress bequeaths her recently amassed power to her former world’s king” (460). The final scenes of The Blazing World are used by Cavendish to mount a defence of her act of publication, by having the Duchess clarify that singularity does not equal vanity, inasmuch as even if fancy creates another referential domain, her uniqueness allows her to self-fashion her proxy as the sole point of reference. To Wagner (2003), “this fiction has a circularity to it”, since the story “ends with the Duchess telling tales of the Blazing World from within a narrative that is already one such tale” (3), thus marking the moment in which “the Empress switches roles and becomes spectator” (Pearl, 50). In this respect, Lilley (1992) draws attention to the ways in which “utopian writing is always of particular interest for genre theory, since any utopian speculation brings with it a meta-concern with systematicity and taxonomy itself; with interpretative categories and the elaboration of, and motivation of, imagined spaces” (102). The story concludes with a series of relations of the Duchess’ visits to the imperial court, including details of vehicles like a chariot whose body is made of “one entire green diamond” and “drawn by twelve unicorns” (107). The Empress also informs the Duchess of the many sorts of recreations pursued by the nobility of the Blazing World, including musical entertainments, races, water-dances, flight-matches and “collations” of rare fruits found there. Thus, these concluding moments centre on musical and dance 314 acts in order to stress the natural harmony of the court of Paradise, but also drawing attention to the way in which both the Duchess and the Empress have returned to their respective worlds but “so transformed as to suggest they now permanently contain each other” (Wagner, 17). Ultimately, Pearl (2014) concludes, Cavendish too, “becomes a figure of power, recuperating the alternativity of the lunar utopia by situating it in the mind and safeguarding it there against the tragedies of history” (54). The problem of subjectivity might be identified as its most vital aspect, in that it serves “to disguise the locus of discursive authority and undermine such categories as author, narrator, protagonist, character, history, and utopia, material and immaterial worlds, even representation and referent” (Khanna, 30), whose many textual hesitations chart many routes without fully committing to a single one. According to Campbell (1999), The Blazing World “was a register opposed to the self-effacing scientist and beautiful dead material of the subjectobject syntax Hooke was helping to construct” (218). In this sense, Price (1998) sees “the Duchess’s newly-found identity as sovereign of her own inner world contains resonances of the emergent modern notion of an autonomous sense of self” (41), while for Gallagher (1988) this emergent self is dialectically constructed and results in and endless multiplication, in “that which seems the undoing of the stability of the self is that which allows subjectivity to come into existence as an excessiveness of consciousness in relationship to all objects but specially in relationship to itself as object” (144). Similarly, the travel narrative framework allows Cavendish “to construct her worlds from an uncontested ‘outside’ position”, as it also allows her “to speak from 315 (ostensibly) outside inwards” (Thell, 448), in a way enabling her to imagine her own imagining self. 316 Conclusion. Cavendish concludes The Blazing World by linking the whole relation to her everexpanding ambition, “not only to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole world” (109). In this sense, Lobis (2015) remarks how “in identifying herself with her fictions and ultimately with herself, Cavendish was potentially compromising her ability to identify with others” (102), but her epilogue suggests another possible interpretation. She insists that the world she has just composed is made “of the most pure, that is, the rational parts of matter, which are the parts of my mind” (109), which is available to every living creature. To Pearl (2014), Cavendish’s text dramatises that “the possibilities of other planets are ultimately relocated to the mind and revivified there by the imagination, buttressed by the walls of the body but constrained chiefly by the limits of the fancy” (46). Therefore, this prologue “masquerading as an epilogue does not provide the expected closure, but instead another opening into the text” (Wagner, 18), for Cavendish’s strongest innovation is her hint at the participatory potential of worldmaking: If any should like the world I have made, and be willing to be my subjects, they may imagine themselves such, and they are such, I mean, in their minds, fancies or imaginations; but if they cannot endure to be subjects, they may create worlds of their own, and govern themselves as they please: but yet let them have a care, not to prove unjust usurpers, and to robe me of mine; for concerning the Philosophical World, I am Empress of it myself (109). 317 Here, the self itself is presented as an infinite world or worlds, “and the proof of its selfsufficiency is that it can make a world in fiction, utterly fantastic and ‘singular’, the ‘world’ of the text we are reading” (Gallagher, 142). The authoress invites us to visit such worlds while vindicating “a writing strategy that creates these ‘personal’ texts […] imaginative and spontaneous, open and non-exclusive in structure and language” (Pohl, 63). As Kunjummen (2019) notes, the most challenging, and therefore the most subversive aspect of her work, was her commitment to fantasy, “her willingness to give the life of the imagination the full weight afforded to everyday reality” (153). Thus, as Watson (2018) points out, “the rise of fictionality as an ontological concept generated the ability, through ironic engagement; to understand the possibility that something could exist as simultaneously real and not actual and provided the tools for authors to inject themselves into the spaces of possibility” (61). Ultimately, this imbalance between the endless mouldings of fancy and the pretended stability of fictional reference is resolved through emphasis upon a strong subjectivity that does not preclude inclusion or invitation. Her dissatisfaction with the position held by women at the time can be discerned, as Gallagher (1988) and Jowitt (1997) argue, through her appropriation of absolutism, which directly links to the modal capacity of the imagination to interpose realms of possibility in fiction. In conflating 182 worlds of fancy and social critique, “originality provides a form of ownership to which she would otherwise not have access” (Rosenthal, 62). As Cavendish herself declares in her preface, the faculty of fancy and its capacity for fiction-making 182 can overcome questions of gender and status: “I am not covetous, but as ambitious as ever any of my sex was, is, or can be; which makes, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First; and although I have neither power, time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not to be mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own: for which no body, I hope, will blame me, since it is in every one’s power to do the like” (6). 318 As Aït-Touati (2017) observes, “by presenting her literary invention as ‘fiction’, Cavendish also helped to reassert the value of the term and to nudge it along the path towards our modern understanding of it”, in that docere recedes as legitimation behind “a claim of its own originality” (498). Thus, “fiction is, in a sense, the ‘truth’ of fancy – that is, the tangible expression of what it creates – but because a thing created by fancy need not be true, neither need it err” (Habinek,148). We should also note that the gradual takeover of allegorical construction in The Blazing World over the “symilizing” of Poems, and Fancies, brings our several lines of inquiry together: from the use of fancy to bridge the gap between two different referential orders in the figures of metaphor and allegory, to a radical act of world-construction, accessible only to fancy. In the words of Cunning (2018), it exercises “a kind of agency in taking stand and making a record of the lives that she would live instead”, while providing “a vision of how things might look if the relevant obstacle were all of a sudden to vanish” (210). In this sense, Sarkar (2019) points out that, by picking Bacon’s New Atlantis as a frame, Cavendish makes a case for the collective “revising, reframing, and expanding the parameters of already fabricated worlds” (175), at the same time that she elevated fancy as a literary category that both highlights originality and non-referentiality in commenting on how “distance from actuality is a necessary precondition to transform readers into co-creators” (177). Thus, to capture Nature’s expansive movements implies letting the fancy roam freely, so that it might capture not only the radical variety of what there is, but also what there might be and what we have not yet comprehended. Her thought inhabits a point of intersection in which the concept of variety, that which marks the products of fancy and 319 plays a significant role in the shaping of human creativity whereby infinite variety becomes an essential aesthetic marker. As Shanahan (2002) puts it: Imitation of nature is radically different for Cavendish […]; Every product of wit is new not as more or less faithful versions of the world but as real original things, ideas or products. These new existents join an everexpanding world of qualities and objects, much as new animals and plants arise without being imitations in any proper sense. That a work of art has some resemblance to already existing things is a measure of how derivative it is. Cavendish’s verisimilitude, if it can be called that, stands the neoclassical sense of the term on its head. To be most ‘like nature’ is to be as fecund as she is (240-41). In this sense, as Venet (2003) argues, Cavendish “renders the rise of modern subjectivity through the emancipation of imagination” (227), but this subjectivity is fall from stable. In realising its capacity to construct other worlds that expand our conceptions of the real, it realises also its own contingency and the arbitrariness of the social spaces it inhabits. Thus, Cavendish “proved her modernity in at least one thing: while the new philosophers spoke in absolute terms and attempted to bring in a new order based on such absolutes, she always insisted on arguing that what she believed was […] rooted in a deep subjectivity that placed her beyond any definitive dogmatisms” (Prieto-Pablos, 277). As we saw in Chapter I, imagination is deeply entrenched in almost every account of the emergence of the thinking subject, which in turn manipulates this cross-cultural and interstitial faculty to ground spaces where questions of reference might be 320 BELL, Alice & Marie-Laure Ryan. 2019. “Introduction: Possible Worlds Theory Revisited”. Possible Worlds and Contemporary Narratology, edited by Alice Bell & Marie-Laure Ryan. University of Nebraska Press, pp. 1–43. 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