When the rumour spread that the crazy Duchess was coming up from Welbeck to pay her respects at Court, people crowded the streets to look at her, and the curiosity of Mr. Pepys twice brought him to wait in the Park to see her pass. But the pressure of the crowd about her coach was too great. He could only catch a glimpse of her in her silver coach with her footmen all in velvet, a velvet cap on her head, and her hair about her ears. He could only see for a moment between the white curtains the face of "a very comely woman," and on she drove through the crowd of staring Cockneys, all pressing to catch a glimpse of that romantic lady, who stands, in the picture at Welbeck, with large melancholy eyes, and something fastidious and fantastic in her bearing, touching a table with the tips of long pointed fingers, in the calm assurance of immortal fame.

—Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader

Margery Kempe tested for her culture the boundaries between madness and divinest sense, to paraphrase an Emily Dickinson poem. A mother of fourteen children who wore white to symbolize her chastity, an illiterate middle-class woman who conversed with holy men, about Scripture, a worldly adventurer who spread herself on the floor of her neighborhood church to weep and wail at the suffering of Christ made her presence felt and her voice resonate throughout the medieval world, if not throughout the centuries to follow. Domesticating Christ, Kempe facilitated her own empowerment in the larger arena of public debate. Two hundred years later Margaret Cavendish also tested the boundaries of madness for her culture. Mad Madge, as her contemporaries sometimes called her, was no extroverted woman like Kempe. Painfully shy and retiring, she nonetheless acknowledged the same desire for public significance as Kempe did. She, too, sought empowerment within the public arena of heroism; and like Kempe she achieved both public praise and notoriety. With more self-consciousness and less volubility, Cavendish was another "eccentric" woman who went about shaping her life and her life story for posterity.

Critics of seventeenth-century autobiography, when they have discussed Cavendish's autobiography, A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life, have remarked on the surprising and unprecedented self-scrutiny evident in her work. Paul Delany states [in British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century, 1969] that "it would be giving the Duchess more than her due to describe her as a penetrating self-analyst, but in her ingenuous way she does reveal much more about her personality than most autobiographers of her time"; and he goes so far as to trace her autobiographical lineage to Rousseau: "The line of development is unbroken from her work to a modern, subjective autobiography like Rousseau's—his kind of preoccupation with his own singularity is already implicit in the Duchess's Relation." Suggesting that the duchess's narrative "adumbrates, if it does not achieve, a scientific emphasis," Wayne Shumaker [English Autobiography: Its Emergence, Materials, and Form, 1954] concludes that it is "full of psychological significance—more so, perhaps, for the modern than for the seventeenth-century reader—and, whatever the motivating purpose, can properly be regarded as a study of character in a broadly sketched environmental setting." Recently, Cynthia S. Pomerleau contends [in Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, 1980, edited by Estelle C. Jelinek] that autobiographies by women in the century, Cavendish's included, "seem more modern, more subjective, more given to self-scrutiny, more like what we have come to know as autobiography" than those works by men that have been conflated with the autobiographical tradition of the seventeenth century. All three, motivated by different critical scenarios, identify in Cavendish's narrative, even if they do not stop to explore it, a protomodern preoccupation with the self qua self that promotes a thickness of selfrepresentation distinguishing her autobiography from others of the period.

"That romantic lady," as Virginia Woolf describes her [in her The Common Reader, 1925], would have reveled in such recognition of her "true" distinction, though not perhaps at its failure until recently to command serious attention. She was born Margaret Lucas about 1624 at St. John's in Essex, the youngest of eight children. Her father, a landed gentleman, died when she was two, after which she was raised in an apparently sheltered, even idyllic environment by her mother and older siblings. With the advent of the Civil War, the circumstances of the young woman's life altered dramatically. Two of her brothers died as a result of the fighting. Family property was confiscated. Then she left home to serve, from 1643 to 1645, as maid of honor to Queen Henrietta-Maria. In 1645, she accompanied the queen into exile in Paris, where she met and married William Cavendish, then marquis, but later duke, of Newcastle. They spent seventeen years in exile in Paris, Rotterdam, and Antwerp, during which time Cavendish turned to writing as a "profession." During the fifteen years between 1653 and 1668, she wrote and published fourteen works: five scientific treatises, five collections of poetry and fantasies, two collections of essays and letters, and two collections of plays, as well as a biography of her husband and an autobiography. With the Restoration she and her husband returned to England and retired from court to live on their country estate at Welbeck, where she died in 1674. Before her death Cavendish became a controversial figure, as the passage from Woolf so sympathetically suggests. She wrote. She wore theatrical costumes. She promoted the importance of a chaste life. She thereby gained a reputation for madness. And yet she received the adulation of some prominent writers and scholars of the period.

Cavendish wrote her autobiography at the relatively young age of thirty-two; she thus looked back, not on a long life, but on a short span covering childhood, young adulthood, early marriage, and the beginning of a "career." She had, in fact, only just begun to write and had not yet achieved public recognition of her talents. But she had married well; and the duke was himself a celebrity. Earlier she had written a biography of her husband, an occasion to idealize him and to defend him against detractors. Her decision to write her own story suggests that Cavendish also wanted to immortalize herself and to defend herself against her own detractors.

Men and women writing autobiographies in the seventeenth century—Cavendish particularly—would have grappled with complex problems of self-representation in a fragmented tradition. They would have struggled with the contours of individual experience, personal intentions, the formal options, and the expectations of their readers, influenced by a cultural ambiance that encouraged exploration of all kinds, including self-exploration, but offered few clearly defined models, in part because many of the autobiographies written during the period remained unpublished for several hundred years. There were, however, two generalized conventions that provided provisional topographical opportunities: the narrative of religious conversion tracing its roots to Augustine's Confessions and the secular res gestae tracing its roots back to the classical period. Yet in both nascent conventions the figures of selfhood would have complicated the autobiographical project for a woman. Religious autobiographers tended to be members of formal church hierarchies who perceived the significance of their lives to derive from their status as members of the "militant elite" or "spiritual aristocracy." While the Protestant sects that emerged from the Reformation validated woman's authority to read her life for the signs of God's grace, except for the Quakers, they continued to deny her access to public roles and responsibilities. Excluded from the ministry because of patriarchal notions about her "natural" subordination to the authority of her husband and her suspect relationship to language, a woman could not claim membership in the church hierarchy and could not, therefore, claim her life's significance to derive from that kind of activity. Nor did the conventions of secular autobiography offer unequivocal guidance, for they depended in the seventeenth century on the premise that the sum of public acts constituted an individual's "life." In other words, formal "autobiography" remained clearly androcentric.

When Cavendish initiated her autobiographical project, neither sacred nor secular figures promised to conform comfortably to the experience of her life. Whatever her relations to and ideas about the other world, they remained outside the purview of her narrative, which she grounds exclusively in the world of people, education, individual characteristics, not in the exploration of divine providence and personal salvation. Moreover, since her only relationship to public events came from her ascribed status as the daughter of Master Lucas and the wife of the duke of Newcastle, she could not write in the tradition of res gestae unless she wrote about the men who had given her her names. (She did so, of course, when she wrote the biography of her husbnd, to which her own autobiography was appended soon after its first publication. But she originally separated her autobiography from his biography, in 1656 publishing her "life" in a folio entitled Natures Pictures drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life.)

As did other educated and predominantly aristocratic women who wrote secular autobiography during the century, Cavendish turned to her private experience for the matter of her narrative. Pomerleau argues that "for women, and not for men, the domestic choices were, partly by default, a medium for self-expression; and as men began gropingly to write about their public lives, so, amazingly, did a few women write about their private lives." She goes on to contend that "the idea that oneself, one's feelings, one's spouse and domestic relations were properly and innately worth writing about was essentially a female idea, however tentatively conceived at the time." For that reason, Donald A. Stauffer [English Biography before 1700, 1930] finds women's autobiographies of the period "more personal, informal, and life-like" since the women are "engrossed in the more enthralling problems of their own lives." Moreover, educated women writing their lives approached autobiography with a different orientation toward rhetoric and writing than educated men did. Denied the classical training offered to young men, a training built on imitation and repetition of classical models, elaborated through the structure of argumentation and agonistic combat, articulated in the voice of "objectivity," women often wrote in a style and with a rhetorical voice more fluid and familiar.

Evidence suggests, however, that other women did not presume, as Cavendish did, to garner for themselves significance beyond that attached to conventional figures of women's selfhood, so that they shunned formal autobiography, never writing expressly about themselves for the public. Some, such as Lucy Hutchinson, based their claim to significance on their domestic roles as mothers and as companions to men of public stature, whose biographies they wrote. For instance, Hutchinson abandoned her autobiographical project after describing her parentage and early years, and turned instead to the biography of her husband in a release of great and skillful verbosity as if her own life story ended after adolescence when marriage subsumed her identity in her husband's. Ann Lady Fanshawe wrote specifically for her son's edification and assumed an appropriately self-abnegating stance as she focused on her husband's career. In both purpose and design these texts served to enhance the image of man. Others may have written of their own, rather than their husbands', exploits in the larger social and political arena, but they limited the audience for their work to family members as Anne Lady Halkett did. Consequently, such works by women fell well within cultural expectations governing women's relationship to self-writing and reaffirmed an ideology of autobiography as a male preserve.

Cavendish, having dutifully written the biography of her husband and having had no children whom she could edify, journeyed well beyond those other autobiographers by publicizing her life. She usurped the authority to write her own story for the world, authoring her autobiography as she authored scientific treatises and works of poetry, philosophy, Utopian fantasy, drama, biography. She recognized, however, that her readers would read her as "woman," inflecting their response to her narrative with patriarchal expectations of woman's identity, condemning her "unfeminine" desire to use her intelligence and ambition in pursuit of public acclaim. For, as Hilda Smith suggests [in her Reason's Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists, 1982], Cavendish "understood, better than any of her sisters, the multifaceted nature of women's oppression. She noted their poor education, exclusion from public institutions, political subordination within the home, physiological dictates of childbirth, and society's pervasive vision of women as incompetent, irresponsible, unintelligent, and irrational." A self-consciousness about her identity and status as a woman therefore dominated her works and prompted her critique of the ideology of gender. Yet, as Smith also notes, her critique, while extensive and even radical, was not without its contradictions: "She often suggested that society's perception was correct; women had made few contributions to past civilization, not because they were ill educated but because they had less ability than men." Such contradictions worry the autobiography itself. Influenced by the discourse on man and its empowering narratives, Cavendish wanted to become not merely an ascriptive footnote in the course of history but a person of acknowledged achievements and historical distinction whose eminently "readable" life would gain her "fame in after ages." Yet as she pursued this vision she threatened herself with still another kind of exile, not from the court, not from England, but from that larger domain of "womanhood" with its privileged stories of selfhood. Moreover, she was herself a product of that discourse and so, as she grew accustomed to seeing herself reflected in "the looking-glass of the male-authored text," internalized the narrative of feminine goodness, a silent plot of modesty, naivité, virtue, dependency, innocence, and self-concealment. The anxiety occasioned by such doubling of narrative purpose manifests itself in the fundamental ambiguity at the heart of Cavendish's selfrepresentation. Indeed, there are in A True Relation two competing self-representations: that of the woman who fulfills the patriarchal imperatives of female selfhood and who defends the integrity of her innocence; and that of the woman who demands from the world recognition of her own independent achievements. The tension that drives Cavendish's narrative and that leads to the unprecedented self-scrutiny noted by critics of her work, is the tension generated as Cavendish struggles to reconcile, if in the end she only fails to do so, her desire to maintain the silence of the ideal woman and her desire to give voice to her own unconventional and heroic narrative.

Cavendish begins her story with a brief biography of her father, revealing the degree to which she located her identity in his status and character: "My father was a gentleman," she writes, "which Title is grounded and given by Merit, not by princes." Probably because he was dead before Cavendish turned three, she invests the slim biography with such mythic resonances. He represents the ideal hero who "did not esteem Titles, unless they were gained by Heroick Actions." But he represents also the hero robbed of heroic possibilities. The critical moment around which the lost possibility coalesces is the scene of the duel her father fought when a young man. A sign of masculine bravery and integrity, the duel reveals her father's allegiance to the "Laws of Honour." And yet the times are not conducive to that particular expression of heroism: Because of political complications, her father is exiled from England by Queen Elizabeth. When he finally returns after Elizabeth's death, "there was no Employments for heroick Spirits" since the times of "wise" King James remain peaceful. In the end, her father never gains a "title" and never, as a result, gains a historically prominent lineage or a heroic story such a title would command. The story she tells of her father is one of exile and frustrated desire.

In its themes of heroism and of exile, this paternal biography resonates with the daughter's desire for story and her own sense of confusion and frustration about selfrepresentation. In many ways Cavendish is her father's daughter. Like her father before her, she would leave behind the legitimate trace of her "Heroick Actions," those "manly" accomplishments that would ensure her "fame in after ages." Like him, she suffers from frustrated desire, as political, social, and cultural circumstances deny her access to the realm of public activity and significance that lie outside the womb. Like him, she suffers "exile" for her attentiveness to that androcentric code of honor. And just as her father's life is lived out in a heroic eventlessness that silences his claims to titles, so too Cavendish's life of inactivity threatens to silence her claim to a cultural story of her own. Thus, as she begins her narrative, Cavendish confronts the cultural silence of the very life she would represent.

In this context it is interesting to consider the relationship of Cavendish's autobiography to the biography she wrote of her husband. Since her husband had been a central (and controversial) leader of the Royalist forces and a companion to the king, his life provided the material and the occasion for Cavendish to engage in heroic storytelling. (Unlike her father, her husband gained esteem and public titles from his heroic feats during fiercely troubled times.) Cavendish organized her story in four parts. The first two parts tell of her husband's participation in the Civil War; but more than that, they offer a partisan's defense of the hero's actions as a way of answering his critics and enhancing his reputation. Thus she presents him as the hero-warrior devoted to his sovereign, abused by the mediocre people around him; and her story appropriates conventional features of the classical res gestae. In the third part she turns to a description of his character, humor, disposition, birth, breeding, and education, in an apparent attempt to flesh out the details of the inner, the personal, life of the hero. The fourth part introduces the voice of the hero himself as she assembles a collection of his own writings and commentaries. Ultimately, Cavendish creates in the story of her husband an ideal figure who enacts "the heroic ethic of the masculine world."

While Cavendish desires to place heroic action in the plot of her own life, she can in fact replicate only the third part of the biography's structure in her story, the personal rather than the public story. Thus she amasses rather disjointed descriptions of her birth, education, family, disposition, and humor, and winds them around a slim chronological narrative of her personal development from childhood to young adulthood. Yet Cavendish does introduce brief narratives of male heroism into her story as she digresses with adulatory descriptions of the characters and adventures of father, brothers, brother-in-law, and husband. Of her brothers she affirms that "they loved Virtue, endeavoured Merit, practic'd Justice, and spoke Truth; they were constantly loyal, and truly Valiant." Of her brother-in-law: "He was nobly generous, wisely valiant, naturally civill, honestly kind, truly loving, Virtuously temperate." Of her husband: "my Lord is a person whose Humour is neither extravagantly merry, nor unnecessarily sad, his Mind is above his Fortune, as his Generosity is above his purse, his Courage above danger, his Justice above bribes, his Friendship above self-interest, his Truth too firm for falsehood," and on and on. Such passages clearly evince not only Cavendish's desire to defend her family but also her obvious admiration of quintessentially male-identified values and qualities of character. They also provide a parallel story of masculine activity alongside her own story of public silence.

Such "male" stories seem to add value, authority, and legitimacy to Cavendish's "life" by a process of association. She enhances her own figure and status as a result of the ideal figures of such male relatives. Yet ironically, such privileging of male biography and ideals of personality in the story effectively subverts a central quality of character she would claim for herself: Like her father, who refuses to buy the status of nobility and who would only earn it through significant heroic action, Cavendish seeks to earn her recognition and fame through significant public action and merit of her own, not to purchase it ascriptively through the heroic feats of men. By incorporating those "masculine" stories so fully into her own, she partially undermines her effort to follow in her father's footsteps. Moreover, she turns her woman's autobiography into a biography of men.

The attentiveness to males—to father, brothers, husband—testifies simultaneously to a very "feminine" orientation to storytelling and to the world in that it pays homage to the superior value and virtue of male-identified activities. Such an orientation becomes particularly critical for Cavendish since, as certain passages in the text reveal, she is acutely aware of the reputation she is gaining as an "unwomanly," even a somewhat "mad," woman. She alludes to rumors and "false reports," projecting throughout her text a public and a reader critical of her desire for public display of her person (in the ostentatious clothes she wears), of her word (in the court appeals she makes, in the books she writes), and of her ambition. Responding to the pressure of those cultural voices, Cavendish struggles to defend her identity as an ideal woman, thereby assuring her reader that she has followed, not in her father's, but in her mother's footsteps. And so, interweaving throughout the digressive narratives of male relatives (and the idealization of the masculine ethic) is the story of her "maternal" inheritance with its idealization of true womanhood—the story, as Mary C. Mason suggests [in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, 1980, edited by James Olney], "of an emerging young woman."

If her father as exemplar of masculine integrity sits at the threshold of her autobiography, her mother, the exemplar of the true feminine, inhabits the center of her story—literally and figuratively. The daughter represents her mother as the embodiment of perfect beauty: "She was of a grave Behaviour, and had such a Magestic Grandeur, as it were continually hung about her, that it would strike a kind of awe to the beholders, and command respect from the rudest." She is also the "affectionate Mother, breeding her children with a most industrious care, and tender love, and having eight children, three sons and five daughters, there was not anyone crooked or any ways deformed, neither were they dwarfish, or of a Giant-like stature, but every ways proportionable." And finally, she is the model wife and widow, who

never forgot my Father so as to marry again; indeed, he remain'd so lively in her memory, and her grief was so lasting, as she never mention'd his name, though she spoke often of him, but love and grief caused tears to flow, and tender sighs to rise, mourning in sad complaints; she made her house her Cloyster, inclosing her self, as it were therein, for she seldom went abroad, unless to Church.

Read in tandem these descriptive passages pay empassioned tribute to a remarkable woman, an ideal of timeless beauty and devotion, an image of female perfection that is cloistered, quiescent, eternal.

Throughout A True Relation, Cavendish tenaciously insists that she has imitated the maternal model of the ideal feminine and she has achieved the sanctity and aristocratic gentility of inner life on which the imitation depends. She does so by characterizing herself as "the sheltered innocent" who lives "the cloistered life," drawing repeatedly on the language and imagery of both figures to sustain that narrative identity. For instance, as Cavendish nostalgically represents it, her childhood was lived out in an idyllic, protected, totally innocent world. Here mother and older siblings created for her a conventual environment closed off from the public realm where males acted heroically; and in that enclosed space the child and young woman was bred "according to … the Nature of my Sex … Virtuously, Modestly, Civilly, Honourably, and on honest principles." Her education included "singing, dancing, playing on musick, reading, writing, working, and the life." Yet intellectual accomplishment and independence of mind were discouraged to such an extent that she can write of her sisters that they "did seldom make Visits, nor never went abroad with Strangers in their Company, but onely themselves in a Flock together agreeing so well, that there seemed but one Minde amongst them."

Describing her entrance as a young woman into the world of the court, Cavendish identifies herself as the sheltered innocent leaving the virtuous life of the cloister to confront a "fallen" world where cunning, sophistication, intrigue, debauchery proclaim the reign of evil. Deprived of the guidance of her siblings, she was "like one that had no Foundation to stand, or Guide to direct me, which made me afraid, lest I should wander with Ignorance out of the waies of Honour, so that I knew not how to behave myself." As a result, she "durst neither look up with my eyes, nor speak, nor be any way sociable, insomuch as I was thought a Natural Fool." Thus, although she might have gained an education, she clings to innocence, maintaining that "being dull, fearfull, and bashfull, I neither heeded what was said or practic'd, but just what belonged to my loyal duty, and my own honest reputation; and, indeed, I was so afraid to dishonour my Friends and Family by my indiscreet actions, that I rather chose to be accounted a Fool, then to be thought rude or wanton." When she describes her later attempt to petition the English courts for access to her husband's lands (which had been confiscated during his exile), she again characterizes herself as "unpracticed," "unlearned," "ignorant," "not knowing." And when she analyzes her bashfulness and her way of living, she emphasizes again and again her isolation from the fallen multitude and her "aversion to such kinds of people." For Cavendish, the representation of herself as foolish, uncomfortable, ignorant, fearful, bashful, and speechless in public testifies to her superior virtue, the basis on which her true merit as model woman rests.

Cavendish also establishes that her virtue derives from her chaste relationship to men and to sexual passion. During her childhood, she tells her reader, her mother "never suffered the vulgar Servingmen to be in the Nursery among the Nurse Maids, lest their rude love-making might do unseemly actions, or speak unhandsome words in the presence of her children, knowing that youth is apt to take infection by ill examples, having not the reason of distinguishing good from bad." She describes herself as a young woman who "did dread Marriage, and shunn'd mens companies as much as [she] could." And she maintains that she "never was infected [with amorous love], it is a Disease, or a Passion, or both, I only know by relation, not by experience." These passages taken together reveal her vision of sexuality as a form of "infection" and of men's company as conducive to another kind of dis-ease. Adding chastity to the catalog of goodness, Cavendish reveals, by the way, the degree to which the life story of the ideal woman demands the repression of sexual desire. In fact, in her relationship to the duke, she represents herself as totally without desire, as a kind of clean slate waiting to be written on: "My Lord the Marquis of Newcastle did approve of those bashful fears which many condemn'd, and would choose such a Wife as he might bring to his own humours, and not such an one as was wedded to self-conceit, or one that had been temper'd to the humours of another, for which he wooed me for his Wife." Here she joins the imagery of sexual purity, religious devotion, and self-effacement when describing her vision of marriage, recapitulating the metaphor of the cloistered life (associated with her mother) with obvious rhetorical flamboyance: "though I desire to appear to the best advantage, whilest I live in the view of the public World, yet I could most willingly exclude myself, so as Never to see the face of any creature, but my Lord, as long as I live, inclosing myself like an Anchoret, wearing a Frize gown, tied with a cord about my waste."

The powerful appeal of feminine "silence" for Cavendish may have derived in part from her profound experience of displacement during exile from England and her desire to reclaim her rightful place in the order of English society. Thus a preoccupation with traditional patterns of social arrangements, and with the sexual arrangements at the center of them, characterizes her autobiography as it does much of secular autobiography of the late Renaissance. As Delany notes, "secular autobiographers were often unusually concerned with their social status, either because it had changed significantly for better or worse, or because they had perceived a shift in the relative standing of the class to which they gave allegiance." The very identity of Cavendish's family had altered dramatically, irrevocably: Two of her brothers had perished as a result of the Civil Wars; her mother had been stripped of her lands and assets; her husband had been exiled. In such a context Cavendish seems to cling to the old, the established, the fundamental patterns of sexual relationships that root her personal identity. Pomerleau, writing of women's autobiographies in the century, suggests that "the old patterns may actually have provided an element of serenity and stability in a world where the sanctity of these patterns could no longer be taken for granted." A proud supporter of the authority of the monarch and a critic of the democratic impulses of the opposition (and of democracy generally, evidenced by her aristocratic scorn of the fallen multitude), Cavendish maintained, despite her acute recognition of the oppression of women, despite her often strong condemnations of the institution of marriage, a commitment to the authority of the familial patriarch as well as to that of the royal one.

Cavendish's insistence before the reader on identifying discomfort with virtue, bashfulness with merit, childlike fear with ideal feminine purity and ignorance testifies to the intensity of her desire to imitate the self-abnegating model of ideal womanhood represented by her mother and thereby to secure the love and acceptance of the world. Yet her rhetoric in key passages betrays another vision of that model of womanhood. If we return to the central passages describing her mother and read them once again, we see that the language evokes, however subtly, images of feminine enclosure and physical and psychological entombment. Of her mother, Cavendish writes that

her beauty was beyond the ruin of time, for she had a well favoured loveliness in her face, a pleasing sweetness in her countenance, and a well-temper'd complexion, as neither too red nor too pale, even to her dying hour, although in years, and by her dying, one might think death was enamoured with her, for he imbraced her in a sleep, and so gently, as if he were afraid to hurt her.

Cavendish obviously wants to testify to her mother's perfection and mystical power. Yet in doing so she testifies to much more. Forever devoted to a dead husband, willingly cloistered in her womb-like convent, marvelously preserved from the physical ravages of time, and caressed easily by death, this mother is also the figure of frozen stillness, a necromantic presence whose real power derives from the hold her memory has on the daughter. Paradoxically, the daughter subverts the grasp of this mother, whose image commands obedient imitation, by betraying in the very language of entombment a fundamental dissatisfaction with the ideal. For to be cloistered in such an ideal, however well preserved and comfortable it may be, is to be dead to independent expression, knowledge, and heroic possibilities. Ultimately, that ideal of self-representation is unmasked as a "fiction," compellingly prescriptive yet untruthful and invalid. While Cavendish would duplicate her mother's story, her language reveals the desire for a duplicitous transgression of its lines.

The language of the text subverts the representation of her mother as ideal woman in yet another way. Cavendish acknowledges that, however much her mother might have emphasized "being" and deemphasized "doing" in her educational scheme, she embraced a socially acceptable practical role foisted upon her by widowhood: "though she would often complain that her family was too great for her weak Management, and often prest my Brother to take it upon him, yet I observe she took a pleasure, and some little pride, in the governing thereof: she was very skilful in Leases, and setting of lands, and Court-keeping, ordering of Stewards, and the like affairs." In this telling description, Cavendish notes the deference and self-abnegation of her mother's public mask and the private sense of satisfaction and power concealed by that mask. In other words, she identifies the fictional nature of her mother's public persona: Before her, her mother, too, masked her pleasure in power. In this characterization, therefore, Cavendish captures her own dilemma—how to maintain the virtuous woman's silence and simultaneously pursue public power. Moreover, she reveals her strategy for negotiating the dilemma—the fabrication of a self-effacing mask. But in doing so she calls into question the very truthfulness of her representation of herself as the virtuous, silent woman.

Of course, the first evidence of a self-asserting protagonist is the autobiography itself. The title announces the very desire for public acknowledgement Cavendish tries unsuccessfully to mute; for once she commits herself to the autobiographical project, she dissociates herself from the figure of the self-abnegating woman. By writing she authorizes her own story: She speaks publicly. Then the opening of the narrative, discussed earlier, reveals her strong identification with the father and the heroic values of the world of men. Male heroics are denied her, however; thus she takes up the pen, a choice that seems natural to her as the preface to one of her other works suggests: "That my ambition of extraordinary Fame, is restless, and not ordinary, I cannot deny: and since all Heroick Actions, Publick Employments, as well Civill as Military, and Eloquent Pleadings, are deni'd my Sex in this Age, I may be excused for writing so much." While she does not turn her autobiography into a conscious exploration of her development as an artist, she does provide, if only unconsciously, a thin strand of a story tracing her emerging authorship.

The figure of an empowered and ambitious self becomes visible in such passages as the one in which she describes her early fascination with dress: "I never took delight in closets, or cabinets of toys, but in the variety of fine clothes, and such toys as onely were to adorn my person." She thus grounds in early childhood her preoccupation with fashioning herself in her own representations, albeit in a conventional script of women's lives:

My serious study could not be much, by reason I took great delight in attiring, fine dressing, and fashions, especially such fashions as I did invent myself, not taking that pleasure in such fashions as was invented by others: also I did dislike any should follow my Fashions, for I always took delight in a singularity, even in accoutrements of habit.

Unique, "loud" clothes break the silence and the anonymity at the core of feminine goodness, publicly distinguishing her from all other girls by giving original lines to her body. Through such fashioning, the young woman gives form to her fantasies of creative selfhood, and the autobiographer, recalling such moments, unmasks her desire for "making up" in both senses of the phrase: making up stories about herself and making herself up for public exposure.

Suzanne Juhasz, in an essay on contemporary autobiographies by women ["Towards a Theory of Form in Feminist Autobiography: Kate Millet's Flying and Sita; Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior," in Women's Autobiography: Essays in criticism, 1980], alludes to the dynamic relationship of literary women to the realm of fantasy, suggesting that "because there is usually a profound discrepancy between the options that society offers to women and the potential that they find within themselves, women frequently have complex inner lives, worlds of fantasy." Cavendish's autobiography reveals that fantasy became a means she early developed to mediate between the cultural imperative of self-annihilating silence and more heroic possibilities of selfhood. Shy, contemplative, yet ambitious—as she tells her reader a number of times—in fantasy and later in writing Cavendish can become the empowering author of her own story and fashion herself as a protagonist of heroic proportions, thereby wresting greatness and distinction from insignificance. Unable to grasp the sword or to ride a horse into battle as her husband (and male relatives) can, she can grasp the pen and ride words across pages. And she can create in her writing women of heroism who take on all the roles of men, including fighting, ruling, discovering, as they do in such works as Bell in Campo and The Description of a New World. Thus writing, with its promise of regenerative, capacious, galvanizing selfhood, not the "Lord" of her text, represents life itself to Cavendish, since it enables her to exercise her reason and imagination, and to body forth her originality by shaping interpretations. (In fact, the marquis, at least as he is represented in the autobiography, performs a function much like the woman "in some corner" of Freud's male daydreams. He becomes a kind of male muse who acknowledges, who seems even to inspire, her writing.) What Stephen Jay Greenblatt claims [in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, 1980] for the prominent literary men of the Renaissance applies as well to Cavendish: "the Renaissance figures we have considered understand that in our culture to abandon self-fashioning is to abandon the craving for freedom, and to let go of one's stubborn hold upon selfhood, even selfhood conceived as a fiction, is to die."

Cavendish's language and imagery suggest the degree to which she imagined writing as a female equivalent to male warfare, a heroic arena in which women might gain access to distinction through merit. In describing her method of writing and her handwriting, she appropriates a trope from the dominant discourse, noting that

when some of those thoughts are sent out in words, they give the rest more liberty to place themselves in a more methodicall order, marching more regularly with my pen, on the ground of white paper, but my letters seem rather as a ragged rout, than a well armed body, for the brain being quicker in creating than the hand in writing, or the memory in retaining, many fancies are lost, by reason they ofttimes outrun the pen; where I, to keep speed in the Race, write so fast as I stay not so long as to write my letters plain.

Yet this language also reveals the degree to which she felt ambiguous about the presumption inherent in such an analogy. Having established the analogy, Cavendish associates herself with the routed and defeated rather than with the heroic and victorious. Hers is a battle lost, at least in terms of the orderliness of her ideas and her handwriting, which by the end of this passage is what her "writing" has been reduced to. Or more precisely, she is really an interloper on the field of battle as the distinction she draws between her husband's writing and her own attests. While the marquis "recreates himself with his pen, writing what his Wit dictates to him," she "pass[es] [her] time rather with scribbling than writing, with words than wit." This disclaimer recapitulates the earlier rhetoric of ignorance and reaffirms—at the moment she would reveal her desire for significant action and accomplishment—her continued allegiance to the conventions of ideal female gentility, in particular the modesty that forbids the assertion of female authority and authorship.

Elsewhere Cavendish takes pains to distinguish herself from other, less virtuous women who speak publicly in their own behalf as "Pleaders, Attornies, Petitioners, and the like, running about with their several Causes." Such women

doth nothing but justle for the Preheminence of words, I mean not for speaking well, but speaking much, as they do for the preheminence of place, words rushing against words, thwarting and crossing each other, and pulling with reproaches, striving to throw each other down with disgrace, thinking to advance themselves thereby.

Again Cavendish appropriates the combat trope, but with an intriguing difference. Here she would accuse other women of unfeminine activity and self-asserting public display, and so doing reaffirm her own modesty in public. But ironically, while she means to mark the difference between herself and other women who use language publicly, the imagery in the passage identifies her with them. Like them, she would through writing enter the world of male combat and seek distinction on the field of battle. Like them, she seeks preeminence. That confusion in her recourse to the combat trope betrays the confusion at the heart of her project and betrays the "fictionality" of both self-asserting and self-effacing representations.

The problematic nature of Cavendish's public exposure is represented both literally and figuratively in her relationship to her carriage. Twice in the narrative she alludes to the pleasure she feels in riding about and reveals her motives for such public exposure: "because I would not bury myself quite from the sight of the world, I go sometimes abroad, seldome to visit, but only in my Coach about the Town." Reality beyond the cloister must be engaged in order for her to enlarge the experiential bases of her fantasies and to feed her vanities: "I am so vain, if it be a vanity, as to endeavor to be worship't, rather than not to be regarded." Like the hero who rides through the streets in his triumphal chariot, Cavendish would be worshipped by the populace. Yet the "fallen" public, that awesome, often truculent, intractable, vulgar reality, threatens to shatter the fantasy of purity and distinction. Thus, for an "ideal" woman cloistered within the protective walls of bashfulness but desiring an audience larger than her Lord to validate her true originality, the carriage becomes the vehicle that promises both assertive self-display and the requisite self-concealment emblematic of an inner goodness so critical to the chaste, virtuous woman. If the public is allowed to see but not to touch, Cavendish is allowed to be seen but not to be touched by the fallen multitude.

The autobiography is itself a metaphorical carriage, a vehicle that parades the body of Cavendish's life before the public, allowing her to escape the confinement of silence. But that secular gesture of self-display threatens to take her on a transgressive ride beyond the conventional path of woman's selfhood. The final passage of Cavendish's autobiography captures the central dilemma in its poignant self-reflexiveness. In the first clause she acknowledges a prominent motif embedded in the ideology of gender: Women manifest a natural tendency to vanity, and vanity in woman is evil. Thus the public display of the woman who would write autobiography marks her as a true daughter of Eve. The scene of autobiography is no place for woman. Just as she earlier acknowledges public censorship of her sartorial fashioning, Cavendish here recognizes the inevitability of public censorship of her literary self-fashioning, of the very autobiography she has just written. In response, she assumes a defensive posture, strategically citing authoritative precedents: "but I hope my readers will not think me vain for writing my life, since there have been many that have done the like, as Cesar, Ovid, and many more, both men and women, and I know no reason I may not do it as well as they." In a gesture of petulance, she would bring the authority of Caesar and Ovid to bear on her enterprise. Perhaps she identifies with the betrayal of the former and the exile of the latter, since as a Royalist she is living through just such betrayal and exile. Certainly, she identifies her autobiographical authority with the literary authority of the man of public action and the poet. But, as Patricia Meyer Spacks notes [in her The Female Imagination, 1975], the models to whom she refers are male—her reference to female precedents notwithstanding—and their deeds a matter of public significance. She can cite no female models of significance, no tradition of women's autobiography. Moreover, the text betrays Cavendish's own ambivalence about such comparisons. The very next clause speaks to the lack of public significance in women's lives and by implication in their narratives: "but I verily believe some censuring Readers will scornfully say, why hath this Lady write her own Life? since none cares to know whose daughter she was, or whose wife she is, or how she was bred, or what fortunes she had, or how she lived, or what humour or disposition she was of?" The catalog of content, a summation of her own autobiographical material, betrays the absence of heroic action and public deeds, the conventional subject matter of formal autobiography.

Her defensive posture intensifies: "I anser that it is true, that 'tis to no purpose to the Reader, but it is to the Authoress, because I write it for my own sake, not theirs." While she declares that the reader's expectations are insignificant to her, the pose remains more rhetorical than convincing. For the next and final passage reveals powerfully the fundamental motivation of the effort:

Neither did I intend this piece for to delight, but to divulge; not to please the fancy, but to tell the truth, lest after-ages should mistake, in not knowing I was daughter to one Master Lucas of St. Johns, near Colchester, in Essex, second wife to the Lord Marquis of Newcastle; for my Lord having had two Wives, I might easily have been mistaken, especially if I should dye and my Lord Marry again.

These closing words of her text testify eloquently to her desperate need to be "read" accurately by those readers who will, if they so choose, distinguish her for posterity from her husband's other wives. Ultimately, then, the issue is one of identity versus anonymity. Cavendish is writing for her very life. Ironically, however, only her identity as daughter and wife will differentiate her from her husband's other wives. So for all her effort to follow her father's example and to maintain the value of merit as the source of "fame in after ages," Cavendish can rely only on her ascriptive status as wife and daughter to place her historically. In that light it is interesting to note again that originally the autobiography appeared by itself in her collection of her writings, Natures Pictures drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life: only later was it appended to the second edition of the biography of her husband, a kind of historical footnote. Thus her story becomes a satellite revolving around the body of man's story. Paradoxically, while she authors his life, his life, in fact, authors and authorizes hers.

Cavendish could not tell her autobiographical story the way her culture had come to expect it to be told. She could not discover in her life the plot for res gestae or for spiritual quest. Somehow, she had to make the private story suffice instead of the public one. Decked out in those "odd" autobiographical clothes, she insisted on being regarded, if only by a public bent on laughing at her. However flawed, however entangled as it inevitably was in the very patriarchal plots that mocked her attempts at self-fashioning, her autobiographical carriage ride is in its own way as frustratedly heroic as her father's youthful duel. Like her father, she was doomed to "die" in the realm of feminine silence and the repetitive anonymity that characterized women's narrative possibilities in the seventeenth century or to become an exile from the autobiographical conventions of her culture. Engaged as she is in that effort, she cannot help but be more self-revealing than contemporary autobiographers who inscribed their self-representations in the more "impersonal" conventions of res gestae or spiritual awakening or in the narratives of domestic drama that provided the autobiographer more comfortable, because more clearly delimiting, narrative personae. Cavendish can give neither us nor herself those comfortable masks. She gives us, instead, a woman struggling uncomfortably with an androcentric genre.

In its narrative chaos the prose surface of Cavendish's True Relation reveals the desperate pleasure the very act of writing must have offered her. Suppressed energy and vitality permeate the text and its constant transformations. Sentences start in one direction, shift, scatter, reconvene, then go off suddenly elsewhere. That may be, as some critics remark, the sign of her undisciplined mind, the mind of a woman denied the intellectual training reserved exclusively for men. As such it reveals the price she paid for being a woman. But it also reveals the fierce desire for power at the heart of Cavendish's personal struggle for "fame in after ages." And so, out of all the mutability and the mobility, the interpenetration of story lines, the proliferation of digressive details, Cavendish constitutes both her "character" and her "life," representing herself as a woman of desire and of potentially unbounded imagination. For all her confusions and ambivalences, for all her protestations of cloistered self-hood, she evinces that unenclosed originality she so admired.