The world arose from an infinite spider who spun this whole complicated mass from his bowels.

(Brahmin Teaching)

Recently Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673), was remembered in the popular [The Incomplete] Book of Failures [by Stephen Pile, 1981] as "the world's most ridiculous poet." And for the past three hundred years—although Charles Lamb may have enjoyed the eccentricity of her person and prose—readers of her works have agreed that she failed as a philosopher and as a writer. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf goes searching for a seventeenth-century "Judith Shakespeare" and finds in Cavendish's writings "a vision of loneliness and riot … as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death." In her study of seventeenth-century travel fantasies, Voyages to the Moon, Marjorie Nicolson refuses to describe Cavendish's New Blazing World because she cannot bear to reread that "ponderous tone" in order "to bring order out of … chaos." But Cavendish herself confesses her shortcomings. In a typically disarming epistle to the reader she warns, "I shall not need to tell you, I had neither Learning nor Art to set forth these Conceptions, for that you will find yourself." Her naivete of method can be and has been blamed on her lack of education and lack of access to learned and critical communities. Yet anyone who has ventured to read ten pages of Cavendish's work knows that her method, or rather her defiance of method, is deliberate.

I. Cavendish's Conception of Herself as a True Wit:

In most of her writings Cavendish celebrates, in theory and in practice, what she calls her "natural style." Her first book, Poems and Fancies (1653), announces the approach she exemplifies:

Give Mee the Free, and Noble Stile,

Which seems uncurb'd, thought it be wild …
Give me a Stile that Nature frames, not Art:
For Art doth seem to take the Pedants part.

She associates the writings of the learned with sterile artificiality and labored imitation. Cavendish's "true wit" is natural wit unrestrained. Occasionally in her writings she depicts playful confrontations between fancy and reason; for example, in Philosophical Fancies (1653), Reason cautions Thoughts to "walke in a Beaten Path" lest the world "think you mad." But Thoughts rebel: "we do goe those waies that please us best. / Nature doth give us liberty to run / Without check." For Cavendish, "Learning is Artificial, but Wit is Natural" ("To the Reader").

While Restoration comedy might be seen to share this perspective in spirit, if not in method, the prevailing literary opinion and practice of her age denied such a polarization between natural wit and learned judgment. As early as 1595, Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie claimed that natural wit "reined with learned discretion" becomes true wit. In Timber, Ben Jonson uses the same image (ultimately taken from Plato) of the rider-poet reining in his horse (spontaneous wit) with a bit (judgment). Like the bee—now known to scholars as "the neo-classic bee"—the true writer imitates; he is able "to draw forth out of the best, and choicest flowers … and turn all into honey." In Epicoene, Jonson creates the archetypal Truewit who has many descendants in Restoration comedy. In all his speeches Truewit seems to speak spontaneously; actually Jonson constructed his "instinctive" eloquence by means of a careful rejuvenation of classical sources. For Jonson, study and imitation, rather than making wit artificial, purify it and make it more right and more natural. In later neoclassical writers, like Dryden, the trend to understand true wit in terms of judgment dominating fancy increased to the point of eliminating fancy altogether.

It will be clear how estranged Cavendish was from the prevailing literary attitudes if we look at a passage from a writer of the next generation who excelled at anatomizing perversions of wit. Readers of A Tale of a Tub are familiar with Swift's masterly creation of the narrator who can be identified as "a mad modern." In a remarkable passage at the end of "A Digression concerning … Madness," Swift reveals the narrator's mentality by playfully applying the traditional horse/rider image: madness is the overthrow of reason by fancy; it is a "revolution" against the natural hierarchical order of the two faculties: "I myself, the author of these momentous truths, am a person, whose Imaginations are hard-mouthed, and exceedingly disposed to run away with his reason, which I have observed from long experience to be a very light rider, and easily shook off; upon which account my friends never trust me alone."

What is mad for Swift is feminine for Cavendish. Reason may predominate in men, but fancy predominates in women. In Poems and Fancies, Cavendish reminds ladies of poetry as "belonging most properly to themselves." Female brains, she claims, "work usually in a Fantasticall motion" and therefore "go not so much by Rules and Methods as by choice" ("To all Noble and Worthy Ladies"). Elsewhere she emphasizes that reason is enslaved by necessity while fancy is voluntary ("To the Reader"). In "Poetesses hasty Resolution" prefacing Poems and Fancies, she describes how her self-love in its ambition for fame overcame her judgment when she published her poems without revision. Reason is depicted as an authoritarian bully who would have told her how ill her poems were if she had not rushed them into print. In a later work she defends herself against a rude comment by a reader who said, "my wit seemed as if it would overpower my brain" by asserting that "my reason is as strong as the effeminate sex requires."

She is claiming, for women at least, a freedom from "rules and method" denied writers by the seventeenth-century literary climate, dominated as it was by the opinions of Horace, whose satiric target in Ars Poetica is the Democritus who believes "that native talent is a greater boon than wretched art and shuts out from Helicon poets in their sober senses." Cavendish was convinced that her originality was enough "ground" for "lasting fame." Over and over again, she tells her readers that she has no time for studying other people's work because "our sex takes so much delight in dressing and adorning themselves." Besides, her ambition is not to be a lowly scholar but a great philosopher: "A Scholar is to be learned in other mens opinions, inventions and actions, and a philosopher is to teach other men his opinions of nature" ("To the Reader"). This ambition led her to send her Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655) to Oxford and Cambridge. Hoping this action is "not unnatural, thought it is unusual for a woman," she asks the universities to house her book "for the good encouragement of our sex; lest in time we should grow irrational as idiots, by the dejectedness of our spirits, through the careless neglects and despisements of the masculine sex to the effeminate" ("To the two Universities"). Besides, she does not see why her opinions should not be studied with other "probabilities" (such as Aristotle's teachings); after all, only the custom of teaching ancient authors prevents readers from a "right understanding" of "my newborn opinions."

As we have seen, Cavendish associates fancy unregulated by judgment with vanity, especially in women. Yet she expects readers to share her good-natured tolerance of this charming foible, "it being according to the Nature of our Sex." At the same time, she presents literary labor as pedantry not becoming to noble persons like herself. Although this attitude was not uncommon among her contemporaries (at least professedly), it led Cavendish to reject revision of her work as a task beneath her dignity and also unnatural to her as a woman. In her supposedly revised Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1663), she thinks it is enough that she is "very Studious in my own Thoughts and Contemplations" and that she records them in their natural and noble disorder: she had "neither Room nor Time for such inferior Considerations so that both Words and Chapters take their Places according as I writ them, without any Mending or Correcting" ("Epistle to Reader," my italics). She goes on to hope that "Understanding Readers" will not reject the "Inward worth" of her philosophy "through a Dislike to the Outward Form." The truth is there somewhere, she claims, because she makes no attempt to censure "Nature," which gives her thoughts "which run wildly about, and if by chance they light on Truth, they do not know it for a Truth" ("Epistle to Mistris Toppe").

Her justification for her lack of method is that she recreates pure nature. Although she cannot create a well-wrought urn, so to speak, she gives fresh thoughts: she asks, "Should we not believe those to be Fools, that had rather have foul Water out of a Golden Vessel, than pure wine out of Eathern or Wooden Pots?" ("To the Reader of My Works"). The natural trait she imitates is fecundity. Nature brings forth monsters, as well as well-proportioned offspring, and lets them die of their own deformity; in like manner, Cavendish claims, she "scribbles" down whatever comes to her and lets the reader sort it out. Fecundity and originality are the gifts of the true wit. Cavendish is best understood, then, as a defender not of her sex, but of self and self-expression.

Hers is the mentality which is the target of Swift's Battle of the Books (1704). In the famous confrontation between the bee and the spider, the ancient and the modern respectively, Swift uses the bee to symbolize the principles and practices of neoclassicism. "By an universal Range, with long Search, much Study, true Judgment, and Distinction of Things," the bee-writer "brings home Honey and Wax." The spider, on the other hand, is akin to Jonson's Little-wit, in Bartholomew Fair, who "like a silkworm" spins creations "out of myself." Swelling up, Swift's spider boasts, "I am a domestick Animal, furnisht with a Native Stock within my self. This large Castle … is all built with my own Hands, and the Materials extracted altogether out of my own Person." His characteristics—his stress on originality; his fondness for a domestic rather than a "universall" perspective; his aimless creativity which, although it creates a space for himself, gives nothing of use (honey and wax) to others—are so extreme that he is fittingly called a subjectivist. The neoclassical bee warns that the spider's perspective ("a lazy contemplation of four Inches round") and his method ("feeding and engendering on it self) turns "all into Excrement and Venom; producing nothing at last, but Fly-bane and a Cobweb."

Yet with what exuberance did Cavendish embrace this subjectivist perspective and method as her own. With a curious aptness she favors imagery of silkworm, spider, and spinning for depicting literary creativity, particularly hers. In Poems and Fancies, she writes that "all brains work naturally and incessantly" and goes on to call the writing of poetry "spinning with the brain." She intends to win fame as a writer "by spinning" a "Garment of Memory": "I cannot say the Web is strong, fine or evenly Spun, for it is a Course piece; yet I had rather my Name should go meanly clad, then dye with cold" ("The Epistle Dedicatory"). I have italicized "web" to emphasize how naturally Cavendish could fuse the images of the spinner and the spider. Cavendish resorts to spinning imagery when excusing herself for encroaching on male prerogative: women have so much "waste time" that "our thoughts run wildly about," producing not only "unprofitable, but indiscreet Actions, winding up the thread of our lives in snarles on unsound bottoms" ("An Epistle to Mistris Toppe"). To describe "great masters of speech," she writes that they can speak "untangled"; they "can winde their words off their tongue" without a snarl or knot; they can work the "thread of sense into a flourishing discourse." Yet Cavendish is aware of the commonplace implications of the imagery of silkworm and spider. In Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil (1656), a collection of conflicting tales about life by various speakers usually identified by sex alone, she has "a Man" denigrate the creativity of spider and silkworm:

The Silkworm and the Spider Houses make,
All their Materials from their Bowels take …
Yet they are Curious, built with Art and Care,
Like Lovers, who build Castles in the Air,
Which ev'ry puff of Wind is apt to break,
As imaginations, when Reason's weak.

In her autobiography Cavendish presents a poignant picture of her life as an isolated duchess who would be a famous writer. Her one delight was her solitary creativity which she describes using her favorite imagery: "I had rather sit at home and write … I must say this on behalf of my thoughts, that I never found them idle; for if the senses bring no work in, they will work of themselves, like silkworms that spins [sic] out of their own bowels."

II. No Room in Salomon's House:

In his New Atlantis, Francis Bacon imagines Salomon's House, a patriarchal institution dedicated to enlarging "the bounds of Human Empire" over nature. When the Royal Society was founded in 1662, it was based on the Baconian principle that the search for knowledge must be communal and experimental. Because the advancement of knowledge requires a mind "steadily fixed upon the facts of nature," Bacon was suspicious of the speculative mind which works "upon itself, as the spider worketh his web," and brings forth only "cobwebs of learning." For Baconians, there could be no room in Salomon's House for natural philosophers who give out their "own imaginations for a pattern of the world."

Margaret Cavendish's writings, as we shall see, attempted to provide an alternative perspective to the prevailing Baconian paradigm. Her lifelong ambition was to win public acceptance as Nature's true champion. In 1653, as R. H. Kargon points out [in Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton, 1966], Cavendish "expounded an Epicurean atomism at once so extreme and so fanciful that she shocked the enemies of atomism and embarrassed its friends." Everything could be explained by the motion of atoms, such as: what causes dropsy, how the brain works, and why the earth has attraction. And "the Cause why things do live and dye, / Is, as the mixed Atomes lye." At times her descriptions of atoms are no less plausible than the descriptions of how the world works given in the learned texts of her more restrained contemporaries who were also fumbling around in search of a credible mechanics—for example, Robert Boyle with his corpuscular universe. At other times she is fancy-free and plays with her atoms, as when she imagines "A World in an Eare Ring": "Wherein a Sun goeth round, and we not see. / And Planets seven about that Sun may move." And her ultimate defense of her opinions is that, although they may or may not be true, they are natural. After all, "I do not applaud my self so much as to think that my works can be without errors, for Nature is not a Deity" ("To the Reader").

Her intuitive, if erratic, exposition and defense of Nature's ways continued after 1660, although, probably in response to the more restrictive intellectual climate of the Restoration, she abandoned atomism: if each atom were "absolute," there could never be "good government" in the universe ("Another Epistle to the Reader"). This use of a political analogy suggests that her social perspective—that of a royalist duchess restored to her place in a regulated kingdom—had some influence on these later speculations about the natural order. In another work she repudiates atomism because in that philosophy every atom is "a kind of Deity" undermining the harmonious whole of Nature. In this typically entertaining passage she depicts rebellious democratic atoms: "Nature would be like a Beggars coat full of lice; Neither would she be able to rule those wandering and stragling atomes, because they are not parts of her body, but each is a single body by itself, having no dependance upon each other."

Yet she continued to present Nature as self-moving and perceptive. Philosophical Letters (1664) should be read as a vindication of the wisdom of nature and the "intelligence" of matter from what Cavendish considers the belittling attacks of Henry More, Hobbes and Descartes. She ridicules More for assuming the passivity of nature ("Letter VIII"). She denies Hobbes' claim for human supremacy by means of language over the rest of creation. As everyone knows, she quips, "a talking man is not so wise as a contemplating one." Other creatures, she says, have their own reason: "For what man knows, whether Fish do not know more of the nature of water, and ebbing and flowing, and the Saltness of the Sea?" She attacks Descartes' separation of mind from body and his reductionist attitude toward the body: "the Eye, Ear, Nose, Tongue, and all the Body, have knowledge as well as the Mind."

The only difference is that the mind, rational matter, is not "encumbered with the grosser parts of matter to work upon" but the senses, sensitive matter, "works or moves only in its own substance." Reason, as she tells us in another work, is "nothing but corporeal self-motion, or a particle of the purest, most subtil and active part of matter." This being the case, she asks why the human should "be the onely Creature that partakes of this soul of Nature," and why the rest of Creation "should be soulless or (which is all one) irrational." The natural soul of reason permeates nature: "I do not deny that a Stone has Reason." Clearly these insights into nature's vital connectiveness resemble the ideas of Anne Conway and others.

Her philosophy of nature is empathetic, subjective, and fragmentary. Sometimes she happens to create a startlingly beautiful analogy; for example, she likens animate matter to a spinner and inanimate matter to yarn: "Natural air seems to be made by such kinds of motions as spiders make cobwebs, for the animate matter's motions spin from a rare degree of inanimate matter." But mostly her natural philosophy consists of passages excusing and flaunting her ignorance; for example, she writes about the anatomy of the body by confessing that she never read a book on the subject nor studied the body because "the modesty of my Sex would [not] permit me." In Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), she presents a curious argument to show that speculation is a higher means toward knowledge than experiment is. Playing on the overlapping social and intellectual connotations of the word "mechanick," she writes that "experimental or mechanick Philosophy" should be subservient to speculative philosophy just as "the Artist or Mechanick is but a servant to the student." Her main target in Observations is the microscope, that "artificial informer" that "more deludes than informs." The year before, Robert Hooke published his influential Micrographia describing his experiments with the microscope. Cavendish thinks it "unnatural" to change the size of creatures so they "cannot be judged according to their natural figure." For illustration, she ridicules one of the experiments describing the 14,000 eyes on a fly. The microscope must be misleading us here or else, she asks, why doesn't a fly see a spider? She adds that these "eyes" might be "blisters or watery pimples."

This is the kind of speculation Joseph Glanvill, an apologist for the Royal Society, compliments in a letter to "your Grace" when he admires "the quickness and vigor of your conceptions." But he adds that hers is a pattern that men should not imitate. Glanvill denies that ratiocination is higher than "perfection of sense" by reasserting the Baconian paradigm. A natural philosopher must be willing "to tie down the mind in Physical things, to consider Nature as it is, to lay a Foundation in sensible collections, and from thence to proceed to general Propositions, and Discourses." Walter Charleton, another member of the Royal Society, also treats her with the tact required in writing to a duchess: he professes not to know "which of the two, Aristotle or your Grace, hath given us the best definition of the humane Soul." But he also warns her that all opinions, even hers, must be subjected to "skeptical Judgement."

In another letter, Charleton tells her the use to which he puts her philosophy: "Whenever my own Reason is at a loss, how to investigate the Causes of some Natural Secret or other, I shall relieve the Company with some one pleasant and unheard of Conjecture of yours so that by reading your Philosophy, I have acquired thus much advantage: that where I cannot Satisfy, I shall be sure to Delight." With her peculiar sense of humor and self-importance, Cavendish would have been pleased with this unusual tribute. There is no doubt that in small selected doses Cavendish delights us, as she intends to, with her fanciful conjectures and self-mockery. Charleton also teased her about her eccentric style: "You plant Fruittrees in your Hedge-rows, and set Strawberries and Raspberries among your Roses and Lilies." Yet even for this "art" he flatters her: she has a fancy "too generous to be restrained" by "the laborious rule of Method."

It was probably not any of her ideas—radical and eccentric as they may seem—that alienated her from the community of natural philosophers. After all, Charleton, a popularizer of Epicurean atomism of the type made respectable by Gassendi, was forgiven after he trimmed his work to the hostile winds of Restoration science. As we have seen, Cavendish willingly discarded her politically dangerous atomism. And other writers, if more cautiously, were sympathetic to finding the life principle immanent in nature. There were two main factors, then, contributing to her exclusion from the intellectual community: her sex and her untamed method. Lady Ranelagh is the only other contemporary Englishwoman who has a claim to being called "a scientific lady," and she was content to work through her brother, Robert Boyle. To a limited extent Cavendish was able to overcome social restrictions because of her status as a duchess and as the wife of a patron of virtuosi: she corresponded with leading thinkers; she published her works; she got invited, albeit as a spectator, to the Royal Society in 1667. But mostly she was isolated. With good reason, then, she defends contemplation as the means, indeed her only means, to seek natural truths. The Royal Society, based as it was on the inductive method and the fraternal accumulation of knowledge, could provide no home for her person or her perspective.

Cavendish's response to her failure as a natural philosopher was to retreat into fantasy. In 1666 she created her own New Blazing World. As she tells us in "To all Noble and Worthy Ladies" of the 1668 edition, the opinions advanced in New Blazing World have "sympathy" and "coherence" with those expressed in Observations, to which it was originally appended in 1666. But in New Blazing World, she could be "Margaret the First" in a more congenial world; no one should begrudge her this pleasure "since it is in every ones power to do the like" ("To the Reader").

The tedious chaos of the "plot" is an obvious feature of this work which has been attacked elsewhere. The central character is an Empress of a newly found polar kingdom whose main interest is in ruling over the virtuosi: "the Bearmen were to be her Experimental Philosophers, the Bird-men her astronomers, the Flyworm- and Fish-men her Natural Philosophers, the Ape-men her Chymists, the Satyrs her Galenick Physicians," for example. The Empress becomes angry at her virtuosi when the Bearmen observe celestial phenomena through a telescope and begin to quarrel. The Empress condemns telescopes as "false informers" which "delude" their senses. Obviously this is the same opinion Cavendish advances in Observations, but in New Blazing World the Empress has power to command them to smash their instruments. She lets them keep their toys only when her experimental philosophers admit that "we take more delight in Artificial delusions, than in Natural truths."

In New Blazing World, Cavendish deliberately lets fancy take the reins and creates a world which indulges her fondest wishes—even allowing her some harmless retaliations against the Royal Society. Cavendish imagined a situation, improbable even in the twentieth century, in which a female leader dominates the scientific community. Her experimental philosophers are hack workers on detail, servants who bring in their observations so that the Empress can triumphantly speculate and create a synthetic truth. But the independent, intelligent Empress gets lost in the oblivion of Cavendish's prose.

What we remember instead is the eccentric duchess created in Pepys' Diary, who made an infamous visit in 1667 to the Royal Society during which leading scientists such as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke did experiments to provide what Marjorie Nicolson derisively calls [in Pepys' Diary and the New Science, 1965] "the afternoon's entertainment." According to Pepys' enduring version, Cavendish did not "say anything that was worth hearing, but … was full of admiration, all admiration." What we remember, then, of the seventeenth-century "scientific lady" of England is the image of woman as audience and, at best, as patron of men's accomplishments.

To reinforce how fanciful, how "mad," how revolutionary, and ultimately, how irrelevant Cavendish's vision of a female scientific genius was to her contemporaries, we need only compare the relationship of the Empress to her virtuosi with the more famous depiction of the relationship between an intelligent woman and a modern philosopher in Bernard Fontenelle's Plurality of Worlds. Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes (1686) was one of Fontenelle's most ingenious tactics in his life-long attempt to popularize the ideas of the new philosophy. There were 28 editions of Entretiens in Fontenelle's long lifetime (1657-1757). The passages quoted in this essay are from the 1638 translation by Aphra Behn. The immense popularity of Plurality of Worlds can be explained, to a great extent, by Fontenelle's choice of format. As Behn's subtitle tells us, he uses "five nights conversation with Madam the Marchioness of***" in a garden in order to defend the mechanical philosophy and the theory that there are other inhabited worlds. We are to enjoy a pleasant and flirtatious dialogue between "Fontenelle" and Madam even as we learn the truths of the Cartesian universe: "we are always in the Humour of mixing some little Gallantries with our most serious Discourses."

But what interests us here is the relationship between the two conversationalists: "Fontenelle" is the authority; he will teach the Copernican system. There are, for him, "no more unnecessary Difficulties" because he can reduce nature to a few easy laws. Because nature works like the contrivance of machines behind the scenes of an opera, he can "draw the Curtains and shew you the World." What room is there for dialogue when one party has all the answers? Well, this expert is a chivalrous servant to a noble and charming lady. Madam is an eager, intelligent, and pliable student. But she has her little rebellions—"just like a woman." When "Fontenelle" offers to demonstrate a point by drawing a zodiac in the sand, she stops him: "It would give a certain Mathematical Air to my Park, which I do not like." Although she admires the simplicity of the Copernican system, she objects to the insecurity of the earth in it. She teasingly claims to favor the Indian system in which the earth is supported by four elephants. If danger threatens these solid foundations, the Indians "would quickly double the number of their elephants." "Fontenelle" laughs "at her fancy"; this is reminiscent of Charleton's pleasure at Cavendish's wit. Late on the first night, Madam at last agrees to be reasonable and to be Copernican. Later when she holds back in attractive timidity from the implications of such a vast universe, he urges her on to intellectual courage.

Thus although modernists like Fontenelle might eagerly debunk the traditional cosmic hierarchies of Aristotle and Aquinas, "Fontenelle" and Madam embark into the new universe with their respective sexual roles intact. He leads intellectually and she follows. Even though Behn might object to the inconsistency of Madam's superficial yet profound character, Fontenelle's book did teach women (and men) what was actually being debated in the science of the seventeenth century, and Behn approved of bringing women into intellectual circles. But Cavendish's New Blazing World offered no instruction and no access to or compromise with the outside world.

In her own world Cavendish can refuse to moderate her desires to accessible goals and can create her women free from the restrictions which hampered Cavendish in both the social and intellectual realms. Only in paradise, only in a state with people of many complexions—literally azure, purple and green—and only in a state ruled by an Emperor "extraordinary" like her husband in his easygoing, non-authoritarian character, only in fantasy, could Cavendish find a haven for the intellectually ambitious woman. But beyond making this crucial point, New Blazing World offers little reading satisfaction or intelligibility. A passage from Robert Boyle reiterating the contempt the new science felt for subjective truth illustrates why Cavendish failed as a natural philosopher in the age of reason. There was no room in Salomon's House for the spider who "taking notice only of those objects, that obtrude themselves upon her senses, lives ignorant of all the other rooms in the house, save that wherein she lurks."

III. Margaret Cavendish and the Crabbed Reader:

Cavendish was used to such complaints as mine. In Orations of Divers Sorts (1668), she ridicules her censorious critics: "those Faults or Imperfections I accuse my self of, in my Prefactory Epistles, they fling back with a double strength against my poor harmless Works; which shews their Malice and my Truth." She asks such "ill-natured" readers why they bother to accuse her plays of having no plots when she already acknowledges that. Such critics "prefer Plots before Wit." Then she states her most characteristic stance as a writer: "I write to please myself, rather than to please such Crabbed Readers." Still there is a proliferation of prefaces before her works in which she addresses readers, shares her problems as a writer and as a thinker, and tells us how to read her work. Yet for three hundred years, her readers have remained crabbed—except for her husband, Charleton perhaps, and Charles Lamb. Perhaps we have yet to understand the nature of the legacy she left to posterity.

Maybe her sense of humor eludes us. Maybe we are like her sour contemporary, Mary Evelyn, who on overhearing the friendly banter between Charleton and the Duchess to the effect that universities should be abolished if they didn't abandon Aristotle and teach Cavendish's new-found ideas, became so provoked by Cavendish's manner that she dismissed the Duchess as mad. Maybe Cavendish intends us to laugh at the incongruous juxtaposition of her self-deprecation and self-dramatization. She not only ridicules herself and the foibles of her sex but also—and this is important—casts doubt upon serious claims to knowledge of nature's secrets. William Cavendish seems to have shared her skeptical and playful attitude in this passage inserted at the end of her Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1663): "Since now it is A-la-mode to Write of Natural Philosophy, and I know, no body Knows what is the Cause of any thing, and since they are all but Guessers, not Knowing, it gives every Man room to Think what he lists, and so I mean to Set up for my self, and play at this Philosophical Game as follows, without Patching or Stealing from any Body." Perhaps Margaret Cavendish developed her science of the fancy to restore the balance in an age of reason. Her work represents, in a whimsical way, a groping toward an alternative vision to Salomon's House with its pretence to finding certain and objective knowledge. And she does attempt a relationship with nature that runs counter to the exploitive mastery proposed by Bacon; her approach is sensitive and reverent as well as subjective.

By her own admission, she was vain, inconsistent and silly; yet she took herself and her philosophy seriously. She was incapable of sustained study and thinking, so she said; yet she wanted to be a famous philosopher and to join the scientific establishment. In the same work she expounds a vitalistic and a mechanistic universe. Her writing is muddled and indecisive; yet she expected posterity to admire it. The effect of letting contradictions stand is to undermine continually any authoritative stance she might be achieving. And yet at times this method gets at the complexity of psychological and social reality: for example, in Orations of Divers Sorts, she lets several female speakers describe the lot of women from conflicting perspectives. They claim everything from "we live like Batts, or Owls, labour like Beasts, and dye like Worms" to "what can we desire more, than to be Men's Tyrants, Destinies, and Goddesses?" Since Cavendish makes no judgmental distinctions among her female orators, it would be a mistake to guess her viewpoint; perhaps she shared all their attitudes to some extent. Contradiction is typical of her style. It is hard to say whether this is an intentional strategy or the unfortunate result of her refusal to revise and to edit her writing.

Cavendish's work is a defense of free fancy or subjective expression in principle and in practice. Some modern writers like Anaïs Nin [The Novel of the Future, 1976] advocate a revolution in style toward one that would reflect psychological reality: the new literary form would be "endlessly varied and fecundating as each crystal varies from the next." Cavendish can be seen as a pioneer of such an approach. Even those of us who are attracted to her personality and ideas cannot help but wish she had been a more disciplined writer. It is also useful, then, to see Cavendish's place in literary history as a cautionary tale for those of us who would suggest that craftsmanship and order are masculine, and artlessness and chaos are feminine. Do we really want to create a literary ghetto called the "female imagination" and claim as its characteristic style of expression, anarchic formlessness? Style has no sex. After all, the real spider's web, although spun out of herself, is architectonically sound, even elegant.