Authorial Sovereignty: Pleasure and Paratext in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing Worlds

Abstract

Authorial Sovereignty: Pleasure and Paratext in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing Worlds Melanie D. Holm That Margaret Cavendish begins her large and complex work The Worlds Olio (1655) by advertising to readers how little concerned she is with pleasing them is unusual: “I am so well armed with Carelessness,” she announces in her “Epistle to the Reader,” that readers’ “Censures can never enter to vex me with Wounds of Discontent. Howsoever, I have my delight in writing Books, and having them printed; and if any take a delight to read them, I will not thank them for it: for if anything please them, they are to thank me for so much pleasure.”1 Cavendish’s early modern peers customarily use the occasion of a preface or other paratextual material to court their readers through the well-established topoi of modesty and humility, conventionally posing as supplicants to a reader or patron.2 Moreover, contemporary readers would expect a woman writer to adopt a deferential, apologetic posture, asking for approval of both her text and her morally dubious decisions to write as well as publish.3 Using a preface to assert that she does both for her own pleasure and is indifferent to reader opinion therefore represents a rather striking departure from expected practices, all the more so because its parodic playfulness makes explicit the generic constraints that implicitly govern acts of reading and literary production. Cavendish inverts the traditional relationship of readers to seventeenth-century writers by claiming the pleasures of the text for herself, and in so doing characterizes writing as an exercise in self-gratification.4 Authors do not thank readers for approval, but readers are to thank authors for any incidental pleasure reading stimulates. Autochthonous delight arms Cavendish with a “carelessness” that makes “Censures” futile and strips readers of their power to “vex” or “wound.” Far from courting reader endorsement, this preface describes her book as a space over which she alone holds dominion: at the threshold of [End Page 5] the text, readers encounter an assertion of authorial sovereignty that relegates them to the status of impotent outsiders. Throughout her works, Cavendish uses parodic prefaces and other paratexts such as the “Epistle to the Reader” to articulate and enact a feminist practice of writing that redefines the boundaries of authority in literary production by introducing a crucial distinction between the pleasures of invention and the imperatives of imitation.5 Her prefatory parodies satirize authorized categories of interpretation and literary production, as well as the critical authority to impose them, in order to illustrate their inadequacy in relation to the possibilities of the literary imagination. In describing a distinctively inventive and individual mode of wit that expands accepted practices of reading and writing, Cavendish, I suggest, re-imagines the agency of readers and writers, giving rise to analogies between texts, women writers, and colonial subjects. She conceives of a literary sensibility that privileges literary eccentricity and the imaginative potential of individual creators. Her prefaces communicate this agenda by presenting the text as the sovereign domain of the author and unmasking impediments to the creation and recognition of true poetry. My construction of Cavendish’s authorial sovereignty intersects with and responds to two prominent interpretive models of Cavendish scholarship: the author as would-be male monarch and as exile. First introduced by Catherine Gallagher and recently employed by Laura Dobbs is an approach that joins Cavendish’s self-proclaimed singularity in select paratexts with her fiction’s female monarchs. By conflating the roi-absolu and moi-absolu, they present an envious Cavendish who desires the absolute power reserved for men and whose writings are fantastical if not pathological projections of that envy.6 A second approach recently proposed by Anna Battigelli and Emma L. Rees superimposes Cavendish’s real life experience of exile over her writing in order to “unlock,” as Rees puts it, the subversive ideas and opinions obscured by generic subterfuge.7 Both of these approaches pay dividends for individual texts; however, when considered alongside her prefatory work, they seem either to over- or under-state Cavendish’s relationships to authority and power. In the “Epistle to the Reader,” for example, Cavendish presents an authorial self who...