“Earth's Complaint” and other SF Poems by Margaret Cavendish

Abstract

159 SF POEMS BY MARGARET CAVENDISH REVIEW-ESSAYS E. Mariah Spencer “Earth’s Complaint” and other SF Poems by Margaret Cavendish Cavendish, Margaret. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: Poems and Fancies with The Animal Parliament. Ed. Brandie R. Siegfried. Toronto: Iter, 2018. xx+462 pp. $59.95 pbk. Of the commonly noted ancestors of modern sf, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, stands out as a singular example. While many genre theorists and historians recognize the Duchess’s contribution to the field, the focus has primarily been on her “science-fictional romance” (3) The Blazing World (1666).1 As Brandie Siegfried’s 2018 edition of Poems and Fancies (1653) clearly demonstrates, however, Cavendish was exploring scientific concepts from the moment of her first publication. Using the heroic couplet with iambic pentameter and generally short, single stanza verses, the poems included in Poems and Fancies offer “a witty, entertaining primer on the manifold parts and powers of nature: atomic motion and form, biological regeneration and disintegration, magnetic pull and repulse, planetary motion and tidal patterns” (2). Siegfried effectively provides us with Cavendish’s early sf poetry in a critical edition with fully modernized spelling and punctuation. The scholarly apparatus of this text is impressive, with its contextualizing footnotes and vocabulary glosses making the work fully accessible to modern readers for the first time. Prior to this publication, the only ways in which Poems and Fancies could be accessed—without visiting a special collections library—were through print-on-demand copies via Scolar Press and the digitized versions available through the subscription databases Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Literature Online (LION). Siegfried’s introduction competently explains the social and intellectual contexts for Poems and Fancies, while steering clear of academic jargon that might discourage the non-specialist reader. Her exposition is straightforward and her research is well documented, which is a necessity given that, as Siegfried notes, “Poems and Fancies took shape as a kind of intellectual cartography as Cavendish carefully mapped for herself a view of the scientific terrain” (7). It contains 270 poems divided into five sections with asides and dedications interspersed throughout, as well as a prose parable, The Animal Parliament. Building on Sara Mendelson’s work on The Blazing World (2016), Siegfried presents Cavendish as a creative scientific thinker, whose universe is full of “intelligent, self-organizing matter” (2). Indeed, much of her oeuvre can be read as extended thought experiments posing the question: What if all matter is sentient? With Poems and Fancies, Cavendish articulates for an early modern audience a secular world-view in which matter and the forces of nature 160 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) are self-directed. In her opening poem to the volume, “Nature Calls a Council, Which Is Motion, Figure, Matter, and Life, to Advise about Making the World,” she personifies each of these natural forces. While Motion, Figure, Matter, and Life remain subservient to Nature, they are imbued with their own agency and purpose: When Nature first the World’s Foundation laid, She called a council, how it might be made. Motion was first, which had a subtle wit, And then came Life, and Form, and Matter, fit. Nature began. “My friends, if we agree, We can and may do a fine work,” said she, “And make some things which us may worship give, Whereas now we but to our selves do live. Besides, it is my nature things to make, To give out work, but you directions take. (75) In this excerpt, Cavendish recasts creation with Dame Nature at center stage, positing a secular—and intentionally fictional—explanation for the creation of the world. She inverts the patriarchal hegemony of the Christian tradition through her gendering of the natural forces as female, thus beginning a long tradition of feminine influence in sf, which we see carried through to Mary Shelley and the pulp writers of the early twentieth century. Siegfried acknowledges that Cavendish’s poems “do not fit familiar literary categories such as pastoral, lyric, devotional, erotic, or epic, although they do make use of features from each of these poetic forms” (23). Instead, what I have noted is that Cavendish presents something altogether new. Of the...