Margaret Cavendish's Dramatic Utopias and the Politics of Gender

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In a 1663 epistle addressed to scholars at Oxford and Cambridge, Margaret Cavendish compares herself and her female counterparts to [b]irds in cages... [that]... hop up and down in our houses, not suffered to fly abroad to see the several changes of fortune.17 Cavendish then associates women's exclusion from universities with their negligible influence in all public contexts. By an opinion, which I hope is but an erroneous one, in men, she observes, [w]e are shut out of all power and authority; by reason we are never employed in either civil or martial affairs.2 In this passage, iron bars are a prison, but, in other texts, Cavendish transforms such cages into arenas of civil possibility for women. In three of her plays-The FemaleAcademy (1662), Bell in Campo (1662), and The Convent of Pleasure (1668)-Cavendish reconfigures traditional distinctions between private and public by creating utopian heroines who take women's sequestration to extremes, completely insulating themselves from men's public spheres.3 The literal and ideological partitions they construct result in new publics in which women wield political power and authority. Like Cavendish's science fiction fantasy, The Blazing World (1666), the three plays demonstrate that utopia, as early modern men's texts construct it, is a highly conflicted space for her and for early modern women generally.4 In contrast to Thomas More and his seventeenth-century imitators, Cavendish does not situate her utopian designs in the new world. For the most part, early modern island utopias depend upon carefully controlled heterosexual reproductive economies.5 Because such utopian narratives valorize natural law and depend upon patriarchal paradigms for marriage, family, and the state, they seldom question women's nature and place.6