Native daughters, evil empires, Blazing Worlds: Margaret Cavendish's imperialism

Abstract

ABSTRACT The kidnapped maiden reborn as an Empress in Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World (1666) ultimately returns to her birthplace to wage war upon its enemies, using her newfound powers to unleash a devastating military force and bring the rest of that world to its knees. Her might is absolute and terrifying and its scope is planetary: coming home means subduing other nations, and sovereignty requires the establishment of a new world order. If empire and colony switch places in the second part of The Blazing World, this reordering system is brutal and ‘astigmatic,’ however, mismatching home and away, ‘fancy’ and ‘serious philosophical contemplations,’ Big Subjects and Little ones. Ideas about autonomy and agency are likewise enlarged and contracted by a new world view which roughly redistributes power and space. The work of post-colonial critics provides a framework for the imperial cartography Cavendish describes, but we can also understand the Empress's ‘superpower’ by drawing upon post-colonial models of exile and return provided by Richard Wright and Tsitsi Dangarembga. Showing us what happens when a native daughter comes home, The Blazing World not only anticipates the resistance of colonial subjects but simultaneously envisions an ‘imperial administration’ vast to enough to crush it.