Abstract
Science fiction was used by Margaret Cavendish to highlight the negative—both present and potential—aspects of her time. In particular, she uses fiction to call into question the relation between power and scientific knowledge and to show that science could be allied to female power only if radically rethought. I will analyse The Blazing World in relation to Cavendish’s scientific theories and explore the theme of sexual difference. Furthermore, The Blazing World shows that, rather than scientific knowledge being objective truth, it has a definite political agenda, and it is the expression of a particular point of view. In this sense, The Blazing World binds to Cavendish’s philosophical reflections, highlighting how her criticism of the mechanistic approach and the experimental scientific method has important political and epistemological consequences, even for the contemporary feminist debate on science and knowledge.
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Notes
- 1.
This is one of the most characteristic traits of Mary Shelley’s text, which re-elaborates an earlier tradition that tells of men who infuse life into inanimate objects or bodies (think of the reference to Prometheus, who in the Greek myth found in Ovid creates humans from clay, and also of the legend of the Golem).
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As Shapin and Schaffer demonstrate in discussing the Hobbes-Boyle dispute, stable communication may be only (and only tenuously) achieved by discrediting and silencing counter-claims and by working to solidify the authority of the dominant (and yet necessarily provisional) claims asserted. See Shapin and Schaffer (1985).
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In this aspect Line Cottegnies notes an affinity between Cavendish and Cyrano de Bergerac: “the affinity between Cyrano and Cavendish concerns their shared defense of relativism, the questioning of the pre-eminence of man in the natural world (one of the major tenets of a theologically informed worldview)” (2016, 116).
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It is significant that in the later edition of The Blazing World in 1668, when it was published separately from the Observations, Cavendish omits the allusions to Cyrano. As Cottegnies suggests: “This afterthought points to an awareness of how risqué the connection with Cyrano might have looked. It is likely that Cavendish had come to realise the potentially damning impact of being associated with Cyrano, given his notorious reputation as a libertine and atheist” (2016, 109).
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For a general view of these new materialisms: cfr. S. Alaimo, S. Hekman (eds.), Material Feminisms, Indiana University Press, Bloomington-Indianapolis, 2008 and D. Coole, S. Frost (eds.), New Materialisms. Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Duke University Press, Durham-London, 2010. For a first discussion on new materialism: cfr. S. Amhed, “Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions. Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the ‘New Materialism’”, in European Journal of Women’s Studies, XV, 1, 2008, pp. 23–39. According to Amhed, these ‘new’ materialisms do not present a true story inside feminist thought because authors like Donna Haraway, Lynda Birke and Evelyn Fox Keller have always worked with the aim of conciliating biology and feminism.
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Cossutta, C. (2020). Margaret Cavendish: Science and Women’s Power Through the Blazing World. In: Ebbersmeyer, S., Paganini, G. (eds) Women, Philosophy and Science. Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44548-5_6
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