18th Century Women

Answer 1

In a period notable for obsession with order and dread of chaos, Margaret Carendish stands out as an anomalous champion of randomness. Scholars have only recently begun to assess her singular body of work in appreciative terms, taking a poststructuralist delight in her paradoxical, regressive, reflexive, and self-contradictory literary creations. Cavendish dramatizes the act of writing, foregrounding the unreliability of authority and interpretation to the extent that her texts deny their own content; they present themselves as mere markers of a desire to write that reflects no stable point of view. Her writing mirrors a subjectivity which, in Catherine Gallagher's words, "unsettles the very identity it was intended to anchor."

Though Cavendish's acentric writing rewards deconstructive interpretation, it remains a challenge to historicists interested in tracing connections between subjectivity and hegemony. What hegemonic forces induced Cavendish to relinquish subjective stability while pursuing a public literary career that spanned twenty years and resulted in fourteen published books? Recent scholarship offers two explanations: one regards Cavendish as a defiant protofeminist, resisting phallocentric discourse by refusing to conform to its logic.

This view makes sense of Cavendish's astonishing literary ambition and her apparent contempt of method, but fails to explain her self-criticism and evident desire to be appreciated, especially by her male readers. According to the other view, Cavendish was rendered incapable of coherent self-expression by patriarchal proscriptions of feminine discourse.[4] This approach explains Cavendish's self-contradictions, but only as failed attempts to communicate. It neglects to specify Cavendish's writings as meaningful efforts to negotiate strictures that may have been imposed on her discourse. Instead, it faults male power with generating, through Cavendish, an absence of meaning.

These perspectives need to be developed in light of Cavendish's intense engagement with the revolution in psychology that took place in the seventeenth century. Frequently dismissed as vacuous, if bold, intellectual posturing, or else appropriated by a poststructuralist hermeneutic that makes little distinction between her ideas and the deconstructive principles they are shown to illustrate, Cavendish's philosophy has yet to be fully decoded in the context of other seventeenth-century psychological theories.

As a woman, Cavendish was especially likely to be thought vain and impertinent in writing and publishing books on philosophy. Contemporaries found her "mad, conceited, ridiculous," "extravagant," and "distracted."Despite unceasing anxiety about the success of her literary efforts, Cavendish actually cultivated her reputation as an extravagant female by ostentatiously displaying foibles most closely associated with a "femininely" lax mentality. Psychological traits associated with women's lesser capacity for reason provide Cavendish with a discursive stance from which to expose some of the intellectual pretensions of her fellow philosophers. Moreover, in presenting herself as an extravagant, ambitious, untutored female, Cavendish obscures what in her time was a much graver moral impropriety, her atheism. She is, like Hobbes, a materialist psychologist, rejecting the idea of the incorporeal soul and the spiritual justifications of political order that this idea makes possible.

In a pioneering study on the impact of politics on philosophical discourse, Leo Strauss identifies a number of characteristics exhibited by ...