Imaginary Worlds - The Blazing World

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

Margaret Cavendish was a pioneer of modern science fiction – except she didn’t intend to write science fiction. In the 17th century, Cavendish was a noblewoman who wanted to be taken seriously as a philosopher. In her poetry and her landmark work, The Blazing World, she imagined parallel universes, microscopic cities, human animal hybrids, zombie armies and flying vehicles. I talk with professors Emily Thomas (Durham University), Lisa Walters (University of Queensland), Lisa Sarasohn (Oregon State University), and Lara Dodds (Mississippi State University) about why Cavendish wrote for future generations that she hoped would understand and appreciate her ideas. Featuring readings by Tanya Rich. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here or email us at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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That is the actress, Tanya Rich. And here she is reading a passage of a poem about the movie Ant-Man and the Wasp, Quantumania. If atoms four a world can make, then see what several worlds might in an earring be. For millions of those atoms may be in the head of one small little single pin. Okay, that poem is not actually about Ant-Man and Quantumania. It's actually from a poem called Of Many Worlds in This World, and it was written by Margaret Cavendish in 1653. Yes, you heard that correctly, 1653. And Cavendish wrote another poem about a microscopic civilization called A World in an Earring. Laura Dodds teaches 17th century British literature at Mississippi State

University. There's a lot of poignancy in that poem because the ear never hears. Like nothing that goes on in that world is ever heard by the woman whose earring it is in. And it is quite distinct from other poems of a similar idea. So there's a famous poem by the religious poet George Herbert called Denial, which questions whether there's something bigger out there that hears us. But in that poem, the resolution is that, yes, God is there and he hears. But in Cavendish's World in an Earring, we're just not sure if there's anything out there to hear. world in an earring, we're just not sure if there's anything out there to hear. At this point, you might be thinking, who is Margaret Cavendish? Why have I never heard of her? That is a story over three centuries in the making.

Margaret Cavendish is best known for writing a book called The Blazing World. It's considered one of the first works of science fiction, and she wrote it over 150 years before Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Of course, Margaret Cavendish didn't know that she was writing science fiction. That term didn't exist back then. But a lot of science fiction draws from two strains of literature that she was intertwining. The first is the philosophical thought experiment. That's where a philosopher creates an imaginary world where everything runs exactly like they think it should. Plato's Republic, Thomas More's Utopia, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. The second genre is travel and exploration. That kind of literature was huge in the age of colonialism. And Star Trek is basically a combination of those two. Gene Roddenberry's Federation is a philosophical utopia,

and the characters are travelers that seek out new life and go boldly where no one has gone before. 300 years before Star Trek premiered, in 1666, Margaret Cavendish did something very similar with The Blazing World. Emily Thomas teaches philosophy at Durham University in the UK. What she does differently to the likes of Thomas More and Francis Bacon, their travelers are travelers heading off the coast of South America. Her traveller goes through a portal somewhere in the Arctic into a new world. And that idea of dimensional travel, I think, is clearly big science fiction. It's a solid trope. The other thing that's going on is that she's really interested in science and technology

and she is describing futuristic technologies. For example, in her blazing world, people have a way of measuring the depths of the sea, and that's not something that would be invented for hundreds of years later. And people also have airships, and they're kind of flying around in ships that go through the sky. Then she desired to know whether their vehicles were made of air. Here is Tanya Rich reading from The Blazing World. Yes, answered the spirits, some of our vehicles are of thin air. Then I suppose, replied the empress, that those airy vehicles are your corporeal summer suits. They answered that

properly there was no ascension or dissension in infinite nature, but only in relation to particular parts. And as for spirit, said they, we can neither ascend nor descend without corporeal vehicles. From a young age, Margaret Cavendish had ambitions to be a writer. From a young age, Margaret Cavendish had ambitions to be a writer. She didn't get the kind of education that she wanted, so she read voraciously and educated herself. Laura says that's one of the reasons why her work was so trailblazing. You know, she would say I was not educated, which is not entirely true, but it also is true.

She didn't go to university. She didn't have the type of education that other writers of that period would have had or other male writers. And so maybe she's just not tied in by the expectations of what literature needs to look like. She eventually found work as a lady in waiting for the queen. And then the English Civil War broke out. The king was executed. The monarchy went on the run with their staff. Lisa Walters teaches women's literature at the University of Queensland in Australia. Essentially, she became a political exile for nearly 17 years while the country was at war. And her own family estate apparently was ransacked by mobs, like thousands of people. They tore the whole house

down essentially. And then her brother was killed too? Yeah, her brother was killed. And we know that she also went into exile with the queen and she's disguised as a peasant, the queen. And apparently when Cavendish and the queen and others did get on a boat, the other forces were firing cannonballs that hit the rigging. So, I mean, beyond her science fiction and her ideas and her philosophy and science, she just has a really interesting life story as well. While she was in exile, she met her husband, William Cavendish. He was a widower and a duke. He had the power to help his wife become the public intellectual that she wanted to be. He arranged salons for her to meet

famous philosophers in Europe. He got her writing published. And by the time the monarchy was restored and they all returned to England, she'd become famous and infamous. She was a woman publishing philosophy under her own name. It's all very unusual. She was also not shy about her opinions. And she was very critical of the Royal Society, which was an elite group of philosopher-scientists. And she had particular disdain for a man named Robert Hooke. Hooke had many scientific accomplishments, but according to many historians, he had, quote, an abrasive personality. He even made an enemy of Sir Isaac Newton.

And when the official portrait of Hooke disappeared and was never found, to this day, people still think Newton was responsible. Now, Hooke was famous for being obsessed with microscopes. He put out a book, which was a bestseller, called Micrographia. It had enormous illustrations of what insects look like under a microscope. Margaret Cavendish thought that Robert Hooke's approach to the natural world was arrogant, even imperialistic. Again, here's Laura Dodds. Cavendish sees nature as being infinite and wise and self-moving.

Humans are part of nature, and because they're only part of nature, they can never have full knowledge of nature, which is at odds with the types of metaphors that are used by Hook and others associated with the Royal Society, who use metaphors of opening up nature to our knowledge and control. The Blazing World was written partially as a response to Robert Hook, but it's also a story. Actually, it's a story in a book of philosophy that Cavendish wrote. The story begins with a beautiful maiden. She is minding her own business when she's captured by pirates. They bring her to a parallel universe where she meets all these animal-human hybrids.

Many of them are actually based on the animals in Robert Hooke's book. Some were bear men, some worm men, some fish or mer men, otherwise called sirens, some bird men, some fly men, some ant men, some geese men, some spider men, some lice men, some fox men, some ape men, some jackdaw men, some magpie men,

some parrot men, some satyrs, some giants, and many more, which I cannot all remember. And after the main character meets these creatures, Emily says, She meets the emperor of this other world, the blazing world, so-called because there are two suns shining down on it rather than just one. And the emperor himself falls in love with her because of her great beauty and virtue and so he makes her the empress of the world and then sort of wanders off so he makes her empress says here have control of everything and then he leaves so what she sets about doing is creating a society so she makes the bear men into her experimental philosophers,

the bird men become astronomers, the foxes become politicians, and so on. That's when she focuses on Robert Hooke's book, Micrographia. Here's Laura. When she has her characters get their microscopes out and look at a louse, and of course the image of the louse from Hook's Micrographia is so impressive, right? It's this giant, it looks giant. You can

see so much detail. But the Empress says, well, now that you have this image of the louse, can you actually solve the problems that lead lice to be on humans? Like, can you solve poverty? Can you help these people who are subject to the bites of these insects? Of course, the bear men who have their microscopes, they say, no, we can't. To which they answered that such arts were mechanical and below the noble study of microscopical observations. Lisa Saracen teaches intellectual and scientific history at Oregon State University.

She's also one of the first scholars in our time who took Margaret Cavendish seriously and helped kick off this worldwide interest in her work. She says the Empress goes on to question all of the creatures in the blazing world about the different schools of philosophy they subscribe to. She doesn't like most of them, does not like the wise men, does not like the bear men, does not like the spider men, likes the worm men. The worm men who present a materialistic philosophy, matter and motion, which is very close to Cavendish's own ideas. She says, that's pretty good. I like that. And so she has these scientific societies. But after a while, she starts to think, the emperor starts to think, maybe all of these various scientists might cause rebellion and division in the new blazing world.

So she decides to dissolve the scientific societies. dissolve the scientific societies. Besides schooling people on philosophy, Margaret Cavendish also got really into world building. Critics at the time thought this was incredibly self-indulgent for a philosophical dissertation. This woman was letting her imagination run wild. But Lisa Walters thinks that Cavendish was discovering the joy of being a science fiction writer. She imagined something kind of like submarine technology.

She even discusses the possibility of what we would today refer to as a zombie army. So it's really startling how modern some of these ideas are. Alas, replied the Empress "'That will never do. "'For first,' said she, "'it will be difficult to get so many dead bodies for their vehicles "'as to make up a whole army, "'much more to make many armies to fight with so many several nations. "'Nay, if this could be, yet it is not possible "'to get so many dead and undissolved bodies in one nation,

"'and for transporting them out of other nations, "'it would be a thing of great difficulty and improbability. And she imagined synthetic drugs that could extend a person's lifespan indefinitely. which rock was hallow within, and did produce a gum that was a hundred years before it came to its full strength and perfection. This gum, said they, if it be held in a warm hand, will dissolve into an oil. The effects whereof are following, it being given every day for some certain time to an old, decayed man, and after the serre cloth is taken away, he will appear of the age of 20, both in shape and strength. Lisa Saracen says at this point, the story gets even stranger.

The Empress summons the spirit of Margaret Cavendish to be her scribe. So the author appears as a character in her story. And the two of them discuss scientific ideas for a while, and then Margaret Cavendish is missing her husband. So the soul of the Duke of Newcastle joins them in a kind of harem. Laura Dodds is fascinated by this relationship between the empress and the duchess, which was Cavendish's title in real life. I mean, it's true that some scholars once saw the empress as a kind of straightforward representation of Margaret Cavendish. But I think that a closer reading of the text, in particular, when you think of the fact that when the Empress says something wrong, the Duchess is there to call her out on it.

And when the Duchess says something wrong, the Empress is there to ask about it. The Duchess says, I'm so concerned with singularity and fashion, and I don't like to pay attention to what other people think. And the Empress says, well, that's nice, but since you are a fine lady, you have the privilege to do that. There are actually three doppelgangers of Cavendish in this story. The character of the Duchess, who is supposed to be her, the Empress, and whoever's narrating the story. It's also possible that Cavendish used this device to distance herself from the Empress.

Because for a while, the character of the Empress is doing basically what main characters usually do in these types of stories. She's creating a perfect utopian society, or perfect by her standards. But then she brings the technology of the blazing world back to her home world. And she doesn't exactly come back as a figure of enlightenment. In the second part of the blazing world, I think she becomes a despot or a tyrant

because she's able to use superior technology to exert her control over that world. The Empress appeared with garments made of the star stone and was born or supported above the water upon the fishmen's heads and backs so that she seemed to walk upon the face of the water and the bird and fishmen carried the fire stone lighted both in the air and above the waters. But good Lord, what several opinions and judgments did this produce in the minds of her countrymen? Some said she was an angel. Others, she was a sorceress. Some believed her a goddess. Others said the devil deluded them in the shape of a fine lady.

The devil deluded them in the shape of a fine lady. Lisa Walter says, even today, in our age of postmodern, ambiguous literature, it's not clear what exactly is the moral compass of the blazing world. One thing that makes the whole issue of what do we think of this megalomaniac, power-hungry, genocidal killer who goes on a massive killing spree on another world, one thing that makes it more complicated is that we are given no ethical or moral guidance from the narrator. And in fact, no matter how dodgy or horrible, no matter what happens, what kind of violence or oppression of people, the narrator doesn't say, hmm, that's a bit troublesome or that's bad. The narrator is just very dispassionate about it,

even forgets things. So we don't really trust her. We don't trust the narrator completely. But the blazing world is certainly an exploration of power. And for me, and there's people read it in different ways. I see it more of a dystopia and that it's showing, well, what happens if you give someone absolute power? What's going to happen with that power? What are they going to do? And

she creates these scientific societies, but they start debating, they start creating knowledge, and so they start fighting, and it starts to destabilize her regime. She realizes, okay, we've got to just stop all this. Let's stop the pursuit of science and crushes it. And for someone like a polymath like Cavendish, who was deeply invested in science and philosophy, I can't imagine her saying, yeah, let's get rid of science because, you know, an empire or an emperor or empress wants to, you know, it might threaten their power. So if this story is a bit of a puzzle to people now, how did readers in 1666 react, especially the male intellectual establishment? Well, let's just say if Twitter

existed back then, the blazing world would have burned it up. We'll get to that in a moment. A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body. We'll get to that in a moment. Vanilla and shea? That's Old Spice Total Body Deodorant! 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. When the blazing world came out, the age of enlightenment had not really extended to women's rights. The 1660s was the tail end of witch trial mania, which had gripped England and Europe for a century and was about to hit

North America soon. But the male intellectuals of the time could not ignore Margaret Cavendish. She was a noblewoman. She and her husband stuck with the royal family when they're in exile, and now they're very much back in power. And she had the economic means to make her voice heard. But Lisa Saracen says that didn't stop men from griping about her. Samuel Pepys, the diarist who knows her works, but he's the main source for this period of time for what's going on. He thinks that she's Looney Tunes. John Evelyn, who is another important figure, also thinks she's absolutely crazy. Emily thinks that Cavendish embraced her reputation as if it was better to be gossiped

about than ignored. There's this really fantastic description by Samuel Pepys when he sees her in London. And then he says that everything about this lady is a romance. Her footmen are clothed in velvet and she's wearing clothes of her own design. So people thought she was eccentric, mad and really unwomanly. That's a complaint that you hear really frequently. Some of her texts, she's very apologetic for the fact that she's a woman and she's talking about these subjects. And then in other texts, she is openly defiant about the fact, I have reason and I will use it to tell you all of these things that I believe to be true. After The Blazing World was published, the Royal Society of Philosophers invited her over. That was a big deal. She was the first woman invited to visit.

But Lisa thinks their goal was to set her straight. You know, she clearly thought that the Royal Society was fairly idiotic. You've got to love her. She's just so wonderful. So what happens when she goes there? She creates a spectacle of it. And crowds gather along the road to the Royal Society to see her coming along. And she has sort of a parade.

When she gets there, they give her a tour. They show her these newfangled devices they're working on. She nods along, says, hmm, very interesting. However. She was not converted into a follower. She publishes another book of essays criticizing the new science and with some more of her, what we would call her imaginary ideas. I love that one because at the end of that, she has an imaginary world that has some sort of creature, rock creature in the middle of the sea that has appendages of arms and legs.

And people who have lost or have died can go and get new bodies and be recreated. By that time, this is kind of very odd, strange stuff, but wonderful. Emily says Cavendish didn't want to just troll the Royal Society, and she didn't want to be lectured to. She wanted people to debate her. She thought that would be a true sign of respect. What I find sad about Cavendish is that

despite the defiance, I think that she was philosophically lonely. So she issues a plea in one of her early books for people to debate philosophy with her publicly, and nobody will. Nobody will come forward and do that. And sadly, there's even another woman philosopher around the same period, Anne Conway, who was tutored by a very famous Cambridge philosopher at the time called Henry Moore. And Henry Moore even advises her in a letter not to be in touch with Cavendish because of the way that she's acting is so unseemly. And didn't she write letters to herself from other philosophers or other people?

She did, yeah. She produced a set of fictional dialogues where she stands in the boots of another philosopher and the two of them sort of argue each other's points with her writing both sides. That feels to me like she really, really wanted public recognition and sparring partners and just didn't get them. Too bad, because her ideas were way ahead of her time. Okay, here's a really big philosophical question for you. What the mind today we tend to think that the mind is made of matter and that thoughts and consciousness is composed of bits of the brain moving very very quickly and sending signals to different parts and that is exactly what Cavendish proposed and this was really controversial because everybody thought that what our minds was what were our immaterial soul in a kind of Christian way. Her theories even play into quantum

physics, which is about the weird, unpredictable world at the subatomic level. I mean, today, some quantum physicists have actually argued that parallel universes and pocket universes could actually exist. And Lisa Welter says, She really argued that it existed. She based her ideas on the idea of atoms, what today what we would call the microcosm. So where the idea that the whole universe, the world is composed of microscopic particles. And that's essentially what she was arguing. But it was very heretical. Now, so far, I've been painting a picture of Margaret Cavendish that's kind of a lonely portrait. But her husband, William, wasn't just a sugar daddy.

In many ways, their marriage was surprisingly modern. He is amazingly supportive. He writes prefaces to her books where essentially says, you all make fun of my wife, but she's the greatest and you should respect her ideas. Yeah. And they never had a child. So she looks on her writings as her child, she says, and I guess he supports that ideal. So what she's doing. Emily Thomas. There's actually a really sweet poem that he writes to her in Blazing World, where he says to her, unlike Columbus, you haven't just discovered a world, you have created one by yourself, and you've created it of nothing but pure wit.

And Lisa Walters says his support for his wife's career continued beyond her death. When Cavendish died, he has a statue of her above her grave where she's holding a book and a pen. So he really wants her to be remembered as an intellectual. And he gathered all kinds of letters and writings about her into one volume. So because of him, we have also a better sense of all the intellectuals that were really excited about her. Yes, there were people who admired her quietly. And Laura says that gave the Cavendish's hope that future generations would appreciate Margaret's work. copies of her books to Cambridge and Oxford and also universities in Europe, which is one of the ways that they were preserved for posterity, because if they're in the library, even if no

one was reading them, they were there for later generations of scholars to discover. Although she was mocked by historians for centuries, they even gave her a posthumous nickname, Mad Madge. They even gave her a posthumous nickname, Mad Madge. She was eventually rediscovered by feminist scholars in the 1970s and 80s, who suspected there were probably great minds buried in the archives. And Laura says around this time, you can start to see Cavendish's influence on science fiction. The Female Man from 1975 was a groundbreaking novel written by Joanna Russ,

and Russ cited Cavendish as one of her influences. The Female Man is a story of multiple different worlds that are connected somehow and then have parallels and also differences. The Female Man also has four female protagonists who are versions of each other, each of which have different life chances and different life possibilities, depending upon the worlds that they live in. And there's more. China Mieville, in two of his novels, he responds to or acknowledges Cavendish, in particular, this idea of moving between worlds. And then Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials sequence has a lot of resonance with Cavendish, even if it wasn't a direct influence, because that story also begins with a young girl who travels to the North Pole and meets a talking bear and then travels into another world. It's tempting to imagine Cavendish as a hero or a prophet of our age.

I mean, this is the time she would have thrived. But if she were around today, I can imagine her still being controversial across the political spectrum. And you know that she'd have opinions about cancel culture. Although Lisa Walters thinks Cavendish would love the attention and love having battles on social media. grounds of natural philosophy, she has different parts of her brain arguing with each other. So the idea was that we see this in the blazing world, the self is not just sort of this whole complete static entity, it's mixing and melding with other selves and ideas. And so even in her philosophy, she's like, well, I'm not settled on particularly on particular opinions, there are parts of me that

that actually might have some doubts. And so she actually quite literalizes those doubts by saying, well, these thoughts said, I don't know, I don't really agree with this philosophical position. But then she'd say, but most of my brain really did agree with this stance. So she really, I think, yeah, I agree with you in that she would really welcome debate. with you and that she would really welcome debate. But this is just a fantasy. As much as Margaret Cavendish thought about the future, she could never know what her place would be in it. She had to keep writing and keep the faith that she wasn't deluding herself. To me, that's the beauty of her story. She didn't get the life she wanted exactly, but she created a good life

with a person who loved and understood her, and she used the superpower that she was born with, her vivid imagination. For I am not covetous, but as ambitious as ever any of my sex was, is, or can be, which is the cause, that though I cannot be Henry V or Charles II, yet I will endeavour to be Margaret I. And though I have neither power, time, nor occasion to be a great conqueror like Alexander or Caesar, yet rather than not be mistress of a world, since fortune and the fates would give me none,

I have made one of my own. Well, that's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Laura Dodds, Lisa Walters, Lisa Saracen, Emily Thomas, and Tanya Rich, who did the readings. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you like the show, please give us a shout out on social media or leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. It always helps people discover imaginary worlds.

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