ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
Pictures drawn by Fancies Pencil (1656); and as solitary sage in Philosophical and
physical Opinions (1655). In these much varied guises, moreover, Cavendish also
wrote less as the passionate spouse of Sir William Cavendish, who was thirty years
her senior when they married in 1645, and more as the Marchioness or Duchess of
Newcastle, his companionate author and coequal in society. (Having had much
of his property confiscated while living in exile overseas, Sir William was made
Duke in 1665.) In the complicated world of sexual and party politics in midcentury,
the “Matchless Orinda” might project a “royalist” identity for herself in
her poetry while married to the Parliamentarian Colonel, James Philips, thirtyeight
years her senior; but Margaret Lucas’s actual “match” to a member of the
nobility gave her a social position—a platform, it is tempting to say—that allowed
her to speak her “fancy,” to cite a key word of hers that runs throughout her writing.
And speak she did, especially in the prefaces: on behalf of her sex, against her
sex, in favor of their essential difference from men, conscious of their general
inferiority as a class. As Catherine Gallagher has noted in an important article
entitled “Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in
Seventeenth-Century England,” “it is an odd but indisputable fact that the
seventeenth-century women whom we think of as the forerunners and founders of
feminism were, almost without exception, Tories.” 39 And the indisputably oddest
example of this sympathetic alliance between monarchical allegiance and protofeminist
impulse is Margaret Cavendish. In Charles Lamb’s formulation, Cavendish
regarded herself as a female “sui generis,” someone not to be bound, as Cavendish
herself said of fancy, by “Rule and Method”; and to the extent that she felt free of
the obligations and constraints of polite society, she further extended into the
marketplace the sense of aristocratic privilege of predecessors like Mary Wroth.
As an aristocrat, Cavendish both absorbed and participated in the radical social
upheavals of the Civil War, although not its radical politics. 40
Singular, absolutist, extravagant in almost every sense of a word being given
new meaning at this particular juncture in history, 41 Cavendish does offer a flip
side to her desire to be “empress of the world,” to borrow her own fanciful selfcharacterization
from The Blazing World. She imagines in verse (again I am
following Gallagher) every world being a world of its own, every element as
having its own organizing structure, each mind its peculiar similes, each gender
its particular discursive realm. “Poetry, which is built upon Fancy, women may
claim as a worke belonging most properly to themselves.” This separatist credo,
both self-empowering and self-diminishing, appears in the preface from Poems
and Fancies addressed “To all Noble, and Worthy Ladies.” And Cavendish’s
poetry, without doubt, is built on fancy: on the idea of having an opinion on
almost any topic. “Of Vapour,” “Of Dewes, and Mists from the Earth,” “The
Attraction of the Poles, and of Frost,” “Quenching out of Fire,” and, again,
“Quenching, and Smothering out of Heat, and Light, doth not change the
Property, nor Shape of Sharpe Atomes”: I am quoting titles from poems on a
single facing page (pp. 24–5). Indeed, the titles are themselves often works of
manifest ingenuity: “It is hard to believe, that there are other Worlds in this
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