Analysis Of The Poetess's Hasty Resolution, By Margaret Cavendish

Register to read the introduction… However, her language bears traces of an internalization of the oppressive social structure and an anxiety of authorship1 that prevents her from successfully establishing herself as autonomous. In this essay, I will attempt to demonstrate how Margaret Cavendish, through her poetry and prose, endeavors to achieve self-sovereignty through singularity but fails due to fear of social alienation from not just the patriarchal hegemony but also from the women of her era that perpetuated it. In The Poetess’s Hasty Resolution, Margaret Cavendish establishes herself as not only a poet but a gifted one at that. “Reading my verses, I liked them so well/Self-love did make my judgment to rebel/Thinking them so good, I thought more to write” (1-3). Here, Margaret introduces her desire for self-sovereignty and her initial willingness to exercise it through the vocation of writing. She writes of a “self-love” initiated by the …show more content…
OED defines reason as “A statement of some fact (real or alleged) employed as an argument to justify or condemn some act, prove or disprove some assertion, idea, or belief ”. However, her usage of the word ‘reason’ evolves. ‘Reason’ later becomes the conduit for her creation of the world in which she can rule as a sovereign, as “Margaret the First”: “This is the reason, why I added this…to my philosophical observations” (1781). Her language when referring to herself in The Blazing World is authoritarian: “I shall account myself as a happy creatoress” (1780); “authoress of a whole world” (1784), etc. Although initially she claims to merely be a scribe to the empress of this imaginary world, there is evidence that Cavendish actually sees herself as the empress. In the first paragraph she sees two worlds, the world in which she exists as Margaret Cavendish and the Blazing World, as antipodes of each other, thus making them parallel: “…and joined them as two worlds at the ends of their poles” (1780). She goes on to describe the world of her creation: “it is a description of a new world…a world of my own creating, which I call the Blazing World” (ibid). As she posits herself in an ultimate position of power as “creatoress” and “authoress” (idem) she herself is sovereign, thus the empress could easily be interpreted as her. This is further evidenced within the romantic beginning of the story. The empress is heralded as a goddess and the object of the emperor’s affection, paralleling the empress’s story with that of her own: receipt of power and title through marriage. By aligning herself with a female figure of power, she at once establishes a female precursor but also empowers herself in fighting the alienation of hegemonic criticism.