Margaret Cavendish and a Dialogic Science

Then the Empress asked them, Whether by their Sensitive perceptions they could observe the interior corporeal, figurative Motions both of Vegetables and Minerals? They answer'd, That their Senses could perceive them after they were produced, but not before; Nevertheless, said they, although the interior, figurative motions of Natural Creatures are not subject to the exterior, animal, sensitive perceptions, yet by their Rational perception they may judg of them, and of their productions if they be regular: Whereupon the Empress commanded the Bear-men to lend them some of their best Microscopes. At which the Bear-men smilingly answered her Majesty, that their Glasses would do them but little service in the bowels of Earth, because there was no light....

- Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, called The Blazing World (1668)

Why is The Blazing World so hard to read? It doesn't seem to be simply the author's nutty preoccupation with following every narrative thread wherever it goes. Neither is it a matter of the story's weird, conflict-less structure, where every wish the author's (multiple!) personas might have is instantly and excessively gratified (a whole paragraph is spent inserting various jewels and precious metals into the protagonist's clothing). All of these things, certainly, impede reading, but fundamentally it is because The Blazing World is a work of science--even bound together with Cavendish's Observations on Experimental Philosophy.

It is a very special kind of work. If it were a treatise, it would be easier to follow; if it were a dialogue, a point of argument or identification might be determined. Instead, it is more like a conversation. The Empress of the Blazing World rules over all sorts of animal-men, whom she deputizes to be scientists. Over half the book is filled with the scientists' reports on their discoveries, reports which are staged as dialogue but in which the Empress expresses no consistent position (not even Cavendish's own). Sometimes she disagrees with the scientists and is correct; sometimes she disagrees with them and is proved wrong; sometimes she agrees provisionally for purposes of harmony. Sometimes she declares a whole branch of work meaningless.

Given this structure of the book, it might be worthwhile to draw attention to the scientific vision it implies, rather than to its more obvious feminist import (there's even lesbianism!). Her whole life, Cavendish strove in vain to be accepted among the scientists of the Royal Society--and, of course, was never taken seriously. In large part, this was because she was a woman; but it was also because the men of the Royal Society, with their elaborately recorded asphyxiation of small animals, had a spirit quite alien to Cavendish's free-flowing narrative, systematic only by necessity.

What would science have looked like had Margaret Cavendish's dialogic science won out? Besides her conventional, somewhat Cartesian physics, she had a strong distaste for experimental apparatus; this wasn't a crazy belief, given the unbelievably unreliable telescopy of the earlier part of the century. But more broadly, a Cavendishian kind of science would have much in common with Feyerabend. Cavendish does not create a theory which then acquires solid borders and clashes with other, equally hermetic schemes. She picks and chooses what seems right to her, and she eagerly abandons interpretations she begins to find unconvincing.

Perhaps a science like Cavendish's would give Thomas Kuhn far less ammunition, and perhaps an Einstein could not have arisen in such a heavily applied environment. Yet her science is also much less susceptible to scientism, much more flexible and adabtable to human needs. More importantly, it encourages debate rather than consensus, questions rather than answers.

There are, no doubt, feminists who would argue that this is a feminine vision of science. That is, I think, far too essentialist. A more plausible reading would imply that science itself, with its penetration of nature's recesses, is a patriarchal project (in which case Cavendish's work represents a kind of false consciousness). The broader lesson, though, is that groups excluded from the scientific narrative acquire a more nuanced and multiplicitious vision of the scientific world simply by virtue of being outside the ivory tower. Cavendish's work might serve to demonstrate the appeal of their approach.