Margaret Cavendish’s Fashioning of Fancy

Abstract

Contrary to Woolf’s characterization, it was not Cavendish’s writing that suffocated other women writers. It was her writing that cleared a path for them, especially for women who wrote during a time when patriarchal structures suffocated their minds. By giving her Fancy free reign, Cavendish made it possible for more women writers to reimagine their worlds, write down their creations, and send them out into the world. In her ultimate role of “creatoress,” Cavendish does not assume the absolute authority of God but rather the sovereignty of endless, unfettered creativity that she makes available to everyone, particularly women. Her version of Fancy not only glimpses unknown worlds and creates radical new ones; it has something to say about how we should understand the world we already live in and perceive its shortcomings. It insists that we see the fantastic in the real. It enables us to understand the constructedness of our descriptions of reality, however scientific and objective they may seem. It helps us construct new, more useful ones. Indeed, it asks us to defy Bacon and “give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world” and strive to make it real. ... For it is Cavendish who releases Fancy from the early modern mindscape where (predominantly) men try to fix it in place, and lets it loose in the world where women can put it to use. In the story of Fancy’s flight through modernity, Cavendish does indeed, as Elizabeth Topp foretold, provide a pattern for other female writers to follow