ABSTRACT
Probably the most formidable obstacle to Margaret Cavendish’s inclusion within the canons of philosophical and literary scholarship has been the perception of her work as incoherent, formless and disorganised. Even critics sympathetic to her free fancy and subjective expression’ such as Sylvia Bowerbank, have regretted that she was not ‘a more disciplined writer,’ seeing her ‘endlessly varied and fecundating’ discourse as ‘a cautionary tale for those of us who would suggest that craftsmanship and order are masculine, and artlessness and chaos are feminine.’ 1 I would argue, however, that when viewed in relation to some of the aesthetic and natural philosophical contexts of the 1650s and 1660s, Cavendish’s work seems less idiosyncratic and eccentric and, if not normative, then at least canonically comprehensible. Viewed in terms of the demands and imperatives of late twentieth-century canons – even recuperative, feminist canons like Bowerbanks’s – much of Cavendish’s work seems difficult to locate, if not downright perverse. Generically, stylistically and formally Cavendish’s works in various literary and non-literary modes seem complex and even contradictory. This paper focuses on Cavendish’s natural philosophical writings, which because of their apparent contradictoriness or unmethodical design have posed particular difficulties for intellectual historians. When her writings are placed within appropriate contexts, however, such as the discourses of conceited wit, and the essayistic probabilism of mid-seventeenth-century natural philosophical discourse, they become, I would argue, more comprehensible if not completely resolved.
