ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that Margaret Cavendish's romance more fully secularizes chastity's power by focusing on cultural alienation. Cavendish offers her malformed letters as evidence of her ignorance of the rules of rhetoric that authorized the endeavors of her male contemporaries. Defending her personal virtue, she responds directly to a poem by Sir John Denny that attacked Mary Wroth's 1621 publication of the first volume of her romance, The Countess of Montgomery's Urania. Rees argues that Cavendish's comparisons of the act of composition to spinning and needlework construct her writing as a quintessentially chaste activity, along the lines of Homer's Penelope. Cavendish's romance reveals how, by the later seventeenth century, virtuosity increasingly displaced virtue as the ground of literary authority. In both the rape and sacrifice scenes, Cavendish's heroine uses methods of coercion in an act of self-defense that is, simultaneously, an attempt to reform her adversaries' misuse of power.