ABSTRACT
As early as 1653, Margaret Cavendish was pursuing the various ways in which the life of the mind was ultimately bound up with the life of the city. The quaint analogy between the city “walls” and the “Dura Mater” developed in her early poem, “The City of the Fairies,” (Poems and Fancies 163) is a lighthearted treatment of what would become a more serious preoccupation as her years of exile stretched uncomfortably to include social, political, economic, and intellectual forms of marginalization. In fact, for almost twenty years, she continued to advance her ideas in speculative and experimental philosophy as useful corollaries for a theory of political sociality, as analogies for a humanity typified by the polls. Indeed, the question of what it means to be a citizen is a recurring concern in Cavendish’s writing.1 More particularly, she seems to be fascinated by the question of how one makes
citizenship-as-identity intelligible in the face of exile - for even when return is possible, the community originally left behind may no longer exist.2 Works which otherwise might seem to have little in common - take, for example, Sociable Letters (1664), The Convent o f Pleasure (1668), and The Blazing World (1666 & 1668) - in fact share an avid interest in the identity of the citizen. Even the work for which she is historically most celebrated, The Life o f William Cavendish (1667), could be read as a portrait of a man posed against the penumbra of citizenship. William’s life as a military hero is described in terms of cities defended or defeated, entered or besieged. His economic fortunes are defined by the particular cities in which he did, or did not, have substantial lines of credit. The tides of his social successes and failures are advanced as vignettes of William receiving courtesy or insult at the hands of civic leaders. From discourse community, to convent, to new blazing worlds, to the Life of William, each of these respective works handles the same persistent question of citizenship despite the winding permutations of literary experimentation for which Cavendish is famous.
