ABSTRACT
In a period notable for obsession with o rder and dread of chaos, M argaret Cavendish stands ou t as an anom alous cham pion o f random ness .1 Scholars have only recently begun to assess h e r singular body of work in appreciative terms, taking a poststructuralist delight in h e r paradoxical, regressive, reflexive, and self-contradictory literary creations. Cavendish dram atizes the act of writing, fo regrounding the unreliability of authority and in terp re ta tion to the ex tent that h er texts deny their own content; they p resen t themselves as m ere m arkers of a desire to write that reflects no stable po in t of view. H er writing m irrors a subjectivity which, in Catherine Gallagher's words, “unsettles the very identity it was in tended to ancho r .”2
