ABSTRACT
In her 'Funeral Orations' and elsewhere in her Orations of Divers Sorts and Sociable Letters, Margaret Cavendish refuses the traditional Christian comfort of death as the beginning of an eternal after life in favor of a profoundly secular vision of death of the body as the final end. In many of her Orations and in her Sociable Letters, Cavendish focuses attention on the destiny of bodies after death. The body is ever present as raw matter to be contended with, and yet it is weakened and diminished by war and time and ultimately destroyed by death's appetite. Cavendish makes frequent and frank references to death as annihilation, with no light beyond it: 'I fear not Death's Dart so much as Death's Dungeon'. So it is not the sting or pain of death that is most frightening, but rather the permanent oblivion it represents.
