ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 considers the lineage of racialized vulnerability by examining Margaret Cavendish’s Assaulted and Pursued Chastity (1656) in light of developments in ideologies of slaving and whiteness that sought to justify England’s expanded slaving operations. By the mid-seventeenth century, the bodily weakness examined in previous chapters had developed into a gendered account of white vulnerability. I argue that Cavendish’s romance depicts the enslavement of her female protagonist to demonstrate the unnaturalness of her treatment as a fragile white woman. She is both physically weak and morally chaste—qualities that are antithetical to the figure of the natural slave, who is imagined to be exceptionally strong and sexually available to predation. The violence of slavers in the forms of rape and forced labor are here racialized in enslaved figures themselves. This narrative thereby serves to naturalize the enslavement of bodies depicted as physically fit for dehumanized labor. I end the chapter by putting Cavendish’s work in conversation with that of Thomas Hobbes and considering how the feminine gendering of racialized vulnerability counterintuitively underpins the vulnerable (and yet male) political subject.
