by Ed Simon
Past the regal bronze lions of Trafalgar Square and Nelson’s towering and triumphant column, up the steps of the National Gallery and behind it’s porticoed, columned, Regency façade, and on the second floor in room 34, the same place where the museum displays William Hogarth’s formal, yet warm, portrait The Graham Children and Joseph Turner’s dramatic Dutch Boats in a Gale, is the most luminescent painting of the British Enlightenment, Joseph Wright of Derby’s 1768 masterpiece An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. Fully six feet tall by eight feet wide, Wright’s composition depicts a wizardly natural philosopher framed in long gray locks and draped in a red coat not dissimilar to a robe, contrasted by flickering candlelight in an eerie chiaroscuro, with his hand atop the perfectly spherical chamber of a vacuum pump, inside of which is a fluttering Australian cockatoo – exotic at the time – right before the pressure of the exhumed air crushes it’s tiny avian lungs. A number of characters witness the scientific presentation; a gentleman in powdered wig and green jacket gives the experiment his rapt attention, two young lovers seem more concerned with each other, an assistant boy at the window closes the bird’s cage while bathed in the light of a full moon, and an elderly man seems to time the demise with an intricate pocket watch.
Demonstrations such as these had been conducted for more than a century by the time Wright put brush to canvas, and during the eighteenth-century they were performed as often by theatrical presenters with a paying audience as they were by scientists, yet the choice of test subjects in these experiments was frequently as cruel as the painter depicted. Robert Boyle, the chemist and philosopher who commissioned the scientist and engineer Robert Hooke to construct England’s first air pump in 1659, records the results of an experiment on a lark, where as oxygen was pumped out of the chamber the bird “began manifestly to droop and appear sick, and very soon after was taken with as violent and irregular convulsions,” so that the animal “threw herself over and over two or three time, and died with her breast upward, her head downwards, and her neck awry.” The dispassionate empiricism of Boyle’s report is in keeping with the mechanistic philosophy which dominated the Royal Society, the scientific organization established by King Charles II’s proclamation shortly after Restoration in 1663, and to which the chemist would donate the vacuum pump.
Mechanistic thought configured the world more as ingenious machine than as anything else, in keeping with the French philosopher Rene Descartes’ dismissal of animal intelligence in his 1637 Discourse on Method, seeing them as mere “automata.” The bird in Wright’s composition is more akin to the gentleman’s pocket watch that the human spectators. An approach which dominated the Royal Society, where the group’s most famous president Isaac Newton and the astronomer Edmund Halley once saw fit to dissect a Thames River dolphin on the table of London’s Grecian Coffee House.
Wright’s painting is ambiguous as to the morality of such experiments, but there are implicit critics rendered within the scene; two young girls with their father, the later of whom seems to be explaining the experiment to his daughters, the older girl covering her eyes, while the younger of them has a pained expression as she watches the dying cockatoo. Notable that the only people in the picture to be disturbed by the bird’s death in the name of science are girls, perhaps a comment from Wright on the innate sentimentality of women, and of the necessary rigorous, objective, analytical and even cold approach which science requires (which is possibly belied by the innate showmanship of the natural philosopher himself). The men gathered about the vacuum look forward to the progressive Enlightenment of science, while the feminine children are mired in misplaced and frightened mawkishness on behalf of a simple bird. In a worried glance, the dusk of one manner of thinking and the dawn of another are expressed; the dismissal of animal vitalism in favor of rational mechanization, and all which the Enlightenment philosophes believed the later promised.
Had Wright saw fit to include Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the first woman to be granted the right to attend meetings of the Royal Society in 1667, then a more complicated painterly allegory would have been the result, for the philosopher surely would have disapproved, but would have no hesitancy being quiet on that score. By dint of both her undeniable brilliance and the privileges of her tremendous family wealth, Cavendish was able to vociferously debate the political theorist Thomas Hobbes and Boyle at conclaves of the society; she produced six books of natural philosophy on the nascent scientific method, and more than double that in literary works, including plays, poetry, and perhaps the first science fiction novel. By contrast to the cold mechanical philosophy which dominated amongst her colleagues at the Royal Society, Cavendish expanded upon vitalist thought, understanding reality a an interconnected, complex, emergent, and conscious phenomenon, while rejecting the noxious reductionisms of scientificity and positivism. Not hard to guess at what Cavendish’s evaluation of such stunts as the air pump experiment would be, witness to similar demonstration performed on sparrows and frogs, she wrote that the “ignorance of men concerning other creatures” elevates the former to the position of “petty Gods in Nature.”
By contrast, writes Kathryn Shevelow in For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement, Cavendish “rejected the power relationships and sense of hierarchy presupposed by the new science… one of a small number of intellectuals who believed that all creatures possess their own kinds of knowledge, which are by definition limited to their spheres – and that this is true of humans, too.” Cavendish the poet, the playwright, the novelist has rightly been rediscovered in the past two generations of scholarship, often by feminist critics adding her to the canon of what Virginia Wolf desired in A Room of One’s Own when she ruminated on the cultural silence surrounding Renaissance writers who could be “Shakespeare’s sister.” Wolf, rather uncharitably, rejected Cavendish in The Common Reader by claiming that her “philosophies are futile… her plays intolerable, and her verses mainly dull,” while describing the seventeenth-century author as possessing the “freakishness of an elf, the irresponsibility of some non-human creature” – and this was in a passage meant to be laudatory. More recently, scholars like Deborah Boyle, Kathleen Jones, Anna Battigelli, and Emma L.E. Reese have done invaluable work both in recovering Cavendish and making her pertinent to our contemporary moment. As critics well should, for while we’ve started to read Cavendish for the depth of her creativity, particularly in 1666’s The Blazing World, arguably the first science fiction and fantasy narrative written in English, as a society we collectively have yet to fully grapple with the significance of her thought.
Cavendish was an exemplary figure of curiosity, her opulent chariot followed by children through the streets of London, her immaculate self-designed fashion the subject of gossip. As a result, she was often dismissed by the men of the learned Royal Society as an autodidact and dilletante, with member and diarist Samuel Pepys calling her “conceited, ridiculous,” and the nickname “Mad Madge” taking hold amongst London’s intelligentsia. Partially, this was because Cavendish was a woman out of time, John Rogers writing in The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton that at the “very moment in Restoration England when the mechanistic theories of atomic matter in motion forwarded by the Royal Society are gaining increasing intellectual assent, Margaret Cavendish repudiates the tenets of mechanism to embrace the animist materialism that had flourished” decades earlier. Regardless, she had her defenders, including the Poet Laurette John Dryden, and even Hobbes whom she shared a philosophical atomism with, even while they differed on the particulars of materialism. Cavendish’s amazingly egalitarian marriage to the Duke of Newcastle, a war hero of the Royalist cause, bestowed upon her an ability to move within circles that would have otherwise been denied to her because of her gender, though it also helped that she was a daughter of the esteemed Lucas family and a member of Queen Henrietta Maria’s retinue who resided at Versailles during the Interregnum. She rightly took advantage of those privileges, an audaciously prolific writer who penned several volumes of unusual verse, including the 1653 collection Poems and Fancies, more than a dozen closet dramas with titles like The Lady Contemplation, The Public Wooing, and The Unnatural Tragedy, which were collectively printed in 1662, several treatises on natural science and a 1656 autobiography entitled A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life. “Reason why I write in Verse,” she explained in her 1653 collection Poems and Fancies, is “because I thought Errors might better passe there, then in Prose, since Poets write most Fiction, and fiction is not given for Truth, but Pastime.” An axiom that’s the key to all of Cavendish’s work, the code for her metaphysics, her epistemology, her science – her entire worldview.
True enough to her contention about poetry’s anarchic possibilities, and Cavendish’s verse is uncategorizable by the standards of seventeenth-century poetry, as neither metaphysical nor Cavalier, while being heavily indebted to the “scientific” lyrics of the classical writer Lucretius. “All things are govern’d by Atomes,” Cavendish writes in a lyric so entitled from Poems and Fancies. The so-called “Atomic poems” reflect Cavendish’s materialist and Epicurean sensibilities, and put forward a theory of the physical which is based entirely on the pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus’ concept of atoms. Even mental states – spirit – could be understood through this new materialism. “Thus Life and Death, and young and old, /Are, as the several Atomes hold. /So Wit, and Understanding in the Braine, /Are as the several Atomes reign:/And Dispositions good, or ill, /Are as the several Atomes still. /And every Passion which doth rise/Is as the several Atomes lies. /Thus Sicknesse, Health, and Peace, and War, /Are always as the several Atomes are.” That Cavendish was a materialist is interesting, though of course so were many enthusiasts of the new science, notably Hobbes. What’s crucial with Cavendish is the form her materialism took, for she thoroughly rejected the mechanistic implications of atomism. For the writer, these dreary and cold particulars of mechanization exorcized free will from the universe, with disastrous ethical and political implications. Jay Stevenson notes in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 that Cavendish “stands out as an anomalous champion of randomness” with Rogers elaborating that she “engages the science of animist materialism with the unembarrassed intention of exploiting the revolutionary potential of its anti-patriarchal logic,” where the” rhetoric of free will” is meant to “combat the oppressive power politics of mechanistic determinism.”
If the paradigm then being established by the Royal Society was one of analysis and dissection, of prediction and measurement, where animals were as little machines and the universe a vast timepiece, then Cavendish’s materialism was warm, organic, variable. Deborah Boyle argues in The Well-Ordered Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish how the author “developed a detailed, internally consistent alternative to the mechanistic natural philosophy embraced by many of her contemporaries.” In addition to being “fascinating in its own right,” notes Boyle, it also “expands our understanding of the landscape of seventeenth-century philosophy.” More importantly is the open question of how Cavendish can expand our understanding of twenty-first century philosophy. The wizards of the Newtonian clockwork universe may have bragged that a hypothetical being with the knowledge of every particle’s location and momentum would be able to perfectly foresee the future, but Cavendish asserted the sovereignty of the unpredictable; she endowed inert matter with its own independence, its own intelligence. “Nature taking delight in variety suffers irregularities,” she writes in the 1664 Philosophical Letters, “for otherwise, if there were only regularities, there could not be so much variety.” Freedom and variety were intrinsically connected in Cavendish’s philosophy, and both were the handmaids of imagination.
A poet and a fantasist after all, she has been rediscovered as a novelist far more than as a philosopher, and yet these two roles are intrinsically connected in her most celebrated production, The Description of the New World, Called the Blazing-World, first printed in that nefariously numbered year 1666. An exceedingly odd book, The Blazing World has sometimes been categorized as the first science fiction novel. Genre questions are only slightly more useful than they are interesting, which is to say little of either. The reduction of Cavendish’s novel to merely inaugurating a genre – whether she beats Jules Verne or Mary Shelley to writing the “first” of science fiction – is an issue for trivia more than literally analysis. What’s far more important is what The Blazing World does, which as Corrine Harol notes in Imagining Religious Toleration: A Literary History of an Idea, 1600-1830 is to “investigate the relationship between literary imagination and philosophical or scientific truth, expressed… as the difference between description and observation.” What’s abundantly clear to anyone who reads The Blazing World is that while there are certainly elements of it which are evocative of science fiction – there are both microscopes and submarines which feature in the narrative, for example – its plot is far weirder than an uncomplicated genre categorization would imply.
Cavendish’s fable is about a woman with her name – a woman who clearly is her – who is able to shift into another dimension by benefit of a vortex at the north pole, a realm that is equivalent with the titular blazing world of the title. In that utopian realm Cavendish encounters a number of chimerical animal-men – bear-men, fish-men, bird-men, even lice-men – whom each have certain roles in the society of the Blazing World, which in short order she becomes empress on, eventually launching an invasion of our “real” world. At its core, The Blazing World is an investigation of the role which imagination rather than analysis plays within life; far more than just a science fiction novel, Cavendish’s speculation is a metaphysical, metafictional, fabulist fantasy. Fundamentally, the plot of The Blazing World is actually about writing The Blazing World, it’s a commentary on the omnipotent powers of fiction to create and generate our own multiverse. As she writes in the preface, she “cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second,” but will rather “endeavor to be Margaret the First,” since rather than as a conqueror she will be “Mistress of a World” she has made herself. Epistemologists and metaphysicians have often ignored the strange quality of fiction, of being able to make your own world, a distinct and discrete realm that can express a psychic interiority commensurate with actual experience but which doesn’t correspond to anything in the “actual” world. Cavendish didn’t occlude the eeriness of literature, writing that all of us can “create world of their own, and govern them as they please,” for “every human Creature can create an Immaterial World fully inhabited by Immaterial Creatures, and populous of Immaterial subjects… all with the compass of the head or skull.”
Her arguments concerning the philosophical implications of imagination are not incidental to her scientific concerns, they are intrinsically related to it. That’s something often obscured when The Blazing World is taught and read today, for in its first printings the novel was also bound with another work of Cavendish’s, Observations on Experimental Philosophy. To redact the latter from the former is to render an incomplete work, for Cavendish is clear that these two books are meant to have “Sympathy and Coherence with each other,” that they were “joined together as Two several World, at their Two Poles,” just as she describes the relationship between her blazing dimension and the mundane realm of everyday life. Harol argues that this “configuration is thus analogous to the thought experiment, and it suggests that Cavendish is engaged in thinking about the relationship between science and literature as a way of thinking about the nature of world, including new worlds, real worlds, and fictional worlds.” From the perspective of Cavendish’s novel, rhetoric is metaphysics. It would be easy to see this as consummately non-materialist, as if Cavendish was rejecting the world of empirical science entirely, but it’s actually the opposite, for she had a far more subtle and nuanced understanding of the relationship between metaphor and that which metaphor is used to describe than did the partisans of mechanization whom she sparred with at the Royal Society.
Mathematics is mathematics, and whether or not a systematized theory can predict observational and experimental results is an entirely separate issue from what rhetoric we used to describe those theories, of what the fictions are which we spin to explain those realities. When Boyle or Hooke described the universe as a cold, unfeeling, mechanized contraption, that was a fiction no less than describing the cosmos in the opposite manner, and there were ramifications to the choices of what language we use to depict those things – something Cavendish understood well. In opposition to the developing clockwork model of the universe – an instrumental, utilitarian, pragmatic device defined by force and energy – Cavendish rather imagined the cosmos by the principles of vitalism. An easy to malign physical theory today, where even while steadfastly materialist, Cavendish and others in her stead (including pantheist Baruch Spinoza) described matter as if it were “alive,” as if it had a “spirit” and “agency.” Writing in The Blazing World, and Cavendish claims that “matter, self-motion, and self-knowledge, are inseparable from one another.” Vitalism was not new to her thinking in The Blazing World, as she described her physical theory at great length in Philosophical Letters, denigrating the mechanistic “Opinions of some Wise and Learned Men… that all Exterior Motions, or Local Actions or Accidents proceed from one Motion Pressing upon another, and so one thing Driving and Shoving Another to get each other’s Place,” but by contrast she claims that “actions of nature are not forced by one part, driving, pressing, or shoving another, as a man doth a wheel-barrow, or a whip a horse; nor by reactions, as if men were at foot-ball or cuffs,” rather “Nature moved not by force, but freely.” For Cavendish, a billiard ball doesn’t move because it’s hit by another billiard ball; it moves because it’s freely decided to do so upon that interaction.
This might seem absurd to the point of ridiculousness, but it’s no less bizarre than using the equally anthropomorphic language of “force” to describe motion. Most importantly, Cavendish’s quibble wouldn’t have necessarily been with the objective mathematics than just beginning to be used to describe motion and inertia, momentum and velocity, but rather with the metaphors which we use in our everyday language to explain such science to each other. Mechanical metaphors are just as arbitrary as vitalist ones. Whether or not you say a billiard ball “forced” the other one to move, or that the second ball “decided” to do so is simply the poetry which you use to clothe the ineffable world of mathematics. Boyle and Hooke appropriated an objectivity which no human could have, they built an idol of a mechanistic universe and mistook it for the real thing – Cavendish had the sense to understand what’s fantastical about any model which we use to explain experiment and observation, whatever those experiments and observations might imply. What language we use to describe the objective world isn’t arbitrary, it has certain social and political implications. As Rogers notes, the ”binary structure of these competing perspectives no doubt strikes us as familiar; the tension between the empirical perspective on outward objects and the rationalist perspective on the inner world of material parts reproduces almost exactly the conceptual antinomy of the public and private spheres of human activity.” To imagine the universe as a clock and an animal as a machine is to risk instrumentalizing humans as well, to render them as tools, as birds in a vacuum. A rigorous critique not against science, or even experimentation, but against how we choose to think about and describe these things. An assault on the positivism which makes an idol out of mechanical metaphor, which confuses a clock for the universe.
The claim which Cavendish makes in Poems and Fancies about poetry’s importance isn’t some mere trifle, it’s what she proposes is the proper way to speak about science and nature, because rhetoric has implications. “New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities,” writes linguist George Lakoff in Metaphors We Live By, something which Cavendish understood well. Disingenuous to pretend that Boyle and Hooke’s rendering of animals as machines, as the world as a mechanism, is not a metaphor. A metaphor is only a means of establishing meaning, which by definition is a human-centered affair, what Lakoff describes as an issue of “imaginative rationality.” Cavendish bemoaned the excising of imaginative faculty from experimental science, and in The Blazing World she offered a model of their union. Philosophically, Cavendish argued that the Royal Society’s dominant approach to understanding nature as relying too much on arid reductionism and inert rationality, where she was dedicated rather to imagination, particularly fancy and wit. Hobbes may have argued in Leviathan that imagination was “decaying sense,” but Cavendish found in it a regenerative force capable of generating new reality whether it “be really existent without his mind or not.” Even clearer some thirteen years later, when in The Blazing World Cavendish writes in the preface that “Fancy creates of its own accord whatever it pleases, and delights in its own work. The end of reason is truth; the end of fancy, is fiction: but mistake me not, when I distinguish fancy from reason,” for often the later requires the former “to recreate the mind.”
In the parable of Cavendish defending the bird over Boyle, there are intimations of a different way of not conducting science necessarily, but of thinking about science. Not in embracing her literal view of the world – though no scientist from the seventeenth-century has seen their work endure in all of its particulars over the past three centuries (as is the nature of science), but rather in embracing the contingent models and metaphors Cavendish uses to think about reality. A holistic, organic, vital approach to the natural world which functions though a genuine and equal consilience of science and the humanities; where imagination is centered over vivisection and the literary counterfactual is both a means of constructing thought experiments, but also of generating parallel worlds, where the category of “fiction” becomes instrumental in understanding nature, and the divisions between the human and the inanimate are rightly seen as illusory. “Wit creates,” wrote Cavendish, “in its imaginations, not only Worlds, but Heavens and Hells, Gods and Devils,” but it is not mere superstition, or even duplicity, but an ability “to create new; not a falsifier of the old.”
We are, in the waning days of late capitalism and the warming evenings of the Anthropocene, in desperate need of new worlds, both figurative and literal. Much of what has pushed us to this ecological precipice are the mirror images of positivism and puritanism, the first being the technocratic, instrumental, mechanized understanding of the world as an inert substance to be used for man’s benefit, and the later the spiritual justification for that same system. By imagining that the world was a living, breathing, organic thing – by choosing to imagine it as such – Cavendish gestured towards the possibility that material circumstances might be affected by intellectual perspective. Of something different. Within The Blazing World, Margaret may have been an empress, but she was also a liberator when she turned back to our own world, her banner reading not “Enlightenment” but “Enchantment.” Now with the water levels rising, and our own lungs as poisoned as that cockatoo choking on carbon dioxide, we are in need of a map that can help us find the Blazing World. “I take more delight and glory, then ever Alexander or Caesar did in conquering this terrestrial world,” writes Cavendish. “I have made my Blazing world, a Peaceable world… and if any should like the World I have made, and be willing to be my Subjects, they may imagine themselves such… but if they cannot endure to be Subjects, they may create World of their own.” The question is, do we still have time to do such a thing? Would we even be able to imagine it?