If it be naught: Margaret Cavendish and the Performance of Trascendence

Abstract

In the second half of the seventeenth century Margaret Cavendish offers one of the most fascinating constructions of identity articulated by an unstable and problematic discourse of the self. Such a discourse has both been inscribed by critics as an aesthetics of ambitious retreat and isolation which renders the speaking subject an autonomous and assertive being, and as the expression of a submissive voice that cries for recognition and praise. This interpretive burden imposed by Cavendish’s writings is one of the starting points of the bulk of criticism on her, which insists on noting the ambivalence and irreconciliation of these two polar drives. Irreconcilable though these leanings may be they become the best expression of her singularity as an authoress, and as such, ask to be construed.

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