Margaret Cavendish's Dramatic Utopias and the Politics of Gender

Abstract

In a 1663 epistle addressed to scholars at Oxford and Cambridge, Margaret Cavendish compares herself and her female counterparts to "[b]irds in cages . . . [that] . . . hop up and down in our houses, not suffered to fly abroad to see the several changes of fortune." 1 Cavendish then associates women's exclusion from universities with their negligible influence in all public contexts. "By an opinion, which I hope is but an erroneous one, in men," she observes, "[w]e are shut out of all power and authority; by reason we are never employed in either civil or martial affairs." 2 In this passage, iron bars are a prison, but, in other texts, Cavendish transforms such "cages" into arenas of civil possibility for women. In three of her plays--The Female Academy (1662), Bell in Campo (1662), and The Convent of Pleasure (1668)--Cavendish reconfigures traditional distinctions between private and public by creating utopian heroines who take women's sequestration to extremes, completely insulating themselves from men's public spheres. 3 The literal and ideological partitions they construct result in new "publics" in which women wield political power and authority.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.