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.