Margaret Cavendish and the Female Satirist

Abstract

Among early modern women writers who have been rediscovered in the last decade or so, Margaret Cavendish has attracted heightened critical attention, especially for the apparent contradictions in her self-presentations as royalist and feminist, as solitary genius and happy wife. In now classic article on Cavendish, Catherine Gallagher has argued that Toryism and feminism converge because the ideology of absolute monarchy provides, in particular historical situations, transition to an ideology of the absolute self.' In examining Cavendish's authorship practices, James Fitzmaurice has shown how she carefully constructed her authorial persona as one devoted at once to fancy and the family, in order to secure the protection she needed in a society that tolerated women writing but was deeply suspicious of women publishing.2 Yet Cavendish's pervasive self-presentation as satirist has not received the attention it deserves; in fact, no critic, to my knowledge, has discussed this significant aspect of her work.3 This general neglect of Cavendish as satirist derives, I suggest, from her more noted self-representations as royalist apologist and devoted wife and biographer of her husband, as well as from her reception by contemporaries and later literary history as the eccentric Mad Madge.4 Both these self-representations and the reception history have tended to deny Cavendish the position of satirist who offers