Blake-LifeMargaretCavendishs-2020

After Life in Margaret Cavendish's Vitalist Posthumanism
Author(s): Liza Blake

Source: Criticism , Summer 2020, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Summer 2020), pp. 433-456
Published by: Wayne State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/criticism.62.3.0433
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AFTER LIFE IN MARGARET CAVENDISH’S
VITALIST POSTHUMANISM
Liza Blake
In Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, an influential book in the burgeoning area

of new materialism that links vitalism and political theory, she writes that
those interested in thinking ethically and expansively about the nonhu-
man “need to cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism—the idea that human
agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature.”1 Anthropomorphism, or
(as she defines it) “the interpretation of what is not human or personal in
terms of human or personal characteristics,” can be “fatal” if one’s proj-
ect is to redefine agency in a way that applies it to the nonhuman world,
because it could merely replicate human agency in nature rather than
allowing us to truly glimpse other forms of agency distributed through-
out all types of matter.2 But the dangers, Bennett argues, are worth the
potential payoff: if we can move beyond using this sensibility to see the
world in our own image, then “what appears next is a swarm of . . .
vibrant materialities.”3 Bennett’s detour into anthropomorphism is an
unexpected moment in a work that is otherwise about political philoso-
phy and philosophies of matter, as anthropomorphism is in many ways a
poetic technique rather than a philosophical one. Even Bennett’s vocabu-
lary to describe it draws on theories of poetry; anthropomorphism, in her
telling, is not necessarily a rigorous or systematic mode of thought, but a
way to “catalyze a sensibility” for viewing the world more generously.4
Where philosophical argumentation about the nature of the vibrant, vital
world might fail, poetry might intercede, allowing one to see—or catalyz-
ing one into a sensibility that then might allow one to see—forms of life,
activity, and agency beyond the boundaries of the human, to recognize the
vibrancy of the world.
However, in this moment, Bennett’s vocabulary undergoes a subtle but
important slippage: the projection of human “characteristics” bestows a
kind of “vibrant” or lively existence to matter, and that life, in turn, is used
to undergird the ethical claims that see forms of life and therefore agency
distributed throughout the world. This argument about lively matter is
motivated partly by Bennett’s larger agenda: as a political theorist, she
studies the history of vitalism in order to argue for vitalism’s capacity to
Criticism Summer 2020, Vol. 62, No. 3, pp. 433–456. ISSN 0011-1589. doi: 10.13110/criticism.62.3.0433 433
© 2020 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

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434 Liza Blake
extend the concept of agency (even, potentially, political agency) to non-

humans. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, editors of the important col-
lection New Materialisms, likewise approach the question of matter from
a political perspective; one project of their collection, they make clear, is
to describe “a materialist theory of politics or agency,”5 and so they begin
from the premise that “materiality is always something more than ‘mere’
matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders
matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable.”6 Bennett, Coole,
Frost, and others, as thinkers practicing the body of work roughly known
as “new materialism,” each attempt, in their own way, to use a philosophy
of vital or vibrant matter to rethink ethical, epistemological, and political
questions.7
While I enthusiastically accept the premise of the new materialists—
that reimagining matter via concepts such as “life” and “agency” might
allow us to develop a more robust political theory, or ethics, or vision of
nature—the slippage at play in Bennett’s plea for anthropomorphism
points to a larger problem with many of these arguments. By declaring
matter important because it is lively, or vibrant, or agentive—because it
can be like humans—we do not remove the ascendency of human life;
instead, we merely elevate matter to come a bit closer to the level of
humanity. Strategic anthropomorphism is, after all, still anthropocentric.
Privileging life, looking for “human agency . . . in nonhuman nature,”8
broadens the category of humanity rather than moving beyond it, still
ascribing value only to that which is human, or that which reminds us
of human agency.9 The exciting work coming from the new materialist
thinkers, therefore, might be most profitably continued by interrogating
the nature of the “life” that informs it, whether that “life” be expressed
as force, power, vitality, vibrancy, or agency. As I will show in this essay,
the seventeenth-century posthumanist Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of
Newcastle, models just such an interrogation and presents in her philoso-
phy a vitalism that privileges qualities other than agency.
When I call Cavendish a posthumanist I mean simply that she was
intensely interested, across the various genres in which she wrote, in
thinking beyond the human.10 Though posthumanism emerged in criti-
cal discourse partly as a historicizing term referring to a period begin-
ning in the late twentieth century, characterized by “the decentering of
the human by its imbrication in technical [and other] networks,”11 I refer
to posthumanism in its broader sense as a theoretical school invested in
decentering the human as a privileged entity in political, ethical, and
philosophical discourse. Many have extended the reach of posthuman-
ism back historically, as in Eileen A. Joy and Craig Dionne’s collection

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MARGARET CAVENDISH’S VITALIST POSTHUMANISM 435
When Did We Become Post/Human, a special issue populated by medi-

evalists and early modernists, which demonstrates the long prehistory
of posthumanism in premodernity.12 The new materialisms, with their
attention to new forms of matter, offer a potentially productive avenue
for developing philosophical systems that will allow us to think in more
expansively posthuman ways. But as I will argue in what follows, the new
materialisms could also make much more robust use of old materialisms,
old philosophies of matter, several of which have as much, if not more,
radical potential.13
The one engagement with historical philosophies of matter in Coole
and Frost’s introduction is two paragraphs in which they argue that
Descartes’s definition of “matter [as] corporeal substance” that is distinct
from the human cogito “yields a conceptual and practical domination of
nature as well as a specifically modern attitude or ethos of subjectivist
potency.”14 Modern science, and the new materialisms that draw on it,
by contrast, “now envisages a considerably more indeterminate and com-
plex choreography of matter than early modern technology and practice
allowed.”15 Accordingly, most new materialists have a vision of matter
that is uniformly monist (theorizing that there is only one substance) and
vitalist (insisting that all matter is, in some way, alive, “affirm[ing] mat-
ter’s immanent vitality”).16 Monism and vitalism seem the only philoso-
phies of matter capable of supporting posthumanism, so much so that,
for example, Jane Bennett, finding Lucretius a productive interlocutor,
attempts to rewrite Lucretian atomism as monism in her collection of
compatible philosophers.17 The reasons seem clear: modern monism is a
direct challenge to Cartesian dualism, which isolates and privileges the
(human) mind from the mere matter of the body; vitalist monism, by
granting life, vitality, or vibrancy to all degrees of one substance, removes
the privilege that might previously have been ascribed to humans alone.
However, despite Coole and Frost’s dismissal of Cartesian philosophy,
the early modern period has much to offer, something even they admit
casually when they note that many new materialists draw on the philoso-
phy of “Spinoza, whose work emerged more or less contemporaneously
with Cartesianism.”18 In fact, the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
hosted a veritable explosion of philosophies of matter, with authors and
thinkers variously advocating Cartesian mechanism, thinking through
different versions of atomism, revising Platonic idealism, reinvent-
ing Stoic physics, espousing robust and varied vitalisms, and frequently
combining these systems into hybrids or building their own visions of
matter and nature from scratch.19 Given the thesis of the new materialist
projects—that redefining matter might allow us to develop and test new

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436 Liza Blake
ethical systems or ways of being posthuman—this early wealth of robustly

imagined physical systems could serve as an ideal starting place to spin
out different ethical consequences (a project of early modern authors as
well).20
Cavendish offers one such robustly imagined physical system in her
work, and I will show in this essay how, despite her own vitalist theories
of matter, she remains deeply committed to moving her readers beyond
life, insofar as “life” tends to look like human life and agency. Cavendish
uses her vitalist materialism to argue posthumanist points, but more
importantly she does so by showing that any vitalist posthumanist project
will fail as long as it relies on a definition of life derived from, or synony-
mous with, human life or human agency. The essay falls into two parts,
offering two different snapshots of her thought (her Grounds of Natural
Philosophy, written in 1668, and her Philosophicall Fancies, written in
1653), as well as two different genres or modes (philosophical argumenta-
tion and poetic philosophical “fancy” or speculation). The genres inflect
her agendas: in Grounds her interrogation of life writes her into the tradi-
tion of philosophical materialism, and in Philosophicall Fancies she uses
the poetic technique of anthropomorphism only to interrogate whether
the expansion of humanity that that poetic technique brings is in any way
liberatory or beneficial.
In the first part, I argue that Cavendish’s particular brand of vitalism
accomplishes what many new materialisms do not: namely, she embraces
death, and in the process creates an expansive (and subtle) materialism and
also a more expansive posthumanism. In the tradition of materialists such
as Lucretius and Spinoza, she describes for her readers a philosophy of
matter that can remove from them the fear of death, and she accomplishes
this by a strategic redefinition of life as distributed association rather than
as anything like human life. This first section, then, establishes Cavendish’s
posthumanism and shows how her natural philosophical system, in its
final iteration, achieves its posthumanist goals by showing how clinging
to a notion of life as human life only causes unhappiness. In the second
part I examine her philosophical poem “Of Sense and Reason Exercised
in their Different Shapes.” This poem, which begins as a playful experi-
ment in Aristotelian hylomorphism, develops into a larger enactment and
critique of poetic anthropomorphism, insofar as that technique offers to
bring life to the nonhuman and inanimate world. Anthropomorphism,
in her hands, becomes an instrument of gendered power, and she uses
what I call “gynaecomorphism” to highlight that poetic expansions and
creations of life are not gender neutral. Through her critique of gendered
tropes in “Sense and Reason,” Cavendish offers a vision of a philosophi-
cally generative poetic anthropomorphism that is almost an inversion of

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anthropomorphism as defined by Bennett at the start of this essay. While

my argument about her Grounds of Natural Philosophy demonstrates
clearly her posthumanist philosophical convictions, my reading of this
early poem demonstrates the poetic, political, and gendered consequences
of being able to imagine meaningful agency as only (male) human agen-
tive force. In both parts, I show how Cavendish is deeply invested in the
concept of life, but only insofar as she can discover a form of life that exists
after, or beyond, human life and agency.
The Happiness of Death in Cavendish’s Late Natural Philosophy
Before discussing the role of death in Cavendish’s natural philosophy, it

might be useful to begin with a quick summary of her philosophy of mat-
ter.21 Though I draw, here, especially on her last treatise, The Grounds of
Natural Philosophy (1668), that treatise is merely the most systematic pre-
sentation of her natural philosophy; her fundamental hypotheses about
matter remain consistent across her four treatises, though her focus shifts
slightly over the years.22 “Nature is but one Matter,” she reminds us in
III.4, and “all her Parts are united as one Material Body” (30). There are
three different degrees of matter, which are, respectively: inanimate mat-
ter, which does not move independently; sensitive matter, which moves
although slowly; and rational matter, which moves quickly and freely.23
However, she stresses that these are only different degrees and not differ-
ent types of matter, because there is only one matter: “which three sorts
of Parts are so join’d, that they are but as one Body; for, it is impossible
that those three sorts of Parts should subsist single, by reason Nature is
but one united material Body” (I.3; 3). This one united material body is
alive, as are the various parts that make it up—“All the Parts of Nature
have Life and Knowledg” (I.7; 6)—and much of Grounds articulates the
relationship of those parts, not in terms of how inanimate matter interacts
with rational matter on a large scale (the Cartesian problem) but in terms
of how different moving, living parts combine to create what she terms
creatures, which are “Composed-Figures” or composite bodies (II.1; 17).
A creature is, vitally, any composite body, not merely an animate or ani-
mal form. Those composite bodies, which have all three degrees of mat-
ter as part of them, are themselves made up of composite bodies, all the
way down: “Creatures must be produced by Creatures. . . . Wherefore,
all Natural Creatures are produced by the consent and agreement of
many Self-moving Parts, or Corporeal Motions, which work to a particu-
lar Design, as to associate into particular kinds and sorts of Creatures”
(III.4; 30–31).

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438 Liza Blake
Insofar as she espouses vitalism and monism, her treatise tracks fairly
closely to other vitalisms from the period. It differs, however, in a few key
ways. First, as I have argued elsewhere, the time spent on the concept of
the creature as a cooperative composite body is a crucial addition, as is her
expansion of the idea of the “creature” to include vegetable, mineral, and
elemental bodies, as is her attempt to incorporate ideas about parts and
wholes into a monist philosophy.24 Second, Grounds spends a significant
amount of time (nearly all of Part II) thinking not about matter but about
the question of knowledge, including epistemological speculation about
what one part of matter may know about another. And third, Grounds
is unusual even among her own treatises for the way that it structurally
builds up to a posthumanist climax. The standard Aristotelian organiza-
tion of a natural philosophical system moves from basic principles, to the
heavens and four elements, to the coming into being of bodies, to the most
basic bodies between the sky and the earth and their transformations, and
then to animated forms. Against this standard progression, ubiquitous in
the early modern period, Cavendish’s treatise culminates not in animals
and then humans, but in elements and metals.25 Having laid the founda-
tions of matter, epistemology, and composite bodies in Parts I, II, and III
respectively, she treats of humans (their bodies, minds, and diseases) in
Parts IV–X. She then, in Part XI, reopens the question of epistemology,
reminding her readers that nonhuman creatures have knowledge(s) as
well, and the treatise culminates (in Parts XII–XIII) with an exploration
of elements and minerals. This unusual organization perhaps indicates
something about her priorities; in earlier versions of her natural philoso-
phy, the Philosophical and Physical Opinions (PPO), the chapter on “differ-
ent Knowledges, in different Kinds and Sorts of Creatures” (XI.1 in Grounds)
is much earlier and buried in different arguments (Part IV, chapter 14 of
the 1663 PPO; Part II, chapter 77 in the 1655 PPO). Grounds is a system-
atizing rearrangement of these earlier treatises,26 and moving the chapters
on nonhumans and nonhuman knowledges to the end allows the treatise
as a whole to work up to this question. Indeed, it makes the treatise read
as if the chapters on humanity are but one specific example of the kinds
of questions one might ask, before returning to the larger epistemological
issues at hand.
Part XI of Grounds is the epicenter of Cavendish’s natural philosophi-
cal posthumanism. In this section, for instance, she argues that different
kinds of creatures have different kinds of knowledges, and one knowl-
edge is not better or worse than another but merely different: “Man may
have a different Knowledg from Beasts, Birds, Fish, Flies, Worms, or the
like; and yet be no wiser than those sorts of Animal-kinds” (XI.1; 164).

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Drawing on the conclusions from an earlier part, she reminds her read-
ers that it can be difficult for some parts of nature to know the thoughts
(II.5, VI.9) and perceptions (II.2, II.7) of other parts, and she states here
in these later chapters that that inability to fully know another is one rea-
son that certain creatures (presumably “Human Creatures”) believe that
other parts of nature have no forms of knowledge: “because one Creature
doth not know what another Creature knows, thence arises the Opinion
of Insensibility, and Irrationability, that some Creatures have of others”
(XI.1; 164).27 While the treatise is, admittedly, largely devoted to explor-
ing human nature, it also insistently reminds humans that human nature
is a part of nature more generally, not only with the cluster of chapters in
Part XI but also at the level of vocabulary. To consistently and repeatedly
call humans “Human Creatures,” as she does throughout the treatise, is
to remind them that they are one creature among others, and that they
are in good company: “Creatures, that is, Composed Figures, as a Beast, a
Tree, a Stone, Water, &c.” (III.4; 30). Creatures, and their various forms of
knowledges, are not upgraded to the level of humanity; instead, “Human
Creature” becomes the marked term, and humans get re-categorized not
as above nature but as a subset of creatures.
This subtle working by redefinition, reclassifying humans as human
creatures, also happens as a part of the other great ethical project of
Grounds of Natural Philosophy: her work in the Appendix to fold death
into her vitalism and account fully for the role of death in her vitalist
matter theory. She does this at the level of vocabulary by rebranding
death as dissolution, or a dissolving motion of matter that is the opposite
of production. She tackles dissolution most robustly in the Appendix to
Grounds, added only to this fourth iteration of her natural philosophy in
1668. Throughout the Appendix, she works to devalue life, and in partic-
ular, life imagined as a sort of antidote to or fix for death. This is, in fact,
the end or goal of the entire treatise and of the larger posthumanist proj-
ect of this treatise. The Appendix to Grounds is her material (in the sense
of physical) vision of the afterlife and is unique, in her corpus, for the
amount of time and attention it spends on theological issues. Cavendish’s
usual stance on theology is that it is best avoided; in a preface to the 1655
Philosophical and Physical Opinions, for example, she says that studying
it too deeply “many times blindes the eyes, both of faith and reason, and
instead of uniting mankind with love, to live in peace, it makes discords
with controversies, raises up faction to uphold each-side.”28 However,
here in the final part of her final natural philosophical publication, we
see her attempt to integrate her philosophy of matter with a vision of the
afterlife.

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440 Liza Blake
Because a project throughout her work is to refuse the existence of

immateriality, she does not tackle the afterlife by thinking about the fate
of the souls after death, because God is the only immaterial (App. I.2),
and the immaterial is not perceivable by any corporal body, i.e., by any
creature in nature (App. I.3). Instead, she thinks about resurrection, the
material (again, in the sense of physical) reconstruction of bodies after
death. When people think of the afterlife, she says, they imagine “Spirits,
or Spiritual Substances; as if all the other Parts of their Bodies, should
become Rational parts; that is, that all their Parts should turn into such
parts as Thoughts” (App. I.1; 238). However, the separation of spiritual
substance from bodies is an impossibility (App. II.2), and so she starts
thinking about what it would really mean for a human body to resur-
rect. A resurrection, she insists, would not include just one version of a
person’s body but must include all matter that has ever accrued to them,
or has been incorporated into the society (the cooperating collection of
parts) that makes up the human creature; it will include “all the Parts of
one Society, as for example, a Man, from the first time of his Production
[birth], to the time of his Dissolution [death]” (App. II.5; 258). In the next
chapter, a small part of her mind breaks off and asks for clarification:
surely the majority of her mind cannot be arguing that at the resurrection
all parts that have ever belonged to a body will resurrect?29 This would
be nightmarish: “Man, at the time of his Resurrection, would be a Gyant”
(App. II.6; 259). However, the major part insists that this must be the
case: the resurrected body must include all parts of the “Society” or body
throughout time, otherwise everyone “would be imperfect at the time of
their Resurrection” (App. II.6; 259).
Her insistence on the physicality of the resurrection is part of her
larger concerted effort to talk about the afterlife in material or physical
terms. One reason she can insist on the materiality of her resurrection
is that she has already argued that “all Sins are Material, [and] so are
Punishments: for, Material Creatures, cannot have Immaterial Sins; nor
can Material Creatures be capable of Immaterial Punishments” (App.
I.11; 247). If the rewards and punishments of the Bible are to be physi-
cal, as she insists the Bible shows (App. I.11), then so must the body be
physical to receive those punishments. However, following the logic of
her argument not only that all bodies will be resurrected but also that
every part of matter that has ever belonged to their bodies will resurrect
with them, she then comes to a remarkable conclusion: that the resur-
rection, when it happens, will be the end of the world, not for reasons
of divine judgment but for reasons of the limited quantity of matter in
the world.

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The resurrection, drawing on the matter of the world to reconstruct

all those giant bodies, will be the exhaustion of all matter in the world.
I include a long excerpt from the chapter “Of the Dissolution of a World”
below:
All the Parts of my Mind agreed, That when all the Human
Creatures that had been dissolved, should rise, the whole
World, besides themselves, must also dissolve, by reason
they were Parts of the World: for, when all those numer-
ous dissolved and dispersed Parts, did meet and joyn,
the World wanting those Parts, could not subsist: for, the
Frame, Form, and Uniformity of the World, consisted of
Parts; and those Parts that have been of the Human Kind,
are, at several times, of other kinds and sorts of Creatures,
as other sorts and kinds are of Human Kind; and all the
Sorts and Kinds, are Parts of the World: so that the World
cannot subsist, if any kind or sort of Creatures, that had
been from the first time of the Creation, should be united;
I mean, into one and the same sort or kind of Creatures; as
it would be, if all those that are Quick, and those that have
been Dissolved, (that is, have been dead) should be alive at
one time. (App. II.7; 260–61)
There are many notable things about this chapter, which comes from
a calculation of the amount of matter necessary to resurrect all bodies:
her continued and continuing use of “dissolution” as an appositive mate-
rial redefinition of death; the recognition that matter is recycled into
other, nonhuman societies of the material world after the dissolution of
a human body (“those Parts that have been of the Human Kind, are, at
several times, of other kinds and sorts of Creatures”); and even the chap-
ter title, which speaks not of the end of the world but of the dissolution
of a world. The use of the indefinite article in the title has two effects.
First, it allows her to continue to downplay the terror of death as dis-
solution: a world dissolves so that all bodies might be reborn—or, in her
terms, might be produced again. Second, it leads directly to the chapter on
Blessed and Cursed worlds (which seem to conjure, if not equate to, the
Christian Heaven and Hell),30 which are merely other worlds that God
will direct Nature to create after the resurrection—after the dissolution
of the world to resurrect all humans—to house all those newly produced
bodies (App. II.8). We know those other worlds (Blessed and Cursed)
will be material (App. II.9) because the rewards and punishments of the

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442 Liza Blake
afterlife will be material (App. I.11) and because the worlds are being
created to house material bodies (App. II.8), and so her project, drawing
on her earlier speculations on the existence of other worlds and our abili-
ties to travel to them (App. II.1–5), then becomes the elaboration of the
material properties of these postworld worlds.31 Parts III and IV of the
Appendix contain elaborations on the material properties of these Blessed
and Cursed worlds, and Part V, the final part, contains speculations on
“restoring beds” that allow for resurrections of bodies before the final
resurrection—a section that, unfortunately, I have neither the time nor
the space to describe here.32
This view of the afterlife as resolutely material is interesting on its
own, as is her material, apocalyptic calculation that the amount of mat-
ter required to resurrect all human forms will exhaust the matter of the
world. But what I wish to argue is that her vision of the afterlife is not
merely material in the sense of physical, but materialist, in the sense that it
is part of a long and rich tradition of materialist or radically anti-idealist
philosophy. Not all materialisms necessarily stem from a philosophy of
matter; Marx is a materialist though he is not working from a vision of
matter, and the materialism of the encounter described in the late work
of Louis Althusser is materialist in the sense of anti-idealist rather than
materialist in the sense of grounded in the physical world or a philosophy
of matter.33 Likewise, it is possible to have a coherent vision of matter
and not be a materialist, to not be interested in using that philosophy of
matter to challenge forms of idealism. Nevertheless, Cavendish’s vision
of the afterlife is both material and materialist: like Lucretius before her,
and Spinoza roughly contemporaneous with her, her materialist vision
of the afterlife comes from a diagnosis that unhappiness about death is
linked to the erroneous belief in immateriality: “most Human Creatures
are so troubled with the Thoughts of Dissolving, and Dis-uniting, that
they turn Fancies and Imaginations, into Spirits, or Spiritual Substances”
(App. I.1; 238).34 She is purging with her philosophy not just flawed
understandings of matter but the fear that, in her view, gives rise to those
flawed understandings in the first place (and the causality is interesting:
fear must be removed so that people can better understand nature, rather
than the reverse).
Like a good materialist, she works not by valorizing life but by taking
away the fearful sting of death and the afterlife. Part III of the Appendix
is her description of the Blessed World, the world characterized by regu-
lar motion that is her material and materialist rewriting of the Christian
Heaven. Early in this part, the parts of her mind split again to debate
whether there could be such a thing as death in the Blessed World, and

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the minor part of her mind argues that the blessed world cannot have
death, presumably because death is irregular, which seems to be operating
as a subtle replacement for cursed or hellish in the Appendix (like “dis-
solution” for death, “society” for body, or “Human Creature” for human).
As with Cavendish’s other subtle shifts in vocabulary, the word “regular”
performs argumentative work. The major part of her mind argues that
“some sorts of Deaths were as regular, as the most Regular Births: for,
though Diseases were caused by Irregular Actions, yet, Death was not:
for, as it is not Irregular, to be old; so it is not Irregular, to dye” (App. III.3;
268).35 The next chapter doubles down on the regularity of death, insisting
not only that death is regular but that, in fact, “it [i]s as happy to Dye, as
to be Born” (App. III.4; 269). Dissolution is a regular motion of matter (at
least in the sense that it happens regularly, “regular” meaning “continu-
ally provided or existing”), and the regular motion of matter (presumably,
“regular” meaning “Characterized by evenness, order, or harmony in
physical form, structure, or organization”) is literally the material basis of
Heaven (or the “Blessed World” that is implicitly standing in for Heaven)
in her system.36 By conflating these two definitions of regular (the reg-
ularity of motion and of death), she makes death happy, again relying,
potentially, on different senses of happiness. “Happy,” when Cavendish is
writing, can mean “lucky” or “fortunate,” or it can mean “blessed, beati-
fied”;37 the first conjures fortune or chance (which she often associates
with the random dances of Epicurean atoms), and the second a divine
blessing. It is “happy to Dye,” in these senses, either because God wills it
as a blessing or because it just happens naturally. “Happy” can also mean
“pleasingly appropriate” in the period; when she says that it is “as happy
to Dye, as to be Born,” it may be that while death is not always cherished,
it is nevertheless that which naturally and properly follows life.38 That
propriety is perhaps what causes the feeling of “pleasure or contentment,”
another meaning of “happy,” this one the primary sense today.39
Her true posthuman and materialist intervention, however, goes
beyond the potentially trite observation that one should be content
with death because it is a regular part of life. The true comfort that the
Appendix offers is in stressing the necessity of death for the continuation
of new and different societies. In response to the major part of her mind
claiming that it is “as happy to Dye, as to be Born,” the minor part dis-
agrees: “though Dissolution might be as Regular as Composition; yet, it
was an Unhappiness for every particular Society, to be dissolved” (App.
III.4; 269). Sure, says the minor part: in the grand scheme of things death
is regular, and yet each individual, or particular society, fears dissolution.
The major part’s response is insistent that the minor part is framing the

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444 Liza Blake
objection incorrectly: though the parts of an individual would dissolve

from their particular society, they would in the process join “the General
Society,” and so there was still no reason for unhappiness, or at least “not so
much Unhappiness” (App. III.4; 269). “[P]articular Parts, or Creatures, did
make the General Society; and not, the General, the Particular Societies,”
Cavendish argues (App. III.4; 269). People, “Particular Societies,” need
to remember that they are part of a larger whole; the point of the general
society, all of nature, is not to maintain specific individuals.
Following this rebuke on the anthropocentrism of certain selfish par-
ticular societies (or people), she then provides an optimistic version of the
same idea: “though . . . particular Human Creatures did dissolve from
being Humans; yet, their Parts could not be Unhappy, when they did
unite into other Kinds, and Sorts, or particular Societies: for, those other
sorts and kinds of Creatures, might be as happy as Human Creatures”
(App. III.4; 270). Unhappiness about death is caused because human crea-
tures can only imagine happiness as human happiness, can only imagine
meaningful life as human life. But upon death, the parts of matter that
make us up dissolve and meld with the world around us, become new
creatures, form new societies—must form new societies, in fact. One may
be happy about death as soon as one lets go of what makes humanity dis-
tinctive, and if one embraces the commonality of matter across creatures
and remembers that all creatures share matter already, all the time (App.
II.7). Happiness in death means opening oneself up to new encounters,
associations, and societies with creatures of all kinds, and imagining radi-
cally different forms of happiness in radically different kinds of creatures,
animate and inanimate alike. A happy death is the path to maximum
posthumanism—and vice-versa.
The Poetics of Gynaecomorphism in Cavendish’s Early

Natural Philosophy
In the Appendix to Grounds, as we have already seen, Cavendish articu-

lates a movement beyond or after (particular human) life by means of the
afterlife, with the “after” in “afterlife” working in the temporal sense.
This second section will argue that Cavendish was “after life” from the
beginning of her career, where “after” means something closer to what we
mean with “post-” in “posthuman”: not chronologically after, but beyond.
Her 1653 Philosophicall Fancies, a companion volume to her 1653 Poems and
Fancies, is a hybrid treatise in poetry and prose that is her first expression
of her natural philosophical system.40 In one poetic chapter in particular,

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she writes a counterfactual poem that imagines what the world might
look like if we were only able to recognize everything around us as alive:
“Of Sense and Reason Exercised in their Different Shapes.”41 However,
this poem does not merely affirm the joy of pan-vitalism; instead, as I
will show in this section, the poem reimagines the relationship between
life and agency, thereby exposing the way that life is only valued if it is
like human life. The poem offers, therefore, similar critiques to those of
the Appendix to Grounds. But given the nature of Grounds as a treatise
(being her mature and final overhaul of her natural philosophical system)
and its implicit goals (to write herself into the philosophical tradition of
materialist philosophy), her most powerful answer to Bennett’s proposal
of anthropomorphizing as a positive poetic and political practice comes
in her earlier hybrid version of the treatise, which itself moves between
poetry and prose as needed to accomplish varying effects. The form of her
philosophical argument in this poem is essential to the argument itself:
far from using poetics as the mere decoration of her philosophical argu-
ment, this poem reminds us that anthropomorphism is, in fact, primarily
a poetic technique. The poem not only explores the philosophical basis
of anthropomorphism via Aristotelian hylomorphism but also shows the
way that anthropomorphism, whether philosophical or poetic, masks
unpleasant gendered consequences.42
Cavendish is a vitalist from the beginning of her career, and such vital-
ism underlies the poetic chapter “Of Sense and Reason Exercised in Their
Different Shapes.” The first lines make clear the philosophical stakes:
If everything hath sense and reason, then

There might be beasts, and birds, and fish, and men
As vegetables and minerals, had they
The animal shape to express that way;
And vegetables and minerals may know
As man, though like to trees and stones they grow. (ll. 1–6)
When she writes that “vegetables and minerals may know / As man,” she
echoes the claim from the earlier prose chapter “Of the Animall Figure,”
where she argues that “Vegetables and Mineralls may have . . . ratio-
nall spirits . . . Onely they want that Figure (with such kinde of motion
proper thereunto) to expresse Knowledge” (54). All matter “may know /
As man”—meaning that different forms of matter may know as much
as man, or may know just as man does. If only different kinds of mat-
ter could translate the motions particular to them to take on forms or
external figures that were more expressive to our understandings, “there

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446 Liza Blake
might be Wooden men, and Iron Beasts” (54), she argues in the preceding
prose chapter. The poetic chapter “Sense and Reason” imaginatively sup-
plies those expressive figures, giving different matters “animal shape[s] to
express” themselves.
However, the poetry of these opening lines, the twisty syntax and ambi-
guity of the word “as,” immediately complicates the straightforward phil-
osophical argument. While in line 6 the “as” means “as much as” or “as
does,” the “as” in line 3 is more tricky. To say that “There might be beasts,
and birds, and fish, and men / As vegetables and minerals” seems merely
to mean that all these different creatures might exist (there might be ani-
mals as well as vegetables and minerals), but since we know that all these
creatures exist this is an unusual “then” statement to follow on the condi-
tional “if” of the first line. Rather, the opening lines seem to say that if we
imagine sense and reason distributed throughout nature, then we might
imagine various obviously animate figures as vegetables and minerals—
we might imagine them to be made of vegetables and minerals, or to
be existing or operating as vegetables and minerals.43 Building on the
potential of this opening, the poem as a whole cracks open Aristotelian
hylomorphism, the idea that the world can be explained by reference to
a passive matter that receives its qualities through different shapes or
forms. What is the relationship, this poem asks, between various figures
that we humans can understand as alive, and different types of matter?
What might we learn by imagining form and matter in different com-
binations?44 And what difference does it make to ask these questions in
poetry?
Following the ambitious if enigmatic opening, the poem immediately
starts positing new combinations of matter and form, imagining in the
process the potential for liberation through poetic anthropomorphism:
Then coral trouts may through the water glide,

And pearled minnows swim on either side,
And mermaids, which in the sea delight,
Might all be made of watery lilies white,
Set on salt wat’ry billows as they flow,
Which like green banks appear thereon to grow. (ll. 7–12)
The effect of imagining coral trout and pearl minnows, starting the
experiment by pairing these materials with these forms, is one of mutual
improvement. Trout and minnows, no longer mere fish, become beauti-
ful as coral and pearls, both precious matters produced by living undersea
forms.45 On the other side, coral and pearl both acquire expressive, motive

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forms, taking the imagined “severall and various motions in Vegetables

and Mineralls” (55) and giving them a figure that allows them to fully
embrace and explore their aquatic environments. The “sea-change” that
these lines describe, in their vague echo of Ariel’s song from The Tempest
(“Full fadom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made; / Those
are pearls that were his eyes”) goes beyond Ariel’s vision.46 The careful
ambiguity of Cavendish’s lines 7 and 8 allows the reader to understand
both sides of this oceanic transformation: it is not exactly that the matter
of pearl is given a minnowish shape, or that the minnow’s matter trans-
forms, but either and both simultaneously.
When she follows up these precious fish with the claim that “mer-
maids . . . / Might be made of watery lilies white,” she brings collective
matters into play: here we see not just a large piece of coral shaped like a
trout but several lilies together forming a mermaid. The use of the simile
in line 12—the green sea on which the lily-mermaids float, we are told, is
like a green bank on which lilies grow—highlights the strangeness of the
repeated “might” and “may” elsewhere in the poem. Though comparing
the smooth, soft, white petal of a lily to a woman’s skin is a repeated trope
in poetry from this period, these lines neither use that simile (their skin
is like lilies) nor make it into a metaphor (their skin is a lily): rather, it
asks us to accept and imagine the non-metaphorical possibility that there
might be mermaids who are made not of flesh but of lilies.47 Mermaids
gain the beauty of a lily; lilies gain the ability to “delight,” as mermaids,
in the sea. The beautiful and mutually beneficial relationship sketched in
these lines comes up in other parts of the poem as well, as when she imag-
ines the stars as a flock of birds: the stars develop expressive voice (“like
larks might sing”; l. 40), while the birds turn into flying comets by day (l.
42) and constellations by night: “When they on trees do rest themselves
from flight, / Appear like fixed stars in clouds of night” (ll. 43–44). The
reader of the poem is granted a pleasure of their own in lines like these,
a pleasure of imagination that complements the pleasure granted to dif-
ferent kinds of matter in the poem, as of the coral that gains the ability
to swim like a fish, or the lilies that delight in the sea as a mermaid. But
crucially, the poem is not what is bestowing this life to or onto matter;
rather, according to Cavendish’s vitalism, matter has always been alive
but is here being granted at least the imaginative possibility of making its
life visible to us.
The poem is not all joy and beauty, however; there are some dark
and even violent segments as well. In the part of the poem imagining
different lives of metals, a leaden hare so heats itself from running that
it melts into a pig of lead, an “oblong mass of lead”;48 brass dogs catching

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448 Liza Blake
that pig can use their own brassy flesh to loudly announce his death or
“ring out his knell” (ll. 27–30). New hylomorphic combinations allow
beautiful matter to no longer be locked into its mineral and vegetal
forms, but they also allow new forms of violence, as with her imagina-
tion of the “iron men” who, because of their iron bodies, “have no cause
to fear” (l. 31) when hunting or in wars, and who cannot be stopped:
“Or if a bullet on their head do light, / May make them totter, but not
kill them quite” (ll. 37–38). The imagination of metal seems to invite
forms of violence to it, but there are flashes of violence in other sections
as well, as when she speculates that “a squirrel [might] for a nut be
cracked” (l. 21), or asks us to imagine, immediately after the mermaid,
how “mariners i’th’midst their ship might stand, / Instead of mast, hold
sails in either hand” (ll. 13–14). Imagining matter in obviously animate
figures highlights the violence we do to and with matter that we think
of as “dead”: metal, used to being used in hunting and in war, becomes
embodied both as hunter and as prey, a kind of natural war parallel to
those normally perpetuated by humans. Imagining a mariner trapped
as a mast gives the mariner an extraordinary amount of power to con-
trol the ship’s motion but also traps him, locks him in, attaches him
permanently to his ship, just when we have been allowed to imagine
matter set free, coral and pearl being allowed to swim as fish for the
first time.
Giving matter expressive life also calls attention to the violence we do
to matter thinking it not alive—and this is nowhere more evident than in
the second movement of the poem, in which suddenly she leaves off her
wild pairing of matters with forms and starts to think about what it might
mean to literalize the poetic blazon in this hylomorphically complicated
world:49
Thus may the sun be like a woman fair,

And the bright beams be as her flowing hair
......................
Or women may of alabaster be,
And so as smooth as polished ivory,
Or as clear crystal, where hearts may be shown,
And all their falsehoods to the world be known,
Or else be made of rose, and lilies white,
Both fair and sweet, to give the soul delight (ll. 45–46, 49–54)
It is significant that this section opens with a simile, which reminds the
reader of love poetry in particular, where women’s eyes are frequently

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compared to suns, their skin to smooth white stone, etc. Here the order
is initially reversed—the sun may be like a woman—but then we return
to standard tropes of love poetry. Unlike the earlier idea of a mermaid
made of lilies, these lines do not focus on the delights that might be made
possible to alabaster and lilies by achieving human form, perhaps because
they will be made to assume female form. Crystal ladies and ladies made
of roses and lilies will face the same misogyny that flesh ladies do: crys-
tal ladies will have jokes made at their expense about their falsehoods
being “transparent,” and the lilies, unlike those that, in mermaid figure,
delight in the sea, here exist only to give delight to others. Both stony and
flowery ladies exist to be looked at, to please others with their beauty;
whether they are able to move or take delight in anything is not clear. If
it is potentially liberating to matter to give matter a form of life and ani-
mation, to practice strategic anthropomorphism, this section reminds us
that some life is more equal than others. The poem darkly suggests that
strategic anthropomorphism only grants agency not if we imagine matter
as human but if we imagine it as a male human; it asks about the gen-
der of life, vibrancy, and agency—or (to use her terminology) expressive
figures. It also, of course, retroactively condemns the standard tropes of
love poetry, which does favors neither to mineral and vegetal matter nor
to women by comparing them with one another—though in this poem
the violence is doubled, perpetuated on female figures and vegetal matter
alike.
Following these lines about women as flowers is an even more baffling
and disturbing section of gynaecomorphism (my coinage for the poetic
transformation of an object into a woman):
Thus every year there may young virgins spring,

But wither and decay as soon again.
While they are fresh, upon their breast might set
Great swarms of bees, from thence sweet honey get.
Or on their lips, for gillyflowers, flies
Drawing delicious sweet that therein lies.
Thus every maid like several flowers show,
Not in their shape, but like in substance grow. (ll. 57–64)
This section continues and magnifies the violence of earlier sections: here
we learn that these short-lived flower-virgins are born only to die and
that they spend their life with “great swarms of bees” (children?) sucking
honey from their breasts, and flies (. . . men?) “[d]rawing delicious sweet”
from their lips. Lady-flowers, we learn, exist not only to be looked at by

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450 Liza Blake
others but also to give up parts of their substance to every bee and fly
who comes to suck—and that the tenor of the insect vehicles is unclear
is, surely, part of the point. Immediately following this we learn that even
the sadness of the lady flowers (perhaps at being so relentlessly sucked?)
gives back to nature:
Then tears which from oppressèd hearts do rise,

May gather into clouds within the eyes,
From whence those tears, like showers of rain may flow
Upon the banks of cheeks, where roses grow (ll. 65–68)
Even tears themselves are used to generate, to produce more roses, per-
haps even to give rise to a new generation of virgin flowers who will
themselves “wither and decay as soon again” (1. 58). Vegetal men, on the
other hand, remain entirely self-sufficient:
Men sycamores, which on their breast may write

Their amorous verses, which their thoughts indite.
Men’s stretchèd arms may be like spreading vines,
Where grapes may grow, so drink of their own wine.
To plant large orchards need no pains nor care,
For everyone their sweet fresh fruit may bear. (ll. 81–86)
When men are trees, they do not even need to plant more trees; they gener-
ate their own fruit and write their “amorous verses” on their own trunks,
perhaps, in those verses, comparing their flowery beloveds to flesh. No
one takes from them but themselves.
However, the somewhat dark reading of these lines that I have been
unfolding only exists if you privilege life as a form of power or agency. If
we seek only agency from life, then we miss the most important argument
that this poem is making. Yes, the masculine sycamores are self-sufficient,
but the almost masturbatory imagery of them taking their pleasures only
from themselves is coupled with their desire to mark themselves by their
own desires made public. The sycamore men are like human courtiers,
who are not content merely to feel love but apparently need to perform
their love for others by scratching their “amorous verses” on their own
breasts. The sycamore men, that is, aping human courtiers, are almost
pathetically unable to imagine life in other than human terms. The flower
ladies, on the other hand, are fully plugged into their environment, and
associate with one another and with the world around them; the bees and
flies suck from them, but they also bask in the “sun of joy,” unfolding

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their “buds of modesty” so that they may “[w]ith full-blown confidence

the sun behold” (ll. 71, 73, 74). Further, the life of the flower ladies is not
modeled on the fantasy of the individual human. Rather, the floral mis-
en-abyme of the tears of the flowers generating roses on their own cheeks
also shows their bodies to be the nested figures within figures that are the
heroes of Cavendish’s early natural philosophy, in which bodies are com-
posites of other, smaller composite bodies and themselves participate in
larger figures or patterns of existence beyond their own boundaries.50 The
reminder of death, of their short life that causes them to soon wither and
die, in the middle of the description of their life also fits with Cavendish’s
larger emphasis in her natural philosophy on understanding the continu-
ity between life and death, on the way death makes way for new life, new
forms of association.
Understanding association, not life, to be the point of the poem also
makes sense of the last section of the poem, ll. 93–108, in which Cavendish
“shifts from imagining animals and people made of unusual matter, to
imagining inanimate shaped matter as animate” (l. 93n11). In this section,
the golden calf worshipped by Israelites “run[s] away from their idolatry”
(l. 98); a statue of Pompey rejoices when it sees Caesar killed (ll. 103–04);
the Trojan Horse, upset about deceit, might have “told what’s in him,
and then run away” (l. 106). This final section is a bit of a crux, because
up to this point the poem has staged mismatches or transformations of
matter and form, but then suddenly ends with a section in which neither
substance nor matter shifts. The majority of the poem bestows different,
often human figures on nonhuman matters; in the final section, rather
than having matter acquire figures, already figured matter acquires the
ability to communicate, or what the prose chapter on the animal fig-
ure calls “that Figure (with such kinde of motion proper thereunto) to
expresse Knowledge” (54). All that changes is our ability to imaginatively
associate with them, to use the poem to understand not how to expand the
boundaries of life and human agency but to dissolve what makes humans
distinctive into a broader understanding of matter in motion.
In Grounds, Cavendish likewise balances her critique of the fear of
death with an alternative, a new, cooperative worldview that finds a
happy death in the association of human and nonhuman societies. While
Grounds analytically diagnoses missteps in the human imagination (par-
ticularly in unhappy imaginations of the afterlife), Philosophicall Fancies
engages the human imagination—including imaginations of the non-
human—directly. “Sense and Reason” flirts with poetic anthropomor-
phism only to destroy it, showing that the ethical desire to imaginatively
expand life and agency to the nonhuman world can fully thrive only by

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452 Liza Blake
challenging the invisible gender of seemingly positive concepts of life,

vibrancy, and agency. It also lays bare the role that poetry—or at least
figurative language—plays in the misapplication of human life—and
therefore the potential for human agency—to nonhumans. Does “Sense
and Reason” offer any viable alternative to poetic anthropomorphizing?
Because of the nature of its poetic form, the answer to this question is
much more unstable than it is in the final iteration of the treatise; nev-
ertheless, a clue may exist in the poem’s refusal of explicit figurative lan-
guage. The poem suggests that similes and metaphors misapply human
traits to nonhuman matters—and vice versa—and so eschews those fig-
ures for the repetition of possibility: vegetal matter, in this thought experi-
ment, is not like a human but might be capable of motion, association, or
thought. That these mights appear far more frequently in her early, hybrid
poetic version of the treatise is not a coincidence: the purpose of her final
treatise is argumentation and demonstration, while the earlier treatise is
more exploratory and experimental. Both are forms of persuasion, though
to different kinds of imagined readers. The mights and mays of “Sense and
Reason,” between the truth-claims of philosophy and the comparisons of
poetry, conjure speculative worlds into existence, much like the worlds
she posits in the Appendix to Grounds or in her more famous Blazing
World. What kinds of afterlives, she invites us to ask, might be lived on
those other worlds?
Liza Blake is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto, working on early
modern literature, science, and philosophy. She has published articles, a co-edited collection
on Lucretius, and two scholarly editions, including Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies,
http://library2.utm.utoronto.ca/poemsandfancies/.
NOTES
I gratefully acknowledge the National Endowment of the Humanities, whose support

allowed me the time to write this article. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommenda-
tions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for
the Humanities. I am also grateful to the Columbia University English Department’s Early
Modern Colloquium and the University of Maryland Marshall Grossman Lecture Series for
inviting me to share early versions of this argument and offering valuable feedback.
1. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010), xvi.
2. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 98, 99.
3. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 99.
4. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 99.

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5. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 2.
6. Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 9.
7. See, for instance, Jane Bennett’s sixth chapter, on how granting political agency to non-
human objects might produce even further complications in abortion debates (82–93).
8. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xvi.
9. See also Jacques Lezra’s argument that the new materialisms and speculative real-
isms “announce the return of humanism in ‘nonhuman’ form.” Lezra, “Uncountable
Matters,” in On the Nature of Marx’s Things: Translation as Necrophilology (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2018), 178–200, 179. See also the powerful recent critiques
of new materialist visions of life in Jonathan Basile, “Life/Force: Novelty and New
Materialism in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter,” SubStance 48 (2019): 3–22; and Steven
Swarbrick, “Nature’s Queer Negativity: Between Barad and Deleuze,” Postmodern
Culture 29 (2019).
10. For another posthumanist reading of Cavendish, see Don Mills, “Mad Madge’s Bestiary:
Philosophical Animals and Physiognomic Philosophers in Margaret Cavendish’s The
Blazing World,” in The Return of Theory in Early Modern Studies, Vol. 2, ed. Paul Cefalu,
Gary Kuchar, and Bryan Reynolds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 39–57.
11. Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009),
xv; see also N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), x.
12. Eileen A. Joy and Craig Dionne, eds., “When Did We Become Post/Human?” a special
issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 1, nos. 1 & 2 (2010). For more
definitions and overviews of premodern posthumanism, see Anna Klosowska and Eileen
A. Joy, “Introduction: The Work, or the Agency, of the Nonhuman in Premodern Art,”
in Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism, ed. Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016), 1–30.
13. See, e.g., John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age
of Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). Rogers explores the explosion of
vitalist philosophies of matter around the time of the English Civil War.
17. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, x: “Lucretius, too, expressed a kind of monism. . . .”
19. On multiple philosophies of matter, see Daniel Garber, “Physics and Foundations,” in
The Cambridge History of Science. Volume 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park
and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21–69. Cavendish
herself notes that “there have been in this latter age, as many Writers of Natural
Philosophy, as in former ages there have been of Moral Philosophy,” in her Observations
upon Experimental Philosophy. To the which is added, the Description of a New Blazing
World (London, 1666), sig. c1v.
20. For an earlier version of this argument, see Liza Blake, “Posthumanism Physics,”
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 1 (2010): 39–45. Even earlier philoso-
phies of matter might be just as productive as well; see, for example, Emanuela Bianchi,

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454 Liza Blake
The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2014).
21. For more detail on Cavendish’s natural philosophy, see Lisa Sarasohn, The Natural
Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Deborah Boyle, The Well-Ordered
Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2018); and Liza Blake, “The Grounds of Literature and Science: Margaret Cavendish’s
Creature Manifesto,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Science, ed.
Howard Marchitello and Lyn Tribble (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 3–26.
On Cavendish’s philosophy more generally, especially as her natural philosophical theses
relate to larger histories of philosophy, see David Cunning, Cavendish (New York:
Routledge, 2016); and Karen Detlefsen, “Margaret Cavendish on Laws and Order,”
in Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, ed. Emily Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2018), 72–91.
22. Margaret Cavendish, The Grounds of Natural Philosophy (London, 1668), hereafter cited
parenthetically by part and chapter number as well as page number when language is
quoted. Italics in quotations from this and other Cavendish texts have been regularized
throughout, except for chapter titles, which are left in italics. Citations to the Appendix
of Grounds, which has its own part and chapter numbers, are prefaced by “App.” The
other three treatises in her natural philosophical series are Philosophicall Fancies (1653)
and two editions of her Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London, 1655; London, 1663).
23. David Cunning points out the strangeness of Cavendish’s inclusion of a degree of matter
explicitly labeled as “inanimate” in her vitalism in Cavendish, chapter 5, “Ubiquitous
Knowledge,” 181–209, esp. 196–99.
24. See Blake, “Grounds,” esp. 11–17.
25. For early modern examples of the typical arc of Aristotelian natural philosophy, see
Ermolao Barbaro, Naturalis scientiae totius compendium (Basil, 1548), 123–24; and Georg
Liebler, Epitome philosophiae naturalis (Basil, [1563]), 6–9. On the ubiquity of Aristotelian
texts in the period, see Charles B. Schmitt, The Aristotelian Tradition and Renaissance
Universities (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984). Even authors whose theories dif-
fer greatly from Aristotle’s tend to organize their systems in roughly this way, having
been trained in Aristotelian natural philosophy at universities. See Ann Blair, “Natural
Philosophy,” in The Cambridge History of Science. Volume 3: Early Modern Science, ed.
Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
365–406.
26. For an overview and visualization of the rearrangements that happen across
the first three treatises, see Jacob Tootalian, “Visualizing Margaret Cavendish’s
Systematic Treatises,” accessed Sept. 24, 2018, http://digitalcavendish.org/2017/06/22/
tootalian-treatises/.
27. See also the poems on the reason of beasts, fish, and birds in Part II of Poems and Fancies
(London, 1653), sig. P1r–v.
28. Cavendish, Opinions (1655), sig. (a)1v. For a more robust account of theology in
Cavendish’s work, see the collection God and Nature in the Thought of Margaret
Cavendish, ed. Brandie Sigfried and Lisa T. Sarasohn (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014),
especially Hilda Smith’s essay in that volume, “Claims to Orthodoxy: How Far Can We
Trust Margaret Cavendish’s Autobiography?,” 15–25.
29. Allowing parts of her mind to split and argue with one another is a common rhetori-
cal technique for Cavendish, particularly when she is discussing a controversial topic,
when she uses this technique as an opportunity to explain herself more clearly. For a

132.205.204.75 on Thu, 31 Oct 2024 17:25:20 UTC
particularly fascinating instance of this technique, see the “Argumental Discourse,”

an argument between her past and present thoughts in the prefatory materials to
Cavendish, Observations, sigs. h1r–q2r.
30. As I have already mentioned, Cavendish’s usual position on theology is that it should be
avoided at all costs, and whether she intends the Blessed and Cursed worlds to invoke
ideas of the Christian Heaven and Hell is unclear. She explicitly disavows that the
Blessed and Cursed worlds are the Heaven and Hell spoken of in Christian theology at
App. III Preamble, but she also seems to suggest they are like the Christian Heaven and
Hell by claiming that after the resurrection “the Good [entities] should go into a Blessed
World; the Bad, into a Cursed World” at App II.8 (p. 261). The contradiction seems to
allow her to speak of something hypothetical and much like Christian ideas of the after-
life without making any defensible theological claims.
31. Though it is far less invested in the philosophical questions of Grounds, compare her
oration on the sensuous experiences that she imagines in both Heaven and Hell in “An
Oration concerning the Joys of Heaven, and Torments of Hell,” in Cavendish, Orations
(London, 1662), 185–91.
32. Cavendish also calls these restoring bed wombs; on the way she shifts the valuation of
wombs in this and other texts, see Lisa Walters, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science, and
Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. 48–49.
33. Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, ed. François
Matheron and Oliver Corpet, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso, 2006). On the
many and sometimes conflicting definitions of the word “matter” and “materialism,”
see Raymond Williams, “Materialism,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society,
revised edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 197–201; see also Lezra,
Marx’s Things, esp. 178–200.
34. On similarities between Cavendish’s and Spinoza’s philosophy, see Susan James, “The
Philosophical Innovations of Margaret Cavendish,” British Journal for the History of
Philosophy 7 (1999): 219–44.
35. In some of her earlier writings she will also argue that the dissolution of matter in death
is necessary to create new bodies, as in her Poems and Fancies, where Motion dissolves
Figures to generate matter for new Figures, or in her Nature’s Pictures (London, 1656),
where a character in a fable proclaims that “Nature creates more Creatures from Death
than from Life” (169). This line of argumentation is largely discarded in the Appendix to
Grounds.
36. Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED), second edition, ed. John Simpson et al. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2018), s.v. “regular, adj., n., and adv.,” 3.b, 2.a.
37. OED, s.v. “happy, adj. and n.,” 1.a, 1.b.
38. OED, s.v. “happy, adj. and n.,” 4.b.
39. OED, s.v. “happy, adj. and n.,” 5.a.
40. Margaret Cavendish, Philosophicall Fancies (London, 1653), hereafter cited parentheti-
cally by page number; italics regularized. That the Philosophicall Fancies is a companion
volume to Poems and Fancies is indicated in Poems, which ends with, “Reader, I have a
little Tract of Philosophicall Fancies in Prose, which will not be long before it appear in the
world” (Cavendish, Poems and Fancies, sig. 2K4v); Philosophicall Fancies likewise has a
note that it was rushed into print “out of a desire to have it joyned to my Booke of Poems”
(in “To the Reader”; unsigned prefatory page).
41. There are two modern editions of this poem; parenthetical references will be to Margaret
Cavendish, “Of Sense and Reason Exercised in their Different Shapes,” ed. Liza Blake

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456 Liza Blake
and Farheen Khan, in Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies: A Digital Critical Edition,
ed. Liza Blake, http://library2.utm.utoronto.ca/poemsandfancies/2019/05/04/of-sense-
and-reason-exercised-in-their-different-shapes-from-philosophical-fancies/ with
occasional reference to the edition in Women Poets of the English Civil War, ed. Sarah E.
Ross and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018),
202–205. The poem was originally published in Cavendish, Philosophicall Fancies, 56–63.
42. For a comprehensive treatment of the role of gender in Cavendish’s philosophy of mat-
ter, see Walters, Margaret Cavendish, chapter 1, 37–99. See also Detlefson, who argues
that we might productively use Cavendish’s natural philosophy “to think about feminism
as applied to the natural world [not just] as applied to the human world,” in “Cavendish
on Laws and Order,” 85.
43. The punctuation in Blake and Khan’s edition makes this reading more easily accessible;
in the original and in Ross and Scott-Baumann’s edition, the word “men” is followed by
a colon.
44. Insofar as I read this poem as an exploration of serious philosophical questions—our
ability to understand Nature as sentient, our ability to recognize different modes of mat-
ter foreign to our human figures, the relationship between types of matter and “animal”
figures—my reading differs from that of Ross and Scott-Baumann, who gloss the poem
as vitalism taken to “a witty extreme” that can sometimes be “absurd and exuber-
ant” even as it intervenes in ongoing debates about matter. See Cavendish, “Sense and
Reason,” ed. Ross and Scott-Baumann, 205.
45. On the early modern valuation of coral, see Marlise Rijks, “‘Unusual Excrescences
of Nature’: Collected Coral and the Study of Petrified Luxury in Early Modern
Antwerp,” Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Country Studies (2017): 1–29; DOI:
10.1080/03096564.2017.1299931), who argues that coral often figured matter or material
transformation in the seventeenth century; on pearls, see Miriam Jacobson, Barbarous
Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England (Philadelphia:
Pennsylvania University Press, 2014), esp. chapter 5.
46. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Metheun, 1958),
1.2.403, 399–401.
47. The repetition of “might” and “may” is also a feature of the “World within World”
poems at the end of Part I of Poems and Fancies.
48. OED, s.v. “pig, n.1,” 11.a.
49. On the blazon in Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies, see Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, “‘Bake’d
in the Oven of Applause’: The Blazon and the Body in Margaret Cavendish’s Fancies,”
Women’s Writing 15 (2008): 86–106.
50. See Cavendish, Poems and Fancies, sig. C1v (“The joyning of severall Figur’d Atomes
make other Figures”); for the vocabulary of “nesting”, see also the poem “Of many
Worlds in this World,” which compares nested worlds to “a Nest of Boxes round” (Poems
and Fancies, sig. G2v), and the poetic chapter “There is no Vacuity” in her Philosophicall
Fancies, which argues, “In Nature if Degrees may equall be, / All may be full, and no
Vacuity. / As Boxes small, & smaller may containe” (8). For the full development of these
ideas into her robust concept of the “Creature” in her late natural philosophy, see Blake,
“Grounds.”

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After Life in Margaret Cavendish's Vitalist Posthumanism

Author(s): Liza Blake

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/criticism.62.3.0433

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In Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, an influential book in the burgeoning area

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extend the concept of agency (even, potentially, political agency) to non-

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When Did We Become Post/Human, a special issue populated by medi-

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ethical systems or ways of being posthuman—this early wealth of robustly

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anthropomorphism as defined by Bennett at the start of this essay. While

The Happiness of Death in Cavendish’s Late Natural Philosophy

Before discussing the role of death in Cavendish’s natural philosophy, it

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Because a project throughout her work is to refuse the existence of

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The resurrection, drawing on the matter of the world to reconstruct

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objection incorrectly: though the parts of an individual would dissolve

The Poetics of Gynaecomorphism in Cavendish’s Early

In the Appendix to Grounds, as we have already seen, Cavendish articu-

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If everything hath sense and reason, then

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Then coral trouts may through the water glide,

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forms, taking the imagined “severall and various motions in Vegetables

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Thus may the sun be like a woman fair,

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Thus every year there may young virgins spring,

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Then tears which from oppressèd hearts do rise,

Men sycamores, which on their breast may write

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their “buds of modesty” so that they may “[w]ith full-blown confidence

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challenging the invisible gender of seemingly positive concepts of life,

I gratefully acknowledge the National Endowment of the Humanities, whose support

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particularly fascinating instance of this technique, see the “Argumental Discourse,”

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