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For his next-to-last experiment in New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall (1660), Robert Boyle suffocated a lark within the air pump, noting that upon "Exsuction of the Air, she began manifestly to droop and appear sick, and very soon after was taken with as violent and irregular Convulsions, as are wont to be observ'd in Poultry, when their heads are wrung off." (1) This is the only moment in New Experiments when Boyle describes a process occurring within nature as "irregular," and his careful usage reflects the complex view of irregularity held by English natural philosophers in the latter half of the seventeenth century. (2) Despite the tendency of Francis Bacon, William Gilbert, and other earlier thinkers to assume that physical bodies functioned according to fixed laws, there was a growing willingness from the 1650s onward to admit that the operations of nature were not always regular. A year before the publication of New Experiments, Walter Charleton had argued that many bodily processes occurred without the mind's conscious control, for the lower organs typically relied upon the same "natural sense" that guided worms, sponges, and other brainless creatures. (3) To illustrate this principle, Charleton turned to the very image used by Boyle to describe the dying lark, comparing a muscle divorced from the "regulating influence of the Brain" to "the body of a Fowl ... after the head is cut off ... For as the body is tumbled up and down, and agitated by various convulsive motions of the feet and wings, yet such as are wholly confused and irregular." (4) Tracing the "irregular" convulsions of the bird's body to the lack of a "regulating" power, Charleton highlights the origin of the term "irregular" in the Latin irregula, meaning "ungoverned." From this etymologically conservative standpoint, irregular motion was not necessarily deviant or unnatural but simply reflected the absence of hierarchic regulation. Indeed, in Charleton's view, the self-driven movement of organs such as the liver was essential for the survival of the whole organism, and Boyle himself disputed the notion that matter naturally behaved according to "the Law that it receives from the Creator." (5) At the same time as the concept of irregularity was deployed in this neutral sense, however, most natural philosophers confessed that from their own vantage as intentional beings, the anarchism of unregulated motion appeared alien and even alarming. Charleton observed that convulsive muscles would blindly injure themselves, and Thomas Hobbes argued that the "irregular justling" of nature's primal state stirred a deep terror that drove people to appoint strong rulers. (6) Instead of simply illustrating a fundamental principle of nature, decapitated animals and headless political bodies thus also stood as a warning. When considered from the perspective of human life, the primitive irregularity of nature threatened destruction and misery, and Boyle registers his own discomfort by referring to the lark's death as a "Tragedy." (7)
In contrast to these philosophers, Margaret Cavendish not only treated irregularity as a key principle of nature but enthusiastically embraced it. (8) She asserts in her Philosophical Letters: "Nature taking delight in variety suffers irregularities; for otherwise, if there were onely regularities, there could not be so much variety." (9) The celebration of variety is a constant theme of the Philosophical Letters, and because Cavendish consciously positioned herself as a female natural philosopher, many scholars have claimed that her focus upon irregularity functions as a form of social critique. (10) As Eve Keller argues: "In place of what she deemed to be the masculine interests served by mechanism and experiment, Cavendish offered a holistic vision of nature and experience that embraces complexity and contradiction." (11) By aligning Cavendish with present-day feminist agendas, these readings have sought to rescue her works from the censures of Virginia Woolf and other female critics alarmed by what Sylvia Bowerbank has referred to as the "anarchic formlessness" of Cavendish's writing. (12) Even as Keller and other recent critics have discovered a purpose for Cavendish's uneven prose style and digressive tendencies, however, they have struggled to account for her deep-rooted commitment to aristocratic hierarchies. (13) While Cavendish insisted that her sex lent her a valuable point of view, she went out of her way to distinguish herself from other women by also stressing the high nobility of her birth, and she similarly depicts Nature as a goddess with absolute control over her subjects. (14) Such attitudes do not square easily with the egalitarian ideal of modern feminism, and they make it difficult to argue that Cavendish's work replaces masculine notions of authority with a vision of the unruled variety of nature.
Indeed, I will suggest over the following pages that Cavendish's distinctive view of irregularity should be traced not to a desire to reject hierarchy but rather to her place in a feminist tradition that sought to redefine authority by associating it with women's inconstant dispositions. Although most Caroline noblewomen followed the queen in mobilizing a Platonic ideal of sexless virtue to oppose the long-standing claim that women's physiologies made them inherently fickle, there was a broad tradition extending back several generations in both English and French literature that instead claimed that women's capricious constitutions gave them a natural superiority over men. This attempt to make a strength out of women's supposedly inferior bodies was popularized at Court by Lucy Hay, and I will suggest that Cavendish's philosophy explored this ideal of female power by framing Nature as a goddess whose commitment to irregular motion lent her a terrible authority in the eyes of her creations. From here, I will look at Cavendish's efforts to translate Nature's qualities onto a mortal woman in The Blazing-World, a prose romance where an empress impulsively transforms her realm in order to satisfy her desire for change. This fictional work demonstrates that Cavendish's emphasis upon irregularity did more than offer an alternative to the views of nature circulated by her male contemporaries. It also revealed how a woman might impose her authority by exploiting the anxieties that Boyle, Charleton, and other men expressed about unregulated motion.
Throughout Cavendish's philosophical writings, Nature is personified as a female sovereign. She is described as "Monarchess over all her Creatures," and to illustrate Nature's power, Cavendish declares: "she is ... the onely Destroyeress and Murtheress of all particular Creatures, and their particular lives; for she dissolves and transforms as well as she frames and creates; and acts according to her pleasure." (15) By noting this willingness to kill, Cavendish invests Nature with a terrible grandeur, reminding her readers that they are subject to a force whose guiding principle is not their well-being but its own "pleasure." Cavendish underlines Nature's authority, moreover, by insisting that the power to kill is not just a theoretical right but one that is continually exercised. Because of the pleasure Nature takes in the variety generated by irregular motion, she is always unpredictably altering her realm, producing a state of upheaval in which death and violence often occur on a grand scale: "as nature doth unite or divide parts regularly or irregularly, and moves the several minds of men and the several parts of mens bodies, so war is made or peace kept." (16) Even the widespread destruction of war is a necessary consequence of Nature's desire to keep herself entertained,...
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