' Soul, Body, and Masculine Women in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World'

Reading Margaret Cavendish’s fiction The Blazing World (1666) alongside her philosophical tract Observations upon Natural Philosophy, which was published together as a companion piece, this article examines Cavendish’s unique view on the relationship of soul and body as well as its gendered implications. In Observations, Cavendish puts forth her philosophy of nature, now called “vitalist materialism,” which suggests that everything in nature is corporeal, self-moving, self-knowing, and self-living. In The Blazing World, Cavendish complements Observations and uses the genre of fiction to explore uncertainties and ambiguities regarding the questions of the gendered nature of the body and soul. Firstly, this essay focuses on the difference between immaterial spirits and corporeal human souls as explained in The Blazing World and draws a tentative conclusion that Cavendish views the mind and soul as gendered. However, through a close reading of two scenes where female souls merge together in one body, and two female souls enter into the male body, this article argues that Cavendish comes up with a fictional human body that rejects gender essentialism as a way to envisage a more empowered mode of women’s existence. Therefore, Cavendish’s creation of a “hermaphroditical” body, justified by her system of natural philosophy, functions as an effective counter-attack on the seventeenth-century discourses that had accused masculine women as unnatural and monstrous.