Mad Marge Making Spectacular Spectacles of Spectacle Shawna Guenther Samuel Pepys famously called Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, “a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman”1 in reaction to her published biography of her husband William. What could Cavendish write that so infuriated Pepys? In a text that purportedly honors the Duke of Newcastle, Cavendish writes more about her own ambition and self-fashioning than she does about her husband and his life. Furthermore, in 1667, she became an infamous spectacle for her visit to the Royal Society where she observed a series of experiments made for her viewing.2 Despite her allegedly debilitating shyness,3 Cavendish was becoming famous for her eccentricities, which included outlandish (often masculine) clothing, 4 her desire for fame, her forays into experimental science and natural philosophy, and her writing in which she developed her own ideas, many of which were contrary to contemporary social and gender conventions. Much to Pepys’ dismay, Cavendish was a lady of spectacular transgression. However, despite the large quantity of scholarship on Cavendish, her writings, and her metaphysics, little analysis exists of the problematical position Cavendish created for herself in terms of her place as a spectator, writer, and experimenter of science, and as a spectacle. I contend that, as a creator and critic of spectating and as an object of spectating, Cavendish confounds the restrictions placed upon her as woman and aristocrat in terms of appropriate public and private behavior, literary convention, and exclusions from education and scientific discourse and experimentation in her Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy and its companion fiction The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (hereafter referred to as Observations and The Blazing World, respectively), published as one volume in 1667. 5, 6 In Part I: Spectacular Selves, I examine Cavendish's disruption of social restrictions through her selfrepresentations as spectator, spectacle, and producer of spectacle. Beginning with her self-fashioning as ambitious and transgressive intellectual and author, I delineate the arced trajectory that Cavendish employs in The Blazing World to create successively interiorized reproductions of herself as the Empress, the (fictional) Duchess, and the Spirits, all of whom are interconnected hermaphroditic spectacles, dubious spectators, and creators of spectacle. My analysis of this text (with digressions from Observations) also illuminates Cavendish’s occupation with materiality and embodiment, reality and fiction, and gender hierarchy.
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