The Ruler of Minds Known as Margaret Cavendish

“Big Brother is watching,” is the famous line from George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984. Strangely enough, this statement aligns perfectly with Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, despite the story being marked at a Utopian portrayal rather than a dystopia. Margaret Cavendish is not only a woman but also a God who has managed to make the entire world her loyal subjects much like Big Brother in 1984, except Cavendish’s subjects are oblivious to their legion. Margaret Cavendish has managed to defy mortality and has created a world so powerful in her mind that it is unified across the universe. This display of power originated from her being a female, rising above in a male dominated society. The main theme of Cavendish’s story is power, and it is displayed in different forms, in relation to her poem Of Many Worlds in this World. Both her story and her poem demonstrate a female display of power through the domination of a female scientific Utopia; power through the control of the mind; and the display of infinite power through her style of writing. Her absolute portrayal of power, well beyond her time, has allowed Cavendish to dominate the entire human population by having them follow her methods to indulge in their own form of power through the retreat of their own mind.

“Just like unto a nest of boxes round, degrees of sizes within each box are found.” This line marks the beginning of Cavendish’s poem. This “box-theory” is a perfect analogy for Cavendish’s idea of the power of the mind. The “box-theory” explains how one world, like a box, can fit into another or be part of a bigger one, and how there are infinite combinations of boxes (worlds). This “box-theory” is being created in the mind and yet the mind itself is one of the worlds, being part of a bigger world. Therefore, through imagination, one can be the ruler of a world, hence attaining God-like power, such as Cavendish does in The Blazing World. The Duchess who is an avatar for Cavendish herself, persuades the Empress, who is also a representation of Cavendish to create an imaginary world where she can build a world. This line of representation shows how power is executed in Cavendish’s mind, using the “box-theory”: Cavendish is the author of the book; therefore, the entire story exists in her mind. The Duchess and the Empress are an image of Cavendish. The Duchess who constitutes a world inside her head, explains to the empress to create a world inside her head as well. If the mind is a world itself, then within Cavendish’s bigger world, the Duchess’s smaller world exists, and that world influences the Empresses’ world to exist, therefore, showing the power of the mind, in which, one big world can constitute of many smaller worlds; without the smaller worlds knowing of the existence of the bigger world, the way Cavendish’s representations do not know she exists. Moreover, in a world which exists in someone’s mind, an objective utopia is impossible. The utopia would carry the bias of the creator of the world. “..but all the people lived in a peaceful society, united Tranquillity, and Religious Conformity.” For example, how the Empress’s bias is a singular, unified society instead of a democratic society.

“And if this small, then ladies well may wear, a world of worlds, as pendants in each ear.” This last line of the poem shows how Cavendish places such infinite metaphysical power in the hands of all women. To think that one woman out there can have an entire world resting in her earring and be oblivious to it, paints a picture of how much bigger her own world is, therefore, asserting female agency. Like the woman bearing a world in her earring, the Empress and the Duchess bears an entire world in their mind. Following the “box-theory,” this infinite power is shown to only be possessed by the two female characters in the story. The Empress being both the protagonist and by the end of the story an antagonist or a vigilante. The power to portray oneself within their own mind as Cavendish has done is also a display of the power of the mind, and the power of the female scientific Utopia that not only makes the fictional world her own but also the reader’s world her own by forcing the reader to question the female agency presented.

Cavendish’s writing style also displays this power and control over her readers as the style and form of her poem and story shows the infinite stretch of time and is read as a never-ending “box-theory.” The lines in the poem are long and they follow in couplets. Both the poem and the story make use of commas and semi-colons to communicate the idea. For example, the following line from the poem, “Thinner, and less, and less still by degree;..” shows the use of “box-theory,” by boxing the word “less” by using repetition to emphasise the word “thinner.” The same method is displayed in the story where there is a heavy repetition of commas in each sentence, which draws out the sentence and gives the reader a sense of stretching time; which has an unconscious effect of succumbing to Cavendish’s idea of infinite worlds, therefore, conforming to her ideology.