38-) English Literature

38- ) English Literature 

Lady Margaret Lucas Cavendish

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (née Lucas; 1623 – 16 December 1673) was a prolific English philosopher, poet, scientist, fiction writer and playwright. In her lifetime she produced more than 12 original literary works, many of which became well known due to her high social status. This high social status allowed Margaret to meet and converse with some of the most important and influential minds of her time.

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was a prolific writer who worked in many genres, including poetry, fiction, drama, letters, biography, science, and even science fiction. Unlike most women of her day, who wrote anonymously, she published her works under her own name. Her significance as a rhetorical theorist has two main dimensions. First, she lived at a time when rhetoric itself and rhetorical theory were undergoing radical changes. Her writings provide a valuable source of information about some of these changes. Second, her ideas about the rhetorical tradition provide particular insight into the relationship of women to that tradition at a critical time in its history. Cavendish not only practiced rhetoric but also recorded her progress, including her fears and failures, and her rhetorical ideas must be understood in this context. No single work is devoted to a consideration of rhetorical theory; to discover her ideas one must sift through many of her works, particularly her prefaces. She was perhaps more successful as an aspiring rhetorician than as a theorist of rhetoric. Yet, familiarity with her ideas is crucial to an understanding of the development of women’s sense of themselves in relation to the tradition, which was later to bear fruit in the work of women more apparently successful than she.

Background

Born Margaret Lucas to Sir Thomas Lucas (1573–1625) and Elizabeth Leighton (died 1647), she was the youngest child of the family. She had four sisters and three brothers, the royalists Sir John Lucas, Sir Thomas Lucas and Sir Charles Lucas, who owned the manor of St John's Abbey, Colchester. As a teenager, she became an attendant on Queen Henrietta Maria and travelled with her into exile in France, living for a time at the court of the young King Louis XIV. She became the second wife of William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1645.

Her husband, then-marquess William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle, was a Royalist commander in Northern England during the First English Civil War and in 1644 went into self-imposed exile in France. Margaret accompanied him and remained abroad until the Stuart Restoration in 1660.

Cavendish returned to her husband in Antwerp early in 1653. The next work in which she deals with rhetorical theory is The Worlds Olio, published in 1655 but begun before her departure to England at the end of 1651. It is a curious work, rather like an informal conversation, flitting from one subject to another in disconnected fashion, with no serious sustained discussion of any issue. In the eclectic assortment of ideas about rhetoric it is possible to identify four themes. The first concerns women as practitioners of rhetoric. In spite of her own project of seeking fame as a writer, she entertains a low view of women’s capacities, declaring that they are inferior to men in wit, wisdom, and eloquence. Women can at best only imitate men. Some women may by education become more adept than some men, but in general, men have a natural advantage. Masculine and feminine styles of writing are quite different, she believes; and she usually sees the masculine as superior. She also introduces the idea, however, that the styles are complementary; each has its uses. This kind of inconsistency is typical of much of her discussion both of women and of rhetoric.

The second theme is the relationship between thought and speech, or ratio and oratio in rhetorical terms. In this work Cavendish, like many of her contemporaries, regards rhetoric as the art of expression only; she is contemptuous and, indeed, suspicious of it: the “colours” of rhetoric can make the bad appear good and vice versa. The business of rhetoric is merely to dress thought; she compares the rhetor to the tailor. Yet, dress and rhetoric have their own importance and must be appropriate to the occasion; and she acknowledges that “want of eloquence” can conceal or misrepresent the truth.

The third theme concerns delivery. In a preface, “To the Reader,” she declares that “the very sound of the voice will seem to alter the sense of the Theme” and uses metaphors from music to illuminate her discussion. In essay 137 she rules that passionate speeches must be delivered in a tenor or even a bass voice, not a treble, to give due weight and solemnity. She even gives advice about the use of lips, teeth, and tongue to achieve the desired effect. Finally, the fourth theme is Cavendish’s preference for natural style. Her dislike of the artificial extends to a horror of the pedantic, the fussily correct: she even states that “it is against nature for women to spell right.” A good style has ease and simplicity, which are more important than mere accuracy.

The Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655; revised as Grounds of Natural Philosophy, 1668) brings together, somewhat eclectically, Cavendish’s ideas about science. Again, she addresses issues of rhetorical theory in the prefatory material. In an epistle to the reader she recognizes that as a woman she is unable to teach publicly; a regrettable situation, she observes, because writing is inferior to speaking as a medium. The Philosophical and Physical Opinions also has an important preface addressed to universities, to which she sent complimentary copies of her works. It includes a plea for recognition of women’s rationality; women, she says, are so used to having their intellectual capacities despised by men that they begin to despise themselves.

Natures Pictures, also written during her time in exile, is predominantly fictional. One of the stories, however, concerns an anchoress who gains a reputation as a wise woman and is consulted on matters of all kinds, including oratory. Since the opinions expressed by the wise woman are quite similar to Cavendish’s own as expressed elsewhere, they may be taken as hers. The main topic of discussion is pathos and its dangers: it ought, says the anchoress, to be banished from law courts; only truth has a place there. Here again she compares the power of oratory to the power of music, and the audience to a musical instrument upon which the orator plays.

Early years

Childhood

Cavendish's father, Thomas Lucas, was exiled after a duel that led to the death of "one Mr. Brooks", but pardoned by King James. He returned to England in 1603. As the youngest of eight, Cavendish recorded spending a lot of time with her siblings. She had no formal education, but had access to libraries and tutors, although she hinted that the children paid little heed to tutors, who were "rather for formality than benefit". Cavendish began putting ideas down on paper at an early age, although it was poorly accepted for women to display such intelligence at the time and she kept her efforts in the privacy of her home. The family had significant means and Cavendish stated that her widowed mother chose to keep her family in a condition "not much lower" than when her father was alive; the children had access to "honest pleasures and harmless delights". Her mother had little to no male help.

Records of the birth of Margaret Lucas were lost during the English Civil Wars in the 1640s, but she was probably born in 1623, just outside Colchester. She was the youngest in a family of eight children, consisting of three sons and five daughters. The main source of information about these early years is Cavendish’s autobiography, “A True Relation of My Birthe and Breeding,” which was published with the first (but not with the second) edition of Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (1656). Her father, Thomas Lucas, died when she was two; the most formative influence upon her, therefore, was that of her mother, Elizabeth Leighton Lucas. Within the family, relationships were warm and loving, but strangers were kept at arm’s length, perhaps because the Lucases were royalists, whereas most of their neighbors supported Parliament. Possibly as a result, Margaret grew up to be afflicted by a terrible bashfulness that left its mark on both her practice and her theory of rhetoric. She received what little education she had at home from a governess and visiting tutors. In general, she was leniently treated and not forced to study against her will. Not a keen student, she greatly preferred to amuse herself by writing—scribbling, as she called it—and by designing her own clothes.

Her happy family life was violently disrupted in 1641, when the political situation reached a crisis: never popular with their Puritan neighbors, the Lucases were attacked in their family home. In 1642 Margaret and her mother fled to Oxford, where King Charles I now held his court; in 1643 Margaret became maid of honor to Queen Henrietta Maria, whom she accompanied in 1644 when the queen escaped to France. There, in the spring of 1645 she met William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle, the famous royalist in exile, whom she married in December of that year. Her husband was a great influence throughout her life. He encouraged her to write, supplemented her scanty education, paid for the publication of her books, and above all gave her confidence. He was himself a patron of the arts and sciences, and his brother Charles was a noted scholar. Childless, and without a great house and estate to care for, Margaret Cavendish amused herself in the early years of her marriage by writing, first in Paris, later in Rotterdam, and finally in Antwerp. The turning point of her career, however, was a visit to England begun in 1651. She had returned, escorted by her brother-in-law, to try to claim a portion of her husband’s sequestered estates for her maintenance. During the eighteen months she spent there, she wrote constantly and also arranged for the publication of her first two books, Poems, and Fancies (1653) and Philosophicall Fancies (1653).

Lady-in-waiting

When Queen Henrietta Maria was in Oxford, Cavendish never gained permission from her mother to become a lady-in-waiting. She accompanied the Queen into exile in France, away from her family for the first time. She notes that while she was confident in the company of her siblings, amongst strangers she became bashful, being afraid she might speak or act inappropriately without her siblings' guidance, while anxious to be well received and well liked. She spoke only when necessary and so came to be regarded as a fool, which Cavendish stated that she preferred to being seen as wanton or rude.

Regretting that she had left home to be a lady-in-waiting, Cavendish informed her mother that she wanted to leave the court, but her mother persuaded her not to disgrace herself by leaving and provided her with funds that Cavendish noted quite exceeded the normal means of a courtier. She remained a lady-in-waiting for two more years before marrying William Cavendish, then still Marquess of Newcastle.

Marriage to the Marquess

Cavendish noted that her husband liked her bashfulness; he was the only man she was ever in love with, not for his title, wealth or power, but for merit, justice, gratitude, duty and fidelity. She saw these as attributes that held people together even in misfortune, and in their case helped them to endure suffering for their political allegiance. Cavendish had no children, despite efforts by her physician to help her conceive. Her husband had five surviving children from a previous marriage, two of whom, Jane and Elizabeth, wrote a comic play, The Concealed Fancies.

Cavendish later wrote a biography of her husband: The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendish. In her dedication, Cavendish recalls a time when rumours surrounded the authorship of her works: that her husband wrote them. Cavendish notes that her husband defended her from these, but admits to a creative relationship, even as her writing tutor, for writing "fashions an image of a husband and wife who rely on each other in the public realm of print."

Personal life

Financial problems

A few years after her marriage, she and her husband's brother, Sir Charles Cavendish, returned to England. Cavendish had heard that her husband's estate, sequestrated due to his being a royalist delinquent, would be sold and that she as his wife could hope to benefit from the sale. In the event she received no benefit. She noted that while many women petitioned for funds, she herself only did so once, and being denied decided such efforts were not worth the trouble. After a year and a half she left England to be with her husband again.

In 1660, with the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, Margaret Cavendish and her husband were finally able to return to England. For a while they lived in London, but they soon found the court of Charles II uncongenial and before the end of 1660 had retired to their estate at Welbeck. Once settled in there, Cavendish resumed her life as a writer, publishing material she had worked on during her exile. She also made a serious effort to improve her knowledge and skills, studying philosophy and revising her philosophical works in the light of her new knowledge.

Character and health

Cavendish stated in A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life that her bashful nature, which she described as "melancholia", made her "repent my going from home to see the World abroad." It manifested itself in reluctance to discuss her work in public, but this she satirised in her writing. Cavendish defined and sought self-cures for the physical manifestations of her melancholia, which included "chill paleness", inability to speak, and erratic gestures.

Religious beliefs

Cavendish's views on God and religion remained ambiguous. Her writings show her as a Christian, but she did not often address the matter. In her Physical Opinions, she explicitly stated her belief in the existence of God – "Pray account me not an Atheist, but believe as I do in God Almighty," – but sought to split philosophy from theology and so avoid debating God's actions in many of her philosophical works.

Her theological temerity was unusual at a time when much women's writing was built around religion. Although Cavendish acknowledged God's existence, she held "that natural reason cannot perceive or have an idea of an immaterial being." So "when we name God, we name an Inexpressible, and Incomprehensible Being." Still, she believed that all parts of nature have an innate knowledge of God's existence. Even inanimate matter, she argues, "also have an interior, fixt and innate knowledge of the existency of God, as, that he is to be adored and worshipped. And thus the inanimate part may, after its own manner, worship and adore God."

Fashion and fame

Cavendish in her memoir explained her enjoyment in reinventing herself through fashion. She said she aimed at uniqueness in dress, thoughts and behaviour, and disliked wearing the same fashions as other women. She also made her desire for fame public. Several passages remark on her virtuous character: while acknowledging goodness in others, she thought it acceptable to hope to better them and even achieve everlasting fame.

She expected to be criticised for deciding to write a memoir, but retorted that it was written for herself, not for delight, to give later generations a true account of her lineage and life. She noted that others, such as Caesar and Ovid, had done the same.

Death

She died suddenly on 15 December 1673,in London, and was buried in Westminster Abbey on 7 January 1674. Her husband arranged for a monument, by the sculptor Grinling Gibbons, to be erected in the north transept of the abbey. Her husband was not well enough to attend her funeral and two years later was himself interred with her, on 22 January 1676. Before he died, however, he collected all the letters and poems written to celebrate her and arranged to have them published as Letters and Poems in Honour of the Incomparable Princess, Margaret, Dutchess of Newcastle (1676). In his 1957 biography of Cavendish, Douglas Grant quotes the epitaph that William Cavendish wrote to be engraved on the tomb in which he was soon to join his wife:The epitaph reads: " Here lyes the Loyall Duke of Newcastle and his Dutches, his second wife, by whome he had noe issue; her name was Margaret Lucas, youngest sister to the Lord Lucas of Colchester, a noble familie, for all the Brothers were Valiant and all the Sisters virtuous. ". All the Brothers Were Valiant became the title of a novel and number of film adaptations in the early 20th century.

Margaret Cavendish’s last years were clouded by disputes with her husband’s children and false accusations from his servants. This Dutches was a wise, wittie and learned Lady, which her many Bookes do well testifie; she was a most Virtuous and a Loving and carefull wife, and was with her Lord all the time of his banishment and miseries, and when he came home never parted from him in his solitary retirements.