| Popis: |
This chapter features a selection of excerpts from Cavendish’s stories and plays. The passages treat a number of topics and issues: agency; authority; imagination; rhetoric; gender; feminism; social and political capital; the interdependence of creatures; government; war; materialism; the relationship between mind and body; ideas as imagistic pictures; theology; and poetry. In Blazing World, perhaps the first piece of science fiction ever written, Cavendish has her main character (eventually the Empress) transported to an alternate world whose inhabitants take seriously the prospect of a woman in a position of authority, for example as a scientist, mathematician, military strategist, and philosopher. In Bell in Campo, Lady Victoria is regarded as a military authority by a critical mass of the women in her community; she leads them to battle, executes a clever strategy to steal weapons from the enemy, and rescues the male army from defeat. In The She-Anchoret, the main character receives audience after audience of individuals who seek her wisdom and counsel on matters scientific, philosophical, mathematical, political, and theological, to name just a few. All three characters inhabit counterfactual environments that are not antagonistic to the development and reception of their skills and capacities, and they flourish. |
