Margaret Cavendish's Utopian Desire: Choice as Dissent through Progress and Form

Choice, in Margaret Cavendish’s texts, is the ultimate form of dissent. Even from within her many enriching academic and social circles, Cavendish was desperate to belong. Her elaborate prefaces and constant digressions exemplify how her surprising confidence was paired with a relentless insecurity that revealed a yearning for approval. As I will show, the resulting tension demonstrates a utopian desire through which she subtly demands not a “utopian” end-goal, but the dynamic potential possible through choice. This desire emerges as a certainty that granting choices to the women of her textual communities would result in a better world. To that end, she participated actively in the only communities to which she would always belong: The several communities of women in her utopian texts. In this paper, I consider examples from CCXI Sociable Letters (1664), The Female Academy (1662) and Convent of Pleasure (1668) to demonstrate how Cavendish aggressively dissented by integrating choice into her texts. She accomplished this through her deliberate and remarkably creative structural decisions with form and her manipulation of the narrative progression of her texts, as I will show.