Cavendish essays

Cavendish essays Margaret Cavendishs Blazing World is an embankment by the imagination upon human desire. Constrained by the physical limitations of this world, Cavendishs ambition and love of thought carry her to the farthest reaches of her own imagination and to the creation of a new world. A world governed by her romancical illusions of reality; a world where desire and fulfillment, are the only reality. In the introduction, Cavendish relates to the reader a reason for her fiction. Human nature, always full of desires and ambitions, has these desires equally opposed to by a force that often overcomes, reality. Cavendish writes, but as ambitious as ever any of my sex was, is, or can be; which makes, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavor to be Margaret the First; and although I have neither power, time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not to be mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own: (BW, 124) Knowing full the limitations upon her, Cavendish seeks satisfaction for her ambition in her only escape, the imagination. Not desiring just happiness or meager comfort, she wants the world, and everything in it to conform to her will. The essence of her aspirations she summarizes when she is talking to the spirits about her desire for a world of her own; for I had rather die in the adventure of noble achievements, than live in obscure and sluggish security; (BW, 185) Rather than suppressing these inner desires, Cavendish did everything within her power to satisfy them. Not only living her fantasies out in her mind, she wrote them down for the entire world to know. Her ambition in life was only equaled by her courage to do or write whatever she wanted no matter what audiences she displeased. Criticized on all accords, her inner fire for glory and fam ...