What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind! as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death.1
I haven’t returned to Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) since I was a graduate student. At that time I was aware that Woolf had written of her in A Room Of One’s Own, but had a recollection that the account was disparaging and irrelevant. Something something cucumbers something. Mad, unserious, thwarted. An unsuitable pioneeress.
Perhaps if I’d gone back to Woolf at that time I wouldn’t have noticed the loneliness and riot of my own thought, the similarity between myself and Woolf’s version of the Duchess. So insistent was I on being an instrument of the establishment, warping my imagination to this end, that I may not have seen the suicidal novel-writing sapphist in Woolf calling to the same in me; may not have read past the vivid image of the unchecked cucumber vine to find a pathos and admiration in the description of Cavendish. But after a recent reading of A Room Of One’s Own I recognise some things that I didn’t before.
It’s impossible for me to spend too much time looking at my academic work from my twenties and early thirties. It seems too obvious, even as I evaded in elegant prose, what I was suffering then. My research interests were always dominated by ideas of mental disturbance, by the deliberate discomposing of one’s mind to access complex ideas, and I wonder if I was trying to find some good in my own disturbances, trying to tell myself I could Renaissance-biohack my way to transcendence as an alternative to the simple health that always eluded me. At my PhD defence, an adviser said my work read as a “poet’s dissertation” rather than a scholar’s, words that torture me on occasion as I consider the sickening waste of time, energy, youth, imagination and power that went into that piece of work. The artist’s mind, says Woolf, ought to be incandescent and unimpeded; what better way to douse and deter it than by stuffing it with the countless prohibitions of academia and keeping it in line with lies?
The anger I experience over this, even now, cannot at present be resolved, so I have to at least find a way to siphon off its energy into writing of some kind. I have a fiction project in process that has the potential to be very powerful, very strange, very dark—and I will try to convince myself that it must be written and can only be written now, in this time of waiting, of instability, of fear and occasional wild illumination. And in that I will dare to do what academia forbids—to take the directives of these writers and poets in earnest.
The thing is, Margaret Cavendish is a joy to spend time with. There is something so rapturously childlike in her energy. She reminds me of me as a child, desperately trying to find other children whom I could draw into my imagined worlds, to co-create. I stopped doing that, but she did not. Look at this magnificent confidence with which she closes The Blazing World:
By this Poetical Description, you may perceive, that my ambition is not onely to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole World if any should like the World I have made, and be willing to be my Subjects, they may imagine themselves such, and they are such, I mean in their Minds, Fancies or Imaginations; but if they cannot endure to be Subjects, they may create Worlds of their own, and Govern themselves as they please …
These words were a beacon of light to me as I struggled through my PhD, soothing my existential crises as it became increasingly clear to me that my life wouldn't pan out as I'd hoped. I'd think of Margaret, who had enough audacity to ensure a permanent immortal transhistorical community of world-authoresses; I'd think of her self-assurance and playfulness, and hope that I could find some of it for myself.
My recent reading of A Room Of One’s Own wasn’t motivated by my interest in Cavendish, but I was surprised to find not only a more interesting take on her than I recalled, but also a similar appeal at the end of an essay. Like Cavendish, Woolf calls upon her audience to connect with an immortal community, as she recalls the imagined sister of Shakespeare, Judith, and her tragic end:
this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her.
It isn't a playful invitation to co-creation, as Cavendish's is, but rather it's an insistence on a kind of immortality of poetic spirit, regardless of output. It comes after Woolf lists 1866, 1880 and 1919 as years of progress in women's rights, and insists that her audience no longer has the same excuses to be silent. I'm not sure if her admonishment is really in earnest, or whether perhaps it's a reflection of the privilege of her audience, because I can certainly attest that there is a substantial lag in social shifts following legal change. My grandmother coached me as well as she possibly could to be a shining jewel of the heteropatriarchy, because she loved me and saw no other path open to me; she was a year old when Woolf's words were published. Should she have seen an alternative path? What were those dates of liberation to her, if her granddaughter's chief value was in a physical appearance that could be coaxed into attractiveness, and a mind that could produce safe witticisms for the benefit of men?
Ten years after the publication of A Room Of One’s Own, Woolf wrote A Sketch Of The Past, a biographical essay which returns to the idea of a transhistorical female inheritance. This time, it’s not about artistry, but self-protection. Recalling the sexual abuse she suffered in childhood at the hands of her half-brother Gerald Duckworth, she writes of her feeling of revulsion and shame, which
proves that Virginia Stephen was not born on the 25th January 1882, but was born many thousands of years ago; and had from the very first to encounter instincts already acquired by thousands of ancestresses in the past.2
Woolf mentions these instincts almost in passing, as a way of illustrating her point: that biography is difficult to write because we focus too much on what happened, with insufficient definition of to whom it happened. That person, she says, is so complicated as to be almost unknowable.
There’s a loneliness here that wasn’t in the appeal at the close of A Room Of One’s Own. That was a call to community with women’s history; this, to me now, seems to fade the individual into a voiceless assemblage of victims, learning from each other not the indomitable poetic spirit but rather the language of appeasement. It’s poison. It’s necessary.
So I consider that cucumber vine in Woolf’s image, and recall the cucumbers I planted in my garden during Covid. One year they barely bloomed; another they were ludicrously, indecently abundant. I filled a box with them and put it outside on the pavement, a gift to my neighbours, who took the excess gladly. But more grew every day. I pickled extensively that year. I couldn’t say what poisons or impediments lurked in the soil or the air from one year to the next, what made a blossoming impossible one day and inevitable another. But my lonely mind was like that, too, full of its own traps, sprung when I least expected an impediment, when the riot was at its most joyful.
It was always an open wound, that garden, anyway. Its edges were always determined to close.
