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Title: A nature of "infinite sense and reason": Margaret Cavendish's natural philosophy and the "noise" of a feminized nature Author(s): Rebecca Merrens Source: Women's Studies. 25.5 (Sept. 1996): p421. Document Type: Article Full Text: But I imagine I shall be censur'd by my owne Sex, and Men will cast a smile of Scorne upon my Book, because they think thereby, Women incroach too much upon their Perogatives; for they hold Books as their Crowne, and the Sword as their Scepter, by which they rule, and governe. Margaret Cavendish, "To All Noble Ladies," Poems, and Fancies, A3. i. From Madwoman to Center Stage: Cavendish and her Critics In recent years, Margaret Cavendish has become something of a cause celebre for feminist critics and historians of science who look to her copious writings as sites where the assumptions and practices of masculinist science and patriarchal culture were challenged and where alternative conceptions of nature and women were fashioned. With Cavendish no longer diminished by references to her as "Mad Madge," or by Pepys' and Mrs. Evelyn's derisive comments on her outlandish behavior and dress, critics have begun to explore Cavendish's contributions to seventeenth-century intellectual debates by rediscovering her prose, fiction, poetry, plays, and natural philosophy.(1) With two notable exceptions, however, critics tend to privilege Cavendish's fiction, poetry, or plays over her experimental and natural philosophy (Sarasohn; Schiebinger). In part, the disproportionate attention to her conventionally "literary" texts derives, no doubt, from the limited (and skewed) publication of her works: until recently, only several poems; her science fiction novel, A Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World (1666); and her biography of her husband, The Life of the thrice Noble . . . Duke (1667) have been widely available in print.(2) As Elaine Hobby persuasively argues, the critical task of evaluating early modern women's writing remains impaired by circumscribed access to their predominantly unpublished work (1-25). If critical claims are always partial, they are far more so when the body of work available for study is severely restricted in manuscript or rare book form. Another problem afflicting Cavendish criticism, however, is critics' unwillingness or inability to read her experimental and natural philosophy as "serious" science and not as utopian, "literary" fancy. In this regard, many critics not only perpetuate early modern conceptions of the greater merit of the "speaking pictures" of "poesy" over natural philosophy, but reproduce centuries of misogynist denigration of Cavendish's philosophy.(3) In one of the few articles concerned with Cavendish's philosophical writings, for example, Sophia B. Blaydes astutely interprets the scorn Cavendish endured because of her attire and public persona as indicative of the implicit cultural dictum that "'Disorderly woman, like chaotic nature, needed to be controlled'" (52). Yet when Blaydes discusses Cavendish's "seven philosophic books individually for ideas and style," she argues that her materialist philosophy, in relation to that of other contemporary philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes, and More, seems "redundant and foolish" (52). Even as Blaydes situates Cavendish's materialism among seventeenth-century philosophical debates and implies that, if Cavendish were not central to these intellectual circles, she was not utterly beyond or excluded from them, she undermines Cavendish as a serious philosopher by reproducing the attacks of Joseph Glanvill and others on her "foolish" theories.(4) Most scholars, however, do not provide more than passing comments on Cavendish's scientific writings, preferring instead to read in her writing the utopian fantasies of an active but untrained mind. Linda R. Payne, for example, rightly dismisses critics who relegate Cavendish to "fantasticall" madness, yet her own argument focuses on the "projections of Cavendish's visions of power" in female dominated utopias and fantasy worlds (22). In concentrating on her dramatic writing, Payne, like Hobby, demonstrates that Cavendish continually creates "women who seek to live their lives without restraint and others who warn them that to do so means failure or death" (31), and that, therefore, the Duchess reproduces both the conditions of seventeenth-century women's lives and fantasizes release from the bonds which fetter them. Kate Lilley shares with Payne an interest in the utopian components of Cavendish's work, and suggests that her "fantasy" writing, particularly The Blazing World, evinces a "meta-concern with the relations between
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power, gender, and discourse" and seeks ways to resolve favorably "the perceived wants" of women's lives (120). Sophie Tomlinson agrees with Lilley in arguing that Cavendish's writing, particularly her plays, enable "fantasies of female self-representation," especially within a highly feminized and contradictory court culture disposed to think of women as perpetually on display, and yet which regarded such theatrical display as potentially licentious (140, 137).(5) Fantasy writing, Tomlinson argues, becomes for Cavendish a means to negotiate the impossible demands placed on women by a culture at once fascinated and threatened by female self-representation.(6) While most of this critical attention has been valuable in reintroducing Cavendish, the overemphasis on her strictly "literary" writing and the pervasive characterization of her literary and scientific writing as "fantasy" misrepresents her interests in two crucial regards. First, critics who ignore her writings on natural philosophy imply an erroneous division between, on the one hand, her poems, plays, and fiction, and, on the other, her scientific writing, and thereby disregard the ways in which Cavendish contests such generic categories by using poetry, for instance, to articulate her theories of nature as comprised of infinite matter in The Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1665, 3). The dialogic interaction between "science" and "literature" which marks early modern culture - particularly in efforts to construct understandings of nature is perhaps nowhere as evident as in Cavendish's works. Yet critics still impose ahistorical disciplinary distinctions when interpreting her work and, thereby, misconstrue her efforts to open up the possibilities for poetry and plays, for example, as genres in which experimental philosophy might be discussed.(7) Secondly, critics tend to suggest that all of her writing, including her scientific writings, is best understood as "dreamscape" or "utopian fantasy." Cavendish does, of course, often refer to her ideas as "fancies" and titles one of her works Philosophical Fancies. As the OED reminds us, however, "fancy" in the seventeenthcentury was as likely to refer to imaginative representations of things "not present to the senses," an "inventive design," or "an invention, original idea or contrivance" as to our more contemporary sense of a whimsical vision or dream. Given, then, that current Cavendish criticism seems marked by tendencies to divorce scientific writing from "literature" and by proclivities to read for a post-Enlightenment conception of fantasy, I am interested in asking a different set of questions about her work than are usually asked. I shall explore what we may learn when we remove Cavendish from the realm of fantasy and reinsert her within the realm of seventeenth-century intellectual philosophy in which she wrote and to which she responded. By reading Cavendish as vitally concerned with the scientific debates of the seventeenth-century (and particularly with issues of gender, nature, and power which structure these debates), we find that she repeatedly articulates critiques of the practices and rhetoric or seventeenth-century science, as well as of the structures which reproduce male privilege and the always tenuous modes of male "Perogative" in her society. I shall demonstrate that the theories of infinite matter and absolute materialism, for which Cavendish is most often dismissed, form the foundation for her socioscientific critiques and offer alternative conceptions of authority and order to those produced by patriarchal writing in the seventeenth century. By theorizing an Epicurean view of nature predicated on celebrating fluctuation and indeterminacy, Cavendish rejects the tenets of patriarchal domination and valorizes instead the very qualifies which threaten and motivate patriarchal philosophers. Before examining Cavendish's radical conception of nature and her claims concerning experimental and natural philosophy, however, it is necessary first to understand the intellectual climate in which she worked and to which she responded. Certainly, the fact that Cavendish challenges dominant notions of order and power in her culture contributed to her denigration and marginalization. Yet it would be misleading to counter claims about her insignificance with claims for her centrality to early modern science: both positions distort the ways in which the borders of knowledge and power were ceaselessly policed and reorganized in early modern culture. In Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer investigate "scientific method as crystallizing forms of social organization and as a means of regulating social interaction within the scientific community" (14).(8) Be detailing the Hobbes-Boyle debate concerning the air-pump, they demonstrate that experimental method became a means not simply to answer questions about natural phenomena but to produce assent to a Restoration social, political, and scientific agenda. Hobbes becomes marked as an outsider because he objects to the veracity of the air-pump trials; his experience with the Royal Society (and particularly with Boyle) indicates the ways in which knowledge and empirical authority were formulated and reorganized as much in opposition to counter-claims (and counterpersons) as it was "produced" from self-evident facts.
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Shapin's and Schaffer's analysis proves useful in understanding Cavendish's intellectual and cultural position as well. While she knew philosophers such as Hobbes and Descartes (who received patronage from the Cavendishes), and while she eventually gained entrance to a meeting of the Royal Society in 1667, Cavendish was never entirely included (as her Royal Society visit might imply), nor was she ever totally excluded from intellectual debate. Instead, her presence as a female philosopher and experimental skeptic served a function analogous to that of Hobbes for the Royal Society, which at once dismissed her counterclaims as "foolish" yet could not disregard her without comment. In effect, Cavendish, like Hobbes, functioned for early modern science like Michel Serres' "third man" or "parasite." Serres contends that "[t]o hold a dialogue is to suppose a third man and to seek to exclude him" (67). That is, any two people establishing communication between themselves necessarily do so by joining forces against noise or a "third man" (or, in this more problematic case, a woman) who seeks to disrupt or to complicate their dialogue; this noise or parasite disrupts communication and, at the same time, that which makes it possible. As Shapin and Schaffer demonstrate in discussing the Hobbes-Boyle dispute, stable communication may be only (and only tenuously) achieved by discrediting and silencing counter-claims and by working to solidify the authority of the dominant (and yet necessarily provisional) claims asserted. Cavendish's critiques of Boyle's experimental philosophy were, in a fundamental sense, then, neither "foolish" nor "redundant" but constitutive of consequent refinements to his methodology and to his experimental claims. As I shall demonstrate, Cavendish appropriates to describe nature the vocabulary commonly used by Boyle and others to define God: by replacing God with nature, Cavendish challenges the foundation on which Boyle and others construct nature and natural philosophy and she forces them to respond to her charges, even if only by more aggressively asserting godly control over a debased nature. Cavendish's parasitic role in shaping natural philosophy, however, has been largely ignored. Even Lisa T. Sarasohn and Londa Schiebinger, two of the most astute commentators on Cavendish, tend to read her philosophical writings only as "Other," that is, only in terms of their opposition to mainstream masculinist science. In this respect, they reproduce seventeenth-century arguments designed to cast her, like Hobbes, as "Other," even as they seek to recuperate her as a foremother of feminist science. Keeping Serres' model in mind enables us to rethink Cavendish's intellectual significance and the ways in which her work challenges the very binary structures of inclusive/exclusive, central/marginal, crucial/"foolish" that have been used to define her work. In this regard, we may understand Cavendish as not simply opposing Boyle and his colleagues, but as noisily constituting "dominant" discourse by forcing Boyle and others to respond to her. In my discussion of Cavendish, then, I will be examining not only the ways in which she functions as the "parasite" in the communications of the Royal Society but how she figures herself as an agent and instigator of communication as well. In her prefaces and dedications, Cavendish variously conceives her partner in dialogue to be her husband, other women, Cambridge and Oxford dons and students, and learned men of the Royal Society. To understand the intellectual space in which she situates herself, however, it seems less critical to identify whom she figures as her audience than to assess whom she perceives she must exclude in order to make her communication possible. In writing about Cavendish, therefore, we must recognize that she was, at once, the noise which requires exclusion in order for other communication to occur and an interlocutor actively excluding others in order to forge her own narrative of nature, order, and culture. ii. Radical Gender and Alternative Nature: Cavendish's Theories for Natural Philosophy As Sarasohn argues in her insightful analysis of Cavendish's natural philosophy, Cavendish "used the skeptical methodology of the new science not only to attack traditional natural philosophy, but also as a weapon in her battle for the recognition of female intellectual equality" (289). Sarasohn notes that Cavendish "embrace[d] the ambiguity of a world turned upside down," seeing radical and turbulent change as a chief means by which repressed women and nature might find equality and redress.(9) Perhaps the most fundamental reversal which Cavendish asserts is that the universe is well-governed not by patriarchal practices, but by materialist nature. The radical component of Cavendish's philosophy, however, is not simply that she asserts nature as productive and cohesive, but that she appropriates for Nature the vocabulary used by Boyle and others to describe God: the threat Cavendish's nature poses, then, is not simply of feminized wisdom, control, and strength, but of the precise modes of wisdom, control, and

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strength traditionally attributed to God. In Cavendish's universe, "Nature is matter, form, and motion, all these being as it were but one thing; matter is the body of nature, form is the shape of nature and motion" (Opinions [A4.sup.v]).(10) She extends her conception of an unified "body" and "motion" (or spirit) when she discusses "The Order of Nature": she argues that The Reason, that there is not a Confusion in Nature, but an orderly Cause therein, is, the Eternal matter is always one, and the same: for though there are Infinite degrees, yet the Nature of that Matter never alters. But all variety is made according to the several Degrees, and the several degrees do palliate and in some sense make an Equality in infinite. (Opinions Ch. 17, p. 5) Matter and spirit, then, are inextricably bound not in opposition to one another, as one finds in Platonic or Cartesian philosophies of nature, but in harmonic complementarity, as equal components of "Eternal matter" which is always "one" and which is fundamentally ordered and balanced. As Cavendish argues in Observations on Experimental Philosophy, "Nor can the grossness and fineness of the Parts of Nature, be without animate and inanimate Matter; for the dulness of one degree, poises the activity of the other; and the grossness of one, the purity of the other: All which keeps nature from extreams" (g).(11) Fluctuations and changes within nature are not signs of scarcity and natural decay, but emblems of nature's "pois[e]" and dynamic order.(12) Change does not produce or indicate disturbance in Nature" because, Nature being peaceable in herself, would not suffer her actions to disturb her Government: Wherefore although particulars were crossing and opposing each other, yet she did govern them with such wisdom and moderation, that they were necessitated to obey her, and move according as she would have them. (Observations g2) Like Boyle, Cavendish focuses on assessing the "order" and "Government" within nature. Yet where he finds God authorizing stability, Cavendish asserts nature's "Government" of "such wisdom and moderation" which compels "obey[ance]." Where Boyle detects in nature "subordinate" "weak[ness]" (flaws which he reads as indicative of an inherently vulnerable female), Cavendish locates self-generating, self-perpetuating order and wise, female-dominated "Government" (Boyle, Free Inquiry 176). Repeatedly she argues that nature possesses an "Infinite Variety" and that Nature is a perpetually Self-moving Body, dividing, composing, changing, forming, and transforming her parts by Self-corporeal figurative motions, which are her part, so she has an Infinite Wisdom to order and govern her Infinite parts; for she has Infinite Sense and Reason. (Observations 69) The qualities which define Cavendish's feminized nature - order, balance, harmony, "Infinite Variety," "Wisdom," "Sense and Reason" - are the very attributes which nature and the feminine are conventionally regarded as lacking and which are commonly ascribed to God and, secondarily, to man. Her depiction of nature is not, however, merely a reversal of male tropes and categories; her characterization of nature as powerful, infinite, and wise depends on her acceptance of the limitations of human understanding and knowledge. Cavendish's sense of personal or female identity does not depend on fashioning a narrative of totalizing domination and control over an Other: perhaps because this mode of self and gender formation was denied symbolically and materially to her and other seventeenth-century women, she more readily accepted what most male philosophers obscure - that knowledge (like identity) is always partial and always contingent.(13) In her many explanatory and dedicatory prefaces, she argues that the intellectual flaws in her writings result partly from her (and, more generally, women's) limited education and subsistence "enslaved" within the "Tyrannical Government" of men who "usurped a Supremacy to themselves, although we were made equal by Nature" and who, thus, perpetuate women's intellectual inferiority and failings.(14) Yet throughout her writings she also ascribes her intellectual shortcomings to the inherent and unavoidable "imperfections" of any knowledge claims. She maintains that . . . to speak without partiality, I do not perceive that men are free from this imperfection, nor from condemning us, although they are guilty of the same fault; but we have this advantage of men, which is, that we know this imperfection in ourselves, although we do not endeavor to mend it; but men are so

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partial to themselves, as not to perceive this imperfection in themselves, and so they cannot mend it. (Playes A5) As Cavendish astutely understands, for men to recognize the "partiality" of their assertions would be to admit the partial nature of their authority and, consequently, to undermine the "Tyrannical Government," the desire for a totalizing authority, which is the product and producer of masculine privilege and ideology. She notes that people's difficulties producing accurate claims about nature derive from our flawed and "wandring . . . Senses," then, which necessarily limit the extent and accuracy of our perceptions: "Finite cannot tell how Infinite doth flow,/Nor how infinite matter moveth to and fro" (Observations 5; Opinions Ch. 8, p. 3). Man's false quest for the "Infinite" (and inability to accept himself as a component of "Finite" matter) causes him to profess his own ontological omnipotence. Cavendish critiques the masculinist desire to create an idealized male subjectivity which may "have some participation of divineness" and which escapes the inevitable decay of "Finite" matter. As Schiebinger argues, Cavendish's thorough materialism enables her to understand that "[m]an is merely one part of nature. The whole (nature itself) can know the parts, but the parts (men) cannot know the whole. Consequently, since he is not above nature, man must be content with things as nature has ordered them" (52).(15) In Cavendish's words, neither can Natural causes nor effects be over-powered by Man so, as if Man was a degree above Nature, but they must be as Nature is pleased to order them; for man is but a small part, and his powers are but particular actions of Nature, and therefore he cannot have a supream and absolute power. (Observations 6) In the "Further Observations on Experimental Philosophy," she extends this point to argue I believe other Creatures have as much knowledg as Man, and Man as much in his kind, as any other particular Creature in its kind; but their knowledges being different, by reason of their different natures and figures, it causes an ignorance of each other's knowledg; nay, the knowledg of other Creatures, many times gives information to Man . . . But Man, out of self-love, and conceited pride, because he thinks himself the chief of all Creatures, and that all the World is made for his sake; doth also imagine that all other Creatures are ignorant, dull, stupid, senseless and immaterial; and he onely wise, knowing and understanding. (Observations 296-98) Cavendish's avid materialism and her insistence on holistic conceptions of nature are not, then, only rejections of masculinist ideologies which construct a feminized nature defined by corruption and lack, but a means to circumvent and to expose the displacement onto nature of anxieties of insufficiency and lack which aptly describe the "self-love, and conceited Pride" of "Man." Boyle, for example, even as he tries to evade the criticisms which Cavendish lodges, reproduces this problem when he attempts to hold nature responsible for experimental failures. Boyle disputes the popular dictum that "Nature never misses her mark" by claiming that Nature must often miss of Her End in Chymical Furnaces, where the Flame does never turn the Bricks, that it makes red-hot into Fire; nor the Crucibles, nor the Cuples, nor yet the Gold and Silver, that it thoroughly pervades, and brings to be of a Colour, the same, or very near the same, with its own . . . And, even when Fire acts upon Wood, there is but one Part of it turn'd into Fire, since to say nothing of the Soot and concreted Smoke, the Ashes remain fix'd and incombustible. (Free Inquiry 276) As I shall explore more fully below, Boyle works implicitly to counter Cavendish's criticisms of the practitioners of experimental methodology by making a faulty nature responsible for experimental failures. Perhaps not surprisingly, every example which Boyle provides of nature "miss[ing] her mark," Cavendish would interpret as male scientists imperfectly manipulating nature to achieve their desired goals. Male scientists turn to "the Mechanical, the Experimental Philosophy" to yield "power over Natural Causes," but neither can Natural causes nor effects be over-powered by man so, as if Man was a degree above Nature, but they must be as Nature is pleased to order them." (Observations 5) Cavendish thus utterly rejects fantasies of absolutist knowledge and power, arguing that One Man or Creature may overpower another so much, as to make him quit his natural form or figure, that

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is, to dye and be dissolved, and so to turn into another Figure or Creature; but he cannot overpower all Creatures; nay, if he could, and did, yet he would not be an Absolute Destroyer and Creator, but only some weak and simple Transformer, or rather some Artificial Disfigurer and Misformer, which cannot alter the World, though he may disorder it. (Observations 272) In the process of exposing the false premises of masculinist logic, Cavendish defines most scientific inquiry as tragedy: discrete efforts to "overpower" a "natural form or figure" necessarily fail to achieve dominance and instead produce only "disorder." The idealized, questing Scientist emerges as a tragically "weak and simple" "Artific[er]" who can produce himself as authoritative only by displacing male failings onto women and feminized nature, against whom men must always redouble their brutal attacks. By asking us to rethink the self-evident "truths" produced by masculine science, Cavendish situates herself not only as a respondent to writings by Hooke and other Royal Society fellows,(16) but also as one who, as a parasitic producer of noise, required silencing. Cavendish remains excluded from most histories of science precisely because they focus on the Royal Society's accounts of knowledge produced only from experiments and dialogues among the upper-class, male fellows of the Society's membership.(17) By rereading maledominated science within a Serrian context, we may move beyond Royal Society accounts of their own communication and work - which Cavendish reminds us always mask their "partiality" - to assess how Cavendish's critiques of science help to shape late seventeenth-century science. In looking particularly at Boyle's treatise on nature, A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (1685), we witness not only another example of how science works as much to shore up absences and anxieties within masculinity as to reveal truths about natural phenomena, but also how Boyle works to exclude the objections Cavendish raises. Precisely because only a mere handful of critics - notably Sarasohn and Schiebinger - have taken Cavendish's philosophical writing seriously, none have considered that she would be perceived by Boyle and the Royal Society as a worthy intellectual antagonist. By dismissing her in this way, critics are left not only to interpret her historic visit to the Royal Society (a visit which followed the initial publications of her natural philosophical writings) as gratuitous benevolence on the Society's part, and not only to disregard the alternative conceptions of nature and science which she explores, but also to misread Boyle's and others' scientific writings as the products of originary deliberation and not, as I contend, the result of dialogic exchange about the politics of natural philosophy. While he does not cite Cavendish's work overtly, at nearly every stage of A Free Inquiry Boyle works to counter the radical claims which Cavendish advances. Boyle, for example, seeks to reassert God's authority over all of Creation and to redefine Nature as "a notional Entity" (60) and not (as Cavendish contends), as nature is oft considered, "the Common Parent of us all" (4). In several respects Boyle reinscribes motifs from earlier seventeenth-century writers who anxiously define nature as unstable and therefore in need of domination. When Boyle argues that "the veneration, wherewith Men are imbued for what they call Nature, has been a discouraging impediment to the Empire of Man over the inferior Creatures of God" (18), he reinvokes similarly androcentric claims by Godfrey Goodman, for example, who argues that Certain it is that the heavens were ordained for man, and for man alone the whole earth was created . . . [thus]; nature should be more bountiful and beneficial to man, than to the rest of the creatures. If for example, in a house consisting of master and servants, if plentie, ease, and contentment can be found under the roofe of that house, you will conceive it in the masters person, and not in the servants: otherwise you will suppose, a very preposterous order, that things are not as they ought to be disposed; and that it is some particular grievance, for some particular occasion: and thus it befalls man. (Fall 68) Boyle, like Goodman, insists that male dominion - defined in the related terms of imperialism for Boyle and classism for Goodman - depends on refashioning nature to be "beneficial to man," or, in Boyle's words, to fulfill her "Duty and Design" "and Her only Task, to keep the Universe in Order, and procure, in all the Bodies that compose it, that things be carried on, in the best and most regular way that may be, for their Advantage" (Free Inquiry 157). Goodman and Boyle are preoccupied by a perceived or potential loss of "Order" and by the class and gender crises which a "preposterous order" would indicate and instigate. The "Order" which they advocate, then, emerges as the by-product of and justification for overpowering a feminized nature, thereby fulfilling Cavendish's insight that man "thinks himself the chief of all Creatures, and that all the World is made for his sake" and "he onely [is] wise, knowing and understanding" because he "doth also imagine that all other Creatures are ignorant, dull, stupid, senseless and immaterial." Nature

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(like women) becomes palatable and nonthreatening only when she is restructured strictly in service to male needs and desires. Boyle's interest in reducing nature from a position of procreative, maternal authority as a "Parent of us all" seeks to undermine claims, such as those Cavendish makes, that nature, as "Infinite," necessarily governs over "us all." Boyle's dominant concern in this treatise, however, is not only (like Goodman's) to expose the perils of chaotic nature and to restore God to his "rightful" place of "Government," but (like Cavendish's) to redefine nature and man's relationship with "her." By reassessing nature as an effect of God's providence and man's experimental discoveries, Boyle works to theorize an affinity between God and man which obviates and excludes nature. Evelyn Fox Keller demonstrates that a consequence of Reformation theology was the further disassociation of feminized nature from God, who was no longer perceived in metonymic relationship with nature but who was granted sole sovereignty over "authoring" the world. Feminized nature thus becomes not only ontologically separated from God, but also the legitimate site of ever more exploration: as Boyle contends, "the vulgar notion of nature" is both "injurious to the glory of God, and a great impediment to the solid and useful study of his works."(18) For Cavendish, however, the splitting off of nature from God which Keller notes does not necessitate nature's denigration; Cavendish argues that reverence for God and for nature are not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforcing positions of human humility. She contends that "All parts of nature, even the inanimate, have an innate and fixt self-knowledg, it is probable that they also may have an interior self-knowledg of the existency of the Eternal and Omnipotent God, as the Author of Nature" (Opinions prefaces).(19) Boyle counters Cavendish's view of God and Nature inhabiting distinct, coequal spheres by arguing that man has no need to pay homage to nature who is merely "a pretended" authority and power, but [only] to that Diety, whose Wisdom and Goodness, not only design'd to make me a Man, and enjoy what I am here bless'd with, but contriv'd the World so, that even those Creatures of his, who by their inanimate condition are not incapable of intending to gratifie me, should be as servicable and useful to me, as they would be, if they could and did design the being so. (Free Inquiry 4) The evidence of God's greater wisdom and providence lies in Boyle's "Man[liness]" - the obvious sign of his privileged relationship with God - and not in a disorderly, "inanimate," and withholding nature. Nature exists by God's "design" only to be of "service" and "us[e]" to man. In such claims, Boyle extends culturally prevalent arguments by Goodman, Bacon, and others to dislodge popular beliefs concerning nature's independent power and authority; as he explains, all too often philosophers - such as Cavendish - regard "extraordinary things that are a mark of Nature's splendor when they rather ought to see them as a sign of God's Wisdom" (4). If Boyle successfully reconceives nature as a subsidiary effect of God's magnificence, he may reduce the threat she poses and may reestablish man as God's interpreter of authoritative order and knowledge. These passages reiterate yet again the profound connections between constructions of gender and nature: just as Cavendish's protofeminist views of women enable her to theorize a nurturing, ordered, wise, and self-moving nature, Boyle's need to reassert man as ideal, masterful, and privileged leads him to denigrate feminized nature and appropriate her alleged "power" for God and man. Throughout A Free Inquiry, these sorts of claims are founded on Boyle's radical assertion that nature exists as a rhetorical construct and not as a being, organism, or coherent system. He begins his treatise with an extended analysis of the word "nature," arguing that nature as "she" is discussed is really nothing more than a word, a mere term whose import has escalated beyond accurate signification to imply that "she" possesses powers of her own. Boyle contends that nature cannot be thought to be "a real Existent Being" with abilities which contest God's and man's authority, but is better understood as "a notional Entity, somewhat of kin to those fictitious Terms, that Men have devis'd" (60). Overgeneralized use of the term "nature" has created a perception (promulgated by Cavendish) that nature maintains her own laws and order; Boyle counters this conception of nature by asserting that "Nature is the Aggregate of the Bodies, that make up the World, framed as it is, considered as a Principle, by virtue whereof they Act and Suffer according to the Laws of Motion, prescrib'd by the Author of Things" (71). Ideally, Boyle would like "nature" to be understood as a descriptive term only, one which refers without "[a]mbiguities" to "The Result of the Universal Matter, or Corporeal Substance of the Universe, considered as it is contrived into the present Structure and Constitution of the World" (72).

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Boyle's insistence on delimiting nature to a "notional Entity" allows him to assert rhetorical control over "her" meaning and, therefore, to circumscribe her influence over male power and privilege and to subordinate "her" to God. By redefining the very meaning of "nature," Boyle also strives to render Cavendish's claims for an animate, self-knowing nature obsolete and irrelevant to his "reasonable" science. He seeks to redefine nature by arguing that: To be short, Nature uses to be frequently recurr'd to, and is so magnifi'd in the Writings of Physiologers, that the excessive Veneration Men have for Nature, as it has made some Philosophers (as the Epicureans) deny God, so, 'tis to be fear'd, that it makes many forget Him. And perhaps, a suspicious Person would venture to add, That, if other Principles hindred not, (as, I know, that in many, and, think, that in most of the Christian Naturists they do,) the Erroneous Idea of Nature would, too often, be found to have a strong tendency to shake, if not to subvert, the very Foundations of all Religion; mis-leading those that are inclin'd to be its Enemies, from overlooking the Necessity of a God, to the Questioning, if not to the denyal, of his Existence. (135) Of course, even as Boyle argues that nature is nothing more than a descriptive term, he ascribes enormous power to her. He thus betrays the fear that motivates his argument: he is provoked to argue that nature is a term and not a "real Existent Being" by concerns that she might, indeed, be able to undermine "the very Foundations of all Religion." In this passage, Boyle defines the struggle as a contest between a feminized nature (and the "Epicureans" such as Cavendish, who promote "her") and a masculine God; yet, given the larger context of A Free Inquiry, we may also read in this section a fear of the feminine in general undermining male society and the structures (such as Christianity) which maintain masculinist culture.(20) For many of the same reasons that Boyle wishes to preempt "Questioning" and "denyal" of God and "his Existence," he seeks to disallow inquiry into patriarchal authority and the "Tyrannical Government" of the feminine by men. A critical component of Boyle's effort to recast nature as a "Result of Universal Matter" and a secondary effect of God's authority is his characterization of nature as "inanimate" (4). While Boyle's efforts in A Free Inquiry to reduce nature to mere rhetoric are fraught by his concurrent, Baconian efforts to warn against the "real" danger she poses,(21) his attempts to define nature as "Corporeal" and "inanimate" are far more consistent, directed insistently against claims for Nature's being pervaded by animated "Motion."(22) Boyle repeatedly asserts that the world is comprised of "inanimate matter" and functions, for example, "as a Great, and, if I may so speak, Pregnant Automaton, that, like a Woman with Twins in her Womb, or a Ship furnish'd with Pumps, Ordance, etc is such an Engine as comprises, or consists of, several lesser Engines" (81). The associations in this passage are illustrative of Boyle's conceptions of gender and materiality: he likens inanimate matter to a profoundly fertile woman and to an inert mechanical device not, as Cavendish does, to argue that an "Automaton" and a ship might be infused with complexity and animation in a manner similar to a pregnant woman, but to suggest that all three are representations of base matter which participate in a "settled Order, or Course, of things Corporeal." While "incomparably the greater part of the Universe" is comprised of "things Inanimate," man is not implicated directly in the "Local Motion" and "Mechanical Affections" which govern these "Bodies" (81): because Boyle defines man primarily in terms of his spiritual existence and not his corporeality (as he clearly does in the case of women); he exists apart from, and in God-sanctioned control of, the vicissitudes of matter and "Phenomena." By subordinating nature to God and, secondarily, to animate man, Boyle theorizes nature as the site of ever more invasive exploration and as the means for reconstituting man's power and identity by defining him as not-nature that is, not controlled, inanimate, or violated. While Boyle's responses to his "Epicurean" critics are clearly structured by gender-based crises and claims, his efforts to undermine Cavendish's and others' critiques evade explicit analysis of her writings or the specific gender/nature/culture nexus she explores. Instead, Boyle focuses on redefining nature and thereby changing the terms of the debate to exclude Cavendish from dialogues concerning nature and science. By reorienting scientific communication to focus on the semantics of "nature" and the revitalized relationship between God and man against a parasited nature, Boyle works to marginalize Cavendish and her arguments as extraneous to his and the Royal Society's claims, definitions, and motives. By reading her back into the context in which A Free Inquiry was written and published, however, we may see Boyle's work as a far more anxious document intent on reestablishing boundaries and definitions to exclude Cavendish and her radical conception of nature.

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My point in juxtaposing Boyle and Cavendish is not to evaluate the veracity of either's philosophical claims; to pursue such a discussion would impose anachronistic judgments on these debates that would bring us no closer to understanding what motivates and structures their arguments. Neither of their natural philosophies produces fundamentally more stable or certain "truths" about "nature." Just a weak, unruly, and defective nature becomes a means for some writers to constitute and to demonstrate stable and commanding patriarchal authority, Cavendish's ordered, wise, and well-managed nature functions as a means for her to forge and to assert the feminine as masterful, prudent, and controlled. By attending to Cavendish's arguments for a nature of "Infinite Sense and Reason," we may complicate histories of science and nature which narrate the ascendancy of Baconian and Boylean experimentalism and demonstrate instead the contested quality of "nature" in the seventeenth century. As feminist historians and critics of science and culture explore the legacy of Bacon's and Boyle's natural philosophy in contemporary Western science and society, it behooves us to reconsider Cavendish's claims for a science predicated on a radically different "nature"; Cavendish's theories force us to reassess not only how science might be theorized and conducted differently, but to explore how science not founded on male "Perogative," but predicated on coequal interaction between scientist and nature and masculine and feminine, might help reconstitute society, as well. Notes 1. For a fairly recent emergence of these longstanding and oft-repeated misogynist comments, however, see Grant, Margaret the First. 2. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the only work for which she has consistently received praise until recent reconsiderations of her work is her biography of the Duke. Apparently, only when writing in praise of a great man is Cavendish deemed an accomplished author. See Greer's Kissing the Rod for some of her poetry. 3. See my essay, "Exchanging Cultural Capital: Troping Woman in Sidney and Bacon," for late sixteenthcentury hierarchies between poetry over natural philosophy. 4. It is worth noting Cavendish shared scientific ideas (such as her belief in atomism) with members of the Royal Society such as Kenelm Digby and Walter Charleton, who were not accounted as "foolish" as she was. See Grant, Margaret the First. 5. See also Wiseman who similarly characterizes Cavendish's writing as "fantasy" and "fantastical." 6. See also Gallagher's important essay, "Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female subject in Seventeenth-Century England." 7. In this regard, Cavendish follows a classical tradition and, particularly, the work of Lucretius. Her critique of science is informed by her attraction to Epicureanism and reflects her interest in Lucretius' work. Thomas Shadwell, for example, (who counted the Newcastles as his patrons) uses Lucretius as a vehicle to mock the Royal Society in The Virtuoso (1676). 8. See also Shapin, A Social History of Truth, for discussion of the specific codes whereby "truth" was produced and governed. 9. In her move to turn the world upside down, as Sarasohn notes, Cavendish was in keeping with many intellectuals of the time such as Copernicus, Descartes, and Galileo (289). 10. The Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London, 1665), A[4.sup.v]. Subsequent citations are from this edition. 11. Observations on Experimental Philosophy, second edition (London, 1668). First edition printed in 1665/6. Subsequent citations are from the revised second edition, unless otherwise noted. 12. See Godfrey Goodman, The Fall of Man or the Corruption of Nature (London, 1616), for arguments that

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nature represents and produces man's "wants." 13. See Gallagher, "Embracing the Absolute," 24-39. 14. "The Preface to the Reader," The World's Olio, (London, 1655). In this regard Cavendish shares a vocabulary of dissent with Aphra Behn. See "The Golden Age," rpt. The Meridian Anthology of Early Women Writers, 8-14. 15. While I think Schiebinger needlessly and unproductively becomes mired in probing whether Cavendish was a feminist or not, her analysis (with Sarasohn's) is one of the few pieces to address as serious science Cavendish's philosophical claims. See particularly 47-65. 16. Such as Djgby and Charleton who wrote extensively on atomism, another topic which occupied Cavendish, particularly in her early philosophical writings. 17. Even one of the best of recent sociologies of Royal Society knowledge, Shapin's A Social History of Truth, perpetuates a somewhat limited sense of the ways in which knowledge was constructed in the period. While Shapin's book provides a careful and compelling account of how knowledge was policed and, specifically, how gentility served to credit or discredit scientific participants, he does not address adequately the ways in which cultural forces and figures outside the sanctioned bounds established by the Royal Society worked to shape knowledge within the Society, and particularly how figures such as Cavendish, who were sanctioned by gentility (and whose brother-in-law, Charles Cavendish, was a fellow) and yet marginalized by gender, shaped knowledge within the Royal Society. 18. Boyle, Works, 4: 361. Also cited in Keller, 63. See also Markley, 95-130. 19. Also quoted in Schiebinger, 52. 20. This is not to ignore the large body of writings in the seventeenth-century which find affinities between feminism and Christian faith. See Hobby, Virtue of Necessity, 54-75. 21. As Markley notes, Boyle recognizes the contradictions and problems of argument which mark his treatise. See Fallen Languages, 248-49. 22. Unlike A Free Inquiry, Boyle's alchemical writings depend on seeing nature as vital and animate. See Dobbs' The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy and The Janus Faces of Genius. Works Cited Behn, Aphra. "The Golden Age," rpt. The Meridian Anthology of Early Women Writers: British Literary Women from Aphra Behn to Maria Edgeworth 1660-1800. Katherine M. Rogers and William McGarthy, eds. New York: Meridian, 1987. Blaydes, Sophia B. "Nature is a Woman: The Duchess of Newcastle and Seventeenth-Century Philosophy," in Man, God, and Nature in the Enlightenment. Donald C. Mell, Jr., Theodore Braun, and Lucia M. Palmer, eds. East Lansing, MI: Colleagues P, 1988. Boyle, Robert. A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature. London, 1685/6. -----. The Works of Robert Boyle. Thomas Birch, ed. London: A. Millar, 1744. Cavendish, Margaret. A Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World. London, 1666. -----. The Life of the thrice Noble . . . Duke. London, 1667. -----. Observations on Experimental Philosophy. Second edition. London, 1668. First edition printed in 1665/6.

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-----. Philosophical Fancies. London, 1653. -----. The Philosophical and Physical Opinions. London, 1655. -----. The Philosophical and Physical Opinions. Second edition. London, 1665. -----. Playes. London, 1662. -----. Poems, and Fancies. London, 1653. -----. The World's Olio. London, 1655. Dobbs, Betty Jo Tetter. The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy: or, "The Hunting of the greene lyon." Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975. -----. The Janus Faces of Genius: the Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Gallagher, Catherine. "Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England." Genders 1 (1988): 24-39. Goodman, Godfrey. The Fall of Man or the Corruption of Nature. London, 1616. Grant, Dougles. Margaret the First: A Biography of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623-1673. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957. Greer, Germaine, ed. Kissing the Rod: an Anthrology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse. London: Virago, 1988. Hobby, Elaine. Virtue of Necessity: English Women's Writing 1649-1688. London, Virago, 1988. Hooke, Robert. Micrographia (1665). Keller, Evelyn Fox. Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender and Science. New York: Routledge, 1992. Lilley, Kate. "Blazing Worlds" Seventeenth-Century Women's Utopian Writing," in Women, Texts, and Histories 1575-1760. Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss, eds. New York: Routledge, 1992. Markley, Robert. Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993. Merrens, Rebecca. "Exchanging Cultural Capital: Troping Woman in Sidney and Bacon." Genre 25 (1992): 179-192. Payne, Linda R. "Dramatic Dreamscape: Women's Dreams and Utopian Visions in the Work of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, in Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, 16601820, Mary Anne Schofield and Cecelia Macheski, eds. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1991. Sarasohn, Lisa T. "A Science Turned Upside Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish." Huntington Library Quarterly 47 (1984): 289-307. Schiebinger, Londa. The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989. Serres, Michel. Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell, eds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.

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Shadwell, Thomas. The Virtuoso. (1676) Marjorie Hope Nicolson and David Stuart Rodes, eds. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1966. Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. ----- and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. Tomlinson, Sophie. "'My Brain the Stage': Margaret Cavendish and the Fantasy of Female Performance," in Women, Texts, and Histories 1575-1760. Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss, eds. New York: Routledge, 1992. Wiseman, Susan. "Gender and Status in Dramatic Discourse," in Women/Writing/History 1640-1740. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman, eds. London: B. T. Batsford Ltd, 1992. REBECCA MERRENS received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington after completing a research fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She is an Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she teaches courses for the major in Science, Technology, and Culture and for the minor in Women in Science and Technology. She has published essays on the relationship between sixteenth-century science and poetry, and on Restoration tragedy, and is currently at work on a book manuscript that explores the construction of masculinist authority in seventeenth-century tragedy and science. Abstract: The works of 17th century writer Margaret Cavendish are controversial because of her attacks on the assumptions and practices of male-oriented science and her introduction of alternative conceptions of nature and women. Most scholars chose to study her prose, poetry, fiction and plays and ignore her experimental and natural philosophy. An analysis is presented that demonstrates the contributions of Cavendish to the discussion of the theories of infinite matter and absolute materialism. Source Citation Merrens, Rebecca. "A nature of 'infinite sense and reason': Margaret Cavendish's natural philosophy and the 'noise' of a feminized nature." Women's Studies 25.5 (1996): 421+. Academic OneFile. Web. 22 Mar. 2012. Document URL http://go.galegroup.com.vlib.interchange.at/ps/i.do? id=GALE%7CA18775244&v=2.1&u=wash89460&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w Gale Document Number: GALE|A18775244

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