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Margaret Cavendish and composition styleRyan John Stark aa Texas Christian University ,Published online: 21 May 2009.

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RYAN JOHN STARKTexas Christian University

Margaret Cavendish and Composition Style

Margaret Cavendish has been getting more attention recently as acontroversial, prolific, sometimes brilliant, sometimes unintelligible Britishwriter in the latter half of the seventeenth century.1 I approached Cavendish'swritings soon after reading the essays in Reclaiming Rhetorica, and I noticed inmany of her works an intriguing view of composition style. She advocatedconsistently that fancy and adornment were appropriate stylistic ingredients inscientific and historical prose. This is especially surprising in that FrancisBacon, Thomas Hobbes, and Thomas Sprat targeted science and history as areasin which fanciful and elaborate writing styles had no place. The rise of modernexpository prose, with its idea of mimetic disinterestedness, can, in part, betraced back to these well-known calls for stylistic "plainness" and "purity" in theseventeenth century.

Cavendish, however, was not sympathetic to early modern calls for stylisticplainness. She was well read in natural philosophy and had contact with figuressuch as Sprat, Hobbes, Walter Charleton, Rene Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi.Gassendi's critique of Descartes influenced significantly Cavendish's own anti-Cartesian, vitalistic view of nature as an intelligent, self-moving, and purposefulentity, not a set of de-animated corpuscles." In addition, Cavendish followedclosely the meetings of the Royal Society, and she was well aware of theSociety's calls for a plain, nearly mathematical style of composition. Sheattended a meeting in May of 1667, the first woman ever to do so, and herattendance drew strong reactions from several members who disapproved of herscientific speculations, her fanciful writing style, and her elaborate clothing aswell, as Samuel Pepys notes in his dairy (8:243). Undoubtedly, Cavendish'sdecision to write scientific and historical prose in elaborate styles was aninformed decision, and her style should therefore be seen as a form of dissentdirected against her age's escalating positivism.Until recently, Cavendish's writings have been characterized in large part bytheir excesses, including their proliferating and extravagant stylistic qualities, acharacterization that began in her own time. As Henry Perry suggests in his1918 dissertation on Cavendish, "the Duchess's lack of restraint in writing was

264 Rhetoric Review, Vol. 17. No. 2, Spring 1999

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Margaret Cavendish and Composition Style 265

noticed by her contemporaries, and she was very justly criticized for anexuberant fancy in need of formal repression" (234). More recently, JamesFitzmaurice notes that Cavendish's elaborate prose has contributed to a typicalrepresentation that she was a "harmless eccentric" who wrote more "for her ownentertainment" and less for reasons of cultural criticism (Sociable Letters xxi).Lisa Sarasohn, Sylvia Bowerbank, Rebecca Merrens, John Rogers, and others3

have investigated Cavendish's outspoken views on politics, gender, and naturalphilosophy, and have dispelled the idea that she was a harmless eccentric. Lessattention, however, has been given to Cavendish's philosophy of style. Toreexamine Cavendish's style as a strategic form of philosophical dissent adds anexciting new dimension to her writings and to debates about seventeenth-centurystyle broadly conceived, dimensions warranting more careful examination byscholars in rhetoric and composition studies. To this end, the following is apreliminary investigation into Cavendish's style.

A Note on The Royal Society's Plain Style Mandate

In order to appreciate Cavendish's style, we need to examine some of thecontroversies and implications surrounding early modern calls for stylisticpurity. One of the more famous of these calls was the Royal Society's, and moreso than any other stylistic imperative, Cavendish's philosophy of style wasresponding to the climate supporting the Royal Society's call for a style thatmirrored the plain, disinterested laws of the universe "discovered" by earlymodern science.

In productive ways contemporary historians of rhetoric have politicized theissue of style in early modern rhetoric more so than the generations of scholarsbehind them. When placed in the context of Renaissance and Enlightenmentviews of gender, class structure, and cosmological and religious controversy,traditional and often narrowly academic notions of plain and elaborate styles(e.g., Senecan plainness and neo-Ciceronian eloquence) become far morecomplicated. Renato Barilli, Brian Vickers, Debora Shuger, Adam Potkay, andWayne Rebhorn have all shown that "style" in early modern rhetoric was aculturally loaded term used to discuss philosophical differences more so than itwas used to discuss diction. In many contexts in the seventeenth century,elaborate writing styles were charged with the connotations of impropriety,enthusiasm, and irrationality. Complaints about "inappropriate" compositionstyles must be conceived of as philosophical arguments, and this is certainly thecase regarding Sprat and the Royal Society's arguments for "primitive purity" asa response to the "amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style" that havecreated "many mists and uncertainties" in "our Knowledge" (112-13).

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Lisa Ede, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford suggest that calls for"primitive purity" in the seventeenth century contributed significantly to "theexclusion of women from the rhetorical scene" in that "women, with theirinferior reason and their involvement in the stylish, the embodied, the material,"were considered to be ill equipped "to attain such rigorous rationality" and"clarity" in style (422). Sprat's association between elaborate styles and "mists"intensified the already negative and longstanding cultural correlation betweenwomen's writing and costume and adornment. Calls for "purity" in styledamaged the idea of women's writing in that such writing was thought to be inan a priori sense more decorative, which meant that it was less pure, reasonable,and epistemically viable. Such calls for plainness became an imperative againstthe "mists" of the "feminine" imagination, and thjs implication thrives in thecommon early modern trope personifying excessiveness in style as animmoderately dressed woman. C. Jan Swearingen notices a key shift from thetwelfth- and thirteenth-century representations of "lady rhetoric" as a championto sixteenth- and seventeenth-century representations of "lady rhetoric," that is,lady delivery and style in many cases, as a gaudy "harlot" (228-31). Thepersonification of style as a harlot was a standard image in the criticism ofrhetoric in the middle part of the seventeenth century, the general time frame ofCavendish's authorship and of the Royal Society's ascendance.

In addition to having damaging implications for gender, the calls for"primitive purity" in style had damaging implications for the working classes.The "unrestrained" verbal habits and gestures of the lower classes were oftencharacterized as monstrous threats to social order. For example, Thomas Wilsonwarns the rhetorician against the "Ruffine maners" of lower-class speech andgesture, undisciplined "maners" that were conceptualized as mass culturedistortions of classical eloquence (138). Henry Peacham's connection between"vulgar" kinds of elaborate styles and the "wilderness," with all of its colonialimplications, is another example of this early modern distinction between the"untamed" eloquence of the marginalia and the nurtured eloquence of upper-class discourse, eloquence cultivated in Peacham's Garden of Eloquence. ThisRenaissance anxiety over the "undisciplined" verbal styles of the lower classesevolved into an Enlightenment preoccupation with restraint in writtenexpressions. Potkay, for example, suggests that "because the figures and actionsof the ancient orators" had been "debased among the gestures and behaviors ofthe lower orders, "Hume, Smith, and other Enlightenment thinkers called for anew "demeanor and standard" of discourse organized around the concept of"self-restraint," a characteristic, as Smith argued, that the "rabble" had notacquired (88). This connection between restraint in prose style, or what Barillidiscusses as "austerity" in style (80), and upper-class good taste eventually

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evolved into a connection between correctness and good taste, or good breeding,through subsequent current-traditional rhetorics. We only need to examineAdam Smith's fervent emphasis upon correct pronunciation and "appropriate"expression (versus overly figurative expression) to see how social propriety andupper-class plainness in style became inextricably linked in the eighteenthcentury.

The Royal Society's emphasis upon stylistic plainness is an early butpowerful example of the emerging enlightenment decorum of self-restraint andpropriety, but to what extent was the Royal Society's mandate intended to beasocial mandate? What was the target for stylistic purity? These questions haveled to strong disagreements about how broadly the Royal Society's stylisticimperative should be interpreted. Most historians of rhetoric acknowledge thatthe Royal Society's plain style mandate was not a "universal mandate" in anexplicit or uncomplicated way. For example, elaborate styles in poetry andpoetics continued to flourish under the Royal Society's mandate, and the reasonwas that poetry and poetics were seen largely as endeavors aimed toward thefaculties of imagination and fancy, not judgment. Barilli, however, is careful tonote that ideas of "verisimilitude and control" (ideas initiated a century earlierby Ludovico Castelvetro) began to dominate the notion of macropoetic structurein the enlightenment, and so the appropriateness of "elaborate style" inEnlightenment poetry was "limited to defining the texture" of a poetic discourse,and not the deeper structure (79-81). The emphasis upon a plain style, in otherwords, filtered into concepts of order in ways that were not always obvious,expected, or even intended.

Recommending a more restrictive view of the Royal Society's target forstylistic purity, Vickers suggests that the plain style controversies in earlymodern rhetoric have been misconstrued by historians of rhetoric, for exampleR. F. Jones, Morris Croll, Francis Christensen, because few of them haveunderstood properly the Royal Society's purpose. Sprat, Vickers claims, targetedthe plain style mandate exclusively at the writing of science (3-15). "Everyonewill agree," Vickers states, that the banning of "rhetorical flourishes" is "aproper rule for scientific papers"(14). Cavendish, of course, is a prominentdissenter on this point of seemingly universal agreement in Vickers' argument.She does not agree with banning "rhetorical flourishes," even in the strictcontext of scientific prose, and also in other discourses aimed predominatelytoward the faculty of judgment (e.g., history); this is why Cavendish'sphilosophy of style is such a provocative counterstatement in the seventeenthcentury. Regardless of Cavendish's dissent, Vickers' attempt to show that theRoyal Society's plain style mandate was directed exclusively toward scientificprose is betrayed in large part by Sprat's own remarks about the importance of

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the plain style. When Sprat argues that "eloquence" or "swellings of style . . .ought to be banish'd out of all civil Societies, as a thing fatal to Peace and GoodManners," his critique extends beyond scientific discourse and into a socialarena where "swellings of style" indicate a breach of "Good Manners" in civilsociety (111-13). We see in Sprat's remarks evidence that calls for plain styleswere part of an emerging enlightenment view of social etiquette. Sprat'sconnection between swollen styles and bad manners harkens back to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century anxieties about excessive styles and social discord.Importantly, Sprat's explicit connection between swellings of style and culturaldisharmony reveals his and the Royal Society's social (versus restrictivelyscientific) rationale behind stylistic purity.

Bishop John Wilkins' Essay Towards a Real Character and a PhilosophicLanguage, 1668, illustrates another complication for arguments that the plainstyle mandate was intended exclusively for scientific prose. Wilkins, a foundingmember of the Royal Society, argued for a plain style of religious discourse thatcarried the epistemic force of scientific plainness. Wilkins sought thephilosophical promise of seeing things "in themselves," without theencumbrance of ambiguous expression. Such a promise led Wilkins, andArchbishop Fenelon as well (Dialogues on Eloquence), to view the plain style asappropriate for the pursuit of both religious and scientific truth. The enthusiasmfor the plain style was an enthusiasm for the idea of epistemic certainty, an ideathat reached well beyond the scientific arena in the latter half of the seventeenthcentury, and so it should not be surprising that various endeavors, religious,poetic, political, etc., wanted to be linked to stylistic purity because of itsepistemic implications.

These complex associations among the Royal Society's plain style mandateand early modern social and cosmological conflicts help us to appreciate thetumultuous environment in which Cavendish argued for elaborate styles. Givenher status as an aristocrat, Cavendish's style violated the arising Enlightenmentdecorum of restraint, and so, undoubtedly, some of the responses againstCavendish's style, however indirectly, involved her transgression of classexpectations. Obviously and more directly, her gender played a profound role inthe devaluation of her stylistic choices, and she was often dismissed as a womancapable only of "scientific fashioning," as opposed to serious scientific inquiry.In religious and cosmological terms, Cavendish's disagreements with several ofthe ideas "discovered" by the "light" of the new science, especially her quarrelwith Descartes' de-animation of the material world (and, by implication, de-animation of style), placed her on the "superstitious" side of early moderncosmology. In short, Cavendish's opposition to calls for stylistic plainness was adisagreement over the very methods by which philosophers justified their

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Margaret Cavendish and Composition Style 269

knowledge of the universe and of society. Her views on style were responding tothis axiomatic struggle over how prose style "embodied" existence, quiteliterally, and in order to approach this question, as Cavendish does over the spanof her authorship, the nature of existence, that is, the nature of nature, history,and society must be investigated.

Cavendish's Philosophy of Style

One of the more extensive discussions of Cavendish's writing careercontinues to be Perry's The First Duchess of Newcastle and Her Husband. Perryargues that Cavendish's biography of her husband, her only sustained piece ofcomposition in the plain style, is "easily the best" of her works, and he spendsmost of the book gently criticizing Cavendish's "lack of artistic regulation"(171, 264). Interestingly, however, the plain style becomes a source ofcontroversy in the biography's own preface, and this is a good place to beginexamining Cavendish's views on style.

In the preface to The Life of William Cavendish, the duchess relates adisagreement she has with her husband about the biography's style:

I said again that rhetoric did adorn truth: and he answered, thatrhetoric was fitter for falsehoods than truths. Thus I was forced byhis Grace's commands, to write this history in my own plain style,without elegant flourishings, or exquisite method, relying entirelyupon truth, in the expressing whereof, I have been very circumspect,(xxxix)

The relationship between rhetoric and "truth" remains ambiguous in the passageand reveals the tenuous grounds upon which the idea of rhetoric existed inseventeenth-century discussions about truth and historical prose. Even in itsstate of being limited to the cannon of style, that is, "elegant flourishings" and"exquisite method," rhetoric, for Margaret, is a key part of presenting history.For William, however, "rhetoric" is "fitter for falsehoods than truths." In thespirit of Hobbes, William suggests that "elegant flourishings" obfuscate thepresentation of historical knowledge. Importantly, Margaret conveys that thestylistic decision of the biography is not her own. She tells us that the duke must"force" and "command" her to write in a plain style, and this suggests that shewould rather write in a more elaborate style.

Cavendish's subsequent explanation of what she would do if given thefreedom to write in any style raises questions about whether or not she believesthe plainly written historical biography accomplishes what a more stylistically

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diverse biography might accomplish. She continues in the preface by saying thatalthough people "applaud very much several histories for their elegant style,"and although people set "a high value upon feigned orations," she will doneither, and she will not "endeavor to make show of eloquence"; furthermore,she will not write "in a mystical and allegorical style" (xxxix, xli). In addition,she will not depend upon her "fancy" for inspiration (xli). Cavendishsummarizes, "Thus I am resolved to write, in a natural plain style, without Latinsentences, moral instructions, or political designs" (xli). Ethics and politics havebeen disconnected from her biography, a book destined to be a fine example of"objective," expository writing.

In this passage Cavendish uses the rhetorical technique of paralepsis to talkabout (by not talking about) what is missing from the work. Paralepsis is thefigure of speech used to emphasize something by intentionally seeming to pass itover. In a clever way, Cavendish calls into serious question the plain style in thepreface to her most substantial text written in a plain style. By pointing out thethings that will not be in her biography, Cavendish makes us feel like many ofthe interesting points of discussion, the politics, the moral instructions, thepassionate orations, the mystical insights, have been drained from the biographybecause of this pressure she feels to write in a plain style. The implication is thatthe plain style cannot capture the richness and complexity of the duke's life, orof history more broadly defined. Elegant flourishings, for the duchess, arenecessary concomitants to the presentation of history, history that is not as clearand as politically and morally disinterested as the plain style implies.

The historical biography was published late in Cavendish's career. Early inher career, she began to theorize and justify her desire to use excessive styles. Inher first book, Poems and Fancies, she makes an important connection betweenstyle and nature's abundant structures:

Give Mee the Free, and Noble Stile,Which seems uncurb 'd, though it be wild . . .Give me a stile that Nature frames, not Art:For Art doth seem to take the Pedants part. (110)

We see in this passage the beginnings of an empirical appeal for the use of a"wild" style that nature itself "frames" or generates. The suggestion is that acertain kind of style complements nature's "wild" framework. Importantly, likethe Port Royalist group and the Royal Society, Cavendish theorizes a style thatmight facilitate the study of nature. Departing noticeably from newly scientificmodels, however, Cavendish sees nature's structures as elaborate and wild, not

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neatly mechanistic and predictable. A plain composition style is not fullyequipped to engage the wide range of natural phenomena she observes.

Cavendish does not advocate an excessive composition style in an effort topreserve notions of classical eloquence. She is quick to distance her interest in"wild" or "florid" eloquence from more traditional conceptions of eloquence,the "Pendants" eloquence, or what Croll, W. S. Howell, and others discuss as the"neo-Ciceronian" style in early-modern England. Whereas neo-Ciceronianeloquence is based upon a long tradition of rhetoric from which Cavendish wasmarginalized, the "natural" eloquence that Cavendish theorizes is based uponthe direct observation of nature's "wild" patterns. In Orations of Divers Sorts,the duchess continues this line of argument for a "naturally" elaborate style bysuggesting that people who prefer classical notions of eloquent style "preferArtificial Connexions before Natural Eloquence" and "Old Authors before NewTruths" (12-14). Cavendish makes an empirical argument in a Baconian spirit byjustifying elaborate styles via the direct investigations of nature—not the"Artificial Connexions" of history. The tone of Francis Bacon's Advancement ofLearning, a text Cavendish knew, resonates most notably in the duchess'complaints against "Old Authors."

Cavendish boldly claims that her "wild" style complements rather thanobscures nature's designs. In the context of the Royal Society's plain stylemandate and the Port Royalist's call for transparency in style, such stylisticexcessiveness had the exact opposite implication of obscuring nature's plainstructures. In addition, as suggested earlier, the relationship between style and"the wild" was a pejorative cultural trope used to indicate a kind of lower-classintemperance, or barbaric immoderation. Cavendish's call for a "wild" style thatwas not like classical eloquence violated both the spirit of scientific expositionand the broader cultural trope associating the wilderness with the forces of socialdisorder. Cavendish's "wilderness" was not the unproblematically dangerousplace that it was in the context of the predominant culture. In fact, herwilderness, and the wild style derived there in, maintains a kind of vibrant andcreative energy, an energy we hear in the tone of her petition: "Give Mee theFree, and Noble Stile."

The tension between excessive and plain styles in natural philosophy, forCavendish, becomes a struggle over how prose should embody the "nature" ofnature, and this speaks to important dissections between Cavendish's vision ofnature's order and the Royal Society's vision of nature's order. Cavendish doesnot travel the route of Cartesian rationalism and reduce nature to a set ofmechanisms. The duchess conceives of nature as an animate and interrelatedentity, a living intelligence. As such, Cavendish views nature as "irreducible," orwhat she describes as nature's "infinite matter, motion and figure," a dynamic

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description intended to indicate God's "limitless" and "mysterious" creativity(The Philosophical and Physical Opinions 204-06). Bowerbank establishesconvincingly the themes of irreducibility and interrelatedness in Cavendish'scosmology by tracing out the duchess's frequent uses of the web metaphor, ametaphor marking Cavendish's natural philosophy with a "vital connectiveness"(396-400).4

In one of the more unusual parables in her scientific writings, Cavendishillustrates her view of nature as vital and irreducible. The parable comes in asection of Philosophical and Physical Opinions titled "Restoring-beds orWombs," and it begins with the duchess imagining the center and the origin ofthe universe: "The Center of the whole Universe, was the Sea, and in the centerof the Sea was a small Island; and in the Center of the Island, was a Creature"(3O8).The image encourages the reader to expect yet another level of specificityin the spirit of scientific classification, but Cavendish complicates the regress ofcenters within centers by describing the creature as being like

a great and high Rock: Not that this Rock was Stone; but, it was ofsuch a nature, (by the natural Compositions of parts) that it wascompounded of Parts of all the principle Kinds and Sorts of theCreatures of this World, viz. Of Elemental, Animal, Mineral andVegetable kinds: and, being of such a nature, did produce out ofitself, all kinds and sorts of Restoring-Beds. (308-09)

This is not the sort of scientific description that the Royal Society encouraged.The image is one of infinite vitality. The "Creature" in the center of theuniverse, far from resembling a collection of first principles or algorithms, is amysterious and proliferating hodgepodge of creativity. In this passageCavendish frustrates the scientific hope of reducing nature to its core principles,a hope embodied in the plain style dogma of mimetic exposition. The rationalebehind Cavendish's own stylistic experimentations begins to take shape. Ratherthan obscuring nature's "order," her elaborate account of this fantastic creatureis a conscious effort to enact nature's complexity and vitality. The image of thecreature is one of philosophical dissent directed against the reductionism thatshe hints at as she moves us toward increasing levels of specificity. The levels ofreduction, however, collapse at the moment we encounter the pluralistic collageof restoring-beds in the middle of the universe.

In many respects, this passage about the mysterious creature in the middleof the universe is typical of Cavendish's scientific speculations, including thepassage's style. In addition to its subjective, imaginative ethos, it contains asurprising twist that complicates, or even transgresses, a commonly held cultural

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trope. In this case, the expectation of arrival at a core image, or core equation inGalileo's sense of nature's book, is frustrated by an image of, and a stylisticenactment of, the irreducible. Importantly, however, the passage is organizedaround the ideas of classification and division, both of which exist under abroader taxonomy. Cavendish's scientific style should not be taken as a kind ofproto-stream-of-consciousness prose, a description better reserved for passagesin Utopian writings such as The Blazing World. The standard activities ofclassification, division, and taxonomy, in fact, exist in the vast majority of theduchess's scientific writings, including her discussions about science in herletters. She changes her style when she addresses scientific topics in her letters,and this alone suggests that her scientific style is purposeful, although not"clear" when set against the backdrop of the Royal Society's expectations.While none of Cavendish's letters on scientific topics has the mathematical rigorof an example such as Copernicus's letters, her scientific letters quite often dotake the form of scientific "essays in the tradition of Bacon," as Fitzmauricedescribes (xii), essays in which she subdivides and classifies in the spirit ofscientific taxonomy. The cultural tension arises when the revisionary content ofher taxonomies contradicts the principles of the new science.

We see an interesting example of this tension in Letter 199 of the SociableLetters, a letter in which she creates a domestic version (a domestic taxonomy)of the same general cosmological speculation involving the mysterious"Creature" in the middle of the universe. The setting is an imaginary "Banquetof Wit" at which philosophers gather to discuss the order of the universe, or the"order of things," to borrow Michel Foucault's book title. Cavendish rearrangesthe order of things at this banquet in an effort to question the order of variousdisciplines. The main dish in the middle of the table, the middle of the universeby analogy, is an "Infinite Hash, and Infinite deal of Meat" dressed with "Diversand Different Compounds and Ingredients, as the four elements, and all mannerof Vegetable and Minerals" (214). After establishing the mysterious hodgepodgeof material in the middle of the table, Cavendish arranges disciplines in relationto the "Infinite Hash." To begin, she mentions natural philosophy, and shecontinues her atypical taxonomy with the

Grand Sallet of Rhetorick, with Oyl of Eloquence, also abagpudding of Sciences, made of Mathematical Cream, LogisticalEggs, and Astronomical Spices, which were Strewed as Thick as thestars oftheSkie. (214)

Possibly the most striking element of Cavendish's domestic taxonomy is herassociation between a frothy dessert item and several of the disciplines most

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clearly associated with the search for epistemic stability and clarity, that is,mathematics, logic, and astronomy. When we compare Cavendish's associationbetween the sciences and a dessert pudding with a similar kind of metaphor inAbraham Cowley's laudatory "Ode to the Royal Society," the transgression of acommonly held trope becomes even more apparent. Cowley, poet to the RoyalSociety, explains that while the good student feeds on the "solid meats" of thenew sciences, the bad student eats too many of the "Desserts of Poetry" andother discourses that create "painted Scenes, and Pageants of the Brain" (448).These dessert items, these decorative stylistic achievements, give pleasure, butnot sustenance, to the intellect.

By aligning the dessert item in her taxonomy with mathematics, logic, andastronomy, Cavendish implies that science is not as "solid" in its content as herculture assumes. Like the passage about the pluralistic "Creature" in the middleof the universe, Cavendish's image of scientific "bagpudding" destablizes theearly enlightenment hope for arrival at static foundations, and for a foundationalstyle. In the broader context of her domestic taxonomy, the "Grand Sallet ofRhetorick" and the sciences are complementary, not contradictory, itemssurrounding the mysterious pot roast in the middle of the table. Cavendish'spositive representation of rhetoric as it relates to the investigation of nature iscertainly unusual; the predominant attitude, articulated so well by Sprat,Cowley, Locke, and others, characterized rhetoric as a disruptive force inscientific inquiry, not as a "Grand Sallet."

Without a doubt, Cavendish's speculations about the giant creature and thegiant pot roast in the middle of the universe are strange, but the spirit ofCavendish's alternative cosmological descriptions is not as idiosyncratic as itmay seem. Underlying Cavendish's cosmology are the key ideas of vitality,irreducibility, plurality, and relationship, and such ideas are not withoutprecedent in Cavendish's context. Cavendish's cosmology is most oftenassociated with the influence of Gassendi, especially Gassendi's interest inepicurean atomism (e.g., see Sarasohn). Gassendi's defense of a living, self-moving atom appealed to Cavendish's own interest in a vitalistic view of thematerial world, with style, for Cavendish, acting as a part of that embodying,corporeal world. Ultimately, however, Cavendish abandons atomism forpolitical reasons, much like Charleton abandoned atomism,5 because atomismbecame associated with a radical egalitarianism (each atom being equal) thatundercut the aristocracy. Behind Cavendish's atomism, however, is a muchdeeper philosophical commitment to a vitalistic view of the material world. Therecurring theme in Cavendish's cosmology, both during and after atomism, is abelief in what she terms in the Philosophical Letters as nature's "animatematter" and "corporeal self-motion" ("Letter 33"), an idea that Gassendi, and

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Pythagoras for that matter, conceptualized as a "world soul" of sorts. Althoughindebted to Gassendi's arguments against Descartes' blind corpuscles (and, byimplication, Descartes' "dead" style), her cosmology is best understood as a partof a much broader tradition of vitalistic cosmology involving additional figureslike Giordano Bruno and the young Johannes Kepler. Bruno, an influence uponGassendi, argued that the universe was a living and infinitely extended creaturefull of innumerable worlds (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, 1584), animage similar to the giant creature brimming with restoring-beds in Cavendish'scosmology. Bruno, like Cavendish, criticized the "lovely little elegacies" ofRenaissance eloquence and favored a more "natural" style (74), but Bruno,unlike Cavendish, did not develop an extensive philosophy of style.

When we look at Cavendish's stylistic elaborations as a form of dissent, thepassages on restoring-beds and logistical eggs, and the striking paralepsis in thepreface to her husband's biography (like many other passages in her works),must be read as purposeful critiques of nature as sketched by the discourses ofthe new science. Cavendish's elaborate passages are clever protests against theidea of a composition style mirroring the clear and distinct, foundational ideasdiscovered through Cartesian rationalism, or the "primary ideas" discoveredthrough the emerging British empiricism, ideas made famous by John Locke'sphilosophy.6 For both Descartes and Locke, style is an afterthought, quiteliterally, in that "style" becomes a "dress of thought" for knowledge that existsindependently of language. The radical mind/body split in Cartesianmetaphysics, in particular, is a critical departure (but an overlooked departure)in modernity regarding style. Style becomes "dead" ornamentation, deadmaterial, worn by the life of the mind. Cavendish's unwillingness to de-animatethe material world, to devalue the linguistic embodiment of life (that is, style), isthe central cosmological rational behind her elaborate styles. The Cartesiandistinction between style and substance is for Cavendish untenable, if for noother reason, because it creates a dissociated corporeal world. Style, forCavendish, is not an afterthought, not a mere "dress" of thought, but the livingembodiment of thought. From a point of view more sympathetic to Cavendish'sstyle, we, along with Cavendish, might argue that her scientific style does notimpede nature's clarity as much as it tries to enact nature's vitality andcomplexity, nature's "life," a concept just as mysterious at the end of the ourcentury as it was at the end of the seventeenth century.

Scientific Fashioning, or the Science and Superstition of Style

By disregarding the plain style mandate, Cavendish brought upon herselfthe reputation of being a "scientific fashioner." Perry's explanation behind

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Cavendish's excessive scientific prose offers insight into the broader socialcontext surrounding her reputation for fashioning science:

The Duke in common with many men of his day felt a genuineinterest in scientific investigation, but the feminine mind of his wifecould grasp only the external trappings of such research. For thislack of rational power she unconsciously substituted an overactiveimagination. (188)

Among other things, "external trappings" is a derogatory reference to style, andthe standard dichotomy of style and substance emerges. Perry conceives ofCavendish's excessive style as a compensation for a feminine defect, that is, a"lack of rational power." We see in his remarks an early twentieth-centurycontinuation of John Locke's argument that "eloquence, like the fair sex," isbetter suited to entertain than to engage in thoughtful inquiry (508). In line withthe vast majority of responses to Cavendish's writings, Perry resorts to thecommon trope of explaining her stylistic excesses as a feminine failure.7

Because "the feminine mind" of the duchess could not comprehend scientificfact, as Perry speculates, Cavendish engaged in a kind of scientific fashioning.

The argument that Cavendish "fashioned" science certainly did not begin inthe twentieth century. Cavendish's reputation for scientific fashioningcontributed to the controversy surrounding one of her more famous, orinfamous, appearances. On May 30, 1667, Cavendish attended a meeting of theRoyal Society. Well before the official formation of the society, however,Cavendish studied science in England and on the continent, and so she certainlydid not attend the group's meeting as an uninformed onlooker. Several scholarshave offered accounts of the meeting, and most have used Samuel Pepys' diaryentry as a point of departure.8 What Pepys records so well about Cavendish'svisit to the Royal Society's meeting is how she intensified the social nature ofthe gathering by making it a "fashionable" affair, and this explicit combinationof self-fashioning and serious science evoked a strong tone of disapproval inPepys' entry. He describes the duchess as being "full of admiration, alladmiration" for the experiments performed by Robert Boyle, among otherscientists (8:243). In addition, and supporting his assessment of Cavendish'sshallow behavior, Pepys mentions the "great pomp" of her arrival and theexcessive and "antick" nature of her clothing, both of which cause him toannounce, "I do not like her at all" (8:243). Pepys' complaints about the "pomp"surrounding Cavendish, including her clothing, are a clear effort to invoke thecommon trope characterizing the feminine mind as preoccupied with flattery andornament, not reason and serious science. Pepys' characterization is certainly a

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critique of Cavendish's scientific fashioning, including her scientific style. Hisdiary, in fact, suggests that Cavendish was all fashion and no substance.

Ideas of "self-fashioning" were an integral part of the early modern mind-set, as Stephen Greenblatt has shown, but the idea of scientific fashioningcontradicted the very premise of the new science. Nature*s Pictures, to use oneof Cavendish's book titles, were not for the new scientist Drawn by Fancy'sPencil. For Cavendish, however, even the scientist (and scientific style)"fashioned nature" to a certain extent in that the scientist's imagination andfancy could not be dissociated from scientific observation.9 In an importantsense, Cavendish's approach to scientific style was driven by the assumptionthat the individual observer was an "interested" part of the experiment. Thisassumption becomes clear in her critiques of the microscope and the telescope,which were critiques of the philosophical disinterestedness behind theinstruments and not of the instruments themselves. She calls the microscope andtelescope "artificial informer[s]" in that their accepted uses "misshape" the"natural figure" of existence (Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy 24-26). The telescope, more so than the microscope, was used in the early moderntrope of "telescoping a life into a fable," which implied a necessary reduction forpractical reasons, but scientific telescoping, and scientific microscoping, asCavendish reminds us in her critiques, admitted to no reduction; rather, thescientist saw these instruments, like the instrument of the plain style, asdisinterested "discoverers" of a reality that could be understood independentlyof subjectivity. In order to counter this hope for disinterestedness, Cavendishabandons the possibility of a neutral, personless language that simply deliversreality. Her imaginative style, therefore, takes on powerfully creativecharacteristics that had been divorced from notions of style by both Ramisticdialectic and newly scientific methodology.

Louis Milic suggests in "The Problem of Style" that an important shiftoccurred in the Renaissance regarding notions of individuality and style, andstyle started to be understood as an indicator of "peculiar temperament" (276-77). Milic's analysis, however, focuses upon literary style, not scientific style.Early modern scientific style strived toward universality and detachment, not"peculiar temperament," with Cavendish serving as an interesting exception.The apex of the association between individuality and literary style can be seenin conceptions of the Romantic genius's particularity of expression. Although itis problematic to call Cavendish "Romantic," especially given hercomplementary view of science and literature, her association between style andsubjectivity is forward-looking and distinguishes her from writers such as Donneand Thomas Browne, writers who also criticized the scientific influence onprose style, but they did so while looking back toward a scholastic literary and

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scientific tradition. Unlike Donne's lament that "all coherence" is "gone"because of the new science, Cavendish welcomes the spirit of newly scientificinquiry; she simply disagrees with key ideas reached by the new science,including the idea of disinterested exposition.10 Cavendish was too conscious ofthe impossibility of separating subjectivity and methodology to believe in theidea of the plain style mandate. Werner Heisenberg, in this century, implicatedthe scientific observer as an active participant when he said famously that "wemust become conscious of the fact that we are not merely observers but alsoactors on the stage of life" (446). As Pepys testifies so vividly in his diary, theduchess knew very well that she was an actor on the stage of life, and thisincluded the stage of science.

Cavendish's controversial fusion between self-fashioning and seriousscience caused Walter Charleton to view her as a "superstitious" writer, andeven as a sorcerer. Superstition is commonly defined as acting against or inignorance of the laws of nature. This is a particularly complicated term in thecontext of scientific revolution, or in the context of multiculturalism as well. Theissue in relation to Cavendish is whether or not her excessive style demonstrateda misunderstanding of the laws of nature. Is Cavendish's scientific stylesuperstitious?

Charleton certainly understood Cavendish's scientific style to indicate amisunderstanding of genuine science. Charleton, the future president of theCollege of Physicians and a member of the Royal Society, gently but quiteseriously associates Cavendish's writings with a kind of sorcery. Aftermentioning the great philosophy and "Mathematiques of Galileo," Charletonlikens Cavendish's "Natural Philosophy" to "the pronouncements of Oracles"(110-11). The Royal Society's aggressive opposition to the widely popularastrology of the day allows Charleton's association between Cavendish andesoteric divination to strike an immediately negative cord: Cavendish is locatedon the astrology side of the pervasive and politically charged tension betweenastrology and science in seventeenth-century England. Charleton continues byaddressing the duchess directly: "Your Descriptions, Expressions, Similes,Allegories, Metaphors, Numbers, all flow in upon you of their own accord, andin full tides" (115). The image of language flowing in upon the duchess recallsimages of the bacchic maids in Plato's Ion. The "full tides" of Cavendish'seloquence become a dangerous and indeterminate form of inspiration. Charletonuses "full tides" to identify the moon's power, accompanied by the connotationsof lunacy and mysterious magic, as the source of Cavendish's excessive style.He figures Cavendish as a sorcerer, and this becomes dramatically clear when headds finally that the "divine Fury" of Cavendish's compositions shows that she

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must have been transported like "the Witches . . . washed above the Clouds onthe wings of their Familiars" (115).

Undoubtedly, Charleton's critique indicates a fear of feminine creativepower, and the standard early-modern trope of equating sorcery with femininecreativity arises. Contemporary characterizations of feminine styles as somehowmysterious and irrational, characterizations exploited by Helene Cixous, reveal asimilar kind of twentieth-century cultural tension regarding the relationshipbetween gender and style. Charleton's critique of Cavendish's superstitious stylecertainly verifies that many debates about style were debates about broadercultural issues more so than they were about diction in a narrowly defined sense.Her style is the primary evidence supporting Charleton's argument that she is asorcerer. The newly scientific mentality, as represented by Charleton, banishesto the island of "low science" and superstition the oracles, astrologers, othersuch diviners, and writers who use excessive styles in the composition ofscience.

Not surprisingly, Cavendish's stylistic "indiscretions" damaged herreputation as a writer. Many of Cavendish's contemporaries and many scholarsin the history of English Studies viewed her excesses in style as examples of badform set against the backdrop of her age's expectations. Her proliferating stylebecame an indication to many that she lacked reason, restraint, and propriety. Toreexamine Cavendish's stylistic choices as a form of dissent directed against thephilosophical underpinnings of early-modern calls for plainness complicates andenriches her work. I am not suggesting, however, that Cavendish's writingsappear anew as brilliant, forgotten masterpieces. Her writings are uneven,sometimes brilliant, sometimes mediocre, and sometimes confusing. Regardless,her work has awaited the poststructural and postmodern critiques of the idea of apurely disinterested style that simply reflects the progression of history and thenature of reality.

Notes1I thank the staff of the Bodleian Library for enabling me to examine several of Cavendish's

manuscripts. I also thank Don Abbott and Thomas Willard, the reviewers for Rhetoric Review, fortheir helpful advice on earlier drafts of this essay.

2Gassendi's full-fledged critique of Descartes' metaphysics appears in his DisquisitioMetaphysica of 1644 and is by many standards the most comprehensive critique of Descartes by acontemporary. One of Gassendi's concerns, a concern which influenced Cavendish (PhilosophicalLetters, "Letter VIII"), involves Descartes' de-animation of the material world as a result of hismind/body split.

3Fitzmaurice provides a list of sources on Cavendish (Sociable Letters xxiv-xxv).Complementing Bowerbank, Merrens credits Cavendish with articulating a "feminized nature"

of interrelatedness.5See Nina Rattner Gelbart's "The Intellectual Development of Walter Charleton."

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6For Chaïm Perelman, the collapse of the Cartesian notion of "clear and distinct ideas" (and wemust add the collapse of the stylistic implications behind this notion) is a key reason for theresurgence of rhetoric in the twentieth century (The New Rhetoric 3-4).

7In the case of someone like G. W. Leibniz, baroque elaboration was forgivable, or evenappropriate. Cavendish's gender amplified the negative connotations of her elaborate prose;"unclear" passages became examples of how the "female" imagination overshadowed reason.

8See Samuel Mintz's "The Duchess of Newcastle's Visit to the Royal Society" and MarjorieNicolson's "Mad Madge and The Wits."

9"Fancy" for Hobbes is the faculty responsible for embellishing style and the faculty mostsuited to "rhetoric" (Leviathan, Chapter 8). Fancy is not a desired element in scientific inquiry. ForSprat, "Fancy disgust[s] the best things" in science (112).

l0This notion of disinterested exposition in science inspired the hope for such disinterestednessbeyond science in the eighteenth century, e.g., deism, Enlightenment aesthetics, Adam Smith'seconomics, Pierre Laplace's cosmology.

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Renaissance 14.3 (1984): 392-408.Bruno, Giordano. Cause, Principle, and Unity. Trans. Jack Lindsay. New York: International, 1964.Cavendish, Margaret. Grounds of Natural Philosophy Divided into Thirteen Parts. London: A

Maxwell, 1668.Life of William Cavendish. Ed. C. H. Firth. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1906.Nature's Picture Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life. 2nd ed. London: A. Maxwell, 1671.Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, to which is added The Description of a Blazing

World. London: A. Maxwell, 1666.Orations of Divers Sorts, Accommodated to Divers Places. 2nd ed. London: A. Maxwell, 1668.Philosophical Letters. London, 1664.Philosophical and Physical Opinions. London: J. Martin and J. Allestyre, 1655.Poems and Fancies. London: T. R., 1653.Cowley, Abraham. Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1905.Charleton, Walter. Letters and Poems in Honor of the incomparable Princess, Margaret, Duchess of

Newcastle. London: Thomas Newcombe, 1676.Croll, Morris. Style, Rhetoric and Rhythm. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1966.Ede, Lisa, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford. "Intersections of Rhetoric and Feminism." Rhetorica

13.4 (1995): 401-42.Fitzmaurice, James. Margaret Cavendish: Sociable Letters. New York: Garland., 1997.Heisenberg, Werner. "Non-Objective Science and Uncertainty." The Modern Tradition. Ed. Richard

Ellmann and Charles Feidelson. New York: Oxford UP, 1965. 444-52.Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Peter Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford UP,

1975.Merrens, Rebecca. "Margaret Cavendish's Natural Philosophy and the Noise of a Feminized

Nature." Women's Studies 25.5 (1996): 421-56.Milic, Louis. 'The Problem of Style." Contemporary Rhetoric. Ed. Ross Winterowd. New York:

Harcourt, 1975.271-95.Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. 10 vols. Ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews.

Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.Perry, Henry. The First Duchess of Newcastle and Her Husband as Figures in Literary History. New

York: Johnson Reprint, 1968.Potkay, Adam. The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1994.Rebhorn, Wayne. Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric. Ithaca, New York: Cornell

UP, 1995.

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Sarasohn, Lisa. "A Science Turned Upside Down." Huntington Library Quarterly 47.3 (1984): 289-307.

Sprat, Thomas. History of the Royal Society of London. Ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold WhitmoreJones. St. Louis: Washington UP, 1958.

Swearingen, C. Jan. Rhetoric and Irony. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.Vickers, Brian. "Prose Style." English Science. Ed. Brian Vickers. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

243-44.Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth. Pasadena, California: Castle, 1985.Wilson, Thomas. The Arte of Rhetoric. Ed. G. H. Main Oxford: Clarendon, 1909.

Ryan John Stark is writing his dissertation in rhetoric and composition at Texas Christian University.His interests include the history of style, composition theory, and rhetoric and philosophy.

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