The Blazing World

Harriet Burden Notebook M

I am going to build a house-woman. She will have an inside and an outside, so that we can walk in and out of her. I am drawing her, drawing and thinking about her form. She must be large, and she must be a difficult woman, but she cannot be a natural horror or a fantasy creature with a vagina dentata. She cannot be a Picasso or a de Kooning monster or Madonna. No either/or for this woman. No, she must be true. She must have a head as important as her tail. And there will be characters inside that head, little men and women up to various pursuits. Let them write and sing and play instruments and dance and read very long speeches that put us all to sleep. Let her be my Lady Contemplation in honor of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, that seventeenth-century monstrosity: female intellectual. Author of plays, romances, poems, letters, natural philosophy, and a utopian fiction, The Blazing World. I will call my woman The Blazing World after the duchess. Anti-Cartesian, in the long run anti-atomist, anti-Hobbesian, an exiled Royalist in France, but she was a hard-bitten monist and a materialist who didn’t, couldn’t quite leave God out of it. Her ideas overlap with Leibniz. Had my father known about Cavendish and her links to his hero?

Mad Madge was an embarrassment, a flamboyant boil on the face of nature. She made a spectacle of herself. Allowed once as a visitor to the Royal Society to watch experiments in 1666, the duchess in all her eccentric glory was duly recorded by Samuel Pepys, who recorded everything. He called her a “mad, conceited, ridiculous woman.” It was easy. It’s still easy. You simply refuse to answer the woman. You don’t engage in a dialogue. You let her words or her pictures die. You turn your head away. Centuries pass. The year the first woman was admitted to the Royal Society? 1945.

The duchess sometimes wore men’s clothes, vests and cavalier hats. She bowed rather than curtsied. She was a beardless astonishment, a confusion of roles. She staged herself as mask or masque. Cavalier hat off to you, Duchess. May its plumage wave.I

Cross-dressers run rampant in Cavendish. How else can a lady gallop into the world? How else can she be heard? She must become a man or she must leave this world or she must leave her body, her mean-born body, and blaze. The duchess is a dreamer. Her characters wield their contradictory words like banners. She cannot decide. Polyphony is the only route to understanding. Hermaphroditic polyphony. “What noble mind can suffer a base servitude without rebellious passions?” asked Lady Ward. But the ladies always win in her worlds. Through marriage, beauty, argument, and rank wishful fantasy. Lord Courtship is thunderstruck by the woman’s lucidity and feeling. He is reborn instantly.

Is this not what I want? Look at my work. Look and see.

How to live? A life in the world or a world in the head? To be seen and recognized outside, or to hide and think inside? Actor or hermit? Which is it? She wanted both — to be inside and outside, to ponder and to leap. She was painfully shy and suffered from melancholia, a drag on her gait. She bragged. She adored her husband. A few sages called her a genius.

I am a Riot. An Opera. A Menace! I am Mad Madge, Mad Hatter Harriet, a hideous anomaly who lives at the Heartbreak Hotel near Sunny’s Bar on the water in Brooklyn with people straight from the funny papers. Bruno says there are those in the neighborhood who call me the Witch. I take it on, then, the enchantment of magic and the power of night, which is procreative, fertile, wet. Isn’t that where their fear lies? Don’t women give birth? Don’t we push those squalling babes into the world, suckle them, and sing to them? Are we not the makers and shakers of generations?

Tiny Gulliver in Brobdingnag looks up at the giant nurse who gives suck to an infant. “No sight disgusted me so much as her monstrous breast. Its size is alarming, and every imperfection of the skin visible.” A Swiftian conflation of microscope and misogyny. But isn’t every infant a dwarf at the breast?

Mother said, “He ran away from me.”

I want to blaze and rumble and roar.

I want to hide and weep and hold on to my mother.

But so do we all.

I. On the occasion of Cavendish’s visit to the Royal Society, John Evelyn, a diarist of the period and a friend of Samuel Pepys, composed a ballad: “God bless us! / When I first did see her: / She looked so like a Cavalier, / But that she had no beard.” Quoted in Emma L. E. Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 13.