The Description of a New World, Called The
Blazing-World, better known as The Blazing
World, is a 1666 work of prose fiction by
the English writer Margaret Cavendish, the
Duchess of Newcastle.
Feminist critic Dale Spender calls it a forerunner
of science fiction.
It can also be read as a utopian work.
== Story ==
As its full title suggests, Blazing World
is a fanciful depiction of a satirical, utopian
kingdom in another world (with different stars
in the sky) that can be reached via the North
Pole.
It is "the only known work of utopian fiction
by a woman in the 17th century, as well as
an example of what we now call 'proto-science
fiction' — although it is also a romance,
an adventure story, and even autobiography."A
young woman enters this other world, becomes
the empress of a society composed of various
species of talking animals, and organizes
an invasion back into her world complete with
submarines towed by the "fish men" and the
dropping of "fire stones" by the "bird men"
to confound the enemies of her homeland, the
Kingdom of Esfi.
The work was initially published as a companion
piece to Cavendish's Observations upon Experimental
Philosophy and thus functioned as an imaginative
component to what was otherwise a reasoned
endeavour in 17th century science.
It was reprinted in 1668.Cavendish's book
inspired a notable sonnet by her husband,
William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
which celebrates her imaginative powers.
The sonnet was included in her book.
== Genre and implications ==
Scholar Nicole Pohl of Oxford Brookes University
has argued that Cavendish was accurate in
her categorization of the work as "a 'hermaphroditic'
text".
Pohl points to Cavendish’s confrontations
of seventeenth century norms, with regard
to such categories as science, politics, gender,
and identity.
Pohl argues that her willingness to question
society’s conceptions while discussing topics
that were considered in her era best left
to male minds, allows her to escape into an
exceptional gender-neutral discussion of said
topics, creating what Pohl labels, "a truly
emancipatory poetic space."Northeastern University
professor Marina Leslie remarks that readers
have noted that The Blazing World serves as
a departure from the habitually male dominated
field of utopian writing.
While some readers and critics may interpret
Cavendish's work as being restricted by these
characteristics of the genre of utopia, Leslie
suggests approaching interpretations of the
work while remembering Cavendish as one of
the first, more outspoken feminists in history,
and especially in early writing.
Doing so, Leslie argues, allows us to view
Cavendish’s work as a capture of the possibilities
that the young genre of utopia had to offer.
Leslie contends that in this sense, Cavendish
utilized the utopian genre to discuss issues
such as "female nature and authority" in a
new light, while simultaneously expanding
the utopian genre itself.Leslie also believes
that The Blazing World incorporates many different
genres, "which include not only travel narrative
and romance but also utopia, epic, biography,
cabbala, Lucianic fable, Menippean satire,
natural history, and morality play, among
others…”
Oddvar Holmesland of University of Edinburgh
agrees that The Blazing World is creative
in its genres, writing that "the term 'hybridization'
aptly captures Cavendish's method of blending
established genres and categories into a new
order, and of presenting her fantasy empire
as versimilar."
University of Georgia professor Sujata Iyengar
points out the importance of the fact that
The Blazing World is clearly fictional, a
stark contrast to the scientific nature of
the work it is attached to.
Iyengar notes that writing a work of fiction
allowed Cavendish to create a new world in
which she could conceive of any possible reality.
Such liberty, Iyengar argues, allows Cavendish
to explore ideas of rank, gender, and race
that directly clash with commonly held beliefs
about servility in her era.
Iyengar goes as far to say that Cavendish’s
newfound liberty within fictional worlds provides
her an opportunity to explore ideas that directly
conflict with those that Cavendish writes
about in her nonfiction writing.Jason H. Pearl
of Florida International University considers
The Blazing World as one of the earliest examples
of the novel, "adding the modifier 'early'...to
indicate a period in the novel's history when
experimentation was more common, when strange
incidents conveyed in strange ways could be
expected from prose fiction."
Pearl also believes it to contain an "interaction
and opposition between two tributary forms:
the lunar voyage, a subgenre of utopian writing,
and natural philosophy, which helped inform
notions of possibility and plausibility in
representations of the natural world."
However, Pearl also considers it "a revision
to the lunar voyage ... one of its revisions
is to pull the destination earthward, literally
and figuratively, making its various possibilities
of difference somehow more accessible."
== 
World ==
Pearl has commented on the surrealism of the
world, as well as (paradoxically) its similarity
to our own.
He writes, “The Lady’s experience is described
as ‘so strange an adventure,’ in ‘so
strange a place, and amongst such wonderful
kind of creatures,’ ‘none like any of
our world’...It seems anything is possible
here,” and that, “near as it is, the Blazing
World boasts a multitude of otherworldly marvels,"
but also believes that "the interstitial passageway
exists as a wrinkle in space, a connecting
disconnection that permits the Blazing World’s
narrow reachability and legitimizes its radical
differences.”
By "interstitial passageway," Pearl is referring
to the unseen, unexplained path the protagonist
and her captors traverse in the beginning
of the story to reach the Blazing World.
== Political views ==
Throughout The Blazing World, the Empress
asserts that a peaceful society can only be
attained through the lack of societal divisions.
To eliminate potential division and maintain
social harmony in the society the text imagines,
Cavendish constructs a monarchical government.
Unlike a democratic government, Cavendish
believes only an absolute sovereignty can
maintain social unity and stability because
the reliance on one authority eliminates separations
of power.
To further justify the monarchical government,
Cavendish draws upon philosophical and religious
arguments.
She writes, "it was natural for one body to
have one head, so it was also natural for
a politic body to have but one governor … besides,
said they, a monarchy is a divine form of
government, and agrees most with our religion."Cavendish's
political views are similar to English philosopher,
Thomas Hobbes.
In his 1651 book, Leviathan, Hobbes famously
upholds the notion that a monarchical government
is a necessary force in preventing societal
instability and "ruin", As a notable contemporary
of Cavendish, Hobbes' influence on her political
philosophy is apparent.
In The Blazing World, Cavendish even directly
mentions his name while cataloguing famous
writers: "Galileo, Gassendus, Descartes, Helmont,
Hobbes, H. More, etc".
== Influence ==
In Alan Moore's graphic novels chronicling
the adventures of The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen, the Blazing World was identified
as the self-same idyllic realm from which
the extra-dimensional traveller Christian,
a member of the first League led by Duke Prospero,
had come in the late 1680s.
The league disbanded when Christian returned
to this realm, and it was to where Prospero,
Caliban, and Ariel also departed many years
later.
In China Miéville's Un Lun Dun, a library
book entitled A London Guide for the Blazing
Worlders is mentioned, suggesting that travel
between the two worlds is not all one-way.
In 2014, Siri Hustvedt published the novel
The Blazing World, in which she describes
Harriet Burden's brilliant but convoluted
attempts at gaining recognition from the male-dominated
New York City art scene.
Hustvedt has Burden refer to Margaret Cavendish
as a rich source of inspiration at many occasions.
Nearing the end of her life, Burden is comforted
by Cavendish's work: "I am back to my blazing
mother Margaret" (p. 348), she writes in her
notebook.
Blazing World was originally published as
a conjoined text along with Cavendish's Observations
on Experimental Philosophy, which was a direct
response to scientist Robert Hooke's Micrographia
which was published only a year before.
Advances in the field of science and philosophy
in the early modern period had a huge influence
on Cavendish and were a major component of
The Descriptions of a New World, Called the
Blazing World.
This influence can be seen directly in Blazing
World, with nearly half the book consisting
of descriptions of the Blazing World, its
people, philosophies, and inventions.
One of these inventions is a microscope, which
Cavendish critiques alongside the experimental
method itself in the Blazing World.
This integration of scientific advances could
be one of the reasons Blazing World is considered
by some to be the first sci-fi novel.
== Notes
