Journal article

Publication year: 2018

Pages: 134-145

Journal: Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte

Volume number: 41

Issue number: 2

ISSN: 0170-6233

eISSN: 1522-2365

DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.1002/bewi.201801887

Publisher: Wiley

Abstract: 
Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World (1666) is one of the very few utopian accounts by women in the early modern period. At first sight, the world beyond the North Pole that Cavendish's beautiful heroine enters after surviving abduction and shipwreck seems to offer the utmost in terms of early modern feminine scientific utopias: after the shortest love story in history, the heroine becomes Empress and is given a whole Empire to govern at her pleasure. But soon it turns out that the hybrid creatures of her newly founded scientific communities, bear-men, bird-men, worm-men, and the like are far from utopian truth-seeking, but, like their earthly counterparts, all too often revel in tedious meaning and believing. The paper will focus on such parodic moments as well as on alternative modes of dealing with science more adequate to the term Paradise. Only with the support of her this-worldly friend, the Duchess of Newcastle, who also happens to be the author of the story, the Empress can not only improve her utopian state, but also the state of affairs in the real world. On the way, the boundaries between fact and fiction, real and virtual, masculine and feminine, sense and nonsense are continuously tested - reflecting and commenting on early modern fear and fascination of the unknown and the promises of science and technology.

Harvard Citation style: Mittag, M. (2018) Science With a Difference: Parody and Paradise in Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World (1666), Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 41(2), pp. 134-145. https://doi.org/10.1002/bewi.201801887

APA Citation style: Mittag, M. (2018). Science With a Difference: Parody and Paradise in Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World (1666). Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte. 41(2), 134-145. https://doi.org/10.1002/bewi.201801887