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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Blazing World, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fiction, Fancy, and Utopia
Gender Hierarchy and Women’s Freedom
Monarchy and Government
Philosophy, Science, and Religion
Love and Friendship
Summary
Analysis
The book opens with a poem by Margaret Cavendish’s husband, William Newcastle. He compares Cavendish creating the Blazing World to Columbus discovering America, and he declares that the book will enlighten its readers.
Newcastle’s poem reflects the financial, personal, and creative support he gave to his wife’s writing career—which played a significant role in her success during a time when women were excluded from mainstream intellectual life. By comparing Cavendish to Columbus, Newcastle suggests that fiction can offer adventure, discovery, and insight just as much as actual exploration in the real world.
Themes
Then, in her author’s note, Cavendish explains why she published The Blazing World alongside the more serious Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy. She isn’t trying to deride philosophy by combining it with fiction—instead, she thinks that philosophy and fiction complement one another. In philosophy, people use reason to try and understand the world, while in fiction, they imagine entirely new worlds. Cavendish wrote The Blazing World for both her own and her readers’ enjoyment. It has three parts, which are “romancical,” “philosophical,” and “fantastical.”
Cavendish insists that her fiction has a serious intellectual purpose. If philosophy is about narrowing down possible truths about the world through rationality, then fiction helps people explore those possibilities and understand their implications in the first place. This is why The Blazing World is a pioneering work in the genre of science fiction: Cavendish deliberately creates a world ruled by a different natural order, way of knowing, and kind of technology in order to show her readers some other ways that the world could be.
Themes
Literary Devices
Cavendish will be “a happy creatoress” if the reader enjoys her Blazing World, but if not, she will go on living in her own noble world, which is full of gold and diamonds. While she “cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second,” she concludes, she can still be “Margaret the First.” And while she can’t conquer the world like Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, she has created a world of her own instead. She concludes that anyone can do the same.
In addition to showing readers new possibilities for the world, fiction also gives them an escape. In other words, Cavendish is saying that there’s little more pleasurable than getting lost in fiction—especially fiction of one’s own. She clearly links the value of fiction to gender: since women lived under a severe patriarchal system in 17th-century England, fantasy was one of the only ways they could experience freedom and power. Eventually, imagining and writing about alternative worlds could even become a way to change the real world.
Themes
