10.13125/2039-6597/3760
One of the peculiarities of 17th and 18th centuries literature is the link between knowledge and imagination, a relationship in which narration sometimes accompanies science, sometimes goes beyond it. The idea of imagination as a true means of knowledge is the subject of Margaret Cavendish’s best known work, The Blazing World (1666), where her alter ego is free to built a whole social and philosophical system based on corporality and subjectivity.From the same conception of imagination starts Siri Hustvedt when in 2014 rewrites The Blazing World: the story of an artist who still in the twentieth century tries to face the overwhelming misogyny with the performance of the body and the theory of embodiment. The protagonist is really close to the Duchess of Newcastle, especially for the desire to overturn the artificial categories of the gender through a real masquerade. The voices of Cavendish, Hustvedt and of all their alter ego follow each other through documents, diary pages and pure narration, in which it is difficult to say what is fiction and what is truth
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9
             The Reason of Imagination.
           The Blazing Worlds of Margaret
            Cavendish and Siri Hustvedt

                              Valeria Cammarata


Abstract
      This essay is aimed at building a bridge between two female writers very
distant in time and place, Margaret Cavendish and Siri Hustvedt, on three basis:
that of a work they have in common – which Hustvedt has almost rewritten
from Cavendish, The Blazing World –, two of their proto-feminist and feminist
tactics to overcome the boundaries posed by patriarchy – that of embodiment
and that of masquerade –. and their consideration of imagination – as a
fundamental means of knowledge.
      Though one of the peculiarities of 17th century paradigm shift was the
distinction of the scientific discourse from the religious, magic, mystic and
artistic one, yet a link still seems to remain between science and imagination, as
demonstrated, for instance, by Galileo’s aesthetic attitude (Panofsky), by
Hooke’s and Baker’s imaginative suggestion before their microscopes (Hooke;
Baker; Nicholson), Bacon’s duplicity as «the enthusiast of both power of
imagination and understanding and as the harbinger of narrow objectivism and
the dissociation of sensibility» (Levao: 5; Bacon). However the idea of
imagination as a true means of knowledge seems to be a merely female
intuition, or rather a subversive way to shift the scientific paradigm once again,
replacing objective and disembodied observation with subjective imagination
and speculation. This is the main subject of Margaret Cavendish’s best known


Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)
ISSN 2039-6597
DOI: 10.13125/2039-6597/3760
Valeria Cammarata, The Reason of Imagination. The Blazing Worlds of Margaret Cavendish and Siri
Hustvedt


work, The Blazing World (1666), where her alter ego is free to build a whole social
and philosophical system based on corporality and subjectivity.
      From the same conception of imagination does Siri Hustvedt start when in
2014 she rewrites The Blazing World: the story of an artist who, in the twentieth
century, still tries to face the overwhelming misogyny with the performance of
the body and the theory of embodiment. The protagonist is really close to the
Duchess of Newcastle, especially for her desire to overturn the artificial gender
categories through a real masquerade. The voices of Cavendish, Hustvedt and
of all their alter egos follow each other through documents, diary pages and
pure narration, in which it is difficult to say what is fiction and what is truth.


Keywords
    Siri Hustvedt, Margaret                     Cavendish,        experimental          philosophy,
neuroscience, masquerade




2
                                 Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)




        The Reason of Imagination.
      The Blazing Worlds of Margaret
       Cavendish and Siri Hustvedt
                        Valeria Cammarata


     The most recent discoveries deriving from the exchanges between
aesthetics and neuroscience – especially those stressing the importance
of the sensory-motor system in both scientific and aesthetic experience
(Gallese 2005; 2011; 2017; 2018; Gallese & Sinigaglia, 2011) – have raised
a particular attention on the subjectivity of mental processes, especially
those related to the knowledge processes, and on the role of imagination.
Experimental aesthetics is a new way of approaching aesthetic issues,
such as those of images or novels as media of experience, by means of
neuroscientific investigations. Nowadays the work of neuroscience
applied to aesthetics has largely demonstrated how both thought and
physical experience are rooted in the same brain-body system, activating
what Vittorio Gallese et al. call “embodied simulation”, that is «a pre-
rational, non introspective process generating a physical, and not simply
“mental”, experience of the mind, motor intentions, emotions,
sensations, and lived experiences of other people, even when narrated»
(Gallese 2011 et all.). Embodied simulation is strictly connected to the
notions of inter-subjectivity and inter-corporality («the mutual
resonance of intentionally meaningful sensory motor behaviour»
Gallese 2017), by which we can understand other people (real or fictional
ones) thanks to the “motor equivalence” between what they do and
what we (could) do. Not only does embodied simulation connect us to
other people, but also to objects (either man-made or natural), allowing
them to attribute relational qualities to the potentialities of our body.



                                                                               1
Valeria Cammarata, The Reason of Imagination. The Blazing Worlds of Margaret Cavendish and
Siri Hustvedt


Furthermore, much of our everyday life is characterized by the
experience of objects, people, actions and worlds which are not real, or
which are not real yet. As for the real life, the life looked at on paintings,
photographs, screens, it activates quite the same re-actions by our
sensory-motor system. Actually, it activates major and more intense re-
actions since, being our body not involved in any other “real” physical
activity, all our energies are focused on this experience. This is the
“liberated embodied simulation”: «Through an immersive state in
which our attention is focused on the fictional world, we can fully
deploy our simulative resources, letting our defensive guard against
daily reality slip for a while» (Gallese 2017).
      The embodied simulation is strictly linked to physiological vision,
cultural gaze and their functioning. It is a particular kind of vision and
gaze, completely different from the one theorized by 17th century
natural philosophy – an objective, disembodied, omniscient, even
imperialistic gaze. However, an attempt to recover the corporeality (not
only) of the vision and its intrinsic intersubjectivity had already been
made, in the twentieth century, by the phenomenological philosophy, of
course starting with Husserl1, but especially by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
and Edith Stein. Maurice Merleau-Ponty lowered the gaze into a terrain
completely different from the Cartesian one: no longer as a mechanism
of objectification that exists only at a perceptual level, but as an
intersubjective relationship. The fundamental characteristic of this
model of gaze is its embodiment, it is the carnality of perception, which
is translated into a chiasmus between visible and invisible. The gaze
which Merleau-Ponty refers to is not a scientific gaze, the gaze from
above, the imposed gaze that distances the subject from the object in a
hierarchical situation. The flesh itself, neither completely opaque nor


      1
       Starting from Husserl’s distinctions among different senses of the living
body, other phenomenologists like Lévinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir
focused on different characteristics of embodiment in inter-personal relations,
such as affective and erotic relations, and specifically, respectively, generativ-
ity and caress, love, desire, hate, indifference, sexuality and sexual desire, sex-
ual ambivalence.


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                                      Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)



completely transparent, is the place of exchange between the visible and
the invisible. It is the place where the only punctum caecum is given: the
subject, his or her corporality, is the means by which the world becomes
visible, but it is simultaneously what remains invisible to the subject
him- or herself (Merleau-Ponty 1964; Cammarata).
     The inter-subjectivity and the corporeal realization of human
vision, as well as of the other senses and means of perception, opens up
a brand-new series of turns in western traditional oppositions:
mind/body; culture/nature2; and, moreover, objective and subjective3. In
this perspective (human) body is no longer seen as a material thing but
the first fundamental means by which all living beings relate to the
world and its object. At the same time human mind is not an abstract,
pure, spiritual, disembodied matter, but a part of our body, which
expresses itself precisely through the body, bodily gestures, and the


     2
         Once the traditional opposition of culture and nature has been broken
down, culture is not conceived anymore as a system of significations and pro-
ductions, but as a system of generative life, grounded in the own mortality of
bodies; on the other hand, nature is not the traditional passive object of the
scientific imperialistic gaze, but the common field in which all living beings
move, perceive and act through their bodies.
       3
         One of the most interesting results of the dismantling of traditional po-
larities is the crisis of "binary economics”, a fundamental turn especially for
1960-1970’s French feminism, of which the most representative is Luce Iri-
garay. Irigaray has had the merit of identifying, in a binary economy made up
of a rigid pattern of polar oppositions, an interpretative model that not only
describes the patriarchal structure, but signals its traps and indicates the ways
out. In the scheme that opposes - among others - man to woman, the feminist
discourse will never find a space for its own voice, the mother's voice, not even
positioning itself in the space opposite to its traditional pole, that of the father.
The only way out is to stand on the sidelines, out of the scheme, breaking the
rigid oppositional structures, refusing the domestication of the binary econ-
omy and the specularity that derives from it. “Precisely because the Mother,
to whom Irigaray gives word, has been removed from the stereotypes of the
binary economy, she herself allows a thematization of the body and of Eros
which subverts the phallogocentric imagination”, (Cavarero, Restaino: 103).


                                                                                    3
Valeria Cammarata, The Reason of Imagination. The Blazing Worlds of Margaret Cavendish and
Siri Hustvedt


whole corporal phenomena. Thus, we have now to talk about
“embodied minds” or “mental bodies”. In the same way nature cannot
be seen any longer as the object of physical sciences gaze, but as the
common field in which we all together perceive, move and act through
our bodies; and culture is not only a system of significations and
productions, but a system producing forms of life grounded in the body,
even     in      its    mortality     (Husserl       1988:     140-182).

      These results have, still nowadays, influence and confirmation in
literature, which many scholars interested in a cognitivistic approach
consider as related, if not just the same, to the ability of mankind to make
tools and, thus, to make sense (Stout, Chaminade 2009).
      An example of this reciprocal influence of neuroscience and
literature is without a doubt the work of Siri Hustvedt, a writer who
constantly tests her scientific studies by means of literature. Indeed,
being both an essayist (see works such as Three Emotional Stories:
Reflections on Memory, the Imagination, Narrative, and the Self, 2011, Living,
Thinking, Looking, 2011, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women:
Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind, 2016, and the most recent The Delusions
of Certainty, 2018) and a novelist (Memories of the Future, 2019, The
Summer Without Men, 2011, The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves,
2010, and The Blazing World, 2014 that we will analyze further) she
perceives literature not as an illustration, an ornament, or a means of
dissemination, rather as «the form in which this research can be given,
since the destinies of the investigation on the mind and on the Self can’t
be given but in a narrative form, this being what contributes to their
formation» (Cometa 2019). As we will see shortly, Siri Hustvedt’s way
of writing is very close to that of the 17th century writer and natural
philosopher, Margaret Cavendish, not only because of the use of
literature as a form of scientific investigation, but also because of the
very style of writing, constantly enriched by autobiographical and
metaliterary inventions, and of a deep conceiving of the corporeal,
embodied form of literature. Thus, there seems to be a bridge linking
Hustvedt’s experimental aesthetics and Cavendish’s experimental
philosophy.


4
                                   Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)



      Experimental philosophy, born in the mid-17th century, was the
reaction of the “new science” against the old natural philosophy, i.e. that
kind of philosophy trying to reach knowledge about nature and
humankind only through speculative reasoning. In this approach
experiments and observations had the only aim of demonstrating what
was already established by reason. With the spreading of new and better
optical devices and, moreover, with the raising of scientific societies, this
approach shifted to a more consistent consideration of observation and
of the usefulness of the senses, first of all that of sight. However, the
consideration of the sight as a not “too much corporeal” sense, much
closer to the mind than to the body, and the support offered to this sense
by mechanical devices (such as the microscope and the telescope),
produced a specific kind of observation which was supposed to be
impersonal and the led the supposed objectivity of science (Schaffer,
Cammarata). Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, is a major
example of active participation in the scientific discussion of her age. In
1666, a year after the publication of Sir Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, a
member emeritus of the Royal Society, the Duchess published a treatise
entitled Observations on Experimental Philosophy, opposed to the theories
of the Royal Society and contesting them.
      What she contested to male experimental philosophy is the
assumed objectivity of science (which side a part the role of the
subjective body), the belief in a mechanical vision (better than the
physical one) and the surrender of imagination. Cavendish was
particularly sensible to the fascination of imagination, or as she said
fancy, considering it as a full means not only of knowledge, but properly
of perception, the unmediated perception she was looking for. If, as she
has already argued, human beings see not only with physical eyes but
also with the mind, then there is a link between imagination and reason,
a link women are much acquainted with. This internalization of
knowledge and perception makes vision work in two different ways,
according to Cavendish’s Natural Philosophy: first, the objects of vision
are projected onto an internal and personal world; second, the external
world is known through the internal, spiritual and imaginative
properties of the subject. Thus imagination, that is the skill of seeing


                                                                                 5
Valeria Cammarata, The Reason of Imagination. The Blazing Worlds of Margaret Cavendish and
Siri Hustvedt


what is not already seen, is a means of knowledge as much as
observation is. Indeed, senses are limited and cannot lead us to a broader
knowledge, while imagination makes us discover what might exist
beyond these limits. Imagination is not considered as a free movement
of the mind. It, belonging to the same brain material, is not fantastic and
needs to be educated both with Natural Philosophy and Poetry, the first
leading its orientation to significant forms, the second making form and
beauty recognizable.
     In the last two decades, the work of Siri Hustvedt, both as a writer
and as a neuroscientific researcher, has built a bridge to the work and
thought of Margaret Cavendish, as definitely demonstrated by her
complex novel The Blazing World, a sort of recovery and rediscovery of
the fancy written by the Duchess in 1666 as an appendix to her
Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. Siri Hustvedt’s attempt is that
of posing the difficulties of women to find their right place as artists (but
also as writers and scientists) in the 21st century. Little has changed since
the 17th century, when Margaret Cavendish was considered “Mad
Madge”4. Hustvedt links her work to that of Cavendish also in
considering the role of embodied experience and of imagination, and in
the vindication of a feminist issue in the cultural and social structure of
science (like other authors – such as Donna Haraway, Evelin Fox Keller,
Lorraine Daston – have been doing in the last few years)5.
     Margaret Cavendish and Siri Hustvedt have, in particular, three
main focuses, which orient the whole structure of their works: a work
written by Cavendish in 1666 and re-written by Hustvedt in 2014; a


      4
        Katie Whitaker, Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish,
Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by Her Pen, New York, Basic
Books, 2002.
      5
        See for instance, Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges. The Science Ques-
tion in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, in Muriel Lederman, In-
grid Bartsch (by), The Gender and Science Reader, London-New York, Routledge,
2001; Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, New Haven-London,
Yale University Press, 1985; Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, Objectivity, New
York - Cambridge, MASS, MIT Press, 2007.


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                                    Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)



precise female strategy to speak as a subject in a deeply male chauvinist
world: the masquerade; the search for a feminine specificity, and its
claim in a subjective, corporeal or embodied form.



                  Rewriting The Blazing Worlds
     Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World was first published in 1666
and then in 1688 as an appendix to the Observations upon Experimental
Philosophy.
     The novel tells the story of a young woman, involved in a
shipwreck, who found herself lost on an island, in another dimension6.
As often happens in this genre, the new world is a mirror of the 'old' one
and it allows the main character and the writer herself (who often
coincide) to reflect on the limits of contemporary society, on the progress
that can be achieved and the best way to achieve it. This is exactly what
happens to the woman who, well received in the “blazing world”, soon
becomes the empress. The first difference from the 'real' society lies in
the almost absolute equality of the sexes. As empress, the protagonist
immediately devotes herself to an in-depth study of the social, political
and, above all, cultural aspects of her kingdom and soon decides to
found a philosophical method of her own, with the support, however,
of a mind that is equal and congenial to hers. The wise philosopher of
the blazing world suggests her not to ask Gassendi, Kepler or Galilei,
but rather a humbler but still lively soul like that of the Duchess of
Newcastle herself. Thus, the author enters, in the second degree, the
story by showing a multiplication of personalities that she had already


     6
       The story is written on the model of the Travels to other worlds, a very
popular genre in that century and the next, after the Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes by Fontenelle, the novels by Wilkins (The Discovery of A World in
The Moone, first published in London in 1638), Godwin (The Man in the Moone
or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales, 1638), Cyrano de Berge-
rac (A Discourse of The World in The Moon) and the rediscovery of Lucian and
his famous work Icaromenippus, The Man in the Moon.


                                                                                  7
Valeria Cammarata, The Reason of Imagination. The Blazing Worlds of Margaret Cavendish and
Siri Hustvedt


staged in the Sociable Letters. In the Epilogue to the Reader, the author
explains how to interpret the whole fancy, making explicit what we have
already argued:

         By this Poetical Description, you may perceive, that my ambition
      is not only to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole World; and that
      the Worlds I have made, both the Blazing- and the other Philosophical
      World, mentioned in the first part of this description, are framed
      and composed of the most pure, that is, the rational parts of matter,
      which are the parts of my mind. (Cavendish 1994)

      Hustvedt's Blazing World was published in 2014. If the genre chosen
by Cavendish is the utopian one, that chosen by Hustvedt is more
difficult to define. We could trace it back to the genre of the biofiction, i.
e., with the definition of Alexandre Gefen, a literary fiction in
biographical form, in this case the life of an imaginary character. But is
this character really imaginary? Or is she an alter ego of the author? In
this case we should talk of autofiction.
      Harry, diminutive of Harriette Burden is the protagonist of the
novel, whose life is told or, rather, collected by another alter ego of the
author’s, something more and different than a narrator, IV Hesse, whose
voice rarely intervenes in the text. In the introduction, in the first person,
he (or she?) tells us of the motivations and structure of the work only
after citing the most explanatory aphorism of the personality of the
protagonist:

        All intellectual and artistic endeavors, even jokes, ironies, and
      parodies, fare better in the mind of the crowd when the crowd
      knows that somewhere behind the great work or the great spoof it
      can locate a cock and a pair of balls. (Hustvedt 2014: 1)

     These are the words of Burden taken from an article published
under the pseudonym Richard Brickman, in the academic journal "The
Open Eye", with the intention of revealing the plan behind her project
(perhaps the real protagonist of the novel) entitled Maskings, stating that



8
                                    Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)




        it was meant not only to expose the antifemale bias of the art
     world, but to uncover the complex workings of human perception
     and how unconscious ideas about gender, race, and celebrity
     influence a viewer’s understanding of a given work of art. (ibid.)

      To stage this project Burden had hired three male artists who
(between 1998 and 2003) had to pretend to be the authors of three of her
works: Anton Tish for The History of Western Art, Phineas Q. Elridge for
The Suffocation Rooms, Runes for Beneath. The experiment would have
shown not only that the three works presented by males would have
had a greater impact than if she had been considered the author, she, the
artist who had never acquired any degree of celebrity and recognition
except for being the wife of Félix Lord, a smart and very rich art dealer
and discoverer of talents, but it also would have shown that the three
accomplices had only been "disguises" hiding the identity of the author.
Neither her identity nor that of the disguises had remained untouched,
each of them confused with that of the author, and hers with theirs, and
all of them together, creating a true hybrid, a 'hermaphrodite self'. And
this applies not only to artistic creation, but also to the 'real' lives of the
individuals involved who will come out of this experience completely
distorted: Tish is unable to recognize his work, Runes and Burden
herself are involved in an undecidable plagiarism case, Elridge is now
freed in his homosexuality but also by the performative creativity that
had distinguished him before the experiment. The story unfolds through
a multi-line and choral narration, through Harry's first-person
narratives, in the notebooks found during Hesse's 'academic' research,
and the testimonies of those who had been close to her, Tish and Elridge,
her daughter Masie and his son Ethan, her partner Bruno Kleinfeld, the
faithful friend (and psychoanalyst) Rachel Briefmann, as well as some of
the young penniless artists that Harry hosted in her Red Hook




                                                                                  9
Valeria Cammarata, The Reason of Imagination. The Blazing Worlds of Margaret Cavendish and
Siri Hustvedt


workshop7. The narration, or rather the narrations, follow each other
rather confusedly with a wealth of details that brings us back to the (non-
diegetic) reality of New York art scene from the 70’s to 2003. It goes by
with a continuous cross-reference between the levels of reality from
which occasionally even the hidden author, Siri Hustvedt herself,
emerges. Harry presents her as «an obscure novelist and essayist, Siri
Hustvedt, whose position Burden calls 'a moving target'» (Hustvedt
2014: 272). She introduces Margaret Cavendish as well. Her biography
is constantly reported by Burden – who calls her a mother but also an
alter ego and a sister –, and by all the other members of her circle –
informed in various ways about the life of the duchess by Harry herself.
Finally, the Duchess is 'embodied' in Burden’s masterpiece, the almost
completed but never presented one, which should have been Harriette
Burden's debut with an uncovered face:

         Harry returned to her Margaret, her Blazing World Mother
      creature she had begun much earlier and had nearly finished […]
      This woman had worlds inside her. When you looked up and into
      her bald, see-through cranium, you saw little people, hordes of
      busy wax Lilliputians going about their business. They ran and
      jumped. They danced and sang. They sat at miniature desks facing
      computers, typewriters, or pages. When you looked closely, you
      could see they were making musical scores, drawings,
      mathematical formulas, poems, and stories […] There were seven
      lascivious couples going at it upstairs in the female Gulliver’s
      head—men and women, men and men, women and women—a
      regular orgy. There was a bloody sword fight and a murderer with
      a gun, looking down at his victim’s corpse. There was a unicorn and
      a minotaur and a satyr and a fat angel woman with wings and lots
      of chubby babies in all colors. Downstairs—that is, from between
      the labial folds of her enormous vagina—the fertile matriarch



      The complex structure, the subject and the style of the work remind of
      7

the work of Georges Perec, Cabinet d’amateur, which is, not by chance, men-
tioned by Hustvedt (Hustvedt: 2014, 286).



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                                  Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)



     popped out another city of little humanoids. (Hustvedt 2014: 314-
     315)

      The plethora of worlds that the ‘real' Cavendish had set in her inner
blazing world are recreated by Harry in an almost carnal body, full of
her fluids, her genital apparatus, but also her imaginary parts and the
instrument of work she would have used if she lived and wrote in 21st
century. Hustvedt recalls also 17th century with the wonder of multiple
and turning proportions and the most representative ‘mask' of the
period, that of Gulliver, in his relation with the little Lilliputians. In
doing so, Hustvedt is creating a pure feminist mother-daughter relation
with Cavendish, the way Irigaray suggested to overturn the patriarchal
scheme of voices. Recreating Margaret Cavendish’s body, Harry (and
Hustvedt as well) gives her a new voice that speaks through the body,
the mystery, the blood, and that by all this can perpetuate her generative
skills, in a way and a duration different from that patriarchy had
foreseen. Margaret Cavendish wasn’t able to give birth to any child
through her physical body, but her paper body gave birth to a female
offspring lasting four centuries. Siri Hustvedt (and Harriet Burden, as
well) is now called to bequeath the same heritage.



                   Maskings and masquerades
   The practice, or better the tactic of the masquerade is the first
common feature between the two authors. Hustvedt herself claims:

        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.
     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



                                                                               11
Valeria Cammarata, The Reason of Imagination. The Blazing Worlds of Margaret Cavendish and
Siri Hustvedt


      characters wield their contradictory words like banners. (Hustvedt
      2014: 221)

     The issue of masquerade is one of the fundamental questions of
feminist visual studies, and of feminist film studies that, thanks to Mary
Ann Doane, have recovered the issue from Irigaray's French feminism
and from the psychoanalysis of Joan Riviere.
     At its origin, the masquerade was a very popular genre of public
entertainment in the English court in the first half of the seventeenth
century, and later even out of the court in the English theatre till the
eighteenth century8. It was a peculiar form of mise en scene playing with
the subversion of roles, even gender roles, especially appreciated by
women. In twentieth-century film studies, scholars such as Mary Ann
Doane have detected this kind of transvestitism as a particular means of
disturbance. This female tactic is somehow linked to the question of
mimicry. This is a question discussed in two different ways by Homi
Bhabha, who defined it as an “ironic compromise” (Bhabha 1984), and
by Luce Irigaray, who defined it as an interim strategy for dealing with
the realm of the discourse (Irigaray 1977). Both the female and the black
objects share a triple kind of gaze: that of a subject, that of an object, and
that of a double character being aware both of his/her looking and the
to-be-looked.
     Within this compromise the 'other' is recognized as a «subject of
difference that is almost the same, but not quite» (Bhabha 1984: 127). On
the other hand, the she-subject is a hysterical subject, staging the
disbelief and the oppression, while exiting the censorship of the 'master'
beholder (Irigaray 1977: 168). Donning the masks attributed by the
dominant visual regime doesn’t mean, both for Bhabha and for Irigaray,

      8
       For the history of Masquerade and its political importance see at least:
David Bevington, Peter Holbrook (ed.), The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque,
Cambridge-New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998; Francis Bacon, Of
Masques and Triumphs, in id. Essays and New Atlantis, New York, W.J. Black,
1942; Ben Jonson, Neptune’s Triumph For the Return of Albion, London, 1624;
Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in Renaissance, Berkeley,
University of California Press, 1975.


12
                                      Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)



simply accepting to be an object, rather to use the resulting partiality and
the virtuality as a means of resistance, with no intention of harmonizing
the differences. Under the mask of desiring gazes, objects do not stop to
be looked at, but what is really looked at is the image already made by
the observers. The real subject with all his or her peculiarities is (more
or less) safe under this image and he/she is returning the gaze, even
though the beholder doesn’t know it, or at least he or she is somewhere
else.
      Although made similar by the same hidden phallocularcentric9
gaze, mimicry and masquerade, as means of using this apparatus to
unmask its own attempt to homologate the differences, differ in
something. Irigaray defines the masquerade in a more doubtful way:
«an alienated or false version of femininity arising from the woman’s
awareness of the man’s desire for her to be his other, the masquerade
permits woman to experience desire not in her own right but as the
man’s desire situates her» (Irigaray 1977: 220).
      The ways in which both Cavendish and Hustvedt use the strategy
of masking are peculiar. For Cavendish the masquerade was the way to
make her body speak, a body that by no means used to behave as it was
supposed to do: it was a mad (or neurotic) body and, moreover, a sterile
one. She had no other chance than showing up that strangeness, in the
most spectacular and unobvious way, in a kind of performance that
opened up her own shy body in an unacceptable way. Joyce Devlin
Mosher refers to her strategy as that of the female spectacle in which the
power of dressing and the display of masks, more or less fitting the male


     9
        Irigaray turns to Nietzsche and Derrida's critique of feminism and de-
cisively connects ocularcentrism to phallocentrism, tracing the origin of the
concept of femininity as a lack in the old idealistic illusion of an eidetic reality.
Since when the "perspective of truth" has forgotten the materiality and corpo-
rality of our vision the visual experience has taken root as a dialectic of the
domain of those who look onto those who are looked at. But the philosophy
of différance provides Irigaray with the means to combat "the blind spot of the
old dream of symmetry", which has affected not only Freud but also Lacan's
theories (Irigaray: 20)


                                                                                   13
Valeria Cammarata, The Reason of Imagination. The Blazing Worlds of Margaret Cavendish and
Siri Hustvedt


apparatus, serve her desire of self-realization. It is the precise aesthetics
that shaped her personal life and her works as well.
      It is well known that Margaret Cavendish designed her physical
presence as a structured demonstration of her elusive identity, described
by her contemporaries under the simplified category of “bizarre and
garish”10. From a less myopic point of view, we can nowadays see the
design under this personal masquerade as an assumption of «the
artificial in order to transcend it» (Mosher 2005: 3). In this case the
artificial was the constructed fashion she produced for herself – with
jewels, dressing and all kinds of accessories – and for her female
characters, which had something more than the pure desire to be
addressed by the gazes of everyone as a goal, for the crowd addressed
their mask and not their self.
      There has been a long debate about the apparent discrepancy
between her innate shyness and this kind of showing off, staged for
example during the visit of the Duchess to the Royal Society. Lisa T.
Sarasohn frames this visit within the consideration that age had of
female writing: a queer phenomenon considered as unnatural and
curious as the monstrous, the hermaphroditism, in short, the in-between
(Sarasohn…). An undefined object Cavendish took advantage of, not
only in order to manage it as a new subject, not yet enclosed within
dominant categories, but also as a mirror reflecting the same
spectacularity under which the Royal scientists disguised their activity,
thus manipulating the audience. While being the first woman to enter
the Royal Society sessions, Cavendish, who used to wear ultra-feminine
clothing, decided to show herself in male attire and performed a parade
with pageboys and maids accompanying her. This is a performance that
we will soon see in one of her plays, acting like Irigaray supposes the
woman to act within mimicry: laying the sexual nature bare, which at
the same time prevented her self from being absorbed. In doing so


      This is the description of Margaret Cavendish visiting the Royal Society
      10

made by Samuel Pepys in his diaries, See The Diary of Samuel Pepys, A new and
complete transcription edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews,
London, G. Bell & Sons, 1970–83, vol. 8, pp. 243–244.


14
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Cavendish reached a triple target: to make visible what was supposed
to be and to stay invisible; to jam the theoretical machinery, which
manages both this visibility and invisibility; to suspend the pretended
truth which masks the univocal meanings this machinery produces
(Irigaray 1977: 78).
      Far from being a passive observer of Boyle’s ‘spectacles’, since in
this way his displayed experiments were defined by the society itself,
Cavendish was converting the planes of representation. Diverting the
gazes from the supposed spectacle to herself, she became the object of
vision, rather than the spectator, but a specific kind of object, since the
body addressed was not her true body, the one she refers to as a
defective one, but a masked one, the blazing body of her empress/knight
to be adored and worshiped.
      No longer a passive object or a controlled one, rather an object
conscious of being looked at, she used and manipulated the whole
system included in the general visual regime. She was not only
conscious of the way in which the most acclaimed scientists were
making science spectacular – i.e. an amusement rather than a profession
–, but she was also very well acquainted with the whole visual society,
which staged diverse sorts of bodies involving both the subjects
displaying and the objects displayed.
      For what concerns Hustvedt the issue is quite different. Harry, in
fact, does not show herself. She always remains hidden under her
masks. However, her art never mimics that of her three accomplices, on
the contrary they end up being very influenced by her art, by her
thought, by herself in flesh and thought. The masks used by Harry
weren’t fictional but real bodies of men, which in their very bodies
became pieces of her art. Hustvedt makes her “Editor” explain very well
in the introduction: «Each artist mask became for Burden a ‘poetized
personality,’ a visual elaboration of a ‘hermaphroditic self,’ which
cannot be said to belong to either her or to the mask, but to ‘a mingled
reality created between them’» (Hustvedt: 2014, 2).




                                                                               15
Valeria Cammarata, The Reason of Imagination. The Blazing Worlds of Margaret Cavendish and
Siri Hustvedt


                        A point of view of her own
     To summarize in a few words the common thought under the
works of the two authors we could say that it stays in the research on
the functioning of human perception, and above all of visual perception;
of how it relates to knowledge, I would say in their case to
understanding; how it becomes artistic creation and is transmitted
through the use of art (be it literary or figurative) in the form of words
or images, in a circle of learning and endless artistic enjoyment. At the
centre of this experience lies the person, the subject, because there is no
knowledge of any kind that is not subjective, which does not start from
a particular point of view, from the images already perceived, stored, or
only imagined, even by the neural history of the person who looks, who
reads, who writes, who creates.
     Furthermore, both in the case of Margaret Cavendish and Siri
Hustvedt, not only is knowledge subjective, it is even interior: we know
through ourselves, projecting the 'matter' we are made of onto the
external world and re-projecting in our interior what we perceive from
the outside. Knowledge, we say today after Vittorio Gallese, is
embodied.
     The reference to subjectivity is crucial, especially in the case of
Cavendish, almost outrageous, for an age that was trying to achieve the
objectivity of scientific observation through a mechanical look. It is the
age of the birth of the experimental philosophy, of the academies, first
of all the Royal Society, of the observations through microscope and
telescope, through those optical devices that, as Hooke and Bacon had
already indicated, would have allowed the «sincere hand and the
faithful eye to examine and record things as they are» (Hooke), which
opened the plurality of microscopic or telescopic worlds to human sight.
From that moment the human eye pretended to be able to see, and
therefore to know, everything that is not human-sized. At the same time
the humankind ended up being a measure of the world, centre of the
universe, the whole human world was discovered to be nothing but a
grain of sand in an immense universe, and that grain was only one of
the possible levels of reality. This mood led to the rediscovery of ancient


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journeys to the moon and to the foundation of utopian. Thus, the age of
scientific certainties gave birth to science fiction. On the other hand,
what better way to know an unmeasurable unknown than imagination!
Cavendish was particularly sensitive to the fascination of imagination,
or fantasies, considered as a real means not only of knowledge, but of
perception, since the direct perception was her purpose (Cavendish
2012).
      If, from her point of view, the human vision is a process shared
between eye and mind, then there must be a link between imagination
and reason, a link that leads to the consideration of a finer perception,
particularly suited to the female imagination. This conception makes the
vision, and all other kinds of knowledge, work through three different
mechanisms: immediate observation, rational abstraction and
imaginative speculation. The first puts the validity of optical devices as
scientific instruments at risk, turning them into instruments of visual
pleasure, which could make us forget the medium, as usually happens,
for example, with the denial of the body as a means. The second was one
of the most debated issues of the time, when the power of reason was
still operating under the disembodied process of the gaze, increasingly
connected to an internal and superior eye. The third, finally, represented
the most dangerous concept for the era of the Royal Society, since it
showed up the need of a codification – first of all a linguistic and
technical codification – for all that has to do with the process of
knowledge and experimentation, a codification which cannot be free
from imagination.
      The images of science excite, whether we like it or not, the
imagination that, rather than refused, should be exploited to reach a
larger part of the public. This is exactly the goal of Cavendish's works,
such as The Blazing World which, not by chance, was the appendix of a
treatise of experimental philosophy:

        If you wonder, that I join a work of Fancy to my serious
     Philosophical Contemplations; think not that it is out of a
     disparagement to Philosophy; or out of an opinion, as if this noble
     study were but a Fiction of the Mind; for though Philosophers may



                                                                                17
Valeria Cammarata, The Reason of Imagination. The Blazing Worlds of Margaret Cavendish and
Siri Hustvedt


      err in searching and enquiring after the Causes of Natural Effects,
      and many times embrace falsehoods for Truths; yet this doth not
      prove, that the Ground of Philosophy is merely Fiction, but the
      error proceeds from the different motions of Reason, which cause
      different Opinions in different parts […]. And this is the reason,
      why I added this Piece of Fancy to my Philosophical Observations,
      and joined them as two Worlds at the ends of their Poles; both for
      my own sake, to divert my studious thoughts, which I employed in
      the Contemplation thereof, and to delight the Reader with variety,
      which is always pleasing (Cavendish: 1994, 152-153)

     Cavendish considers the world made up of atoms that give shape
not only to the outside world but also to mental processes, first of all that
of the imagination (Cavendish 1994). Fantasy and imagination are,
therefore, creative tools of knowledge through which the mind can learn
from. Moreover, our knowledge is according to Cavendish, a knowledge
of images, of eidola. Of course, our senses are the principal means by
which we can come into contact with these images, but the imaginative
vision brings them to light, being the mind and the forms made of the
same atoms.
     Sensoriality is, therefore, limited and cannot lead us to a wider
knowledge. Imagination, instead, makes us discover what could exist
beyond these limits. How could we, otherwise, discover unimaginable
things like the microcosm and the macrocosm, other worlds within ours,
the atoms or the air? Imagination is not considered as a free movement
of the mind, it belongs to the same materiality of the brain, it is not
fantastic and therefore it is necessary to educate it both to natural
philosophy and to poetry, the first orientates it to the forms of sense, the
second let her recognize form and beauty.
     To this sensoriality/imagination pair, Hustvedt adds another
element: memory, that is a complex process of definition of the present,
of recreation (and not only reminder) of the past, of creation and
imagination of the future. It is therefore made of the same substance as
imagination, and of the very substance of artistic creation:




18
                                  Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)



        Memory and imagination partake the same mental process, they
     both are bound with emotion and often assume the form of
     narrative. Novel writing as well as any other form of artistic
     creativity stems from the same faculty that transmutes experience
     into the narratives we remember explicitly, but which are formed
     unconsciously (Gallese 2011: 196)

     Fiction, therefore, would be the re-elaboration of unconscious
memories along with emotional elements (Hustvedt calls them “tones”)
and their translation into a meaningful narrative: «Writing fiction is like
remembering what never happened» (Hustvedt 2011: 187).
     As Hustvedt says, Margaret Cavendish was an «Anti-Cartesian, in
the long run anti-atomist, anti-Hobbesian, […] a hard-bitten monist and
a materialist who didn’t, couldn’t quite leave God out of it. Her ideas
overlap with Leibniz’s». On the other side, Hustvedt's ideas on fiction
and imagination can easily be included into the embodied simulation
theory and even more specifically seem to fall into the theory of
embodied liberated simulation.
     Quoting Gallese: «The body-mind systems are endowed with non-
introspective pre-rational processes (embodied simulation) that
generate an experience of the physical and not only mental mind:
intentions, emotions and motor sensations, and also experiences lived
by other people even when narrated» (Gallese 2011: 197). These systems
make our mind trigger physical reactions similar to those that would be
activated if we were really subjected to the stimulus that we are reading,
observing or imagining. Indeed, when we read, we watch a movie, we
look at a picture, the concentration of our mind and our body (which at
that moment is not engaged in any other activity) release an even more
powerful bodily reaction than in a non-simulated situation (liberated
simulation).
     From a neuroscientific perspective, therefore the clear separation
between real and fictional, between real worlds and fictional worlds
appears much less defined and much less clear than we have imagined
for centuries. Thus «when the artist, through his imaginative creativity,
gives life to a fictional world, it shares with the real one not only many



                                                                               19
Valeria Cammarata, The Reason of Imagination. The Blazing Worlds of Margaret Cavendish and
Siri Hustvedt


of its aspects, but also many of its supporting neuronal processes» (ibid.:
199). We would say, as Cavendish said, that the imaginary worlds are
made of the same substance as the mind, and they do not reside
anywhere but within us.
      According to Vittorio Gallese, Siri Hustvedt demonstrates that
«neuroscience and psychoanalysis can converge when they deal with
the world of fiction, as both see the body as the common playground for
the imagination» (Gallese 2011: 200).




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                                    The Author
Valeria Cammarata

      Valeria Cammarata is Assistant Professor in Comparative
Literature at the University of Palermo. Her main search field is the
relation between literature and visual culture. In particular she is
interested in the forms of phototext and ékphrasis, and in the female
gaze and its literary representation from early modern period to today.
Among her publications: WJT Mitchell, Pictorial turn. Saggi di cultura
visuale, M. Cometa, V. Cammarata eds, 2017, V. Cammarata, M. Cometa,
R. Coglitore, Archeologies of Visual Culture, 2016; Breve storia femminile
dello sguardo, 2014, Donne al microscopio, 2013.



24
                                   Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)




      Email: valeria.cammarata@unipa.it



                              The Article
Date sent: 31/05/2019
Date accepted: 31/10/2019
Date published: 30/11/2019



                       How to cite this article
Cammarata, Valeria, “The Reason of Imagination. The Blazing Worlds
of Margaret Cavendish and Siri Hustvedt”, Finzioni. Verità, bugie, mondi
possibili, Eds. R. Galvagno, M. Rizzarelli, M. Schilirò, A. Scuderi, Between,
IX.18 (2019), http://www.betweenjournal.it/




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