Resurrection Reading: Margaret Cavendish Drafts the Afterlife

Abstract

Margaret Cavendish’s quest for intellectual and literary fame garnered infamy during her own lifetime—so she extended her pursuit of favorable renown into the afterlife, envisioning “a glorious resurrection in following ages” (“To the Two Universities,” in Philosophical and Physical Opinions [1655]). She sought to impart a residue of herself in her texts which could then be reanimated in the minds of readers: “I am industrious,” she declares, in Sociable Letters (1664), “to do some Work, wherein I may leave my Idea, or live in an idea, or my Idea may Live in Many Brains.” This essay situates Cavendish’s vision of living in the “many brains” of future readers within both her natural philosophical and fictional works. From the notions of perception, conception, and the composition of matter put forth in her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), I extrapolate a theory of reading consonant with Cavendish’s vitalist-materialist worldview. From the speculative appendix of her Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668), I piece together a theory of resurrection and the mechanisms by which a fully material authorial afterlife might plausibly arise. These operations remain tentative in Cavendish’s explicitly scientific works, but they are more centrally enacted in her fictional Blazing World (co-published with Observations in 1666). I suggest that this text’s famously baffling scenes of soul-swapping, body-hopping, and world-building coalesce in modeling the kind of vulnerable authorship, collaborative readership, and intersubjective relationships that could produce the “glorious resurrection” in the minds of others to which Cavendish aspires. [S.R.]