Ad Singularitatem: Multiplicity, Commonplaced Selves, and Miscellanies in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World

Abstract

This essay focuses on the intertextual engagement of Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World with Margaret Cavendish’s seventeenth-century fiction. Going beyond a single-text reading, the essay argues that Hustvedt’s critical interventions in the making of a woman’s subjectivity—paratextual and intermedial—are informed by early modern manuscript culture and ekphrasis. As commonplacing affords opportunities for a compiler to assume plural voices, the commonplace books created by Burden, the protagonist, present a nuanced unfolding of a woman’s subjectivity on textual and visual levels. Notably, Burden’s self-fashioning and ensuing self-dissolution are prompted by deep-seated anger. Hustvedt, even in the face of her protagonist’s tragic end, celebrates the multiplicity that attends a woman’s heroic journey in attaining singularity.