Cavendish’s Aesthetic Realism

This paper offers a new interpretation of Margaret Cavendish’s remarks on beauty. According to it, Cavendish takes beauty to be a real, response-independent quality of objects. In this sense, Cavendish is an aesthetic realist. In broad outline, I argue, this position remains constant throughout her writings. While there are passages in Cavendish’s work that might seem to count against this reading—specifically, passages on disagreement in aesthetic judgement, on the power of beauty to elicit the passions, and on our inability to specify the nature of beauty—I show that, when situated against the background of Cavendish’s broader metaphysical views, those passages in fact support the realist interpretation.