Silkworms and Panaceas: Margaret Cavendish, Infinite Nature, and the Progress of Utopia

Abstract:Panaceas and philosopher's stones were, in late seventeenth-century Europe, the holy grails of medical progress. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1624-1674) rejected her contemporaries' obsession with cure-alls but, armed with the conviction that fiction is the more pleasant and the more rigorous part of natural philosophy, she conjectured wildly about natural rejuvenation. In the fancies adjoined to her mature philosophical treatises, she adapts recent findings by William Harvey and Virginia Ferrar about the reproductive cycle of silkworms to imagine a natural gum that restores centenarians to youth and "Restoring Beds, or Wombs" at the center of the world. In so doing, Cavendish stakes out an unpopular position: Nature will not cure all our diseases but, if we wait for it, it may usher in the medical progress and sought-after eternal youth that human artifice never shall achieve. Her conjectures of all-natural remedies ground, I argue, a massive redefinition of utopian writing. Revising a genre that delights in the progress and dominion of techne, Cavendish invites readers to join her in celebrating the unfathomable potency of Nature, not by testing what seems reasonable but by conjecturing what by all accounts should appear impossible