Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Confuting Those Blind Geographers: Christopher Marlowe’s Spectacle of Maps and the Female Body
- 2 ‘T’illumine the now obscurèd Palestine’: Elizabeth Cary and the Mapping of Early Modern Marriage and Colonialism
- 3 ‘Willing to Pay Their Maidenheads’: Thomas Heywood and the Cartography of Bodily Commerce
- 4 ‘The Fort of her Chastity’: Cavendish’s Mapmakers of Virtue
- Conclusion: Women as World-Writers
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - ‘The Fort of her Chastity’: Cavendish’s Mapmakers of Virtue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Confuting Those Blind Geographers: Christopher Marlowe’s Spectacle of Maps and the Female Body
- 2 ‘T’illumine the now obscurèd Palestine’: Elizabeth Cary and the Mapping of Early Modern Marriage and Colonialism
- 3 ‘Willing to Pay Their Maidenheads’: Thomas Heywood and the Cartography of Bodily Commerce
- 4 ‘The Fort of her Chastity’: Cavendish’s Mapmakers of Virtue
- Conclusion: Women as World-Writers
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Cavendish's plays respond to the commodification of women's bodies as geographic objects by assigning to women the roles of both cartographer and territory. In Loves Adventures and Bell in Campo, the women appropriate the authority of those who survey and create maps of the land; in this case, the territory in question is again women's bodies, but Cavendish demonstrates how women, through assertion of bodily sovereignty similar to that of Elizabeth as Virgin Queen, can gain agency. Cavendish's strategy is inspired by the mapmakers of the Low Countries, where she spent time in exile. As the Dutch lost actual territory, they exerted rhetorical control of the world through their surveys and depictions of land and people around the globe.
Keywords: Loves Adventures, bodily sovereignty, Bell in Campo, Dutch cartography, Aphra Behn, The Lucky Chance.
Although the conclusion of the second part of The Fair Maid saw Bess Bridges ushered into the home during its performances in the 1630s, the next decade would see numerous women not only leaving their houses to participate in politics, but also actively defending their households from encroaching Parliamentary and Royalist forces. During the English Civil Wars, N.H. Keeble notes that ‘the incidence of female petitioners of parliament during the years 1642-1653 and in 1659 is a clear and specific example of the Civil War enabling women to forgo their customary womanly silence for an “Amazonian” or “masculine” spirit; the activities of prophetesses is another’. Keeble's assessment assumes that women before this time were customarily silent, and the character trajectories of Heywood's Elizabeth and Bess seem to bear this assertion out. Of course, although much critical work has demonstrated the presence of very vocal fictional and historical women in the early modern period, there is no doubt that, in the upheaval of the Civil Wars and the uncertainty of the Interregnum, actual English women's more vocal presence and visible work outside of the household exerted a marked influence on other women. Margaret Cavendish benefitted not just from those women's example but also that of real and fictional women using geographical rhetoric. As a woman writing and publishing during the Interregnum and Restoration, Cavendish not only can claim the female petitioners and prophetesses as forebears, but she also within her work reveals the imprint of geographic texts.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage , pp. 197 - 244Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019