The Reason of Imagination. The Blazing Worlds of Margaret Cavendish and Siri Hustvedt

This essay is aimed at building a bridge between two female writers very distant in time and place, Margaret Cavendish and Siri Hustvedt, on three basis: that of a work they have in common – which Hustvedt has almost rewritten from Cavendish, The Blazing World –, two of their proto-feminist and feminist tactics to overcome the boundaries posed by patriarchy – that of embodiment and that of masquerade –. and their consideration of imagination – as a fundamental means of knowledge. Though one of the peculiarities of 17th century paradigm shift was the distinction of the scientific discourse from the religious, magic, mystic and artistic one, yet a link still seems to remain between science and imagination, as demonstrated, for instance, by Galileo’s aesthetic attitude (Panofsky), by Hooke’s and Baker’s imaginative suggestion before their microscopes (Hooke; Baker; Nicholson), Bacon’s duplicity as «the enthusiast of both power of imagination and understanding and as the harbinger of narrow objectivism and the dissociation of sensibility» (Levao: 5; Bacon). However the idea of imagination as a true means of knowledge seems to be a merely female intuition, or rather a subversive way to shift the scientific paradigm once again, replacing objective and disembodied observation with subjective imagination and speculation. This is the main subject of Margaret Cavendish’s best known work, The Blazing World (1666), where her alter ego is free to build a whole social and philosophical system based on corporality and subjectivity. From the same conception of imagination does Siri Hustvedt start when in 2014 she rewrites The Blazing World: the story of an artist who, in the twentieth century, still tries to face the overwhelming misogyny with the performance of the body and the theory of embodiment. The protagonist is really close to the Duchess of Newcastle, especially for her desire to overturn the artificial gender categories through a real masquerade. The voices of Cavendish, Hustvedt and of all their alter egos follow each other through documents, diary pages and pure narration, in which it is difficult to say what is fiction and what is truth