A Woman’s Optics: Margaret Cavendish, Sensory Mimesis, and Early Modern Rhetorics of Science

ABSTRACT

Accounts of the rhetorical tradition in early modern England often focus on the Royal Society of London and the scientific epistemologies and visual pedagogies surrounding technologies like the microscope. One critic of the Royal Society, Margaret Cavendish, theorized her own optics to counter the increasing exclusivity of the scientific community. An analysis of this woman’s optics reveals how the rhetorical concept of mimesis brought a theory of embodied, material sight to a historical moment in which objectivity was emerging. This critically imaginative analysis thus brings forth an early rhetorics of science in which alternative epistemologies may critique mechanical, experimental processes and argue for more inclusive scientific methods.

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the journal's editor for providing invaluable insight that strengthened the essay. Cheryl Glenn's graduate course in feminist rhetorical historiography inspired the content of this article, and the critical eye of Debra Hawhee saw the piece to completion. This article has also benefitted from the feedback of writing group members Sarah Adams, Curry Kennedy, Ashley Ray, and Michael Young.

Notes

^1. Tina Skouen and Ryan J. Stark report that Cavendish was “the first and the only Englishwoman of the period to publish works in natural philosophy in her own name” (Skouen and Stark 2015, 13). A recent collection by Leah Knight, Micheline White, and Elizabeth Sauer (2018), Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain, sheds light on the writing, publishing, and reading practices of early modern women, and Julie Crawford uncovers how Cavendish was especially strategic in the distributing of her texts, ensuring that certain university libraries maintained copies of her folios (Crawford, 2018, 114). This care taken to consider the longevity of her work shows that Cavendish viewed her ideas as compendiums to other established texts in the universities like Hooke’s.

^2. Cavendish’s engagement with Hooke was certainly a matter of “optics.” Although modern conceptions of optics relate to physics—reflection, refraction, and how light enters the eye—this shift in focus from sight to light is a relatively recent occurrence in the history of optics, explains historian A. Mark Smith. Smith traces the etymology of the Greek optika to opteu$\bar{o}$ (“to see”) and both words to $\bar{o}$ps (“eye”) (2015, 25). Only with Kepler’s theorization of the retinal image, Smith argues, did the study of optics become more concerned with light than with sight. In early modern England, then, Cavendish would have conceived of her explication of Hooke’s way of seeing and her own theory of visual perception as a theory of optics.

^3. Hooke’s theory of vision, it should also be noted, was not altogether different from Cavendish’s. Christa Knellwolf explains that for Hooke, vision was “a mechanical process of registering corpuscular light which, in the mind, produces Ideas which he ‘suppose[s] to be material and bulky’” (Knellwolf 2001, 195). Ian Lawson further argues that “Hooke’s aim was never to … share with his readers … a realistic impression of sight with a microscope, but his privileged knowledge of the microworld” (Lawson 2016, 39). The key difference in their respective optics is that Hooke had no conception of sense organs as patterning objects’ internal motion.

^4. Hobbes, it seems, was at least Cavendish’s earliest philosophical influence, according to Eileen O’Neill. Hobbes served as her husband’s tutor in his youth, and Hobbes remained close to the family thereafter as a main figure of the “Newcastle Circle” and as the Newcastle family served as his patrons (O’Neill 1998; Detleftsen 2007). Remnants of Hobbes’s materialism is evident as a central undercurrent in Cavendish’s thought, yet she went to great lengths to distance herself from him, writing against his theories at times and denying that she knew him well at others. Once Cavendish even wrote that she had never read more than 20 words of Hobbes (Hutton 1997).

^5. Many elements of the Royal Society’s philosophical and scientific views were under contestation in Cavendish’s “attempt to bend [their] discourse.” Here particularly, Rogers is speaking of the Society’s “monistic materialism,” or the idea that all matter is composed of a single element that was subordinated and organized by God (Rogers 1996, 6). In contrast to monistic materialism, Cavendish adopted a “vitalist” view of matter. Vitalism contended that all matter was composed of self-moving, animate matter and that these many elements of matter might not always cohere into a unified whole (Marshall 2016, xvi). Other scholars define Cavendish’s view of matter as “panpsychist” (Broad 2011, 459). Still others define it as “vitalist materialism” (Boyle 2018, 62-63).

^6. In many respects, Cavendish’s theories parallel the ideas expressed by Francisco Sanches, the skeptic and cousin of Michel de Montaigne, who argued that true scientific knowledge could never be acquired because all that humans could attain was “a limited knowledge of some things in the present” (Popkin 1988, 682). The revised skepticism of Sanches and Montaigne, Popkin contends, became the challenge that must be met for those philosophers seeking a new foundation of knowledge (Popkin 1988, 684).

^7. Literary scholar Tita Chico argues that Cavendish was in error when she pinpointed the weakness of the microscope. Cavendish was one who “implies that microscopes are a kind of plaything that have little to do with accurate perception,” according to Chico (2006, 151). But such inaccuracy would have enamored experimental philosophers, as it proved the “monstrosity of nature”—to use Daston and Galison’s phrase (2010, 67). Perception was indeed the issue for Cavendish, but her disavowal of the microscope had less to do with the importance of the scientific tool as with who was given access to reason through its means, whose perception mattered. If microscopy came to be the only valued observation, then women’s observations through contemplative philosophy would come to be dismissed.

^8. The idea of “patterning” may also evoke notions of quilt making. Much research has been written on quilting as a feminist embodied and communicative practice—see, for example, Elsley (1990), Fisk (2012), and Witkowski (2014). Most relative to this study is biologist Maura C. Flannery’s (2011) depiction of quilting as a feminist metaphor for how scientific inquiry may most ethically progress.

^9. There is much evidence to suggest that Cavendish would have had a robust understanding of ancient rhetorical writers and thus conceptions of mimesis. In her analysis of Cavendish’s books, Crawford uncovers the expert knowledge Cavendish had of ancient Greek and Roman authors like Plutarch, Thucydides, and Livy, authors of whom Cavendish often denied having knowledge (Crawford 2018, 95). Crawford argues that Cavendish’s reticence in that regard signaled a certain political positioning.

^10. Force is a contentious issue in theories of vision. The Royal Society’s optics of objectivity, in which the observer acts upon objects but is never acted upon, recalled Platonic theories of vision. This similarity has led feminist literary critics to connect thinkers from the Royal Society, such as Francis Bacon, with the concept of the “male gaze.” As Walters explains: “Though Bacon suggests that scientists have not been able to dominate Nature, she is none the less imagined as a female body to penetrate and violate by male reason for the pursuit of knowledge. The male/female binary is utilized to portray a relation between knowledge and sexual power. Power can be obtained over Nature as man has power over woman” (Walters 2014a, 63).

^11. This communicative exchange, Cavendish made clear, does not occur in conscious, voluntary channels. As she put it, “The actions of imitation or patterning, are different from the voluntary actions” of other bodily functions like “expulsion” (Cavendish 1666b, 35). Patterning, instead, happens on a different register, often, she implied, unbeknownst to the conscious mind.

^12. See Daston and Galison (2010) for an overview of the debate about the origins of objectivity and the role played by Royal Society members in determining the evolution of visual practices in scientific argumentation.