Abstract
This paper investigates the construction of Amazonian matriarchy in Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World Called ‘The Blazing World’ and its implications for the early modern period’s concept of gender, power, and sovereignty. The study employs close reading of Cavendish’s texts along with elements of her paratext and draws upon the 1666 first edition. It also engages with the generic framing of the utopian writings of More, Bacon, and Campanella. Cavendish does not claim to place a woman on the patriarchal throne. Instead, she uses the feminine capacity of sovereignty to govern, comprehend, create, and command to reconstruct sovereignty. As an empress of the Amazonians, she integrates intellectual, political, military, and religious authority. She creates a state religion, organizes the bird-men and other hybrid communities, establishes an Experimental Philosophical Society, and wages war across other worlds using asymmetrical warfare. As a result, she has authority far beyond what would be expected of a woman in the early modern era. She concerns herself with matters of imperial control, theology, natural philosophy, warfare, and creative imagination. However, as women gain more power and freedom, so too does the empress, which in turn creates tensions. The story addresses some of those tensions as it relates to absolute power, intellectual autonomy, and the ordering of society The study places Cavendish in the symbolic heritage of Amazonian political thought and outlines the conditions in which a female sovereign is allowed to rule, comprehend, and create across multiple worlds.
Keywords: Amazonian Matriarchy, Feminist Political Theory, Gender and Sovereignty, Speculative Fiction, Utopian Fiction.