“yet I am chastly honest”: Militant Chastity and the Negotiation of Gendered Morality in Margaret Cavendish’s Loves Adventures
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This paper examines female militancy in Margaret Cavendish’s Loves Adventures and discusses how Cavendish attempts to reconcile women’s social and political actions such as military experiences and petitioning with conventional gender norms. Cavendish dramatizes women warriors in Bell in Campo and Loves Adventures, but deals with female militancy in a different way. Both Lady Victoria in Bell in Campo and Lady Orphant in Loves Adventures engage in warfare for love as an overriding motive of their military pursuits. But, while Lady Victoria expands her personal needs to women’s rights in general, providing forceful arguments for female liberty and autonomy, Lady Orphant regards her military adventure only as a romantic pilgrimage and remains a subordinate subject to her lover, embracing gender hierarchy. This ambivalent attitude towards female self-sovereignty and political capacities shows that Cavendish attempts to vindicate women’s rights without breaching the standards of feminine deportment demanded by patriarchal gender ideologies. Satirical texts during the Civil Wars commonly identified political women with whores. Cavendish is well aware that female militancy blurs the boundary between chastity and whoredom, diverging from the conventional gender norms. Thus, she reconciles female political pursuits with socially inscribed female modesty by dictating chastity in her women warriors. In so doing, she makes female autonomy and pleasure compatible, free from accusations of whorishness. This militant chastity of women warriors, I contend, is the product of Cavendish’s negotiation with gender-biased social imperatives.
Abstract
This paper examines female militancy in Margaret Cavendish’s Loves Adventures and discusses how Cavendish attempts to reconcile women’s social and political actions such as military experiences and petitioning with conventional gender norms. Cavendish dramatizes women warriors in Bell in Campo and Loves Adventures, but deals with female militancy in a different way. Both Lady Victoria in Bell in Campo and Lady Orphant in Loves Adventures engage in warfare for love as an overriding motive of their military pursuits. But, while Lady Victoria expands her personal needs to women’s rights in general, providing forceful arguments for female liberty and autonomy, Lady Orphant regards her military adventure only as a romantic pilgrimage and remains a subordinate subject to her lover, embracing gender hierarchy. This ambivalent attitude towards female self-sovereignty and political capacities shows that Cavendish attempts to vindicate women’s rights without breaching the standards of feminine deportment demanded by patriarchal gender ideologies. Satirical texts during the Civil Wars commonly identified political women with whores. Cavendish is well aware that female militancy blurs the boundary between chastity and whoredom, diverging from the conventional gender norms. Thus, she reconciles female political pursuits with socially inscribed female modesty by dictating chastity in her women warriors. In so doing, she makes female autonomy and pleasure compatible, free from accusations of whorishness. This militant chastity of women warriors, I contend, is the product of Cavendish’s negotiation with gender-biased social imperatives.
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