Margaret Cavendish’s Experiments with Interiority

This essay juxtaposes Margaret Cavendish’s two early works Sociable Letters (1664) and The Convent of Pleasure (1668) in an effort to illustrate how the seventeenth-century woman writer attested to the possibility of achieving interiority in and outside of printed texts. In conversation with the recent literary scholarship focusing on the construction of interiority and inwardness in long eighteenth-century texts, including Jonathan Kramnick, Julie Park, and Sean Silver, I seek to illustrate the ways Cavendish toyed with the idea of interiority. Stakes of this essay are many: primarily, the intersections of spatial and cognitive interiority as depicted in Cavendish’s works show that the author anticipated the rise of the novel, whose sustained interest in the particular and the material gives rise to a subject’s inwardness. Second, by creating a springboard for unfolding all-female space, Cavendish suggests an alternative to a woman’s way of living. The pastoral closure, one that is akin to the marriage closure in Shakespeare’s comedy, can be seen as disintegrating the hard-won establishment of the women’s closet. And yet, I argue that what Cavendish believed to be pleasure is firmly rooted in the convent or a closet, where women can retire from distractions and censorship so that they can acquire time for contemplation fundamental to self-sufficiency and self-governance.