War, Women, and the Commonwealth in Margaret Cavendish’s Bell in Campo

This study explores the relationship between war, women, and the Commonwealth in Margaret Cavendish’s Bell in Campo against the historical backdrop of the English Civil War, which naturally prompted reflections and debates on the nature of government and the state. Published shortly after the Civil War decades, Bell in Campo depicts the birth of a Female Army, a military commonwealth constructed by agreement between all the women and Lady Victoria, their “Generalless.” This article considers how Cavendish’s work engages in dialogue with the state theory unfolded in writings like Filmer’s Patriarcha and Hobbes’s Leviathan. Considering the pervasive analogy of the state contract and the marriage contract, Cavendish’s all-female army rewrites conventions of the seventeenth-century heroic plays and arguably feminizes the subjects who enter into a contract with the sovereign. In this sense, Bell in Campo critically addresses the contemporary theory of the Commonwealth, and questions whether there is a place for women as citizens in it. However, the ending where women's roles are relegated back to the domestic sphere illustrates the ambivalent nature of Cavendish's drama where the voices of the Leveller women echo, but the ideal of a strong female monarch presides.