The third counter: “We have more Reason to Murmur against Nature than against Men, who hath made Men more Ingenious, Witty, and Wise than Women, more Strong, Industrious, and Laborious than Women, for Women are Witless, and Strengthless, and Unprofitable Creatures, did they not Bear Children.”
The fourth propose: “We should Imitate Men, so will our Bodies and Minds appear more Masculine, and our Power will Increase.”
“Hermaphroditical!” the fifth will cry.
“Masculine Women ought to be Praised” will say the sixth.
And the last of us will speak: “Women have no Reason to Complain against Nature, or the God of Nature, for though the Gifts are not the Same they have given to Men, yet those Gifts they have given to Women are much Better.”
In 1662 Margaret’s Orations was published — to outrage, wonder, and scorn.
THE BLAZING WORLD
IT IS A COLD MORNING IN EARLY SPRING. THE SUN HAS RISEN; THE sky is piled with clouds. Soon the snow will fall. Over the trees, the pond. The cows and pigs and sheep. Now smoke rises from a chimney in the village, a grayish plume into the grayish sky. The little village houses are not visible from the window, not through the woods, the innumerable leaves, though on certain days, if the wind is right, she can hear the village children shouting and playing games. She can smell the bacon fried. When she drives through in her carriage, when she makes her daily tour, she sees their faces peering out from cottage doors. She is a specter. A spectacle? The snow will blanket the road.
Margaret stands inside her room and stares out at the grounds. It is early spring. Or is it winter’s end? So much now is changed. Yet like the flakes beyond the window glass, some years rise up while others sink down, out of her view, without concern for order. She remembers a day six years ago, which feels much further back, how the fountains plashed with wine — soldiers, trumpets, a drift of pigs in the street. Every bell in London swung. It was the king’s thirtieth birthday, and he arrived on a ship awash in satin and guns — the Royal Charles moaned in shallow water — then disembarked and spat upon the ground. “A pox on all kings!” cried a hag. He flipped on a wig and mounted his stallion, rode with billowing hair down billowing streets, the bluster of many horses’ hooves muffled by petals and tapestries, puddles of wine and shit — Fleet Street to the Strand to Charing Cross to the palace — then ordered Cromwell’s traitorous head severed from its body, stuck up on a twenty-foot spike above Westminster Hall evermore.
Or had she only heard that part from William?
She paces as it snows. Her skirts wave around her as she takes this morning exercise, fold upon fold of fabric unfurling in continued variation. Of course, it doesn’t snow inside her room, onto the floor, the Turkey carpets, yet every other minute she flicks her hand before her face as if hurrying away a flake. No, winter is kept outside. Or is it early spring? In any case, the room is warm — stuffed with roses, a blazing fire, the honeyed air her husband finds so stifling. He prefers she visit him in his chamber a floor above, where the Ballad of Robin Hood is painted on the ceiling. He isn’t at Welbeck today, however, gone to London on forest business, having been named at last the Justice-of-Eyre. Not the position he’d hoped for at court. At least they are a duke and duchess — she is Duchess of Newcastle now.
But I am old, she thinks, turning to the mirror.
She touches her hand to her neck.
Normally, she would begin her writing directly, but her newest book, really two books in one—Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy and The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princesse, the Duchess of Newcastle, which she calls one part Fantastical and one part Philosophical, “joined as two Worlds at the end of their Poles,” and in the preface of which she claims to be “as Ambitious as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be; which makes, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First”—has just returned from the printer.
She is anxious for its reception, plans to send a copy to the king, copies to Oxford and Cambridge. On her desk this new book sits, leather-bound, a strange and reverent object. It marries, Margaret thinks, all of my life’s work. And she opens it at random to a passage near the start, finding the Emperor of the Blazing World leading the visiting Duchess of Newcastle to see his horse stables of gold, cornelian, amber, and turquoise — they are utterly unique! — whereupon the duchess confesses that “she would not be like others in any thing if it were possible; I endeavor,” she tells him, “to be as singular as I can; for it argues but a mean Nature to imitate others; and though I do not love to be imitated if I can possibly avoid it; yet rather than imitate others, I should chuse to be imitated by others; for my nature is such, that I had rather appear worse in singularity, than better in the Mode.” Surely it shines, she thinks. And she wishes it one thousand or ten thousand million readers. Nay, that their number be infinite! The Blazing World with its blazing sky and river of liquid crystal. Its gowns of alien star-stone! Its talking bears and spiders! William has told her it is her finest work, and even composed a poem to include:
You conquer death, in a perpetual life
And make me famous too in such a wife.
Margaret shuts the book.
Her eyes burn from reading too long by candle last night: one new pamphlet from the Royal Society called “Some Observations of the Effects of Touch and Friction” and another, well-thumbed, from Hooke’s Micrographia; or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon, on the discovery of a new world — not a new world, she thinks, for certainly one’s inability to see something does not mean it is not there until one does — opened for the first time to his sight, with so-called new stars and new motions, and in particular one section regarding the moon, wherein Hooke, observing light near the Hipparchus crater, concludes that the moon “may have Vegetables analogus to our Grass, Shrubs and Trees; and most of these encompassing Hills as may be covered with a thin vegetable Coat, such as the short Sheep pasture which covers the Hills of Salisbury Plains,” as well as the description of an experiment that may, he writes, reveal a hidden world beneath our very feet, beyond the reach of even the most powerful microscope, an alternate universe of harmony and vibration — and hadn’t she thought the very thing herself, and years ago? A world inside a peach pit? Inside a lady’s jewel? Yet he magnifies a flea to fill a folio page, as if to turn nature into a monstrosity is the most profound success. He turns a flea into a thing not wholly flea!
So it’s for the best — it is, and she will not regret it — that in this new book she addresses these men directly. Of Hooke and his Micrographia: “The inspection of a bee through a microscope will bring him no more honey, nor the inspection of a grain more corn.” She calls their microscopy a brittle art. Hooke himself admits it! How the light inside the instrument, coming from different angles, causes a single object to take on many shapes. They distort the very thing they claim to expose! Indeed, she pities the flea. Meanwhile, their so-called observations reveal only the outer shell, and nothing of the inner essence of a thing. The mysteries of nature go utterly unrevealed! She even challenges the Royal Society to debate her ideas in public, for why should it be a disgrace to any man to maintain his opinions against a woman? “After all,” she says to the mirror, “I am a duchess and not unknown,” and she straightens out her heavy skirts, twisted all around.