Intimate Creations: Margaret Cavendish and the Violent Desires of Fandom

Abstract

Abstract:This essay considers Margaret Cavendish as a pre-modern reader and writer engaged with the concerns of what we have come to call fandom. Cavendish offers an early model of what it looks like to read and write for the sake of intimate affective attachment to texts and characters. A standout among other early modern writers, she draws attention to the emotional, even erotic bonds that may form between readers, writers, and characters; she begins to theorize the creative process of worldbuilding as a complex emotional and ethical act; and she articulates her participation in these practices in ways that anticipate how certain later fans and authors would come to speak about their identities and creations. Notably, these articulations may not mesh with the optimism that characterizes much seminal scholarship on fandom. This essay examines how Cavendish models the formation of fannish identity and desiring subjectivity through her affectively engaged reading and writing, as well as how she participates in the creative, communal act of worldbuilding. It then turns to how these affective engagements are intimately entwined with conflict and violent desire, both internal to Cavendish's constructed worlds and inherent in the relationship between certain writers and their fans in ways that resonate with twenty-first-century fannish controversies.