Silkworms and Panaceas: Margaret Cavendish, Infinite Nature, and the Progress of Utopia

IF 0.2 2区 文学 0 LITERATURE
ELH Pub Date : 2022-03-04 DOI:10.1353/elh.2022.0003
A. Zimmern
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Abstract

Abstract:Panaceas and philosopher's stones were, in late seventeenth-century Europe, the holy grails of medical progress. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1624-1674) rejected her contemporaries' obsession with cure-alls but, armed with the conviction that fiction is the more pleasant and the more rigorous part of natural philosophy, she conjectured wildly about natural rejuvenation. In the fancies adjoined to her mature philosophical treatises, she adapts recent findings by William Harvey and Virginia Ferrar about the reproductive cycle of silkworms to imagine a natural gum that restores centenarians to youth and "Restoring Beds, or Wombs" at the center of the world. In so doing, Cavendish stakes out an unpopular position: Nature will not cure all our diseases but, if we wait for it, it may usher in the medical progress and sought-after eternal youth that human artifice never shall achieve. Her conjectures of all-natural remedies ground, I argue, a massive redefinition of utopian writing. Revising a genre that delights in the progress and dominion of techne, Cavendish invites readers to join her in celebrating the unfathomable potency of Nature, not by testing what seems reasonable but by conjecturing what by all accounts should appear impossible
蚕与灵丹妙药:玛格丽特·卡文迪什、无限自然与乌托邦的发展
摘要:在17世纪晚期的欧洲,灵丹妙药和魔法石是医学进步的圣杯。纽卡斯尔公爵夫人玛格丽特·卡文迪什(Margaret Cavendish, 1624-1674)拒绝了同时代人对灵丹妙药的痴迷,但她坚信小说是自然哲学中更令人愉悦、更严谨的部分,她对自然复兴进行了疯狂的推测。在她成熟的哲学论文中,她改编了威廉·哈维(William Harvey)和弗吉尼亚·费拉尔(Virginia Ferrar)最近关于蚕繁殖周期的发现,想象一种天然口香糖可以让百岁老人恢复青春,并在世界中心“恢复床或子宫”。这样做,卡文迪什站在了一个不受欢迎的立场上:大自然不会治愈我们所有的疾病,但如果我们等待它,它可能会带来医学进步和人们所追求的永葆青春,这是人类技术永远无法实现的。我认为,她对纯天然疗法的推测,是对乌托邦式写作的一次大规模重新定义。卡文迪许修改了一种以技术进步和统治为乐的流派,邀请读者和她一起庆祝自然的深不可测的力量,不是通过测试看似合理的东西,而是通过猜测所有人都认为不可能的东西
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来源期刊
ELH
ELH LITERATURE-
CiteScore
0.60
自引率
0.00%
发文量
30
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