Bibliographic record
Abstract
Margaret Cavendish sets up feminine utopias in her plays Bell in Campo (1662), The Female Academy (1662), and The Convent of Pleasure (1668). In Bell in Campo, women build a ‘feminine army;’ in The Female Academy, a school for women scholars; and in The Convent of Pleasure, a utopia intended as a pleasurable escape from courtship and marriage. All three ultimately fall apart. This raises an interpretive puzzle: why does Cavendish keep setting up these feminine utopias only for each one to crumble in a spectacular fashion? While these works are iterations of Cavendish’s politics of gender, I want to suggest that they also illustrate her larger feminist social epistemological project. I argue that across these three frustrated feminine utopias, Cavendish develops an account and critique of an epistemic dimension of patriarchy, specifically, that patriarchy undermines women’s epistemic nature – it makes them unknown and unknowable, even to themselves, and their attempts to resist are cast as absurd, liminal things. Cavendish does so by highlighting practices of silencing and distorted speech, ignorance and knowledge, and being (un)known in gender-asymmetric ways. I also argue that Cavendish has a proposed solution: for Cavendish, women ought to become mermaids and hermaphrodites – at least, in a manner of speaking. To make my case, I will present the three plays in Section 2, highlighting Cavendish’s criticisms of the epistemic dimension of patriarchy and what I take to be revealed by the plays’ dramatic conclusions. Section 3 illustrates Cavendish’s formulation of the epistemic problem of patriarchy for women. Section 4 provides a brief reconstruction of Cavendish’s implied solution to this epistemic problem and responds a concern about its potential departure from nature. I close with some final thoughts in Section 5.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".