Paper bodies: Feminine Biopoetics in Margaret Cavendish Duchess of Newcastle

Abstract

In the debate between biopolitical and bioaesthetic approach the case of the literary – and performing – work acted by an English woman writer and natural philosopher lived between 1623 and 1673, could result really meaningful. The work and the whole life of Margaret Cavendish represents an interesting example of the ways in which biopolitical control on both bodies and minds could started to work in that period, and in which ways a woman like Cavendish could resist to both epistemic and physical violence by fighting a battle on two grounds, by means of her own artistic creations and her body expressions. Her physical or material artistic products could represent a result of which evolutionary literary considers as adaptation to a functional or disfuncional environment or society, giving them in the same time a kind of immortality in a bioaesthetic way. Making herself more than ordinary was just the main ambition of Margaret Cavendish’s art and performances.