The Blazing World: Part 1 Summary & Analysis

While the Lady initially finds the Blazing World strange and threatening, its extraordinary technology shows her that it’s actually radically better than her own world. In turn, this otherworldly technology reflects Cavendish’s hope that human life and society can radically improve in the future. Of course, contemporary readers will note that modern ships are similar to the fantastical ones that Cavendish describes here (even if they aren’t made of leather or gold).

The Blazing World is an absolute monarchy—or a kingdom in which the king has total power over everything. But, contrary to the modern assumption that dictatorship creates cruelty and unrest, the Blazing World is actually peaceful and unified. In fact, Cavendish clearly thinks that absolute monarchy is the best form of government. This makes sense in the context of her life as a noblewoman and staunch supporter of the English monarchy during the English Civil War.

The name “Paradise” and the Emperor’s extravagant, gated palace strongly suggest that the Blazing World is an allegory for Heaven (with the Emperor representing God). Yet this is only one of many ways to read the novel—for instance, the Blazing World could also represent the human mind, the future of society, the conquest of the Americas, or England if the monarchy had won the English Civil War. Rather than asking which interpretation is correct, readers ought to explore the significance and implications of each one.

The Emperor mistakes the Lady for a goddess because she is just as striking and exotic to him as the Blazing World is to her. By turning the Lady into the Empress, Cavendish inverts more medieval social norms and literary tropes (in which men hold power and almost never willingly give it up to women). The book becomes a fantasy of female political empowerment, designed to explore the possibilities of a government run by and for women. In addition to shining a light on Cavendish’s own ambition, the book shows how fiction can function as a tool for planning and imagining different futures (such as more just social arrangements).

After becoming Empress, the Lady takes in the Blazing World as a whole. She learns that, not only do plenty of unusual hybrid creatures live there, but it also lacks all of the familiar creatures that she is accustomed to seeing on Earth. The Blazing World’s fantastical creatures challenge the categories that readers intuitively use to understand the world (most importantly, the division between humans and animals). But, despite being hybrids who don’t clearly fall into familiar categories, they also all have clearly defined places in their own world’s social, political, and intellectual order. In fact, the Blazing World’s society seems to be organized around knowledge, which reflects Cavendish’s intense interest in the early modern science of her time (and its potential to improve human society).

The statesmen’s explanation again reflects Cavendish’s belief that absolute monarchy is the best form of government: she thinks that people naturally respect and obey a benevolent king or queen, which creates social order. Similarly, the Blazing World’s religion is also unified, even if its practitioners are diverse. Thus, the Blazing World is a utopia specifically because it’s all united under a particular set of institutions and values—in other words, because it’s ruled by a single global empire with total power. This is a significant comment on real-world politics, given that England was building an overseas colonial empire during Cavendish’s time, and that Cavendish was deeply committed to the English monarchy.

The Blazing World’s architecture makes sense according to the laws of physics and resembles that of some real-world societies, but it is very different from that of the places where Cavendish lived her life (England, France, and the Spanish Netherlands). In other words, it is a rational but utopian solution to real-world problems—which again shows how Cavendish’s fictional world can help her readers improve the real world.

Having learned about her new society, the Empress now decides to learn everything she can about nature in the Blazing World. She will spend much of the rest of the book immersed in this quest for knowledge, which reflects Cavendish’s own lifelong involvement in English scientific circles. In fact, these scientists were just starting to develop modern scientific principles and experimental methods at the time. The bird-men’s theories about the stars echo major scientific debates that Cavendish participated in.

To modern readers, the bird-men and fish-men’s explanations may seem to range from accurate to outlandish. But Cavendish still depicts them as serious scientists doing their best to explain complex phenomena through the best available hypotheses. Nature may function very differently in the Blazing World than it does in our own world, but the scientific method remains basically the same.

The bear-men’s experiments reveal Cavendish’s scientific empiricism—or her belief that the surest route to knowledge is through observing the external world. At the same time, the bear-men’s experiments turn out to be absurd and unsuccessful. To understand why, it’s helpful to know that Cavendish frequently clashed with scientists whose experiments she considered useless and misguided (such as Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle). Thus, while Cavendish clearly believes in science and experimentation, she also makes a point to mock science that goes wrong and confuses instead of clarifying.

The Empress’s conflict with the bear-men over microscopes also represents a real episode from Cavendish’s life. When prominent scientists showed her tiny objects under a microscope, she became very interested in microscopy and bought a microscope of her own. Later, she feuded with the Royal Society of London over whether microscope results were reliable. Early microscopes often didn’t work well, and Cavendish didn’t think that seeing the outside of a small object could tell scientists anything meaningful about the object’s true nature inside. Thus, while she clearly admires microscopes’ potential as scientific tools, she is also skeptical of scientists who rely too heavily on them.

The fish-men and worm-men, who are natural philosophers (biologists and earth scientists), combine the bodies of animals with the minds of humans capable of analyzing the environments where they live. Regardless of whether their hypotheses accurately explain the Blazing World’s natural environment, they still demonstrate how science as a method can expand people’s knowledge and power in any world. Meanwhile, their discussion of animals and their spirits foreshadows the Empress’s conversations about mind and body with the immaterial spirits in the next section of the book.

This conversation about reproduction and perception shows that the Empress is interested in the origins of life and the kinds of minds that different life forms have. This points to the more philosophical concerns to which her scientific questioning eventually leads her—including the origins of the world and what kinds of perception and reason are reliable.

The worm- and fish-men’s knowledge of the Blazing World’s geology and hydrology suggests that it is very similar to the Earth in many fundamental ways. This again shows that Cavendish’s speculation about the Blazing World is a way to test out her own scientific hypotheses about Earth. The worm- and fish-men’s science is imperfect, but the Blazing World’s superabundance of gold and jewels shows that it’s clearly more successful than science on Earth.

The ape-men’s claims about the motion of animals show that they are investigating the fundamental question of what differentiates living from nonliving matter. Again, this foreshadows the conversations about the nature of life and the universe that the Empress will soon have with the spirits who visit her. And the bear-men and worm-men’s debate over how to learn about minerals inside the Earth again points to Cavendish’s focus on epistemology—or the different methods that scientists and other thinkers can use to learn about the nature of the world.

These topics of discussion turn the conversation towards the philosophical question of what determines something’s identity. On the one hand, the idea that nothing can exist without qualities like color is significant because it means that many of things’ important, essential traits depend on their physical bodies, and not on some deeper inner nature or soul. On the other hand, the existence of seeds and immaterial spirits suggests that the essence of life could be a nonphysical soul, which directs the motion and development of matter. Forms, or the basic ideas and structures that repeatedly appear in nature, are also an important dimension of this problem: they may be eternal blueprints that have always existed in nature (as philosophers like Plato suggest), or they may simply be the result of different physical things repeatedly behaving in similar ways.

The Empress’s conversation with the ape-men, like all of her other dialogues in this section of the book, is really about the meaning of science. The ape-men want to find the fundamental building blocks of all matter, just like modern scientists who have organized them into the periodic table. But the Empress believes that focusing on the interconnections between things in nature is an easier and more useful way to explain the world than breaking nature down into separate, disconnected component parts. In other words, the Empress defines nature through its totality, whereas the ape-men define it through its parts.

The ape-men have done practical experiments to benefit other people. These experiments are Cavendish’s interpretation of scientists’ and alchemists’ longtime search for rejuvenation technologies. And they again show how Cavendish uses her fantasy world to explore the meaning of Western culture’s aspirations to scientific and cultural power. The ruling imperial people’s alchemy not only makes them young—it also allows them to continue living and ruling forever, which creates a more stable system of government over time. Thus, Cavendish’s fantasies about superior technology are really just a means to fulfill her political fantasies about creating an invincible absolute monarchy.

Like the ape-men, the anatomists, herbalists, and Galenic physicians offer practical scientific insights, not theoretical ones. They do not know for a fact what makes up herbs, monsters, or the plague, but they do know what role each can and should play in human society. Modern readers will know that understanding the inner nature of medicines, animals, and diseases can help sciences use and fight them. But, in the 17th century, Cavendish did not seem to think that this was as important a goal as merely identifying problems and solutions.

Cavendish’s Empress continues to sort the meaningful sciences from the meaningless ones. In addition to reflecting her interest in the practical technological applications of science, preference for natural science over pure mathematics also shows what kind of scientific method the Empress values. Specifically, she believes that empirically observing the world is a surer way to understand it than analyzing it theoretically.

The Empress sees the value in the orators and logicians’ arts, but only when they are applied to meaningful real-world challenges. Like the mathematicians and geometricians, the orators and logicians err in believing that their skills are in the abstract. For instance, the parrot-man tries to show off his ability to persuade, without believing in any cause, and the logicians care more about the abstract beauty of logic than the actual world where they live. Instead, the Empress argues that these arts and sciences are not valuable in themselves, but only as tools in service of the natural sciences. Thus, Cavendish suggests that biology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy hold the real truth about the universe, not math, logic, and philosophy.

The Empress decides to transform the Blazing World’s religion after talking with the logicians, who seem to think that human rationality is perfect enough to worship instead of God. The Empress’s conversion mission strongly resembles Europe’s colonial missions around the world, which wedded the quest for power and wealth with a religious imperative to convert non-Europeans to Christianity.

The Empress uses the Blazing World’s miraculous natural phenomena to convince its people to worship her God instead of their own. Controlling the Blazing World’s religion also helps the Empress maintain political control over its people. Notably, however, this is only possible because of the world’s advanced technology for mining the mountain and the stars. Thus, Cavendish suggests that science and technology give people power, and this power is the cornerstone of religion and good governance. The fire- and star-stone make such an impression on the kingdom’s people simply because of their extraordinary, blinding light. Thus, in addition to again suggesting that people’s senses control their thinking and decisions more than their intellect, the persuasive power of the Empress’s chapels also suggests that religion may only serve to unite people by manipulating them.

The immaterial spirits’ arrival is a significant development because, thus far, Cavendish has primarily focused on the physical world and sought to understand it through science. In fact, it’s not entirely clear whether her worldview is consistent with the existence of immaterial spirits at all. Yet these spirits also offer her the only way to bridge the gap between her original world and her new one. Her interest in Cabbala, or the mystical interpretation of the relationship between God, the physical universe, and human beings, shows that she has moved beyond science and into the realm of philosophy. Specifically, she is starting to ask questions that natural science cannot answer.

This conversation is really about psychology—and specifically the way the mind stores and processes information. Clearly, the spirits are not all-knowing deities. Instead, their minds are different from human ones, and their wisdom is greater, only because they are not constrained by physical bodies (so they can go anywhere they want and learn anything they wish). In this sense, they embody the ideal conditions for knowing about the world, but this knowledge is still based on their senses, and not on any supernatural insight into hidden truths.

The Empress’s questions about the Cabbala might seem confusing or irrelevant to modern readers. However, she’s really asking a simple and important question: how can people answer the greater questions that science can’t answer, like what created the world and what God is like? She offers some possible solutions, including looking to scripture, seeking out mystical or divine inspiration, and philosophical deduction. But the spirits clearly reject this last option, which makes the same mistakes as the logicians: it wrongly assumes that human reason is perfect and infallible.   

Readers can think of the next long section of the Empress’s conversation with the spirits as Cavendish’s attempt to test out her philosophical ideas about the nature of the universe. She asks what the world would actually look like if her ideas are true, and then she asks whether this world could actually function coherently. The spirits’ lecture clarifies that reason is the right tool for understanding the world, while faith is the right tool for understanding God. In other words, they use philosophy to define where scientific inquiry must end and religious faith must begin. This means that there’s no contradiction in the Empress dedicating her life to scientific inquiry, yet also setting up a new religion for the Blazing World, which is based on faith.

This obscure conversation about whether spirits move bodies or bodies move spirits is really Cavendish’s way of addressing a major philosophical debate about where the true essence of a person (or other being) really lies. Many philosophers traditionally think of people’s true identities as their souls, and their bodies as mere vessels for the souls. The spirits partially support this view by noting that they can enter different bodies. But they also partially reject it when they emphasize that bodies move them. Similarly, they note than they can only understand the physical world by attaching themselves to a body and then experiencing the world through that body’s senses. Thus, while Cavendish accepts the division between body and spirit, she thinks that bodies are much more important—and spirits much less so—than her philosophical contemporaries do.

Cavendish describes the spirit (or soul, or mind) as an immaterial force that enters a physical body and takes up residence in it. This view is similar to that of philosophers who believe that all individuals are the unity of an immaterial soul and a material body. But these philosophers generally think that the individual’s essence is really their soul, and the body is merely a vessel. Cavendish rejects this conclusion. Instead, she thinks that, if the soul is really immaterial, it really can’t do anything without the body. This means that the body is far more than a mere empty vessel—instead, it’s the vehicle that drives around the helpless, motionless soul.

The Empress’s conversations with the spirits turn from the nature of mind and body to the origins of the world and the relationship between the different worlds that she has experienced. Cavendish uses this portion of the conversation to establish that the Blazing World absolutely could exist. It’s logically consistent with all of her own philosophical beliefs about the nature of the world, and once those fundamental principles are set in stone, the Blazing World is just as viable as our own world. Thus, Cavendish encourages her readers to see that many seemingly essential features of their world could actually be totally different, and the fundamental nature of reality would not have to change at all.

Cavendish again connects her work to the Christian creation story by showing the spirits declare that Paradise is really the Blazing World. Of course, this also lends validity to the interpretation that the Lady actually died on the merchant’s ship at the beginning of the book and has gone to Paradise. Cavendish suggests that this Paradise is not a mystical spirit-world populated only by people’s souls—instead, it’s a real, physical place where they get new bodies and live out eternity.

The spirits encourage the Empress to start thinking of religious doctrines about the creation of the world as metaphors, rather than literal truths. Since human reason and language are imperfect, they suggest, Scripture can never perfectly express the truth of God and creation. Indeed, just like people cannot fully grasp infinity, they cannot fully grasp God—but they can try, despite knowing they will always fall short. Thus, Scripture is just an imperfect attempt to describe God’s indescribable perfection—it’s like looking at God’s reflection off of a rippling pool of water. Scripture makes it possible to get an imperfect glimpse of God, Cavendish concludes, but it will never represent God fully or accurately.

Understanding the true origin of the universe requires learning where the very first physical thing came from—and not just the planet where we happen to live and the stars that we happen to see. By pointing this out, the spirits show the Empress that the answer to this question is more far-flung than she thought—which implies that she must find it through faith and divine inspiration, not science and reason.

Cavendish uses this conversation to clearly distinguish her philosophy, which views the world as primarily material, from the more conventional ideas popularized by philosophers like Plato, who believed that there is a material world of things and an immaterial world of ideas. The spirits also admit that they can’t answer certain questions—and in doing so, they emphasize how many things are impossible to understand, which means that philosophical knowledge has certain inherent limits. Thus, the Empress must grapple with the fact that, despite being all-powerful in the Blazing World, there are many things that she will simply never know, because nobody ever can.

The difference between the soul and the spirit might seem like a meaningless technicality, but actually it’s the key to understanding Cavendish’s view of the world. Philosophers have long suggested that humans and animals are conscious because, unlike other things in the world, they have special, immaterial souls (or minds). Cavendish agrees, but she thinks that the soul is made of matter. Thus, like earlier philosophers, she still views people as the union of a soul and a body—she just thinks that the soul happens to be physical. Despite her belief that fantasizing can be a useful alternative to acting in the real world, then, Cavendish actually thinks that fantasy is a real, physical object. Modern readers might find this easier to understand by thinking of the Blazing World as a physical thing in the sense that it's made of a series of electrical signals in Cavendish’s brain.

Cavendish’s metaphor about the sun and moon may help readers understand her unusual view of the nature of life. But it shouldn’t be misinterpreted as meaning that the body contains the essence of a person’s identity and personality, any more than the soul does. Whereas most philosophers thought that the soul controls the body’s movements, Cavendish thinks that the body controls the soul’s because it moves on its own, while the soul just sits around inside.

The Empress returns to a subject she has already asked about: the nature of humankind’s original sin. In fact, it’s reasonable to view her as a stand-in for Eve in the Bible—after all, she is in Paradise, seeking absolute knowledge about the nature of the universe and God. In this way, Cavendish could be seen as criticizing and reinterpreting the traditional version of the story, which holds that Eve caused the fall of man by defying God and eating from the tree of knowledge. Instead, the Empress seems to save the world and her people through knowledge.

The spirits’ speculation about the soul’s journey after death again suggests that the Blazing World may really be the afterlife. Their comment about “lives, forms and matter” again reinforces Cavendish’s theory that living beings are entirely material—including the soul, spirit, or life-force, which is usually imagined as immaterial instead.

The Empress’s curiosity about the natural evolution of humans and animals may seem irrelevant to the rest of her conversation with the spirits. But it’s really just another way of asking about the Blazing World’s origins. Specifically, her questions about the first man are ways of investigating the history and origins of science. Similarly, her questions about the Blazing World’s animals in the past and present are an attempt to understand where its peculiar human-animal hybrids came from.

There are numerous ways to interpret the spirits’ sudden disappearance, as Cavendish never gives any definitive explanation of it. In one sense, the Empress ironically repeats the story of Adam and Eve through her unhealthy curiosity about original sin and the meaning of everything. The only difference is that she gets the spirits banished from Paradise, instead of herself. Under this interpretation, the spirits’ disappearance would mean that humans shouldn’t try to understand God and the meaning of the universe, since they simply can’t. Alternatively, if readers agree with the Empress that the spirits’ answers were the problem, they can reasonably question any of the claims the spirits have made so far—and replace them with ideas of their own. In this way, Cavendish preserves her readers’ power to creatively interpret her philosophy however they wish.

Regardless of what the spirits’ banishment means, Cavendish uses it as a plot device to transition from the Empress’s philosophical dialogues to the book’s next phase, in which she meets and befriends the Duchess. While the spirits do not actually end up banished to the abyss, the Empress’s fear suggests that this abyss represents Hell (the counterpart to the Emperor and Empress’s city of Paradise). Finally, the spirits’ banishment shows that, even though the Emperor has given the Empress absolute power over the Blazing World, there are still unfathomable forces beyond her control.

When the Empress calls for famous philosophers as scribes, the spirits’ responses—that they would be too proud or misogynistic to work with her—point to the serious obstacles that Cavendish faced in her life. Philosophers, scientists, and men in general didn’t take her work seriously because of her gender and lack of formal education. This context is crucial for understanding this book’s fantasy form and unconventional approach to philosophy. Of course, the Duchess of Newcastle is Cavendish herself. By pointing out male philosophers’ biases and having the spirits choose her as the Empress’s scribe, Cavendish insists that her readers should judge all thinkers by their personal and intellectual qualities alone.

When Cavendish appears as a character in her own book, The Blazing World becomes a work of metafiction—or literature that emphasizes the fact that it is a work of fiction created by an author. Of course, this scene raises the question of whether The Blazing World is supposed to be the Duchess Cavendish’s work or the Empress’s Cabbala—meaning that it contains the Empress’s philosophical interpretation of the meaning of the universe. However, in reality, it seems to be both: while Cavendish has imagined the Empress into existence in the first place, the last several dozen pages of the book have contained the Empress’s philosophy, transcribed by Cavendish.

Each different kind of Cabbala represents a particular kind of methodology, or approach to developing knowledge. Thus, when the Empress decides which kind of Cabbala to write, she is really making a definitive decision about which way of understanding the world she believes to be best. She rejects philosophy because, as the spirits have shown her, reason alone cannot answer the most fundamental questions (like what created the world and what God is like). Meanwhile, the Empress also rejects morality and politics because they don’t need detailed interpretation. Living morally and governing well depend entirely on reason, which means that asking about them won’t help the Empress understand the true secrets of the universe.

The Empress’s “poetical or romancical Cabbala” is likely this very book, which uses the Empress’s journey to the Blazing World as a metaphor for Cavendish’s worldview. Cavendish uses the Empress’s rise to power to communicate her faith in absolute monarchy, and the Empress’s endless conversations with the animal-men and spirits in order to present her unique philosophy that the world is made of rational, self-moving matter. Finally, the concept of Platonic love is based on Plato’s vision of love and virtue in the dialogue Symposium, but it only became a popular idea during Cavendish’s life, in the very royal court where she spent her youth. It refers specifically to loving someone because of their virtue and goodness.

The Duchess’s speech allows Cavendish to express her frustrations with the gender roles of her time. Because she could not meaningfully wield political power, her best chance to articulate and spread her ideas was by turning herself into a fictional character. Of course, her desire to rule her own world explains why she has created the Empress as the Blazing World’s all-powerful ruler. Even though modern readers may think that England’s tyrannous monarchy was responsible for oppressing women, Cavendish doesn’t agree. Instead, she views absolute monarchy as the solution to women’s oppression.

By learning about all of the other worlds, the Empress and Duchess realize that the Empress is actually much less powerful than she feels. She only rules over one world, and there are infinite people who rule infinite other worlds and thus are just as powerful as her. As a result, she starts to see absolute power differently: a truly powerful monarch must rule many worlds, not just their own. Put differently, they have to build an inter-world empire. In turn, this observation raises important questions about Cavendish’s political philosophy. Will rulers inevitably keep seeking more power, until they inevitably overextend themselves and collapse? Does this make absolute monarchy, Cavendish’s preferred form of government, inherently unstable in the long term?

“Celestial world” is just another term for fantasy, so in this passage, the Duchess is really talking about the virtues of imagination—or fiction. If it’s impossible to build and maintain a sustainable absolute monarchy in the “terrestrial world,” then imagination is the best solution to the human hunger for power. In this way, Cavendish presents one basic defense of science fiction, a genre that she arguably invented in The Blazing World.

The Duchess’s first worlds fail because Cavendish thinks all these previous philosophers’ views were incomplete or inconsistent. Her own world is based on the theory of “rational self-moving matter”—the same theory that the Empress and the immaterial spirits agreed upon in their conversation. In this view, bodies and souls are both made of matter that is capable of motion on its own—and so life can exist without needing to depend on some special, divine, or immaterial ingredient to breathe life into inert things. This perfect, beautiful world of self-moving matter is clearly the Blazing World. Thus, Cavendish is really talking about the process through which she wrote this book.

The Empress and Duchess imagine other worlds together. Put differently, they are writing utopian fiction, and their relationship shows how fiction can inspire and entertain both the people who create it and the people who read it. Cavendish’s readers may never know if the Blazing World is the Empress’s world, the Duchess’s, or a mix of both. This is doubly true because the Empress imagines her own perfect world from within the Blazing World. Still, it has the ideal creatures, art, and political system that she describes. One way to interpret this scene is that the Blazing World is Cavendish’s utopia, but everyone else (including the Empress) might envision their own perfect world differently.

Cavendish describes her own world, which is distinct from both the Blazing World and the Empress’s native world, in order to elaborate on her political theory. If the Blazing World is peaceful because a single Emperor rules it with absolute power and there are no laws or factions, then Cavendish clearly thinks that the real world is full of conflict and suffering because no single ruler has managed to bring everything under his or her sole control.

By visiting the Duchess’s world, the Empress refines her thinking about how the perfect world would work. This shows that people’s ideas of utopia can evolve over time, based on their knowledge and experiences. Specifically, the Empress realizes that the Blazing World’s absolute monarchy is too harmonious, and growth requires a certain level of conflict and competition. This suggests that, despite Cavendish’s love for absolute monarchy as a form of government, she may also recognize its shortcomings. On the other hand, the events of the rest of the book suggest that she would also be willing to sacrifice many lives for a bit more power.

Through the Duchess and Empress’s adventure, Cavendish argues that Turkey and England are among the best societies on Earth because their rulers are the most autocratic. Indeed, according to the Duchess’s comments about England, Cavendish thinks that a ruler’s degree of power over the territory they rule is more important to their governing success than the actual amount of territory that they rule. Finally, the Empress’s comments about theater suggest that Cavendish sees much other 17th-century literature as unoriginal and unrelatable. Of course, she tries to overcome both of these issues by telling an entirely new kind of story and merging her personality as a writer with her character in the book.

Cavendish defends the English monarchy by praising its leaders’ personal virtues. Her family’s political and financial stake in the monarchy certainly influenced her view, but this scene isn’t mere flattery. Instead, Cavendish sincerely believed that England’s leaders were benevolent, and that this destined England for greatness. Meanwhile, her description of the Duchess and Empress’s souls reflects the eccentric philosophy of mind and body that the immaterial spirits explained to the Empress.

Cavendish uses this passage to proclaim her love for her husband and show off his virtue—much like he did for her in his introductory poem to the book. Similarly, she also wants to explain his misfortunes to her readers: in the English Civil War, Parliament defeated the monarchy and took away the property of noblemen like the Duke. Clearly, Cavendish ties her family’s personal misfortune to her country’s foolish decision to abandon absolute monarchy, and she hopes to convince her readers that the monarchy is at once more just, more effective, and more merciful to unlucky noblemen like her husband.

Cavendish uses this unusual scene, in which three souls meet in one body, to clarify the distinction between physical and Platonic love. The Empress loves the Duke’s soul because of his virtue, and this is the essence of Platonic love—which needs no physical or sexual component.

From the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages, Fortune was conventionally depicted as a fickle goddess. Cavendish continues this tradition. Just as she uses the Empress’s rule to imagine fulfilling her fantasies of absolute power over the world, she uses Fortune’s trial to fulfill her fantasy of actually achieving justice for her beloved husband. Of course, modern societies attempt to give people fair trials through democracy and equal laws, but Cavendish doesn’t believe in either. Instead, she believes in absolute monarchy, under which the only way to get a fair trial is by convincing the monarch to create one. The Duchess does so because she’s close friends with the Empress, but readers can only guess how—or whether—everyone else can receive a fair trial in Cavendish’s imaginary Blazing World monarchy.

Cavendish insists that her husband was in the right by showing Prudence and Honesty defend him against Fortune before the judge of Truth. Even if the Duke never got his estate back in the real world, Cavendish’s fictional trial could still shape his legacy and preserve his reputation. Thus, just as she chose to rule and do science in the fantasy Blazing World because she could not in the real world, she exonerates her husband in fiction because she lacks the power to do so in fact.

Fortune’s case against the Duke is entirely personal: she mistreats him because she is bitter about not receiving his personal favor and envious of those who do. Thus, Fortune rules like a tyrannous monarch: she uses her power however she wishes, without regard for ethics or justice. This is ironic because Cavendish advocates for exactly the same system of government: she believes that rulers should have absolute power and be able to do whatever they wish. Clearly, whether such a form of government works depends entirely on the virtue of the person running it.

The vices support Fortune’s case against the virtuous Duke. It’s clear that Truth will not really be judging the case—instead, Fortune will do whatever she pleases, whether or not it aligns with truth and virtue. Thus, Cavendish shows that good and evil both have power in the world, and that the only way people can choose one over the other is in their fantasies.

While Prudence and Honesty are both virtues, they don’t necessarily get along—instead, Prudence often requires telling less than the whole truth, and Honesty is often imprudent. By showing Honesty win out over Prudence, Cavendish gets out the whole truth about her husband’s legacy—even if she makes it likely that he will lose his trial. Again, while this technique may be unremarkable in fiction today, it was very innovative in Cavendish’s time. It again shows her commitment to using fiction to change the real world (and vice versa). After all, writing was probably the most powerful tool available to Cavendish in her lifetime.

Fortune cannot stand the honest truth, and she clearly will not be changing her behavior toward the Duke. Cavendish concludes that people can fantasize about winning justice, but in the real world, they must simply accept fate—even when it is deeply unjust. Evil might easily win out in the real world, but the Empress and Duchess’s friendship shows how people can fight this tendency by consciously identifying and promoting virtue in their relationships.

While it may be easy for readers to miss, the Empress has changed the Blazing World by introducing her own religion and shutting down many of the native groups’ professions (like logic and geometry). The Blazing World has not changed very much, and it is by no means democratic or pluralistic. Still, the Empress and Duchess agree that it has to be more autocratic in order to remain peaceful. This shows how deeply Cavendish believes in absolute monarchy and the repression of dissent. At the same time, the Empress’s failure to improve the Blazing World also ironically shows how arrogant rulers often create conflicts by seeking to control too much.

The Empress’s willingness to change the laws shows that she truly is a worthy, benevolent ruler. Meanwhile, the Empress and Duchess’s Platonic friendship shows how women could find guidance, power, and companionship in one another, during an era when they had little political or social power. But since the Duchess is just Cavendish, her Platonic love with the Empress also represents Cavendish’s deep personal investment in the fiction she has written.