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Part 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Blazing World, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fiction, Fancy, and Utopia
Gender Hierarchy and Women’s Freedom
Monarchy and Government
Philosophy, Science, and Religion
Love and Friendship
Summary
Analysis
The Empress reorganizes the Blazing World’s laws and religion, and all is peaceful and quiet. But spirits tell her about a devastating war in her native world, which has destroyed her country. She wishes the Blazing World could send troops to her native world, but she knows that this is impossible. The Emperor asks whether they could arm the spirits, and the Empress says no, since they’re immaterial and won’t want to participate in violence. The Emperor suggests sending the spirits to fight in men’s bodies, but the Empress doubts that it will be possible to find enough vacant bodies to raise a spirit army. And even if they could, the Empress continues, all the bodies would already be dead and rotting.
The Empress has overcome the Blazing World’s problems by ruling wisely. Cavendish uses this as an example of why benevolent monarchy is the best form of government: when the king or queen wants to simply solve a problem, they don’t need to wait around for anyone else’s approval. But the Empress still has other loyalties and higher aspirations, which extend beyond the limits of the world she already rules. In particular, she feels loyal to her native country and wishes she could save it from destruction—much like Cavendish felt about England during her exile. The Empress’s discussion with the immaterial spirits has already made it clear that spirits are only as strong as the bodies they inhabit, so she will need another military solution.
Themes
The Emperor is out of ideas, so he recommends that the Empress consult with the Duchess of Newcastle. She does, and the Duchess visits and promises to help with the war effort. First, she tells the Empress to have the fish-men look for a route back to her original world. They find a passage, but it’s extremely narrow and often frozen over. The Duchess and Empress ask the giants (architects) to build ships that can travel underwater, and they promise to try. Meanwhile, the Duchess proposes sending bird-, worm-, and bear-men towards the passage. The Empress worries that they would all quickly die in a war, but the Duchess asks for the Empress’s faith and patience, and the Empress agrees because she loves the Duchess. Then, the giants return with their underwater ships.
The Empress seeks guidance from the person she most loves and trusts, the Duchess. Beyond showing how loyalty and friendship can give people tools for making wise decisions, this conversation is also a metaphor for the process of writing fiction. Namely, to drive a story forward, an author must consult their characters (or combine their own ideas with their characters’ traits and ways of thinking). After deciding to invade her original world, the Empress finally puts the Blazing World’s extraordinary science and technology to use. This shows that her endless conversations with the bird-men, worm-men, bear-men, spirits, and more actually served an important purpose: they will help her build the most powerful army that the universe has ever seen.
Themes
Literary Devices
Next, the Duchess declares that the Empress has to lead her troops into war. But the Duchess will accompany her by sending her own soul along in the Empress’s body, together with the Empress’s. Then, the Duchess hatches a plan. The fish-men will remain on the underwater ships, which are indestructible because they’re made of gold, but have no weapons. The worm-men will mine the fire-stone, which can serve as a great weapon for destroying the enemy’s wood boats, as well as a source of light for navigation.
The Duchess and Empress’s close Platonic friendship culminates in this invasion. Moreover, their souls unite in one body, which carries important symbolism: Cavendish (the Duchess) or her protagonist (the Empress) become indistinguishable from the outside. It’s impossible to say who is speaking or acting in the following section of the book. Of course, this represents the way that the Empress is just an extension of Cavendish’s mind, work, and fantasies.
Themes
The Empress follows the Duchess’s plan, and her army of bear-, bird-, worm-, and fish-men assembles at the entrance to the passage. The fish-men drag the ships through the underwater passage in the Icy Sea, and then they emerge in the Empress’s native world and sail the rest of the distance to her native country. Using their telescopes, the bear-men see a large fleet of ships besieging the country. Carrying fire-stone, the fish-men and bird-men make it look like the sky and sea are burning. The enemy thinks that judgment day has come. In the morning, when the Empress’s fleet sails toward land, the enemy is astonished to see that her ships carry no weapons.
The Empress reenacts the book’s opening scene, but in reverse: she passes through the same channel that brought her into the Blazing World, but now to invade the world where she started. Where she left her world powerless, abducted by an evil merchant, she returns to it as a radiant goddess seeking to save her people from their enemies. Since the Blazing World represents the imagination, the Empress’s transformation symbolizes the way that fantasy enables people to grow and empower themselves.
Themes
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The Empress writes her native country’s council of leaders to inform them that she is coming to their aid. But the council can’t agree on what to do, and this frustrates the Empress, who nearly turns her army around and leaves—until the Duchess convinces her to have more patience. The council sends a messenger to ask the Empress where she comes from and how she will help the country. The Empress doesn’t say where she came from, but she promises that she will appear where she is needed at one in the morning.
Readers know about the Empress’s good intentions, but will also understand why her appearance worries people in her native country. From their perspective, a magical, seemingly all-powerful foreign princess has invaded their world, then dubiously claimed to be helping them. They have no way to test her true motives. Unfortunately, the Empress is too used to absolute power; she wants to simply save her country, without having to explain herself or negotiate with her people.
Themes
At one o’clock, the Empress appears to her country’s fleet. She wears shining clothing made of star-stone and appears to be walking on water, because the fish-men support her on their backs. Her country’s people start to worship her, and she gives a speech announcing that she has come from another world to save her native land. She promises to destroy her country’s enemies and asks only for gratitude in return. But her country’s people can’t decide if she’s an angel, goddess, sorceress, or devil. The next morning, dressed in jewels and star-stone, the Empress leads her army’s attack. Her army sets the enemy fleet on fire, decimating it. Her country’s people rejoice and decide that she’s an angel.
The Empress becomes a Messiah figure, who visits her people from another realm in order to save them. By walking on water and sparkling with divine light, she makes these religious undertones all the more clear. She declares that her primary motives are love and loyalty for her people—the same values that motivate her to protect her husband’s honor and help the Duchess. Of course, this scene is especially significant because the Empress is a woman, which contradicts virtually all traditional depictions of the Messiah. Cavendish’s message is clear: women can do anything that men can, from writing to ruling to saving the universe.
Themes
Literary Devices
The Empress meets with her country’s king and promises to help him become the most powerful leader in his world. He asks the Empress to help him destroy all the enemy’s other ships and establish naval dominance, and she agrees. She has her army burn all other countries’ ships until they start paying tribute to her country’s king, making him “absolute master of the seas.” Then, all the other countries decide to band together and fight against the Empress’s native country. These other countries form a large fleet, but the fish-men still easily defeat them with fire-stone.
The Empress doesn’t merely want to save her native country from foreign invaders—she wants to help it achieve global domination, the same way that her kingdom has in the Blazing World. Of course, this aligns with Cavendish’s belief in absolute monarchy. While achieving global domination requires excessive military force, Cavendish clearly thinks that this is worth the long-term benefits of peace and security.
Themes
Next, the Empress goes after the countries with no navies, who trade and travel exclusively by land. The bear-men use their telescopes to examine different towns and cities, and then the Empress develops a plan. In each country, she will send the bird-men and worm-men to burn down larger and larger towns, until the ruler submits and agrees to pay tribute to the king of the Empress’s country. They begin their attacks: the bird-men lay fire-stones on top of each house, and the worm-men at the foundations. The stones start burning slowly, but when it rains, the whole town bursts into flame.
Thanks to the Blazing World’s extraordinary science and technology, the Empress easily conquers the remaining countries in her native world. By doing so, she gradually builds a global empire for her country’s king. Curiously, the bear-men use their telescopes as part of the Empress’s campaign. This minor detail is significant because, when the Empress first dialogued with the bear-men about their research, she decided that telescopes are deceptive and unscientific. But clearly, she has changed her mind by learning about telescopes’ practical uses. Similarly, Cavendish was famously interested in microscopes and telescopes, but also skeptical about the claims of scientists who used them.
Themes
The Empress repeats this over and over, until every country in her native world, except one, has pledged fealty to ESFI (her native country). The one holdout is a country where it doesn’t rain, but there is a massive “flowing tide” once a year. The worm-men put fire-stones under the houses of this country’s towns, and when the tide comes in, all the houses burn down. This country ultimately submits to ESFI, too, which gives the King of ESFI absolute control over his whole world.
During Cavendish’s life, the British monarch was officially called the King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland. This is why the Empress’s native country is called “ESFI.” Thus, the Empress invading her native world to build a global empire for “ESFI” is a clear allegory for Cavendish’s royalist fantasy of helping the English monarchy conquer the whole world.
Themes
The “greatest princes” of this world all want to meet the Empress, so she agrees to reveal herself to them at sea before returning to the Blazing World. When she does, they think that she is a goddess. The same night, she puts on a show with the bird-men and fish-men: they light up the sky and sea using the fire-stone, she appears in her own glowing robes, and then they sing a beautiful melody. At daybreak, the Empress visits the King of ESFI’s ship to promise him that she will always be available to assist him. Then, she gives a speech to the princes of her world, encouraging them to respect and pay tribute to the King of ESFI.
The people of the Empress’s world view her in much the same way as the Emperor did when she first reached the Blazing World: as an all-powerful goddess. This is because what is ordinary in one world looks extraordinary in the other—just as the Empress’s human form seemed otherworldly to the Emperor, the Blazing World’s fire-stone and star-stone seem otherworldly to the princes (as they likely do to the reader). Thus, Cavendish suggests that people tend to confuse the extraordinary and unfamiliar for the divine—but that the universe is full of many more possibilities than most of them realize.
Themes
The Empress returns to her ship, and her whole fleet sinks underwater and begins its trip back to the Blazing World. The Empress’s and Duchess’s souls talk extensively on the journey. The Duchess asks why the Empress didn’t enrich her own family or country with the Blazing World’s endless reserves of gold and jewels. The Empress explains that riches drive people crazy—they constantly compete to get more than their neighbors, and the more they get, the more they want.
Even after she conquers her native world, the Empress’s greatest pleasure in life is still talking with the Duchess. Everyone needs companionship in order to be truly happy, Cavendish suggests, including powerful people. The Empress’s comments about riches show that, even though Cavendish believes that monarchs should have absolute power over society, she also clearly understands how power can corrupt them.
Themes
However, the Empress promises that, if the Duchess can find a pathway between the Blazing World and her own native world, she can have all the riches she wants from the Blazing World. The Duchess clarifies that she only wants enough riches to restore her husband’s estate to its previous size, and that she would much rather have the Blazing World’s elixir of youth than its gold and diamonds. The Empress promises to send the fish-men looking for a passage from the Blazing World to the Duchess’s world, and she declares that she wants to help the Duchess become her world’s “monarchess,” too. The Duchess thanks her, and they declare their love for each other.
Like the Empress, the Duchess (Cavendish) values wealth out of a sense of honor, not greed. Specifically, she thinks that rebuilding her disgraced husband’s reputation will require growing his fortune again. She really wants power and influence, not mere possessions. Of course, since she lacked the political and legal means available to men, she built her legacy through her writings instead. As she puts it in her introduction and epilogue to The Blazing World, she has chosen authorship because ruling a fictional world is her best alternative to ruling the real one.
Themes
In another conversation, the Duchess explains that she cares more about being original than being good—even though everyone who has met her knows that she is also virtuous and chaste. She only writes about “dishonest and wicked persons” to prove her wit.
Cavendish expresses important personal values in this passage. First, she prefers originality to virtue, and second, she sees no contradiction between them. While readers can only speculate about her motives for reaching these conclusions, it’s clear that she became such a pioneering writer precisely because she was committed to expressing original ideas and leaving a legacy—and because she didn’t care what her critics thought of her.
Themes
The Empress reaches the Blazing World and returns to her palace. The Emperor and Empress joyously reunite. The Duchess wants to return to the Duke, but the Emperor asks her to stay in the Blazing World awhile first. He tells her that he has started training horses, like the Duke, and shows her his magnificent stables made of gold and jewels. He asks for her advice about building a theater and directing plays, but she claims not to know very much about the subject. The Duchess admits that other playwrights look unfavorably on her plays, but she thinks that their plays are just a “nursery of whining lovers” with no artistic value. The Duchess stays in the Blazing World to build a theater and put on plays for the Emperor and Empress.
The Emperor borrows his new hobbies of horse-training and theater from the Duke and Duchess. As usual, Cavendish takes the opportunity to praise her husband’s virtue and remind her readers of how art can inspire people (including them). She also uses this scene to prove that the Blazing World’s Emperor is a wise, benevolent ruler: he knows how to identify and learn from other people’s good ideas. Finally, Cavendish responds to her critics once again by declaring that they simply do not recognize the artistic value in her plays. Needless to say, she was right: like the Empress, critics have learned to appreciate her unconventional plays over the centuries. Many were not appreciated or performed until centuries after Cavendish’s death.
Themes
But the Duchess also desperately wants to return to her own world and see the Duke. Eventually, the Emperor and Empress agree to let her go, and she returns back to her own body. She tells the Duke all about her plays, invading the other world with the Empress, and the Emperor’s beautiful horses. The Duke and Duchess lament that there’s no passage from their world to the Blazing World.
The Duchess’s conversations with the Duke are no doubt the same as Cavendish’s real-life conversations with her beloved husband about the book that she has written. Accordingly, her stories about visiting the Empress stress that, through the imagination, people can take transformative journeys to other worlds. This applies as much to writers imagining their own worlds as to readers visiting others’ worlds.
Themes
The Duchess also tells her acquaintances about the Blazing World. She explains how the Empress likes to discuss the nature of the world with learned scholars, how the Blazing World’s weather is always perfect, and how its bright stars light up the sky at night. She describes the Empress’s extraordinary royal chariots, which are covered in shining diamonds and driven by unicorns. She explains how giants guard the Empress, fish-men and bird-men sing to her on her seafaring journeys, and fox-men and ape-men race for her when she travels overland. She describes the Emperor and Empress eating exotic fruit and dancing on the backs of singing fish-men. In fact, the Blazing World is full of all sorts of extraordinary music and instruments that cannot exist in this one.
Fact and fiction again merge in this closing passage. Cavendish (the author) tells her friends about the Blazing World by describing the Duchess (her character) doing the same. Thus, Cavendish ends by telling a story about herself telling the story that she has told in this book. In this way, she emphasizes how her desire to share the beauty of her imagination with others drove her to write and publish this book. Finally, the book’s concluding passage focuses on the Blazing World’s unfathomable art and beauty. This is what most captured the Empress’s attention when she first arrived in the Blazing World. And this beauty is also a metaphor for the stunning power of the imagination.
Themes
Literary Devices
