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Race Thinking in Margaret Cavendish's Drama
- Author(s):
- Sujata Iyengar (see profile)
- Date:
- 2021
- Group(s):
- 2020 MLA Convention, CLCS Renaissance and Early Modern, LLC Shakespeare
- Subject(s):
- Women authors, Sixteenth century, Seventeenth century, European drama--Renaissance, Intersectionality (Sociology), Arendt, Hannah, 1906-1975, Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of, 1624?-1674
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- Women dramatists, Race Thinking, social class, meritocracy, contaminatio, Early modern women writers, Renaissance drama, Intersectionality, Hannah Arendt, Margaret Cavendish
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/5has-f304
- Abstract:
- This essay uses an intersectional approach to identify in the drama of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the patterns that Hannah Arendt called “race thinking” and to extend Arendt’s approach backwards in time as early as the seventeenth century. Famously, Cavendish -- poet, playwright, personality-- prided herself on her “singularity” or originality, from her cultivated eccentricity of dress to her insistence, which anticipates the Romantic movement, that her works come from her alone (down to her punctilious annotation of the occasional lines or stanzas or scenes composed by her husband and included in her plays). The combined authority Cavendish appropriates – rank and individual merit – and that she uses to transcend the restrictions placed on her by her gender makes Cavendish an apt instance through which to investigate how or whether merit and rank – and gender – can produce race thinking. I suggest that Cavendish’s first play, the two-part Loves Adventures, simultaneously queers or questions heteronormative reproduction and the purity of an imagined bloodline or race and yet restricts the ability to transcend race (understood for Cavendish as bloodline and as gender) to those who can demonstrate merit or (to borrow Patricia Akhimie’s invaluable formulation) “cultivation.” Similarly, Cavendish’s later play The Bridals uses cross- or transgender casting and the potential for cultivation not to liberate but to humiliate and racialize its working-class characters. In The Female Academy, wealthy, aristocratic ladies literally become the gatekeepers and guarantors of education and bloodline. The intersectional hierarchies of rank, skin color, gender, and sexual autonomy thus triumph over an imagined innate or even a “cultivated” merit or virtue.
- Notes:
- This item is available from the publisher now and will be available here 12 months after publication, according to the journal's Green OA policies. It includes material from a paper I presented remotely at the MLA in 2020 and in a seminar paper for the Shakespeare Association of America in 2021.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 2 years ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
9-iyengar.pdf