Chapter Twelve - The Politics of the English Civil Wars in Natures Pictures

Summary

Although the heterogeneity of topics in Natures Pictures has discouraged discussion of the volume as a whole, one salient topic throughout is Cavendish’s experience of the English Civil Wars – explicitly treated in her poem, “A Description of the Civil Warrs,” and recounted in “A True Relation” – as it relates to her interest in political theory in the tales. Despite the prevailing assumption that Cavendish was an unequivocal royalist, her explicit statements of royalism in “The She-Anchoret” and “A True Relation” coexist with – but also place under erasure – the more veiled critique of Charles I in “The Moral Fable of the Ant and the Bee” and the complex political analysis concerning the monarch’s relationship to the subject in “The Contract” and “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity.” The contrast between the discursive on the one hand, and the literary or fictive on the other, enables Cavendish to hew to her expected royalist position in the former while exploring oppositional political perspectives in the latter.