“Spinning with the brain”: Spinsterhood in Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies

Abstract

This project examines Margaret Cavendish’s references to spinning in her 1653 Poems and Fancies within the context of a seventeenth-century redefinition of the term “spinster” to mean “unmarried woman.” Instead of regarding Cavendish’s spinning references as a self-conscious performance of feminine modesty, I suggest that these moments in her written work operate as sites of engagement with a spinster’s ability to retain a self-contained legacy within the patriarchal system. I argue that Cavendish’s poetic investment in a self-contained legacy disrupts chrononormative constructions of reproductive time in a way that mimics the liminal temporality of spinsterhood; this temporal disruption is visible not only in the narrative treatment of time in individual poems, but in the formal structure of the text in its entirety. By drawing attention to the untimely spinster characters that populate Cavendish’s P&F, as well as to her ultimate treatment of these transgressive figures, I highlight and contextualize the author’s complex and often contradictory representation of women within her literary work. Cavendish’s P&F is an intersection of interest in self-sufficiency and anti-chrononormative reading practices rendered legible through its invocation of the double meaning of spinsterhood, so it serves as a useful space in which to test the utility of a reading of early modern writing (and Cavendish in particular) that foregrounds a new definition of the term “spinster.”