Margaret Cavendish’s Femmes Fortes: The Paradoxes of Female Heroism in Bell in Campo (1662)

Abstract

This paper proposes to read Margaret Cavendish’s Bell in Campo (1662) in the light of Pierre Le Moyne’s Gallerie des femmes fortes (1647). It shows how this celebration of women’s high deeds sheds an interesting light on the the ambiguous staging of female heroism in Bell in Campo: like the French Jesuit, Cavendish uses female heroism both as a way to explore the possibilities of female emancipation and as a paradigm to express her own political and anthropological views. In order to highlight the Duchess’s double focus on gender and politics, the article looks in turn at the crisis of the heroic ethos, at the making of the female warrior, at different possible interpretations of Lady Victoria’s triumph. It ultimately shows that Lady Victoria’s heroism may be understood in the Civil War uncertain context as a defence of royalist and aristocratic values.