Betwixt Two Ferns: Cavendish and Hobbes

As the editors of Women Poets of the English Civil War writing in their essay in Editing Early Modern would put it, the poetry of Margaret Cavendish is, for me, a “good read”–I can read through these poems quickly, due to interests I have in common with Cavendish including her relationship to Descartes and Hobbes and her sympathy with the oak tree and with nature in her dialogue poems, “A Dialogue betwixt Man and Nature” and “A Dialogue between an Oak and a Man Cutting Him Down,” responding to Hobbesian/social-contract/self-interest themes. These two poems are appealing to a present-day audience concerned with eco-criticism and increasing scientific research into the emotional and social lives of (other) animals, such as chimpanzees, dogs, and even of trees (see: Suzanne Simard’s TED Talk titled “How Trees Talk to Each Other”). Cavendish addresses concerns that we are addressing now as she was then, with regard to humankind’s assault on the environment and considering nature a “resource” from which to continuously draw, as well as the potential consciousness of (other) animals as well as trees (in other of her poems, even vegetables). 

In Hobbes’s Leviathan, to which Cavendish’s dialogues “Betwixt Man and Nature” and “Between an Oak and a Man Cutting Him Down” respond, a talking tree does not make an appearance; rather, frequent allusions to the Genesis tree of knowledge are scattered throughout [to include the sections on “Names Proper & Common Universall,” “The Right of Monarchy through Scripture,” “Kingdom Of God Taken By Divines Metaphorically But In The Scriptures,” “Place Of Adams Eternity If He Had Not Sinned, The Terrestrial Paradise,” “Texts Concerning The Place Of Life Eternall For Beleevers,” “Ascension into Heaven,” “The Third Part Of His Office Was To Be King (Under His Father),” “Errors From Mistaking Eternall Life, And Everlasting Death”] (see: Project Gutenberg’s Leviathan). Cavendish’s “Nature” dialogue similarly deals with the question of man’s “knowledge” and whether that actually makes man superior to nature as “he” claims. For example, man states that “beasts have no pain” (not true!!) and that they don’t have it so bad because they don’t have to “think how they shall die” (line 40). In line 41, “Reason doth stretch man’s mind upon the rack,” man likens his knowledge and the “troubled thoughts” that come with it to a notorious torture devise, and frequent references to “knowledge” and “ambition” come up until nature gets in the last word: “why doth man complain, and cry, / If he believes his soul shall never die?” Ending the dialogue/debate with nature’s last word, a question, leaves readers pondering whether eternal life makes sense given the fact that man is constantly complaining and crying. This turns the debate that man is superior to animals due to “his” understanding on its head, by pitting it up against “man’s” idea of eternal life. Man’s “bargain for my [Nature’s] tree” is a Hobbesian “social contract” (“But men among themselves contract, and make / A bargain for my tree; that tree they take; / Which cruelly they chop in pieces small, / And form it as they please, then build withal” (lines 18-25). Hobbes calls a contract “a mutual transference of right”; man contracts with other men, not with nature. Hobbes writes, “To make Covenant with bruit Beasts, is impossible; because not understanding our speech, they understand not, nor accept of any translation of Right; nor can translate any Right to another; and without mutuall acceptation, there is no Covenant.” Cavendish’s transference of Hobbes’s contract to occur in the exchange of words in her dialogue poems is a major step toward the personification and valuing of nature as equal to or above human kind, in these two as well as her other dialogue poems, not only by elevating nature above Hobbes’s state of “beasts” by the very “fact” that they are able to dialogue in her poems, but also due to the fact that nature and beasts are portrayed as having the upper hand. 

Works Cited

Women Poets of the English Civil War, pp. 231-248