Margaret Cavendish’s ‘Ecocritical’ Thinking: A Reading of ‘A Dialogue Between an Oak and a Man Cutting Him Down’

Margaret Cavendish’s ‘Ecocritical’ Thinking:

A Reading of ‘A Dialogue Between an Oak and a Man Cutting Him Down’

Professor Line Cottegnies (Sorbonne Université)

Abstract:

Margaret Cavendish is now routinely enrolled as an early example of an eco-conscious author, and studied through the lens of ecocritical approaches, but the risk of anachronism is strong. In this paper, I aim to contextualise her apparent concern for the natural world in relation to the literary tradition of prosopopoeias of trees, seventeenth-century politics and her philosophical conception of nature. In particular I look at one of her 1653 dialogues, a long poem of 164 lines entitled “A Dialogue between an Oak and a Man Cutting Him Down”. This poem, which includes the tree’s plea to the feller not to be hacked, has comfortably been read in recent critical studies in an ecocritical perspective. Yet the convention of the tree prosopopoeia, which goes back to the Bible and Ovid, had already been used by Drayton, for instance, in his popular Polyolbion (1619). Placing Cavendish’s approach within this tradition allows us to better understand the articulation between her concern for the natural world, political allegory and her natural philosophy.

Bio:

Line Cottegnies is Professor of early-modern English Literature at Sorbonne Université. She has published a monograph on the poetics and politics of wonder in Caroline poetry and has co-edited several collections of essays, including Women and Curiosity in Early Modern England and France (with Sandrine Parageau, Brill, 2016). She has worked on Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn and Mary Astell. Her edition of texts includes 15 plays for the Gallimard Complete Works of Shakespeare (2012-21), 2 Henry IV for The Norton Shakespeare 3 (2016), and (with Marie-Alice Belle) Mary Sidney Herbert’s Antonius and Thomas Kyd’s Cornelia (Robert Garnier in Elizabethan England, MHRA, 2017). She is currently working on an edition of three works by Aphra Behn for Cambridge University Press.