I finished reading it about a week ago and I just need to get this rant off my chest. Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World is soulless, creatively bankrupt, and riddled with delusions. I can’t think of a single redeeming factor for this collection of words that doesn’t deserve to be called a book.
Something you’d recognize after the first dozen pages is the writing style: it resembles that of a middle schooler’s wattpad fanfiction, and that might be an insult to middle schoolers. She is adamant that the entire thing is essentially her fantasy, but she has so little imagination that every alien creature is just apemen, birdmen, bearmen, or some other animal+man combination. Luxury and beauty means everything has to be decked out in gold and diamonds. There are no relatable characters, nor believable plot.
The main character gets isekaied to another world with no wars or factions, and immediately becomes the empress and is worshipped like a god. So obviously the first thing she does is ruin it for everyone by dissolving entire fields of study based on her personal preferences and brainwashing the indigenous people to accept Jesus as lord and savior. After a while she goes back to her world and decides to help her home country Esfi (England Spain France Ireland, real subtle with that one) achieve world domination. She does this by recruiting an army from the blazing world (which didn’t have armies or wars before her arrival) and burning down every city that refuses to pay tribute to her country. So yeah, very likeable protagonist.
Sure the past is a foreign country and Britain is a foreign country, so maybe I shouldn’t expect too much, but Hamlet, Don Quixote, Journey to the West etc. were all published way before her, so clearly they had access to good literature. I suppose her being the Duchess of Newcastle helped, and also maybe 17th century aristocrats just saw it as something new, but how has it maintained that critical acclaim until today? What could be gained from the critical reading of literal garbage?
by Icarus_13310
6 Comments
Never heard of it. But it sounds dreadful.
Dang. Can you critique my work next? No seriously…
Tbh the entire idea sounds like a ‘fall from Grace’ type plot but if the writing is that bad, nothing can save it.
I think you’ve misunderstood and misread the story, but forgetting that—it was a ground-breaking achievement at the time, both because of its subject matter and because it was written by a woman. It’s one of the first examples of science fiction.
You didn’t care for it. That’s miles away from it being “literal garbage.”
This is like reading Swift’s Modest Proposal and critiquing it based on practical merits.
Well it sounds like its critical value comes in the insight it gives into the foreign country that is the past; it sounds like a book which is laying bare the hypocrisy and brutality of colonialism, and showing how the idea of “uplifting” other cultures via missionary work was seen as virtuous.
I don’t think a book which gives an insight into the mindset of the past, which contextualises in real terms how people understood and normalised world views we consider abhorrent now, is worthless; it’s a historical source.
Who said it was a classic?