Margaret Cavendish y sus Atomic poems (1653): fusión revolucionaria de ciencia y literatura

Abstract

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was a remarkable personality in both 17th c. literary and scientific fields. Undoubtedly, she must have been deeply influenced and determined by her life experience and the socio-historical context of that period (Bazeley 1990). Her work reflects the socio-cultural tensions of the time and constitutes a true vindication of women's rights (Charlton 2002). Furthermore, her scientific theory, which splits up from Hobbes and Descartes's mechanicism, is characterized by her “feminine vision” of science (Rees 2003). She was the only woman to offer then her own utopian vision of the world devoting her literary work to scientific matters. One of the examples of this blending between literature and science is her Atomic Poems (1653). The aim of this study is to offer some keys towards a relevant understanding of these apparently confusing and nonsensical poems from the historical perspective of 17th c. New Science. Today's perspective, based on 21th c. scientific knowledge, would be absurd and would make Cavendish appear as an ingenuous visionary. Far from that, Cavendish was the perfect fusion of literature, science, fiction and feminism.