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Sympathetic Rhetoric and Sociable Letters Sympathetic Rhetoric and Sociable Letters
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“When Sympathy Joyns Not” “When Sympathy Joyns Not”
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Egoistic Sociability Egoistic Sociability
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Cavendish and “The Man Of Feeling” Cavendish and “The Man Of Feeling”
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2 The “Self-Themes” of Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes
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Published:December 2014
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Abstract
This chapter provides a fuller and more nuanced account of the reception of Thomas Hobbes’s psychology as it pertains to the history of sympathy. According to standard accounts, the emphasis on sympathy as a virtue after the Restoration was in large part a reaction against Hobbes’s selfish view of human nature. This chapter argues that the work of Margaret Cavendish represents an important challenge to that account. Suffering in the English Civil Wars, Cavendish largely shared Hobbes’s vision of society, but in insisting on the vital qualities of matter, she developed a scientific account of sympathy pointedly different from his. Having described the dynamics of sympathy in her scientific writing, in Sociable Letters and The Blazing World Cavendish prescribes sympathy as a virtue. But, despite their belief in the harmonizing power of speech and rhetoric, her protagonists struggle to reconcile a moral ideal of sympathy with the grim realities of civil war and its aftermath. Cavendish’s epistolary and utopian narratives ultimately expose sympathy as a problem in the moral world. Comparing Cavendish’s and Hobbes’s accounts of sympathy with that of Isaac Barrow, the chapter concludes with a claim for Cavendish’s significance in an intellectually and historically broader genealogy of sensibility.
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