“In my wood to dwell”

Margaret Cavendish is now routinely enrolled as an early example of an eco-conscious author, and studied through the perspective lens of ecocritical approaches, but the risk of anachronism is strong. Her ecocriticism needs to be reassessed in light of her philosophical conception of nature. This article aims at contextualising her professed concern for the natural world in relation to the literary tradition of prosopopeias of trees, seventeenth-century politics and her philosophical conception of nature, looking in particular at one of her 1653 dialogues, a long poem of 164 lines in rhymed pentameters 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 prosopopeia, which goes back to the Bible and Ovid, had already been used by Drayton, among others, in his popular Poly-Olbion (1619). Placing Cavendish’s approach within this tradition allows us to better understand the articulation between her genuine concern for the natural world, political allegory and her natural philosophy. Focusing on Cavendish’s complex allegorical technique in the poem, this article studies her discursive uses of the oak as a multifaceted emblem, which requires hermeneutic agility on the part of the readers – and proves once more, if need be, that her poetry is more sophisticated than was once thought

Allegory · Anachronism · Ecocriticism · Plea · Poetry · Politics · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Historical Philosophy and Science · Literature: history, themes, analysis