Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World is a text that is rich with philosophical ideas and one whose author intended it to serve many purposes. It is many things at once: a philosophical dialogue, a scientific text, and a testament to women’s leadership potential, to name only a few. Though many criticize Cavendish’s piece as being too deeply rooted in fantasy or difficult to follow, the depth of information contained in the otherwise short novel provides a considerable amount of content for discussion. This is demonstrated in the novel itself through the Empress and the Duchess characters, whose interactions give readers a firsthand account of Cavendish’s thought processes and the themes that pervade the story. One theme that most definitely plays a role in the story is nature, particularly in terms of its irregularity. Cavendish’s Blazing World serves to make observations of the flawed “real” world through a comparison with a more peaceful, fantastical one in order to demonstrate importance of recognizing the inherent qualities of nature. 
	In naming the main female character of the novel Empress of the Blazing World, Cavendish immediately targets gender norms and cements her advocacy for female leadership. This stance somewhat resembles the attitude that likely materialized as a result of the backlash Cavendish’s writing was met with by male audiences and critics, as well as other writers. Literary scholar Angus Fletcher discusses the prevailing attitude of Cavendish’s time regarding women, explaining that misogynist literature “railed continually against women’s fickleness, warning their readers not to be bullied or seduced into allowing women to indulge their endless desire for new things.” From the beginning, Cavendish was working against society’s predisposition toward women, particular in regard to fulfilling any role typically done so by men. By comparison, these supposed differences between men and women are completely nonexistent in the Blazing World, and consequently a non-factor in the decision to name their Empress. Those who would call the young lady’s leadership “unnatural” would be disappointed by the way in which nature played a small role in her appointment as leader, as the sudden tempest which Cavendish describes causes both the deaths of the men onboard as well as the transportation of the woman to the Blazing World’s entrance. Still, other, misogynistic literature often aimed to portray women as “bad influences who needed to be held in check by the firm governance of men,” something that, by comparison, never occurs to the Emperor of the Blazing World. Fletcher further states that “Cavendish’s description of Nature can be understood as a part of a broad response to the effort of misogynist writers to curb female authority.” In a world in which nature is far better understood and revered, gender norms—particularly those that seek to limit women’s access to positions of power—simply do not exist.
	Within the realm of the Blazing World, the Empress fulfills a symbolic role meant to represent Nature itself. According to Fletcher, “given ‘absolute power’ over her realm, [the Empress] occupies a position analogous to that of Nature, and she proceeds to display similar aims and actions.” While it may be said that putting a woman in such a position of power is a statement of the “naturalness” of that position, it is more likely that Cavendish is using Nature as a symbol for female rule. At the same time, however, Fletcher argues that Cavendish is admitting “an anxiety about encouraging women to use their natural tendencies as the foundation of their authority.” Indeed, this symbol does demonstrate the concept of irregularity in nature as it pertains to the same trait in women. Late in the first part of the novel, the Empress refers to women as being “much delighted with change and variety,” which may suggest that this is a trait that women must overcome in order to be effective rulers. Instead of discrediting women as potential rulers, argues Fletcher, Cavendish is “revealing that an awareness of these anxieties is center to her model of female sovereignty.” After all, these are traits that were supposedly present in the real world, which included the society in which Cavendish lived, as purported by the dominantly male zeitgeist. In other words, the Empress was not subject to these fears from her subjects as a hypothetical female ruler of Cavendish’s time would have been. As a native of the “real” world, the Empress was naturally subject to the anxieties that she expressed concerning the nature of women, even if she was alone in this regard. Rachel Trubowitz, head of the English department at the University of New Hampshire, likens the image of the Empress, “an all-powerful and magnificently accoutered” leader, to that of the ideal leadership for which Cavendish felt strong nostalgia. It is an ideal not only in the case of leadership, but also in the ideal self as a woman. As Trubowitz explains, the symbolic figure that the Empress represents “is internalized by the Duchess as a monarchical ideal of the independent woman who has complete dominion over herself.” The realm of the Blazing World allows for symbolic representations of real-world concepts that Cavendish hopes to impart to readers who may not have otherwise understood or accepted the merits of her ideas.
