Ambition and fame

Ambition and fame in The Blazing-World are first presented as a hunger for sovereignty, distinction, and lasting remembrance, then redirected toward the freedom of making an inward world. The Duchess of Newcastle’s aspiration links the book’s authorial self-presentation to its fictional politics: when power and opportunity are unavailable in the world she inhabits, imaginative creation becomes an alternative form of rule, while the Empress’s own authority demonstrates both the reach and the burdens of governing a material realm.

Authorial Ambition and World-Making

In the address to noble ladies, the Duchess presents The Blazing-World as a world she has made because Fortune and the Fates have given her none. She admits that she cannot become Henry the Fifth or Charles the Second, nor conquer like Alexander or Cesar, but insists that she can still become mistress of a world by creating one of her own. The claim turns literary invention into a counter-sovereignty: circumstances deny her the power and occasion of a great conqueror, but not the authority to imagine and govern. Her chosen title, Margaret the First, gives that ambition a sovereign form without pretending that imaginative rule is the same as historical conquest.

This self-fashioning is tied to the book’s mixed design. The Duchess says the work began as an appendix to Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, with a sympathy and coherence that made the two works like separate worlds at opposite poles. She separated out material because many ladies take little pleasure in philosophical arguments, and presented them with the fancies her contemplation afforded. She identifies the first part as romancical, the second as philosophical, and the third as fantastical. The imagined world is thus at once literary creation and deliberate offering to women readers; its riches of gold and diamonds become an image of abundance she would gladly share, while the gold she would keep is framed as enough to repair her husband’s losses. Her ambition is not represented as a simple desire for wealth: she disclaims covetousness even as she claims a degree of ambition extraordinary among her sex.

A Wish to Become Empress

Within the narrative, the Duchess’s soul confesses to the Empress that her melancholy arises from extreme ambition. At first she says she wants to be a great Princess. The Empress answers by debating the rank of titles, arguing that a Duke or Duchess may stand above a Prince in honour, while the Duchess distinguishes the special status of kings’ eldest sons. That discussion does not satisfy the Duchess, because her desire is not merely for a higher title: she wants to be an Empress of a world, like her friend, and says she will not be at peace until she achieves it.

The Empress responds with affection rather than dismissal. She wishes the Duchess could enjoy the object of her ambition and offers to seek advice from the Immaterial Spirits about whether another world might be available. The Spirits report that there are more worlds than the stars visible in the three worlds under discussion, but none is without government. An apparently vulnerable world, Lucian’s World of Lights, has already been secured by Helmont, who strengthened its immortal parts with mortal outworks. The Duchess’s desire therefore meets a practical limit: worlds are numerous, but not vacant prizes. The Spirits add that conquest rarely brings lasting enjoyment, since conquerors are more feared than loved and commonly come to an untimely end.

The Duchess nevertheless makes the stakes of ambition explicit. If directed to the easiest world to conquer, she says she would trust to Fate and Fortune, preferring death in a noble undertaking to obscure and sluggish security. Fame, in her reckoning, survives the individual: even the shortest-lived fame lasts longer than the longest human life. The Spirits qualify this confidence by observing that fame, like life, can last long or end quickly, and that circumstances may never permit achievements capable of winning it. The exchange neither simply condemns ambition nor guarantees its reward; it tests the desire against the instability of opportunity, reputation, and political success.

The Turn from Material Rule to an Inner World

The Spirits redirect the Duchess’s ambition by proposing that a person can create an immaterial world within the mind. Such a world may have its own inhabitants, forms, colours, perceptions, motions, and government; it can be altered as the maker pleases. They contrast this inward sovereignty with the Empress’s external dominion. Though she possesses a whole world, she knows neither every place nor every country and domain within it. A monarch bears the general burdens of rule, while subjects experience the pleasures of particular places; no single person can enjoy an entire kingdom at once without travelling through it and enduring the inconvenience of the journey.

The Spirits further argue that glory, delight, and pleasure depend on other people’s opinions, and cannot by themselves give the mind tranquillity or the body ease. The Duchess accepts the argument and resolves to reject the worlds outside her and create one of her own. The Empress, recognizing the possibility of a world within as well as the world without, also says she may become mistress of two worlds. The change is not a rejection of imaginative ambition but its redirection: the Duchess moves from wanting another person’s kind of sovereignty to claiming a creative power available within herself.

The creation itself proves difficult rather than effortless. The Duchess first tries to frame a world according to Thales, but Dæmons obstruct her and compel her to follow their commands, so she abandons that design. She next attempts a Pythagorean world and gives it up because she cannot arrange its parts through numbers, having no skill in arithmetic. A world based on Plato brings a different difficulty: its many Ideas depend for motion on the mind from which they flow, and imparting motion to each becomes as troublesome as moving every puppet in a puppet show. Impatience leads her to annihilate that world as well.

Her Epicurean attempt founders on the infinite Atoms, which make a mist that blinds her perception. She cannot provide a Vacuum to receive them or a place for them to retire; their disorder produces strange, monstrous figures and a mental Chaos that nearly dissolves her composure. After laboriously clearing her mind of the dusty and misty particles, she considers Aristotle, but recalls the difficulty that her mind is held by most learned people to be immaterial, whereas Aristotle’s principle allows nothing to come from nothing. She is forced to desist from that work too. These failures give the metaphor of self-creation concrete limits: inward sovereignty may escape the scale and opposition of an external empire, but making a coherent world still demands order, method, and a form that the maker can sustain.

Fame, Friendship, and the Burdens of Rule

The Duchess’s ambition is developed through friendship as well as political comparison. She is chosen as the Empress’s spiritual scribe after the Immaterial Spirits describe her as a plain and rational writer whose work proceeds from Sense and Reason. The Empress prefers her, in part, because she is of the same sex, and the Duchess’s soul comes to serve, advise, and be welcomed by her. Their continuing meetings produce an intimate Platonic friendship. In this narrative arrangement, the author’s literary identity is not merely praised from outside: a version of the Duchess enters the imagined world and becomes an interlocutor whose judgment influences its ruler.

That friendship also gives the Duchess a place to disclose how vast and unsettled her ambition feels. The Empress’s affection makes room for the confession, but does not convert it into possession of another world. Instead, advice from the Immaterial Spirits helps the Duchess relinquish the specific wish to become a material Empress. Her later willingness to return to her husband and kindred in her Native World, while agreeing to visit the Empress again, locates her ambitions within continuing attachments rather than replacing them with a conquest plot.

The contrast between inward creation and public authority becomes sharper when the Duchess later advises the Empress about government. The Empress explains that she altered the arrangement she found after receiving absolute power from the Emperor, and that factions and disputes now threaten the peace of the Blazing-World. The Duchess recommends a return to one sovereign, one religion, one law, and one language, and proposes dissolving the learned societies whose disputes, she fears, may grow into political disorder. Her advice imagines unity as protection against the fragmentation she associates with the Duchess’s Native World. The Empress’s rule is therefore both the model that first provokes the Duchess’s wish and a responsibility whose troubles help explain why inward sovereignty could appear more attractive.

The book does not make ambition disappear when it turns toward the mind. Instead, it separates the desire for creative power from the hazardous pursuit of public fame and conquest. The Duchess’s opening claim that she has made a world because none was given to her anticipates the Spirits’ argument that a person can make one within. Yet the failed philosophical designs show that this freedom is earned through imaginative labour, not guaranteed by wishing. Fame may outlast a life, but remains uncertain and dependent on occasion; a self-created world promises greater command, though it too must be composed and governed. The tension gives ambition and fame their double significance: they name both the pressure to be remembered in the public world and the literary means of founding a world beyond its limits.