Wealth and insatiable greed

Wealth and insatiable greed is a recurring concept in The Blazing-World: precious materials are plentiful, but their possession and display are tightly regulated, while the desire for riches proves limitless. The Empress’s refusal to export the world’s abundance turns material plenty into a test of judgment: wealth can repair a particular loss, but, in her view, it also feeds the covetousness that drives people to destroy one another.

Abundance, Exchange, and Rank

The Empress’s realm possesses gold in expanses greater than the Arabian sands and precious stones in rock-sized deposits. Yet its inhabitants do not use coin; they trade commodities by exchange. Nor does abundance mean unrestricted access. Only the Imperial Race may wear gold, and jewels are reserved to the Emperor, the Empress, and their eldest son. The contrast is deliberate: valuable materials are ordinary features of the world’s landscape, but visible possession remains a privilege marking political rank.

The Empress’s own ceremonial appearance makes that hierarchy spectacular. Her regalia includes a pearl cap, a diamond half-moon, a sun-shaped carbuncle, and a coat of pearls and colored diamonds. In the Emperor’s palace, magnificence extends to buildings made from precious substances: a double stable holds a hundred horses on each side, with a gold main structure, an agate roof, cornelian-lined walls, an amber floor, and mother-of-pearl mangers. Such displays establish what extraordinary wealth can make possible, while the rules on wearing jewels show that it is not simply available for private use.

Wealth, Loss, and Desire

The Duchess’s prefatory address presents imagined riches as a response to real financial injury. She says that she would want only enough gold to repair her husband’s losses and offers to surrender her share of the world’s diamond rocks if they could be distributed among her noble female friends. Her stated ambition is not modest in every respect: unable to become a conqueror, she has made a world of her own. But she distinguishes that imaginative sovereignty from covetousness and limits the material wealth she would claim for herself.

That distinction returns in the conversation between the Empress’s soul and the Duchess’s soul. Asked why she has not enriched the country of her birth, or at least her own family, the Empress answers that she loves both, but will not give them riches because people everywhere become mad for gold and try to destroy one another to obtain it. The Duchess proposes the opposite diagnosis: perhaps people are so eager because they have too little. The Empress rejects it. Particular covetousness, she argues, exceeds the wealth of even the richest world; the more riches people possess, the more covetous they become, because their greed is infinite.

The exchange does not resolve the difference between scarcity and appetite. Instead, it makes the Empress’s refusal a political and moral choice: she will not treat unlimited access to treasure as a cure for disorder. The Duchess, meanwhile, says she would accept neither gold nor jewels for herself, but only enough to restore what her husband had possessed before the Civil Wars. Her wish is directed toward his losses and posterity, not personal enrichment.

The Limits of Material Passage

The Duchess asks whether a passage between the worlds could be found, and the Empress promises to command the Fish-men to search. The Duchess doubts that one exists and identifies a further obstacle: material things cannot travel as immaterial beings do. She singles out the life-preserving elixir growing amid the golden sands as the one substance she would want, not riches, but health and the prolongation of life. Even that desire remains conditional, since without a passage the elixir cannot be carried across.

The Empress’s offer reaches beyond compensation. If the worlds could be joined, she says, the Duchess would have wealth and long life and could become as powerful a monarchess as the Empress herself. The Duchess thanks her, valuing her love above natural things. The episode thus places material abundance beside the limits of material transfer and bodily life: the Empress can offer treasure and power within her world, but cannot make those goods cross into the Duchess’s.

Wealth as Imperial Power

The Empress’s refusal to enrich her birthplace does not mean that she withholds her power from it. When she returns to aid the King of Esfi against invading fleets, she first destroys the enemy navies and then demands that neighboring maritime nations pay tribute to him. Those that refuse lose their ships and trade; the resulting dependence compels them to submit. The King becomes master of the seas and, consequently, of that world, because its nations cannot readily live without maritime commerce.

This contrast sharpens the concept’s political force. The Empress condemns the destructive appetite for private or national riches, yet uses naval power to impose a tributary order benefiting the King of Esfi. Wealth is not merely a temptation in this world: control over trade and tribute is also a means of dominion. Her argument against enriching her family therefore coexists with an exercise of imperial power that redirects resources and compels submission.

An Abundance That Does Not End Want

The Duchess’s later account to her husband returns the imagined riches to the scale of intimate loss. She tells him that, if a passage existed, he could have some of the Emperor’s horses and materials for grand stables, as well as enough gold that she would never begrudge his generous gifts. He replies that he is sorry there is no passage between the worlds and that he has always found an obstruction to his good fortunes. The lavish stable, like the promise of gold, cannot repair his circumstances because it remains on the other side of an impassable boundary.

Across these episodes, abundance never simply abolishes need. Imperial restrictions turn precious materials into signs of status; the Duchess’s wish for restitution remains bounded by affection and loss; and the Empress’s warning insists that possession can enlarge appetite rather than satisfy it. The concept’s central tension is therefore not between having wealth and having none, but between material plenty and the human desire that no quantity of riches can finally contain.