Platonic Friendship

Platonic Friendship in The Blazing-World is the bond between the Empress and the Duchess of Newcastle’s soul, a relationship that makes intellectual companionship possible across separate worlds and mortal conditions. The Empress seeks the Duchess not merely as a learned assistant but as a trusted friend; the Duchess, in turn, offers frank advice, reciprocal affection, and a distinct imaginative authority. Their intimacy is tested by questions of religion, wealth, ambition, authorship, and separation, but ends without rivalry: the Duchess returns to her husband, and the Empress explicitly refuses to disturb her friend’s sovereignty in the world they share through imagination.

A Friendship Across Worlds

After the Empress has settled the affairs of Church and State, she longs to learn about the world she left behind. She decides that only the Immaterial Spirits can provide this knowledge and summons learned inhabitants of the Blazing-World to ask whether such beings exist. The Spirits eventually visit and tell her about her native world and its inhabitants. In their conversations, however, their powers prove limited: they acknowledge that created spirits have no universal knowledge, and they can forget events that have not been recorded. The Empress’s search for a trustworthy informant thus takes place in a narrative that questions claims to supernatural authority rather than simply accepting them.

When the Empress wants to make a Cabbala, the Spirits disappear. After recovering from a trance, she becomes distressed by the possibility that her question has caused them to suffer. She later asks for the soul of the Duchess of Newcastle, recommended as a writer of sense and reason. The Duchess is summoned to serve as the Empress’s scribe, but their first meeting quickly moves beyond a practical arrangement. The Empress greets her with an embrace and a spiritual kiss, and the Duchess becomes a participant in the Empress’s search for knowledge, not a silent instrument of it.

Counsel Without Deference

Their first extended exchange establishes both closeness and intellectual independence. The Empress proposes that the Duchess help create a Jewish Cabbala. The Duchess cautions that the Spirits are fallible and that no created being has absolute knowledge of the mysteries of the Creator. She advises the Empress to leave the project alone: it would be of no benefit to her or her people, and speculative interpretation could lead to error. When the Empress suggests philosophical, moral, and political Cabbalas instead, the Duchess answers each proposal on its own terms, arguing that reason already guides inquiry into nature, that moral life needs no elaborate hidden system, and that government rests on reward and punishment. Her advice is affectionate but direct, and the Empress treats disagreement as counsel rather than disloyalty.

The friendship is also shaped by the limits of what the Spirits can know. Their account of spirits makes them dependent on material vehicles for movement and bodily speech; pure spirits, they say, are immovable, and particular created spirits lack absolute knowledge. The Duchess takes up this limitation when warning the Empress against relying on them to explain sacred mysteries. The relationship therefore joins imaginative access to critical judgment: the Empress can cross into another world through spiritual means, but her friend insists that such access does not guarantee certainty.

Wealth, Singular Character, and Reciprocal Affection

During the voyage back to the Blazing-World, the Duchess asks why the Empress has not used the passage between worlds to enrich her birthplace or her own family, despite possessing wealth enough for the whole world. The Empress replies that she loves both her native country and her family, but fears that riches make people destroy one another; in her view, greater wealth only intensifies covetousness. The Duchess counters that scarcity itself makes people eager for riches. She says she is not covetous and wants no more than the wealth her husband had before the Civil Wars, adding that her concern is for his descendants. Her answer makes their differences visible without weakening their attachment: one sees wealth as an appetite without limit, while the other gives her request a familial and dynastic purpose.

The Empress offers to send the Fish-men to seek a passage and promises that, if one is found, the Duchess and her husband need not lack either riches or long life. She even says she would make the Duchess as great and powerful a monarchess as herself. The Duchess receives the declaration with gratitude and says she values the Empress’s love beyond all things in nature. Yet the imagined gifts cannot overcome the material separation of their worlds. The Duchess explains that matter cannot travel as souls and spirits do; even the natural Elixir that grows in the Blazing-World’s Golden Sands could not be carried across without a passage. The offer reveals the Empress’s generosity, while the Duchess’s response keeps their friendship from becoming a transaction measured by wealth or rank.

Their conversation turns from riches to singularity. Asked why she delights, when joined to her body, in being unusual in clothing, behavior, and discourse, the Duchess admits that she wants, if possible, to be unlike others. She would rather be imitated than imitate, and would rather appear worse through singularity than better by following the mode. The Empress warns that the world might call these choices vanity, but the Duchess says she does not care about the judgment of the present or future ages. She grounds her self-defense in her conviction that her conduct is virtuous and chaste, and argues that the attendants of noble households make their actions knowable. When the Empress asks why she pleads for wicked people in her writings, the Duchess distinguishes literary performance from personal character: she says she does so to show her wit, not her nature. Their friendship accommodates a self-description that is at once ambitious, defensive, and unapologetically independent.

Companionship, Authorship, and Departure

At the Blazing-World’s Imperial Palace, the Emperor rejoices at the Empress’s safe return and the narrative stresses that his love is returned. The Duchess’s soul asks leave to go back to her noble lord, but the Emperor first asks her to see what he has built during the Empress’s absence. His new stables and riding houses are intended for horses of the kind the Duchess had described from her husband’s world. The double stable holds one hundred horses on each side; gold, agate, cornelian, amber, mother-of-pearl, crystal, turquoise, and other precious materials furnish its structure. The Duchess admires the buildings, but their magnificence also makes tangible what friendship cannot erase: she and her husband belong to a different world, where such materials and resources cannot simply be delivered.

The Emperor and Empress then ask the Duchess for advice about a theatre and plays. She says she knows little about constructing stages, but discusses the difference between natural descriptions of human actions and the artificial rules favored by contemporary critics. The Emperor wants plays that make wise men and follow nature; the Duchess argues that her own plays, rejected as unfit for performance because they do not follow prescribed rules, might suit the Blazing-World. She contrasts the ideal of wise, noble, well-behaved spectators with what she calls a nursery of whining lovers, and the Empress adds that she likes a foolish farce attached to a wise play. The Duchess identifies the Lice-men, Bird-men, Spider-men, Fox-men, Ape-men, and Satyrs as fitting performers of farce. The exchange turns friendship into creative collaboration: the Empress and Emperor seek the Duchess’s particular judgment rather than asking her to imitate an established theatrical fashion.

They ask her to remain until she has arranged the theatre and prepared plays and farces. The Duchess instead longs to return to her dear lord and husband, promising to visit again after a short time. The Empress and Emperor grant her request only with difficulty, a measure of their attachment, but they do not prevent her departure. Once restored to her own body, the Duchess tells her husband about the Empress’s kindness and the events of the journey, including the Emperor’s buildings and horses. She reports that the Empress had praised him to the Emperor. Her homecoming does not cancel the friendship: it carries knowledge of the Empress back into the Duchess’s marriage and makes the relationship part of her life in her native world.

Imaginative Sovereignty and the Friendship’s Meaning

The Duchess’s account of the Empress’s conquests further clarifies the difference between intimacy and possession. She tells her husband that the Empress subdued the monarchs she encountered and made them pay tribute and homage to the ruler of the Empress’s native country. Yet the relationship between the two women does not reproduce that political subjection. In the concluding account of world-making, the Duchess says that the Empress rules the Blazing-World with wisdom and conduct, and calls her a dear Platonic Friend. Though the Duchess claims the right to create and govern an imaginative world of her own, she rejects the prospect of overthrowing her friend. If another friend needs a world, she says, she would rather create another one than depose the Empress.

Friendship thus becomes a principle for distributing imaginative sovereignty. The Duchess’s final defense of her own worlds allows readers to imagine themselves as subjects of them, or to create worlds and govern themselves; but it also warns against unjustly usurping another’s creation. The Empress’s authority and the Duchess’s authorship remain distinct, held together by affection rather than conquest. Their parting is consequently not a defeat of their intimacy but its defining limit: the Duchess can love the Empress deeply, accept her counsel and generosity, and collaborate with her, while still returning to her husband and preserving her own independent imaginative domain.