Singularity and refusal to imitate

Singularity and refusal to imitate is the Duchess of Newcastle’s stated preference for distinctiveness over conformity: she would rather appear worse in her singularity than better by the standards of fashion. In her conversation with the Empress, this ambition is both a defense of an unconventional self and a claim about authorship, tempered by her insistence that eccentricity does not displace virtue.

The Duchess’s Principle of Singular Conduct

When the Empress asks why the Duchess takes delight, when joined to her body, in being singular in dress, behaviour, and discourse, the Duchess acknowledges that her choices go beyond what is usual. She explains that her ambition is to be unlike others wherever possible. Imitating others, she argues, indicates a mean nature; if she cannot prevent imitation of herself, she would rather be imitated than imitate. Her compact maxim makes the cost of that preference explicit: she would choose to seem worse in singularity than better in the mode.

The statement defines singularity not simply as unusual appearance but as a deliberate refusal to use prevailing taste as the measure of personal worth. The Duchess admits the extravagance of her conduct rather than presenting it as ordinary, and makes independence itself the object of her ambition. The Empress responds that, without the standing of a great lady, the world might dismiss these singularities as vanities. The exchange thus distinguishes the Duchess’s chosen self-presentation from the public judgment that can reduce it to mere eccentricity.

Reputation, Virtue, and Writing

The Duchess says she does not care whether the present or future ages censure her singularities as vanity. She is confident, however, that neither age can truthfully deny her virtue and chastity: acquaintances and former servants, she says, could attest to her conduct under oath. Her defense grounds the claim in the possibility of witnesses, especially for people of noble rank, who are seldom without attendants and whose faults, if they have any, are readily known and divulged. Singularity is therefore not offered as exemption from moral scrutiny; she separates freedom from conventional style from the standards by which conduct may be judged.

The Empress presses this distinction by asking why the Duchess pleads for dishonest and wicked people in her writings if she takes such pride in honesty and virtue. The Duchess answers that she does so to display her wit, not her nature. The reply marks a boundary between the positions or characters a writer can represent and the moral identity she claims for herself. Her refusal to imitate extends, in this exchange, from dress and behaviour to a defense of imaginative authorship: writing about wrongdoing does not, in her account, make the writer wicked.

Singular Selfhood in a World of Competing Ideals

The conversation occurs within a larger narrative that gives women markedly different kinds of authority. The Empress rules the Blazing-World and later establishes a congregation of women, teaching them the articles of her religion; yet the world’s existing religious institutions exclude women from public worship, leaving them to pray at home. The Duchess’s claim to individual self-fashioning and intellectual authorship therefore sits beside an institutional order that restricts women’s public religious participation. The contrast gives her singularity a wider resonance without making it a simple program for changing those institutions.

The Duchess’s independence also belongs to a book that repeatedly stages disputes over knowledge and authority. The Empress’s learned observers disagree over what their Telescopes reveal, and their arguments are ultimately permitted only on the condition that they remain within their schools and do not disturb the state. In another exchange, the Duchess is persuaded to abandon the ambition to rule a material world and to create one within herself instead. Against those pressures toward externally measured knowledge, government, or reputation, her preference for singularity asserts a personal standard—but one she limits by claiming virtue and chastity, rather than mere difference, as the lasting measure of her character.