Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700

Margaret Cavendish's play The Convent of Pleasure (1668) gives readers emotional whiplash as it pivots from a radical endorsement of queer female separatism in its first four acts to an abrupt and unsatisfying final act in which a heterosexual marriage spells the end of the titular convent. This essay integrates the work's ending with its earlier sections by using theories of queer virginity and asexuality to analyze the text's representation of pregnancy as traumatic and repulsive.¹ The multivalent critique of pregnancy in the text is part of its effort to theorize an asexual reproductive ideology. Although the convent rejects sexual procreation, it celebrates the potential of other reproductive methods. Identifying these methods as "asexual reproduction," as opposed to "nonsexual reproduction," emphasizes that the text constructs modes of reproduction that are incompatible with sex.² These modes can be read as virgin births—not simply nonsexual but asexual; according to the text, a vow of virginity enables alternative forms of reproduction. Based on the text's inextricable rejection of pregnancy and glorification of virginity, this essay thus proposes an asexual reading of Cavendish's conceptual universe regarding gender and sexuality, as evidenced in her biography, her other writings, and their publication history.³ I apply this framework to three instances of pregnancy within the text: the literal pregnancy of female characters in a series of vignettes staged within the convent; the symbolic impregnation of the convent with the unwanted male body of the prince; and the physical book itself, which is structurally impregnated with the words of Cavendish's husband.

An asexual reading of The Convent of Pleasure contributes to and builds on multiple ongoing conversations in Cavendish studies. Specific to the play, scholars frequently [End Page 83] identify tension between its radical beginning and (seemingly) traditional conclusion.⁴ Understanding the play as an asexual rejection of pregnancy offers an alternate reading of the play's ending while also drawing parallels across critical textual moments and features within it. This reading also expands on a body of work applying queer theory to Cavendish, which has largely focused on the presence of female eroticism in her writings. These applications are increasingly capacious, as noted by Rachel Warburton: "Where the earlier inventories of homoerotic moments implicitly locate Cavendish as a (queer) feminist foremother, the more recent discussions attempt to locate her work in an increasingly complex cultural history of sexuality."⁵ Asexuality is a critical lens that fosters contributions to these efforts. Queer theory is often still preoccupied with sex—including the focus on homoeroticism in Cavendish's work—and asexuality both makes patent and resists this preoccupation.⁶ Given that resistance to sex figures significantly in a handful of Cavendish's writings, both fictional and autobiographical, her work represents a corpus ripe with potential for the burgeoning field of early modern asexuality studies.

Recognizing The Convent of Pleasure as a rejection of penetrative sex and pregnancy illuminates the play's investment in theorizing queer communities and asexual reproduction for women. In this sense, the play has two inextricable ideological projects: rejecting traditional sexual reproduction and envisioning queer alternatives to such. The Convent of Pleasure represents the culmination of Cavendish's fictional rejection of pregnancy. Analyzing one of Cavendish's earlier works, Assaulted and Pursued Chastity (1656), in which the heroine takes creative measures to avoid coerced sex, Eun Kyung Min argues that in her fiction, Cavendish "offers scathing parodies of the social and cultural investment in women as mothers and breeders of children" and attempts to imagine worlds "built on alternative uses for women's bodies, desires, and affects."⁷

In The Convent of Pleasure, Cavendish continues this imaginative project, but queerness, rather than creativity, becomes the solution. Cavendish's convent can be identified as a queer community within Judith Halberstam's capacious definition of "queer" as a term describing "nonnormative logics and organization of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity"—all facets of female life to which the convent proposes radical alternatives.⁸ The convent's queerness is evident in its centering of virginity, its modeling of an alternative kinship...