Lawrence 1994

Exilic Wanderings: Cavendish and Burney

"The topos of exile provides fictional opportunity to explore new forms of women's agency and power." (29)

"movement serves as a metaphor for freedom and the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity" (30); restlessness to Cavendish's work

"In the heroine's responsiveness to the workings of chance, the opposition between passivity and activity and between hapless victimization and absolute control is econstructed -- enforced movement occasions action, intentional movement produces surprise." (33)

"in using the topos of exilic wandering, Cavendish explores the link between imagination and power in various cultural encounters, verbal and physical, between the traveler and her antagonists" (34)

improvisation of the explorer; eccentricity

"We teeter between male and female agency, as if this strange construction poised the adventure somewhere between travel and exile (self-determined and forced)." (37)

"Cavendish's seventeenth-century imaginary voyage becomes a fitting emblem for the cross-gendering aspect of adventure and adventure writing -- to write and to live adventure was to make an incursion into a no-man's-and, to play the role of a man." (40)

"Like the tendency of exile to drift into self-determined travel, the motif of cross-dressing takes on a pleasurable life of its own." (42)

"In cross-dressing adventure through her imaginary voyage, Cavendish displays the protofeminist possibility that women can be the actors and aggressors, not merely the objects, in adventure. The element of masquerade suggests that masculine courage, like costume, is something one can put on, impersonate, thus yoking prowess and ingenuity." (45)

lavishness of writing (becomes an adventure story at odds with the chasteness the plot covets (50)