Kelly and Leslie 1999

Evading Rape and Embracing Empire in Margaret Cavendish's Assaulted and Pursued Chastity

"I want to argue here that Cavendish's virginal poetics achieve their potency, in fact, by negotiating between the Scylla of the absolutist virago and the Charybdis of the monstrous usurping androgyne to arrive at a gendered allegory, featuring the martial maid as both the emblem of disordered times and the tonic to cure them." (179)

virgin-virago as object of "admiration, dread of disgust"

• Amazons in misogynist literature -- "the very personification of a violently disordered domestic sphere"
• Elizabeth -- virginal body politic

Henrietta Maria; Cavendish was a lady-in-waiting to her; Neoplatonic cult of chaste love surrounding her, drawing on Amazonian and hermaphroditic models