King Bees and Hive Minds in Margaret Cavendish’s Interregnum Poetry

Abstract

In Margaret Cavendish’s first publication, Poems and Fancies (1653), she compares the brain to a honey comb, and thoughts to various bees in “Similizing the Head of Man to a Hive of Bees.” The poem itself is no surprise, considering Cavendish’s keen interest in natural history, but what is surprising is her metaphor of the soul as the King bee, not the Queen. Beekeeping manuals, which proliferated in the seventeenth century, hotly debated the sex of the ruling bee, but the consensus was moving in favor of a queen. Surely Cavendish must have known this. So why mention a king? Could her poem be underpinned by political matters, chiding her English readers for their kingless, and soulless, state? From the approach of both historicism and ecocriticism, this paper will analyze the implications of the conflation of bees, politics, and women in Cavendish’s Interregnum poetry.