In moving from the more conventional romance narratives of her earlier stories to what she understands as a kind of new fictional truth, Cavendish uses astronomy to define the boundaries of her Blazing World [40] Modeling the experience of reading on that of looking into the telescope allows Cavendish to define her fiction in a way that also questions astronomy's reliance upon unverifiable visual evidence.
In the opening pages, readers would already expect the Blazing World to be an alternative romance world.
The suggestion that astronomers could see the Blazing World through their "very good Telescopes" in the same way that they sometimes see "two or three suns at once" transforms scientific discovery into optical illusion.
Responding to her own experiences as a reader, Cavendish constructs The Blazing World to redefine the access that her readers have to the "truth" of the text.
In The Blazing World, by contrast, Cavendish intends the reader to see things which would not be visible in any lens, however powerful.
While the construction of the Blazing World affirms the power of natural vision, the scientific practices of its inhabitants demonstrate the limitations to artificial technologies.
During the most contentious of these arguments, the Lady asks the philosophers what they can see with their telescopes from the southern pole of the Blazing World.
In this case, the description of these three stars is important primarily because of its filiation with another group of three celestial bodies, the three planets described in The Blazing World.
The Lady's second celestial voyage in The Blazing World provides a further critique of the philosophical assumptions underlying natural philosophy.
Cavendish's goal in The Blazing World is not to read and thus know what Aristotle or Galileo knew.
Kegl, 126, makes an argument similar to mine when she suggests that The Blazing World is a piece of "Fancy" which is "attached" to The Philosophical Observations in order to show readers that fancy, as a contemplative activity, is the final stage of philosophical inquiry.
"Between the Glass and the Hand: The Eye in Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World." 16501850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 9: 25-38.