Music, Noise, and Silence in the Works of Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Philips

This thesis examines how Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Philips, two prominent Royalist women writers, employed acoustic vocabularies to construct and maintain identity after the collapse of the Caroline acoustic and political order (1642-1660). It contends that the acoustic experiences of the English Civil War and subsequent exile constituted a profound crisis of selfhood for the aristocratic elite.
This study adopts an integrated methodological framework incorporating sonósfera, audiation, and soundgrams to access the subjective and embodied experience of sound. This approach reveals how these poets encoded sonic memory within their texts, enabling dispersed Royalist communities to recall their lost acoustic environment.
The analysis traces Cavendish's and Philips's use of sonósfera and soundgrams through three principal categories:
1. Music (Chapters 1 and 2): Establishes the ideal pre-war sonósfera of harmony and consort, highlighting the sophistication of acoustic knowledge as a form of intellectual capital for women writers.
2. Noise (Chapter 3): Analyzes the disintegration of this order into the political and military cacophony of the Civil War, employing soundgrams such as storms and war cries as indicators of trauma and institutional collapse.
3. Silence (Chapter 4): Examines the strategic use of quietude and melancholy as mechanisms for cultural preservation and intellectual survival, transforming imposed marginalization into a form of chosen aristocratic authority.
Ultimately, this research contributes to historical sound studies and early modern history by demonstrating how figurative language can shed light on the acoustic experience and knowledge of seventeenth-century aristocratic women.