Summary
In Part Two of The Blazing World, the Empress learns that her old homeland of ESFI is under threat from foreign invaders.
The King of ESFI is losing the war, so the Empress decides to come to his rescue by using an icy passage that connects the two worlds. In the Blazing World, the giants, who are architects, conceive of a special type of ship that can travel underwater.
Under the Empress's leadership, the army of the Blazing World travels to the kingdom of ESFI to help save her native land.
When they arrives, the Empress is wearing lustrous clothing and appears as a goddess, riding on the backs of the fish-men to mimic the image of walking on water. She speaks to her once-native people and tells them that she will defend her country using her special army, and that she is loyal to the King of ESFI.
Her army defeats the invaders easily, then invade enemy lands and destroy their cities until they, too, pledge loyalty to the King of ESFI.
The Empress returns to the Blazing World, where she continues to commune platonically with the Duchess. The two of them discuss fortune, wealth, and the theater.
Eventually, the Duchess returns to her own world, where she resolves to tell everyone about the wonders of the Blazing World and the power of the Empress.
Analysis
It is only after her visit to the Duchess's world that the Empress realizes she has made a mistake in attempting to convert the inhabitants of the Blazing World to her new religion. Her observations of the misfortunes of the Duchess and her husband convince her to return to the old ways of governance, once again blurring the line between fiction and reality and showcasing Cavendish's own dedication to the Royalist cause in England, in which the country would continued to be united under one monarch.
These political opinions come to a head in Part Two of the novel, when the Empress must return to her native kingdom of ESFI (England, Scotland, France, and Ireland) in order to defend the King from invading forces. The Empress's success in this mission is, the novel suggests, largely due to the scientific advancements that the Blazing World has made: their dedication to scientific inquiry and technological progress is ultimately what helps them travel to ESFI and defeat the King's enemies. Thus, their victory over the invading forces is directly connected to their respect for science and knowledge rather than attributed simply to brute force, special leadership, or strength in numbers.
Nowhere is Cavendish's Royalist sympathy more prevalent than in Part Two, where the King of ESFI is struggling to defend himself against his enemies.
This situation mirrors that of the English conflict during the seventeenth century, when talks of mixed monarchy or a commonwealth began to challenge the power of the king, Charles I. The conflict reached its apex in 1649, when Charles I was publicly beheaded for treason and the monarchy declared abolished in England. Plenty of Royalist (pro-monarchy) sympathizers remained after the execution, however, and the monarchy was restored in 1660 with the ascension of Charles II to the throne.
In The Blazing World, Cavendish essentially dramatizes the Restoration itself in a more compressed timeline, showing how the invading forces threatened the kingdom but how they were eventually squelched by the power of both ESFI and the army of the Blazing World. As such, the novel ends on a note that both emphasizes the utopian power of Cavendish's fictional society and imagines that that vision could be carried out, at least in part, in real life.
