Imagining the Mind 147

rather than in an unknowable afterlife. In representing mental order as teleologically

paramount, the allegory secularises transcendent religious and personal virtue as
psychological well-being, reversing the more common allegorical presentation of
mental integrity as a means to a social or religious end.
In obvious contrast, Pilgrim's Progress suggests mental integrity is not an end in
itself, but a means to a higher religious end. Could Christian's acceptance into heaven
function as a metaphor for a mental state? Could Bunyan's allegory be interpreted as
a fable about psychological well-being? The narrative is certainly slippery and
especially marked by the ambiguity characteristic of allegory in general. The events
it represents are ambivalently psychological events, simulacra of actual events, and
'dark' shadowings of a transcendent truth that cannot be perfectly known. Christian's
salvation, however, is not simply analogous to his psychological state, but contingent
on it. He must master his inner fears in order to cross through the River of Death to
the Celestial City. Failure to maintain faith would not result simply in mental anguish
but damnation. Narrative closure is achieved not simply with the reaffirmation of faith,
but with Christian's arrival and acceptance by God and the Saints. lO
Thus, Bunyan's allegory is largely blind to the self-reflexive sense in which
Christian's uncertainty, together with sectarian politics, requisition transcendence.
B unyan does not emphasise the possibility that the effect of transcendence his allegory
seeks to produce may stem from a self-fulfilling psychic and political desire. He
presents transcendent atonement as a solution for the problem of mental struggle
without suggesting that such atonement may be merely imaginary, taking place as an
effect of mental resolution. Cavendish's religious allegories. on the other hand,
repeatedly associate transcendent atonement with reflexive self-ordering. In
Cavendish, moreover, mental order is fictive, depending upon the mind's acceptance
of ideas toward which the narrative exhibits scepticism. There is a disjunction between
the narrated and the narrating mind, which have opposed attitudes toward transcendent
ideals. The narrated mind 'believes' these ideas and thus attains resolution. The
narrating mind promotes these ideals merely as a means of bringing about resolution.
The importance of mental order is evident in Cavendish's political allegories as
well as her religious ones. Like her religious allegories, her political allegories make
contradictory use of ordering ideals. In these, the purpose of achieving mental order
is not necessarily to resolve the social problems they seem to be concerned with.
Instead, social order is achieved allegorically as a way of resolving mental problems.
In 'Fancy's Monarchy in the Land of Poetry', for example, mental faculties are
allegorised as state officials and the five senses are military commanders patrolling the
borders. 11 Good government makes for a good mental state, rather than vice versa.
Here order is achieved through, and figured as, the discipline of writing poetry. While
the ideals advanced in the mind's poetry are persuasive enough to regulate the mind,
they are not asserted for their own sake by the writing mind of Cavendish, but are
shown to serve the purpose of achieving mental order.
Similarly, in 'Of the Indispositions of the Mind', a sick mind seeks help from
divines and moral philosophers who disagree about the nature of the mind's disease
and about the appropriate cure. 12 The wrangling of these doctors and theologians
exacerbates the mind's indisposition to the point of refiguring it. The mind's disease