Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England (review)

Scholars from Gordon Schochet to Jonathan Goldberg have long argued for the mutually supporting nature of fatherly authority and absolute monarchy in the early modern period. In her illuminating and wide-ranging book, Su Fang Ng complicates and reframes this argument by revealing both the resilience and flexibility of seventeenth-century comparisons between family and state. She persuasively argues that, far from simply bolstering monarchal power, these comparisons were deployed across the political spectrum by Royalists, republicans, and radicals in their attempts to shape old and new models of national government and local community. As Ng succinctly puts it, "At the root of the family-state analogy was not a single ideology but a debate" (7). The tropes of household affiliation that underpinned much early modern political thought thus formed a malleable idiom that could be used to justify competing definitions of government by a range of seventeenth-century authors, including John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Hobbes.

Taking the long seventeenth century as her focus, Ng splits the book into two parts that usefully bridge the usual period divide of 1660: "Revolutionary Debates" and "Restoration Imaginings." Part 1 begins with the figure dominating much earlier discussion of political patriarchalism, James VI and I. Ng argues that James's infamous insistence on absolute fatherly and monarchal authority, later adopted by his son Charles, is complicated both by James's own inconsistent use of family metaphors and heroic representations of the queens consort as powerful co-rulers. This chapter functions as something of a test case for Ng's thesis, as it stresses the diversity of the family as a political idiom, even within the ideologically limited setting of the Stuart court. The chapter on James also lays a historical foundation for the explorations that follow by arguing that the early seventeenth century leaves a much richer legacy of family-state analogies than previous scholars have realized. The rest of part 1 explores this legacy, analyzing the leveled fraternal bonds of Milton's prose tracts, the displacement of paternal power in Hobbes's political philosophy, and the vexed revival of the notion of pater patriae in elegies for Oliver Cromwell. Part 2 focuses on writers that Ng identifies as being "outside the mainstream," who use family bonds for religious and political experiment (141). Ng discusses the revolutionary privileging of the younger brother in Paradise Lost, the idealized espousal of the female monarch and female aristocrat in Margaret Cavendish, and the productive tension between equality and hierarchy in Quaker marriage metaphors. The book ends with a brief consideration of the continuing force of the family-state analogy in Mary Astell's late seventeenth-century work.

In its sheer range of authors and genres, this is a book of impressive richness and breadth. Occasionally the thread of the argument gets lost, as Ng pauses to explain the intricacies of natural law or Quaker contributions to national print culture. But these scholarly detours are also part of the book's strength, as she masterfully synthesizes a range of discourses to produce an erudite narrative that offers insights into intellectual history, political theory, and literature. These insights are at their most compelling in Ng's nuanced and complex readings of texts. She illuminates noncanonical works: one highpoint is Ng's argument that elegies for Oliver Cromwell balance older dynastic models of family inheritance with a non-monarchal insistence on his son, Richard Cromwell, as a spiritual heir — raised to political prominence after his father's death by merit not blood. Ng also casts canonical authors in a new light: her analysis of the dynamic fraternal relations of Paradise Lost, for example, concludes with an innovative discussion of Eve as an analogical younger brother — a seemingly secondary figure whose belatedness actually augurs social and religious renewal. In a similarly sophisticated reading, she shows how Margaret Cavendish's old Cavalier values clash with Restoration sexual and state politics...