Milton and the Grounds of Contention

2. John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson and the Republican Biblical Epic

Milton, Hutchinson and the Republican Biblical Epic 37 37 2 • John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson and the Republican Biblical Epic David Norbrook In a recent book, Writing the English Republic, I tried to situate Milton in a larger grouping of republican writers who, whatever their limitations and the limitations of their moment, offer a present challenge in an England newly open to political change.1 On questions of gender, however, the charge that Milton is indeed a monument to dead, patriarchal ideas poses a continuing challenge and difficulty. Joseph Wittreich has addressed that difficulty in a series of studies which have opened up contradictions and resistances in Milton’s prose and poetry, and have drawn attention to contemporary women readers who responded admiringly to his writings.2 The fact remains that many of the leading women poets of the later seventeenth century were strongly royalist in their political 38 Norbrook views. Germaine Greer has found “a contrast between royalist and republican culture that could be traced from the beginning of the century to the triumph of masculinism in the Whig supremacy,” with royalist culture being more sympathetic both to female agency and to female sexuality.3 Mary Astell’s attack on Milton may seem to clinch the argument that republicanism or Whiggery was antagonistic to the most advanced women thinkers of the time. That assumption, however, has become fixed too easily. It was in an attempt to rethink its empirical base that I was led to explore the writings of Lucy Hutchinson (1620–1681), long known both as a republican and as a woman writer of some distinction, as the author of a celebrated biography of her regicide husband. Further exploration has revealed that Hutchinson was in fact the author of a much wider range of poetry, including an epic poem on the book of Genesis which, though unfinished, reached to about four-fifths the length of Paradise Lost. This poem, Order and Disorder, was arguably the most ambitious poem composed by an Englishwoman down to that time, and it emerged from the center of the republican ideology which Milton affirmed. To set the two poems against each other is to find a striking convergence in theme and poetic strategy. In some sense, however, Order and Disorder may indeed be argued to prove the rule of which it is an exception: it is much less overtly feminist than many contemporary writings by women, and indeed it has been traditionally assumed to be the work of a man, Hutchinson’s brother Sir Allen Apsley. The poem in fact belongs to that large class of texts which were published anonymously and were subsequently assumed to be by a male author. The assumption in this particular case, by the strongly Tory Anthony Wood, lacks evidence, and a far stronger combination of factors identifies the author as Apsley’s sister, Lucy Hutchinson. Ironically enough, the only critical attention the poem has attracted is from Wittreich himself, in a stimulating survey of Milton’s immediate reception.4 His reading is colored by Milton, Hutchinson and the Republican Biblical Epic 39 Wood’s attribution to the conservative Apsley; the reascription offers new evidence for precisely the kind of cooperative though critical dialogue between Milton and his female readers that Wittreich has so imaginatively explored. Rather than opposing an infinitely open Milton to a rigid and closed Hutchinson, I believe that it is more realistic to expect both poets to be at once constrained by and open to their age’s questioning of different orthodoxies; there are common elements in both poets, which I shall consider before turning to the undoubted points of difference that Wittreich has noticed. The first five cantos of Order and Disorder narrate the Creation and Fall; the remaining 15 cantos follow the major landmarks in Genesis from Cain and Abel to the story of Jacob, Rachel and Leah, at which point the poem breaks off abruptly in midline. Thus the poem effectively reverses the proportions of Paradise Lost, giving the majority of its space to the events that are presented in inset narratives in Milton’s last two books. Order and Disorder, too, belongs to the genre of biblical or hexameral epic, with a mingling of biblical and classical conventions, though the latter are mainly confined to the occasional extended simile, and the style often moves from high prophetic passion to a plain, meditative...