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4. Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson: Writing Matter
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f o u r Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson: Writing Matter Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson have been linked before, as David Norbrook indicates in an essay joining and commending them as ‘‘both in different sense rebels who pushed at the limits of the conventional thought of their day’’; for him, one crucial site for this conjunction lies in the fact that ‘‘both wrote verse based on Epicurean atomism.’’1 The pages that follow certainly mean to support these contentions, and the hinge connecting them will be the relationship of these two authors to atomism. Norbrook’s essay, predictably, is more tied to political history than to Epicurean atomism, and the real point of contact for him (real because it is attested to in Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson) is the regard that William Cavendish showed John Hutchinson when the former commander of the garrison in Nottingham was imprisoned in 1663 on charges of treason. Norbrook’s account of the two women is subordinated to their husbands and to their husbands’ politics. Royalism and republicanism butt heads in a relationship that Norbrook describes in the same paragraph as both ‘‘diametrically opposed’’ and nonetheless constituting an ‘‘important dialectic’’ (182). That dialectic 122 Writing Matter 123 involves the changing historical fates of the two men over the past several hundred years and the causes for which they fought. The afterlife of their wives, whose works also include lives of their husbands, seems caught up in this history, and Norbrook’s essay is motivated at least in part by a desire to redress recent attention to Cavendish (whom he aligns with postmodern relativism) through a revaluation of Hutchinson as something more than a dour and dutiful Puritan wife. The possibility of seeing them together, which Norbrook wishes were as empirically evident as the meeting of their husbands or could be a matter of demonstrable influence of the writing of one upon the other (or even in both directions) is frustrated. He can, thanks to Cavendish opining toward the close of letter 16 in her CCXI. Sociable Letters (1664) that the war that divided men need not have disrupted relations between women, at best imagine a scene where both women might have been present and can think that Hutchinson could have written her memoir against the model of Cavendish’s. Insofar as the only attestable meeting place for their relationship lies in what Norbrook terms the ‘‘unique common ground’’ (188) that Lucretius offers Cavendish and Hutchinson, he charts this as a kind of dialectic . For Cavendish, Lucretius was a sign of modernity, linked to the atomism that engaged many of those gathered around the Cavendish circle, Descartes and Hobbes among them; for Hutchinson, on the other hand, Lucretius represented a classical author not yet translated into English , a site for the humanistic investments that led her to have the skills to read and translate Latin. These are skills Cavendish lacked, at least in part because of an aristocratic class bias against education, Norbrook claims, a bias based in a belief in the dangerous effects it might have on the lower classes, which need to be kept stupid. (Norbrook downplays the dialectic relationship between this sentiment, which he finds intimated in the Duke’s writing, and the widespread republican denial of rights to those without property.) Politically, Lucretius had an appeal to a royalist like Cavendish because of his skepticism about political engagement, while for republican Hutchinson, his antimonarchism would have been valued. The movement of atoms was often seen as democratic (189), although the fact that Lucretius also was translated by the royalist John Evelyn and was philosophically akin to the materialist Hobbes, as [23.20.51.162] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:39 GMT) 124 Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson well as related to new scientific work that could be hard to reconcile to conventional Christianity, could have made him anathema (although not to Hutchinson’s humanist ambitions as a writer). Norbrook’s ‘‘dialectic’’ intends mainly to give Hutchinson a place and a chance to displace Cavendish, and the evenhandedness of his account is constantly belied by his evident republican sympathies. Nonetheless, many of the issues that engage him will be engaged in the pages that follow, albeit in rather different terms (and not, I hasten to add, to make some brief for royalism or aristocratic ignorance). Norbrook has difficulty making room for a gendered analysis (and seems, in fact, happy to emend the image...