Maternity, Marriage, and Contract: Lucy Hutchinson's Response to Patriarchal Theory in Order and Disorder

Since C. A. Moore's 1927 essay "Miltoniana (1679-1741)," the then-unattributed Order and Disorder has been compared with Milton's Paradise Lost. Moore refers only to the first five cantos, which were published in 1679, thus explaining his comment that this poem of twenty cantos is "very small."¹ While assuming male authorship of this poem, Moore describes Order and Disorder as "an imitation" and "also a veiled rebuke of Milton."² David Norbrook's recent attribution of this poem to Lucy Hutchinson and his edition of the poem, previously unavailable in print, is likely to initiate extensive explorations of the interaction between Hutchinson's and Milton's poems; this project has already begun in Norbrook's detailed introduction to the poem.³ Like Milton's Paradise Lost, published in 1667, Lucy Hutchinson's poem takes as its subject the narrative of Genesis and thus considers the event of and the consequences of the Fall. The points of contact between the two writers suggest that comparisons between their work will be fruitful. Like Milton, Hutchinson was both a Puritan and a parliamentary supporter. In fact, her husband had signed Charles I's death warrant, and his struggle to regain his freedom after the Stuart Restoration forms a significant segment of her Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, written during the 1660s. Her extensive body of work also includes a translation of Lucretius's Epicurean poem De rerum natura, a work of theology addressed to her daughter, and a series of elegies. Like Milton, then, her engagement with the political turmoil of mid-seventeenth-century England prompts textual production in the genres of history, theology, and biblically-inspired epic poetry.

Order and Disorder is of particular use since it allows a comparison of contemporaneous narratives of the Fall from a male and a female perspective: one's perception of the role of gender and its relationship to social order in seventeenth-century England was largely determined by one's interpretation of the biblical story of the poem. Intertextual studies of these two poems will also allow us to place Milton's poem in conversation with those of his contemporaries, particularly with newly discovered or rediscovered women writers of the period. This essay will begin the productive process of placing Hutchinson's poem in dialogue with Milton's, though I wish to expand the texts and voices with whom Hutchinson seems to be in conversation throughout her poem. It certainly is the case that in Order and Disorder Hutchinson is in part "rebuking" Milton's theological assumptions. She announces in the Preface that "I found I could know nothing but what God taught me, so I resolved never to search after any knowledge of him and his productions, but what he himself hath given forth. Those that will be wise above what is written may hug their philosophical clouds, but let them take heed they find not themselves without God in the world, adoring figments of their own brains, instead of the living and true God."⁴ Hutchinson does see her poem as a kind of check on Milton's narrative of "things invisible to mortal sight";⁵ for Hutchinson, the "figments" of his "own brain" deny him access to the "living and true God" whom she can engage through her closer work with the Bible. Yet her twenty-canto-long poem in heroic couplets, modeled closely on the events within Genesis, engages in a conversation with numerous texts, including Milton's poem, seventeenth-century political theory, and motifs from her own translation of Lucretius's De rerum natura.

Hutchinson's poem allows us access to a seventeenth-century woman's perspective on the actions of Eve and the consequences for gender and social order. While Hutchinson may be said to "rebuke" Milton's representation of the Fall and the other events in Genesis, she is explicitly rethinking Milton's representation of a more material topic: the presence of the mother. While critics of Milton's poem have engaged the issue of the elided mother in Paradise Lost, I...