“I remain, an airy phantasm”: Lucy Hutchinson’s Civil War Ghost Writing

The Restoration has often been described as a period haunted by the civil wars. The Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, Lucy Hutchinson’s 1660s account of the wars and their aftermath, tells a very different kind of ghost story, one that challenges us to rethink both this narrative of national trauma, as well as the binary gender analysis that has limited our understanding of her wartime writing. Throughout her work, Hutchinson represents the instability of identity, from her detailing of impersonations in the life story of her husband, to her description of double images in her elegies, to her depiction of “pious fraud” in her Genesis poem, Order and Disorder. Drawing on recent work by historians on the experience of the civil wars, this essay investigates a range of Hutchinson’s genres, showing that her engagement with so-called “identity problems” reached far beyond the marital dyad, or even the hierarchy of God, husband, and wife. Responding to the civil wars, Hutchinson performs a series of improvisations in which she embraces the unstable and phantasmatic nature of earthly existence as part of divine will, and makes a series of subtle distinctions between the deceits of her opponents and the “pious frauds” of the Godly.