Cultural and Genre Markers in Lucy Hutchinson's Order and Disorder

Order and Disorder, since its attribution to Lucy Hutchinson (1620-1681) at the turn of the twenty-first century, has been hailed as Eve’s version of Genesis, as the first epic poem by an English woman, even conjuring a Paradise Lost written by “Judith Milton”. More recently, scholars have questioned the genre of this unfinished poem in 20 cantos, moving it from the category of epic to that of the biblical meditation and paraphrase. Hutchinson’s work expresses what Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (2013, 197) has termed a “poetics of not knowing”: negotiating the need to remain faithful to the Biblical narrative and a desire to express the ineffable, Hutchinson promises her readers in the Preface that they will find “nothing of fancy”, “no elevations of style, no charms of language”, and yet, the author resorts to an array of techniques to sing the sublimity of the “mystic wonders” with which her “ravished soul” has been “fire[d]” (1.1-2). Such devices include gendered modesty tropes; apophasis; potentially subversive conditionals and subjunctives; a complex intertextuality with authors ranging from Virgil and Lucretius to Du Bartas, Edmund Spenser, and even Shakespeare, and a complication of the readerly experience via paratextual glosses. This essay wishes to revisit the assessment of such techniques and suggest that Hutchinson weaves in her poem different markers to voice the varying degrees of her “endless admiration” (1.15).