When your body is a battlefield: Lucy Hutchinson and the Militarized Womb1

The title of Lucy Hutchinson's Genesis poem, Order and Disorder, describes her depictions of reproduction, as she charts both the horrors and the promise of the protoevangelium. The relationship between order and disorder, however, also serves as an apt description of her experiences of war. Th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Seventeenth century Vol. 38; no. 3; pp. 475 - 483
Main Author Murphy, Erin
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Durham Routledge 04.05.2023
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
17th century
Armed forces
Disorder
Hutchinson, Lucy (1620-1681)
Literary criticism
Lucy Hutchinson
maternity
Memoirs of the Life of John Hutchinson
Militarism
Order
Poetry
War
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Summary:The title of Lucy Hutchinson's Genesis poem, Order and Disorder, describes her depictions of reproduction, as she charts both the horrors and the promise of the protoevangelium. The relationship between order and disorder, however, also serves as an apt description of her experiences of war. This essay begins to explore the way that Hutchinson's work depicts reproduction and war as intertwined fields of struggle and possibility. Focused primarily on the experience of male bodies, scholars have shed crucial light on the role of trauma in the English Revolution, and the masculinity crisis caused by soldiers' paradoxical mix of power and loss, regimentation and chaos. Moving beyond the bodies of soldiers, this essay examines Hutchinson's representations of the intersections of war and wombs in order to illuminate the paradoxes of militarism in seventeenth-century England, and to help recalibrate discussions about women and republicanism.
ISSN:0268-117X
2050-4616
DOI:10.1080/0268117X.2023.2197381