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

• Published in: The Seventeenth century Vol. 38; no. 3; pp. 475 - 483
• Main Author: Murphy, Erin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• 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
• DOI: 10.1080/0268117X.2023.2197381
• ISSN: 0268-117X

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.