Lucy Hutchinson's Rhetoric in Order and Disorder Christina Iluzada, BA
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ABSTRACT To Teach, Move, Meditate, and Oppose: Lucy Hutchinson’s Rhetoric in Order and Disorder Christina Iluzada, B.A., Ph.D. Mentor: Phillip J. Donnelly, Ph.D. Lucy Hutchinson’s biblical poetic paraphrase, Order and Disorder, employs rhetorical strategies that enable her to teach and move her audience, meditate for her own spiritual benefit, and oppose the atomistic doctrine of Lucretius. In this dissertation, I begin to examine the poem using a rhetorical analysis that draws upon the Aristotelian causes as a framework. The poem’s final cause is to persuade Dissenting readers to trust and praise divine Providence and to pursue virtue; its formal cause is a type of plain style that relies upon tropes and sparingly employs schemes; and its material cause is the biblical story that the poem paraphrases, while weaving other biblical texts, images, and ideas into the Genesis narrative. This analysis of Hutchinson’s Non-Conformist rhetoric sheds light on the Calvinist Dissenter plain style, demonstrating how her interpretive strategies align with her Biblicism and distinguish her writing from Enlightenment rationalist notions of “plain.” It also reads the poem as a meditation, showing that Hutchinson’s rhetoric functions both to persuade herself as well as her Dissenting readers in the midst of difficult political and personal circumstances in the aftermath of the Restoration. This analysis of the character of Non-Conformist rhetoric highlights the various ways in which Hutchinson’s poem contests Lucretius’s atomism and epistemology. This study sketches a more thorough picture of Hutchinson’s rhetorical aesthetic than scholars have yet completed. It demonstrates that this seventeenth-century woman’s biblical epic poem places her in the position of not only a poet but also a teacher of doctrine, a rhetorician who moves her audience, a private Christian meditating on Scripture for the sake of her own soul, and an intellectual who directly counters Lucretian philosophy. Copyright © 2013 by Christina Iluzada All rights reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS viii 1. Introduction 1 2. A Plain Contradiction?: Hutchinson’s Rhetorical Purpose and Her 13 Portrayals of Eloquent Speeches The Apostle Paul’s Plain Style and Rhetorical Philosophy 16 Preaching and Hutchinson’s Rhetorical Philosophy 21 The Dangers of Rhetoric for the Wrong Ends 25 Hutchinson’s Augustinian Notion of Rhetoric Ordering the 27 Affections Rhetoric Alone Cannot Regenerate Souls 32 Moving Receptive Listeners Toward Virtuous Action 34 Making Knowledge Affective 36 Preaching to the Rhetor 42 3. The Plain Style and Hutchinson’s Usage of Tropes 51 Various Definitions of Plain 53 The Bible and Tropes 57 Teaching Suprasensible Concepts and Moving Readers to Praise 61 Evaluative Tropes 65 Persuading Readers to Avoid Sin 67 v Transformative Tropes 74 Creating New Meanings 77 4. Hutchinson’s Plain Style and Schemes in Order and Disorder 85 Sophistic Schemes 86 Biblical Schemes 88 Biblical Schemes in the Poem 89 Memorably Affirming without Dissecting Doctrine 93 Revealing the Character of Postlapsarian Realities 96 5. The Rhetoric of Interpretatio: Dilating Genesis with the New Testament 106 Biblical Paraphrase 107 Turning Scripture into a Romance? 108 Moral Exemplars 109 Interpretatio as Application 116 Praise for a God Who Orders Disorder 128 6. The Tropes of Types and Emblems 146 Hutchinson’s Christological Typology 147 Types Revealing the Special Providence of Redemption 149 Emblems 150 Emblem-Writing as Meditation 154 Instructing Through Emblems Before Encouraging with Types 162 vi Emblems that Occur without Types 174 Unlabeled Emblems of Genesis 178 Unlabeled Emblems of Creation 187 7. Order and Disorder as an Alternative Vision of De rerum natura 201 Situating Humanity within Creation 204 Hutchinson and the Calvinist Dissenter Aesthetic 223 Seed 229 Sun and Shadows 233 Day 237 Martial Tropes 238 8. Epilogue 250 vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I simply could not have completed this project without the guidance of my dissertation director, Dr. Phillip Donnelly. His seventeenth-century poetry class introduced me to Lucy Hutchinson, and his instruction and suggestions as I have drafted and revised these chapters have been invaluable. I greatly appreciate the thoughtfulness and thoroughness with which he considered every question I asked and the time he made to discuss this project during each of its stages. I am also grateful to my other dissertation committee members. Dr. Kevin Gardner helpfully guided me to recognize Hutchinson’s Dissenting audience and pushed me towards more precise historical accuracy. Dr. Joshua King has been sacrificial with his time; I am thankful for the always detailed, helpful, and encouraging feedback he provides. His comments challenged me to rethink the Pauline character of Hutchinson’s rhetoric. My thanks also go to Dr. Lisa Shaver and Dr. Julia Hejduk because they were willing to join my committee though they did not know me at all before I began writing this dissertation. Talking with Dr. Shaver about balancing writing and teaching helped me to actually finish the dissertation in the midst of a busy semester. Also, her comments regarding my use of terms were helpful to clarify my argument. I am grateful to viii Dr. Hejduk for her congeniality and her invaluable notes regarding classical allusions and conventions in the poem. I feel truly blessed to have spent these years at Baylor and to have had the privilege of learning from outstanding Christian scholars who genuinely care about the success of their students. ix CHAPTER ONE Introduction As Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann recently noted in The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558-1680, “puritanism fostered artistic endeavor and intellectual curiosity as much as iconoclasm” (Introduction 4). One Puritan whose remarkable interest in art, theology, and philosophy has gone virtually unnoticed is the wife of the regicide John Hutchinson: the poet, translator, and biographer, Lucy Apsley Hutchinson. She displayed both her theological and her rhetorical acumen in the various genres she attempted but especially in her epic poem Order and Disorder (1679). A linguistically gifted writer, she undertook this poem after she had completed the first English translation of Lucretius’s atomistic and Epicurean poem De rerum natura, leading David Norbrook to assert that Hutchinson wrote “one of the most intellectually ambitious bodies of writing of any seventeenth century woman” (“John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson” 62). Known primarily as the author of her husband’s biography, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, she has attracted the interest of many scholars due to her writing’s historical and political information. 1 Scholarship is thinner for her biblical epic poem, Order and Disorder, because of its mistaken authorial attribution. The first five cantos were published anonymously in 1679, and Anthony Wood attributed the entire poem to Hutchinson’s brother, Sir Allen Apsley, in 1691, twelve years after her death. In 2001 Norbrook brought to light that the entire poem is indeed Lucy Hutchinson’s work. Though scholars have discussed her memoir for many years and her translation since it was published in 1996, not much work has yet illuminated her epic poem. Some scholars have begun to take interest in Order and Disorder and the way it illumines the issues of seventeenth-century notions of gender and gender roles, which has also been a central discussion in regards to her memoir.1 Shannon Miller, aligning Hutchinson with Hobbes and Locke, argues that Hutchinson rejects patriarchal theory and embraces consent theory, giving more agency to women in her epic than Milton does in Paradise Lost. Much more scholarship should be done on the issue of gender in Order and Disorder, but my interest in this poem primarily regards Hutchinson’s rhetoric in relationship to her theology and explicit biblical purpose, which has received little critical attention. A few scholars, such as Jonathan Goldberg, Robert Wilcher, Reid Barbour, and, especially, David Norbrook, have begun analyzing how Hutchinson’s 2 poetics relates to her theological aesthetic. Much of Barbour and Goldberg’s interest involves analyzing Hutchinson’s appropriation and adaptation of material from De rerum natura for her poem. While Goldberg and Barbour are interested in Hutchinson’s use of her Lucretius text, Wilcher analyzes Hutchinson’s possible response to Milton and the ways her poem incorporates the genre of romance. Wilcher shows the different ways that Hutchinson and Milton adapt biblical narrative, arguing that while Milton freely adds to and colors biblical narrative, Hutchinson frequently asserts that she will not address issues with her own fancy that the Bible does not, although, he claims, she does add romantic conventions to the later (previously unpublished) cantos of the poem. Wilcher also briefly notes that Hutchinson likely uses the technique employed by Francis Quarles in his Emblemes, especially the use of “types” and “emblems.” Norbrook has published the most work on Hutchinson. Comparing Paradise Lost to Order and Disorder on several levels, he, like Wilcher, maintains that Hutchinson is probably responding to Paradise Lost because she uses phrases similar to those in Milton’s poem and sometimes seems implicitly to rebuke Milton for straying from biblical sources. Norbrook also claims that her poem contrasts with Milton’s in the ways it prioritizes nature and proclaims Calvinistic theology. Norbrook primarily focuses