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from Part II - The Rewritten Legacy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
The manuscript of Lucy Hutchinson's elegies (composed 1664–71) includes a lyric passage in the hand of Lucy Hutchinson's descendant Julius. The title reads “These verses transcribed out of my other book J: H:” and the text contains the concluding note “Memdm these verses were writ by Mrs Hutchinson on ye occasion of ye Coll: her Husbands being then a prisoner in ye Tower: 1664.” In fact, these forty-two lines come from Hutchinson's biblical epic Order and Disorder: they are Eve's lament after the fall, her acceptance of responsibility and exclamation of regret for her act. The lines mix the mutuality of friendship with bitter self-criticism:
Seeing the man I love by me betrayed,
By me, who for his mutual help was made,
Who to preserve thy life ought to have died,
And I have killed thee by my foolish pride,
Defiled thy glory and pulled down thy throne.
O that I had but sinned and died alone!
Then had my torture and my woe been less,
I yet had flourished in thy happiness.
This passage exhibits, in miniature, Hutchinson's complicated reworking of the friendship tradition to reimagine marriage. She entwines the central themes of betrayal, mutuality, and self-sacrifice. With the image of the self who flourishes by giving herself up for her friend, Hutchinson links together the republican trope of friends rebelling against tyrants and the humanist textual generativity that she elevates over physical reproduction.
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