Pamela S. Hammons

Polluted Palaces: Gender, Sexuality and Property in Lucy Hutchinson's “Elegies”

While Hutchinsons “Elegies” lament her husbands death, they also struggle to locate her speaker in relation to the family estate and to fashion the speaker as a proper widow. At times, Hutchinson seems to create a female speaker who is a perfect fantasy figure for readers invested in notions of female subordination and dependency: she is an appropriately contained, chaste widow; she cloisters herself, dedicates herself to her husbands memory and downplays her new liberties. Despite this careful self-representation, however, flickers of female desire and agency still emerge in her “Elegies”, and the specter of female ownership haunts her verse. Attending to Hutchinsons self-representations in relation to real property exposes her subtle gestures towards economic agency; indeed, it reveals her desire to be a subject of property.

Valuing Early Modern Women’s Verse in the Twenty-First Century

Early modern women poets, in the last two decades, have undergone a second renaissance. From the 1988 publication of Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse, to the production of editions of individual women’s verse, to the development of electronic databases of women’s writing such as the Brown University Women Writers Project and the Perdita Project, seventeenth-century women’s poetry has become increasingly available to a wide audience.1 Scholarship in the last twenty years has been enabled — indeed, radically reconfigured — by the emergence of these important resources, which have provided substantial introductory essays, glosses, and notes to accompany their accessible copies of the poems. Much of this scholarship, not surprisingly, is grounded in various feminisms and gender theories; however, there tends to be a divide between scholars performing archival work and those focusing their analyses upon the best known, most accessible — and by now, effectively canonical — women poets (e.g., Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth, Katherine Philips, Lucy Hutchinson, and Aphra Behn).