ABSTRACT
Like John Milton’s Paradise Lost, published in 1667, Lucy Hutchinson’s poem takes as its subject the narrative of Genesis and thus considers the event of and the consequences of the Fall. Order and Disorder is of particular use since it allows a comparison of contemporaneous narratives of the Fall from a male and a female perspective: one’s perception of the role of gender and its relationship to social order in seventeenth-century England was largely determined by one’s interpretation of the biblical story of the poem. This chapter begins the productive process of placing Hutchinson’s poem in dialogue with Milton’s, though they wish to expand the texts and voices with Hutchinson seems to be in conversation throughout her poem. It then suggests that Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder is distinctly more than an engagement with Milton’s poem: it is a sophisticated political rethinking of tenets of patriarchal theory that offers alternative visions of governmental formation in the late seventeenth century.
