ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the tangled, seemingly incompatible strands of gender ideology that form the complex fabric of Lucy Hutchinson’s “Elegies”. Hutchinson wrote her “Elegies” after the death of her husband in 1664. Amy Louise Erickson, meanwhile, points out that: Widowhood was the most often caricatured state of female existence, usually in the form of the merry widow. The wealthy, sex-hungry widow as male fantasy was a stock-in-trade of early modern dramatists. Both economically and sexually independent, she was a loose, free electron in a society of coupled atoms, with all its potential—and all its danger. A profound focus on containing female sexuality is also prominent in Hutchinson’s “Another on The Sun Shine”, which could be termed a closet poem. This complex poem can be interpreted on many levels. Hutchinson’s focus on a sun complicit in a variety of bloody and immoral acts certainly critiques the restored Crown and foretells its defeat.
