Animals and the political in Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish

Abstract

In the introduction to his edition of Hutchinson's translation of Lucretius, David Norbrook suggests that Lucretius' materialism underlies Hutchinson's interest in the relationship between animals and humans in Order and Disorder.1 While Hutchinson explicitly disavowed aspects of Lucretius' work that she translated, for example his atheism and his graphic account of human sexuality, she engaged deeply with his thinking concerning animals - at times taking his positions even further in her translation and exploring their implications in her own epic, Order and Disorder. My investigation of Hutchinson's interest in animals, which has not yet received scholarly attention, will build upon and extend Laurie Shannon's recent discussion in Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales of what she calls early modern zoo-topia in Shakespeare's plays -a place well populated with [animals] and marked by more pervasive cognizance of their presence than modern Western culture largely affords.2 Especially relevant for this analysis is Shannon's emphasis on the political idiom to characterize the relationship between humans and animals - based on a constitutionalist sense of legitimated capacities, authorities, and rights that set animals within the scope of justice and the span of political imagination (5). Both Shannon and Keith Thomas, in his earlier and encyclopedic Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility, mention Margaret Cavendish's writings on animals - though they are silent on Hutchinson's.3 Yet just as Cavendish's association with Pierre Gassendi and his Epicurean atomism parallels Hutchinson's immersion in Lucretius' atomism, so their writings concerning animals level the accepted hierarchy of human over animal with significant political implications, as I will show. In doing so, I will place both Cavendish and Hutchinson in the context of classical and early modern thinkers and writers on animals, such as Ovid, Plutarch, Montaigne, Du Bartas, Descartes, Gascoigne, William Cavendish, and above all, their English contemporary, Milton.Cavendish's animalsMargaret Cavendish's more widely known and noticed interest in animals is best represented in her poems, The Hunting of the Hare and The Hunting of the Stag, which appear contiguously in her Poems and Fancies.4 Donna Landry remarks that Cavendish capitalized on the traditional link between English poetry and hunting to achieve some of her best verse, and that she closely describes the habits and behaviour of the and the stag, in what she calls manner that is ecologically aware.5 But what is most notable in these poems is that despite her status as an aristocrat, one of whose privileges was hunting, Cavendish dramatizes the panic and fear that the hunted animals experience.In The Hunting of the Hare, Cavendish individualizes the from the first line, by giving him name, Wat. She echoes Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis where Venus counsels Adonis to hunt timorous flying hare (674) rather than the boar that she fears will - and indeed does - bring about his death.6 Elsewhere in Poems and Fancies, Cavendish states, according to the constitution of my Sex, I am as fearefull as Hare.7 She follows Shakespeare's Venus in calling the poor Wat (696), but while Shakespeare frames the grief of the dew-bedabbled wretch (701, 703) within Venus' advice to Adonis to hunt it, Cavendish echoes Shakespeare in order to criticize Venus' exhortation to Pursue these fearful creatures (678). Cavendish, by contrast, does not instrumentalize the hare; rather, her entire poem focuses on the hare's subjectivity. In fact, while Venus presents poor Wat as suitable prey for Adonis, Cavendish repeatedly addresses the as poor Wat, recalling Virgil's second-person address, infelix Dido, which expresses empathy with his tragic heroine (e.g., 4.450). Indeed, Virgil in well-known simile compares Dido to hunted hind (4. …