Early Modern Women Challenge the Ideology of Epic Form: Anne Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse and Lucy Hutchinson's Order and Disorder.

This article argues that two early modern women writers, Anne Bradstreet and Lucy Hutchinson, wrote epics that challenge the patriarchal ideology of epic form. Both writers were connected to prominent political men and were thus privileged with a "status-linked right" (to use Pierre Bourdieu's term) to take on the challenge of writing in the privileged masculine form of epic: Bradstreet's father and husband were governors of Massachusetts; and Hutchinson's husband was a prominent parliamentarian during the English Civil Wars. They both wrote during, in the wake of, and about the English Civil Wars, which brought tumultuous upheaval to the political and social order of English society. Indeed, Anne Bradstreet's "Dialogue between Old and New England" dramatizes an overturning of war-torn Old England's authority over its colony as a dialogue between a diseased and aged mother with her not entirely reverential daughter. Brad-street's The Tenth Muse (1650) and Hutchinson's Order and Disorder (1679) deploy epic conventions—invocations, catalogues, similes—to announce their self-conscious participation in the epic tradition; through their emphasis on the importance of the maternal line, they challenge the predominantly patriarchal ideology of epic, and through their deployment of elegy, they mobilize its counter-ideology of epic form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]