Gardens of Grief: Lucy Hutchinson's "Elegies, " the Garden of Gethsemane, and Formal Uses of Betrayal. (2nd July 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Lonich Ryan, Elise
• Is Part Of: Exemplaria. Volume 28:Number 3(2016)
• Page Start: 212
• Page End: 229
• Publication Date: 2016-07-02
• Subjects: Lucy Hutchinson -- Garden of Gethsemane -- Julia Kristeva -- poetics -- exegesis -- betrayal -- conveyance; European literature -- Renaissance, 1450-1600 -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Literature, Medieval -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Middle Ages -- Periodicals; 809.0205
• DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2016.1178450
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1041-2573

Abstract

Abstract : Lucy Hutchinson's "Elegies, " which were written in the late seventeenth century, mourn the loss of the poet's husband, Colonel John Hutchinson, and the loss of a republican form of government in the face of the Restoration. The garden landscapes in the poems that invoke Hutchinson's estate at Owthorpe are typically read as a figure for a lost Eden. I argue for a different biblical garden, however, the Garden of Gethsemane. Examining the poems' language of betrayal and grief alongside seventeenth-century exegesis on the Gethsemane episode, I show the correspondence between garden spaces, affect, and sympathetic textual and personal engagement. Using the psychoanalytic concept of conveyance, particularly in its gendered articulation in Julia Kristeva's Black Sun, I yoke exegesis to poetry in order to argue that mediating environments are capable of producing both subjects and affective experiences. Moreover, these formal products are contingent, depending on a continuous betrayal of the original lost object.