The Erotics of Materialism by Jessie Hock;

Author:Jessie Hock;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)
Published: 2020-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

Women and Lucretius in Seventeenth-Century England

Hutchinson’s dedication participates in a tradition of erotic responses to DRN stretching from antiquity onward, and she was also actively engaged with contemporary conversations around Lucretius that also linked Lucretian poetry to questions of sex and gender. The erotic discourse surrounding DRN made the poem a lightning rod for early modern debates about women and reading. Anxiety over the morally corrupting influence of reading texts perceived as dangerous—particularly pagan literature and sexually suggestive genres like romance or love lyric—was exacerbated in seventeenth-century England by the increasing availability of texts in English, both translations of classical and continental texts and homegrown English renderings of classical and continental genres and styles. English-language texts came under particular suspicion because women, who were far less likely than men to have been taught foreign languages, especially ancient languages like Latin or Greek, could read them. Large sections of DRN were first made available to Englishspeaking audiences in John Florio’s translation of Michel de Montaigne’s Essais (1603), which contains approximately one-sixteenth of DRN in quotation. Because it was dedicated to a group of aristocratic women, Florio’s translation was understood to be directed toward a female audience. Reid Barbour and David Norbrook argue that Florio’s petition to women followed a pattern set by earlier French editions of the Essais: “Montaigne’s first editor, Marie de Gournay, was a champion of women’s learning, establishing a pattern in which Epicurean ideas showed a strong appeal to female readers.”43

While Florio’s “englishing” of the classical authors, including Lucretius, quoted by Montaigne was remarked upon by readers and critics, English translators who tackled the entire DRN came under stronger fire. English translations of DRN, a notoriously atheistic and hedonistic text, were attacked as being expressly designed to seduce women. Thomas Creech encountered a barrage of criticism for his translation, some focused on the dangers an English Lucretius posed to the gentler sex. An anonymous detractor raged that “’[t]was enough that Mr Hobbs seduced the Men [with atomist ideas]; too much that Mr Creech should debauch the Women with those corrupt Notions of a Deity, & by his soft Translation of a rough Piece melt the Ladies into admiration first of the Poetry & then of the Opinion.”44 Other commentators, however, applauded Creech for the very same reason. In her commendatory poem on Creech’s DRN, “To the Unknown Daphnis on his Excellent Translation of Lucretius,” Aphra Behn praises the translator for rectifying gender inequality—he “Equall’st Vs to Man!”—by making the important classical text available in English.45 Behn boldly embraces the sexualized vocabulary associated with DRN, writing in the same poem that in Creech’s translation “Reason over all unfetter’d Plays, / Wanton and disturb’d as Summers Breeze.”46 While Behn agrees with Hutchinson that DRN is “wanton,” she celebrates such wantonness as liberatory for women; Hutchinson would have strongly disapproved.

Seventeenth-century dialogues about the particular danger Lucretius posed to women intersected with ongoing debates about gender and style. The anonymous critic’s description of Creech’s DRN as a “soft Translation of a rough

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