Epic Anger and Shame in Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder

In his didactic epic, De rerum natura, the Roman poet Lucretius rejects the unity of affect and genre in Homeric epic. Instead, in Lucretius anger is anti-heroic: the human race is demeaned by fear, cowering before a fabricated vision of vengeful gods. The gods are not angry, and human fear is therefore absurd, even shameful, since it leads to outrageous acts of appeasement that violate basic human decency. When Lucy Hutchinson, the first English translator of the full De rerum natura , approached the task of writing an epic version of the book of Genesis, affect was already a central, though vexed, structuring element in epic. Drawing upon Lucretius’s scenes of the material dissolution of the cosmos into atoms, Hutchinson imagines a Christian Apocalypse crucially shaped by the anger of a punishing God, the fear and shame of human sinners, and a natural world that is in a complex mirroring relationship with human beings. Hutchinson’s revision of the epic, contrary to Lucretius’s teaching, places fear and anger at the center of the form, but shades these affects with shame. While the anger of the gods is a key structure of epic, Hutchinson’s portrayal of divine anger leads to an analysis of shame and its recuperative potential.