17th Century
Tears, Bezoars and Blazing Comets: Gender and Politics in Hester Pulter's Civil War Lyrics
By , Massey University (August 2005)
Sections: 17th Century
Subjects: Literature, Politics.
Periods: 1000 - 1999, 1600-1699.
Key Topics: gender, monarchy, poetry, war, lyric, sexuality, literary history, government , English Civil War.
Abstract
Hester Pulter composed her verse during the 1640s and 1650s in a kind of royalist retirement at her country home of Broadfield, Hertfordshire, and her biographical isolation is mirrored in a poetic preoccupation with loss. Contributing to the sense that her verse might encapsulate a ‘female aesthetic’ of retreat (a phrase that has been used of male, royalist devotional writers) is the predominance in her verse of a discourse of sighs and tears. In this paper, however, I will argue that the sighs and tears of Pulter's lyrics in fact constitute a significant, gendered, female reaction to political events. In a self-construction drawing on Francis Quarles’ emblematic representation of Esther, Hester Pulter constructs a notion of godly fame, in which her poetic sighs and tears provide a consolatory example for other royalist readers.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2005.00161.x
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