Singular Modes: The Politics of Dress in Cavendish, Evelyn, and Hutchinson

Abstract

Margaret Cavendish’s and Lucy Hutchinson’s sartorial presentations have often been regarded as largely apolitical: Cavendish’s a part of her eccentric public persona, and Hutchinson’s a badge of puritanism and wifely sobriety. This essay argues instead that Cavendish and Hutchinson deploy politically charged (and surprisingly comparable) rhetorics of dress in their writings, both harnessing the power of fashionable singularity to express intra-party dissent. Examining two of Cavendish’s plays, A Piece of a Play and A Comedy of the Apocriphal Ladies, and Hutchinson’s biography of her husband, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, this analysis shows how both writers push back against a politic of modish copying as expressed by writers such as John Evelyn, whose Tyrannus imagines standardized fashion as a way to underscore the power of bureaucratic gentry regulators after the Restoration. Analyzing the ways that Hutchinson and Cavendish both harness discordant dress as a form of political critique (albeit to disparate political ends) reveals how powerful rhetorics of dress travelled across seventeenth-century political divides, and helps push our understanding of the sartorial sensibilities of both writers beyond the frameworks of austere puritan wife or extravagant dresser. [K.L.]