Family ties, political fictions: Metaphorical communities in seventeenth-century England.

Abstract

This study delineates the complex ways in which early modern authors used metaphors of the family to represent competing visions of family, state, and society. The classical analogy linking family and polity, father and king, was so ubiquitous in early modern England that scholars have taken it for granted. Early modern authors rethought the relation between family and government in explosively unstable ways. In doing so, they expanded the possibilities for political action, reconceptualized authority, and redefined gender roles. During the civil war period, massive dislocations of the political system and fragmentation of the Christian <italic>communitas</italic> into numerous separate churches made new ways of conceptualizing identity both possible and increasingly urgent. By revising the relation between state and family, writers challenged old communities and constituted new ones, imagined and real, as they came to inhabit new collective identities. While historians of political thought have viewed the family metaphor largely in the context of patriarchal (versus contractual) theories of the state, I suggest that this flexible trope was appropriated by a wide range of people of various political and religious beliefs for contradictory ends. The meaning of the family metaphor depended on context, for it was a conceptual vehicle by which writers debated political issues. James I styled himself father-king to his people, but Milton vehemently resisted this interpretation by imagining citizens as a family of equal adult brothers. Margaret Cavendish in turn reinvented the family and monarchical absolutism by presenting both as a partnership; her new configuration of the monarchy as headed by a married couple augmented the queen's role. In <italic>Leviathan</italic>, Hobbes vitiates the family analogy by staging a displacement of the metaphor with the analogy of the body politic, the other traditional trope for the state. And the Quakers used metaphors of marriage and family to depict their own separatist communities. By tracing the conceptual transformation of the family through a variety of material---from literary texts to political treatises to religious tracts and epistles---my study reveals the metaphoric underpinnings of the contentious refigurations of family and state in the early modern public realm.