No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
“Injoying of true joye the most, and best”: Desire and the Sonnet Sequences of Lady Mary Wroth and Adrienne Rich Madeline Bassnett Dalhousie University . A . drienne Ric h ’s c la ssic d efin itio n of re-v is io n — “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction” (Lies 35)— not only presents a critical model for reclaiming early modern women’s writing, but also suggests the possibil ity of using Rich’s own texts to analyse and re-vision earlier works. Rich’s contemporary and political interest in re-visioning traditional forms such as the sonnet sequence makes her Twenty-One Love Poems (1976,1978)1 a particularly apt lens through which to read the first such sequence to be written by an English-speaking woman: Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, published in 1621. Wroth radically inverts the focus of male writers on the physical charms of the female beloved, disclosing instead the bodily pangs of the female lover. Rich, although not definitively familiar with Wroth’s work, continues Wroth’s tradition of reworking and re-visioning the sonnet sequence from a twentieth-century, lesbian-femi nist viewpoint. Wroth’s expression of unrequited and concealed love is revisited and extended through Rich’s more explicit discussion of lesbian 1 Rich initially published the sequence as a chapbook with Effie’ s Press before including it in her collection, The Dream ofa Common Language. ESC 30.2 (June 2004): 49-66 Madeline Bassnett is a doctoral candidate at Dalhousie University. Her research interests include early modern women’s writing and twentieth-century poetry. She has a forthcoming article on The Changeling and the early modern passion of wonder in the Dalhousie Review. desire, thus developing a rarely discussed continuity in the variety of women’s writing about love and longing. Through the constraints of the sonnet form and the use of traditional Petrarchan tropes such as the dream, both poets negotiate private and internal space within the public realm of the printed word. They turn the blazoning gaze back on the narrators to suggest the disintegration both of the love affairs and the speakers’ bodies under the force of forbidden desire. At the same time, Wroth and Rich paradoxically re-birth the desiring female lover, using the sonnet structure to reform the lover’s body within the new, external space of the poem. Intertextual consideration of these two poets is a particularly useful way to build on formalist discussions of both sequences, which are less common than criticism that focuses on subjectivity, and, in the case of Mary Wroth, which too often attends primarily to biographical detail.2 1 will re-vision Wroth’s groundbreaking expression of female desire through Rich’s extensive descriptions, while drawing attention to the formal and linguistic overlaps of the two sequences. I argue that these revelations of forbidden desire are specifically tied to the sonnet form, as is the break down and re-formation of the distressed narrator. Rich’s more radical reworking of the sonnet sequence draws attention to Wroth’s earlier text as likewise “refusing to be circumscribed or colonized by the tradition ... refusing] to let form become format” and “claim[ing] a personal space and time and voice” (Rich “Format” 5).3For despite the “emptiness, lack, 2 For formalist discussions of Wroth, see especially Heather Dubrow’s Echoes ofDesire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses, and Mary B. Moore’s Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism. For Rich’s sequence, see Jane Hedley’s "'Old songs with new words’:The achievement of Adrienne Rich’s ‘Twenty-One Love Poems.’”Useful work on the development offemale subjectiv ity and voice in Wroth’ s writing includes Diana E. Henderson’s "Female Power and the Devaluation of Renaissance Love Lyrics,” Jeff Masten’s “'Shall 1 turne blabb?’: Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Sonnets,” and Gary Waller’s “Mary Wroth and the Sidney Family Romance: Gender Construc tion in Early Modern England.”Similar attention is placed on lesbian subjectivity and voice in Rich’s work in Kevin McGuirk’s “Philoctetes Radicalized: ‘Twentyone Love Poems’and the Lyric Career...
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.