No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
“ A S Y D N E Y , T H O U G H U N -N A M E D ” : L A D Y M A R Y W R O T H A N D H E R P O E T IC A L P R O G E N IT O R S JA N E T M A C A R TH U R University of Calgary C ritic s have often commented upon the tensions in Lady Mary Wroth’s prose romance The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania (London, 1621), of which the sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus1 became a part. Caro lyn Ruth Swift has suggested that Lady Wroth was ambivalent, caught be tween her “ empathy with society and her empathy with beleaguered women” (345). Josephine A. Roberts also finds ambivalence, which she claims sur faces in the stylistic unevenness of the sequence: “ the poems as a group vary widely in quality, from those that merely repeat the well-worn Elizabethan conceits to others that rise above the traditional imagery to present an intensely ambivalent response to love” (58). In her dissertation of 1978, Margaret Witten-Hannah concludes that “the see-sawing of the different attitudes to wards constancy and change [in the Urania] must be regarded as significant and as illustrative of the author’s own uncertainty in the face of conflict between traditional moral values and ideals, and the realities of experience” (253)Many of the critics attribute the tensions, ambivalence, and contradiction in Lady Wroth’s work to the gender of the writer and the speaker. In this study, I would like to extend the investigation of the role of gender to an examination of Lady Wroth’s use of Petrarchan conventions in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Elaine Showalter claims that “women’s fiction can be read as a double-voiced discourse, containing a ‘dominant’ and a ‘muted’ story, what [Sandra] Gilbert and [Susan] Gubar call a ‘palimpsest,’ ” (204). I see the tension between the dominant and muted, showcased in the sonnet sequence, as a tension between feminine difference and Lady Wroth’s desire to emulate the poetic models of her uncle and her father. Because she opts for the latter, tension is evidenced in the attempt to create an androgynous discourse in a gender-specific mode. This produces the “palimpsest” of Pamphilia to Am philanthus. That Lady Wroth chose to write at all at a time when women’s writing was seen as a violation of the Pauline injunction requiring women’s silence, obedi ence, and chastity is remarkable.2 Indeed, Lord Denny, one of her first critics, E n g l i s h S t u d i e s in C a n a d a , x v , i , March 1989 questioned her chastity and femininity. Outraged by what he perceived as the Urania’s less than subtle or sympathetic allegorization of his family’s private affairs, he responded with a vituperative poem. Astute as any latter-day critic, he also suggests that she had divided loyalties. In his poem, he labels her an “ Hermaphrodite . . . in deed a monster” and urges her to “leave idle bookes alone / For wise and worthyer women have writte none” (cited by Roberts 32-33). In another letter, he encourages her to try her hand at producing “a volume of heavenly lays and holy love” as did her “virtuous and learned aunt” (cited by Roberts 34), the Countess of Pembroke. His message is clear: even if you are a Sidney, producing fictions is not your prerogative. Many critics have also found it odd that Lady Wroth wrote a sonnet se quence twenty years after the sonnet vogue had run its prolific course, at a time when there was little interest in and even outright disdain for sonnet writing. Yet both her decision to write and publish her work and her choice of the anachronistic sonnet sequence can be explained by her identification with the Sidneys. Gary Waller proposes that for many Jacobeans the Eliza bethan Sidneys had become “a nostalgic reminder of older, more solid courtly and literary ideals” (12), especially Sir Philip Sidney who had become “a long-lost reminder of disintegrated virtue...
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 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.