Lady Mary Wroth: A New Voice

Lady Mary Wroth’s voice arises out of a culture that did not want to hear what she had to say because of her gender. She was a female in a male’s world. Regardless of this predicament, Lady Mary Wroth wrote and had published The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, Love’s Victory and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Her sonnet series, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, was the first English compilation of poetry to be written by a woman. In the male dominated world of Petrarchan love sonnets, Lady Mary Wroth creates a place for herself by manipulating the Petrarchan tradition of a male speaker and replacing it with the voice of a female, with both female and male characteristics. This produces poetry that flips the Pertrarchan tradition inside out, because by defying the rules of society, Lady Mary Wroth brings attention to herself and gives insight into autonomy and the tension between genders during the Early Modern period. Lady Mary Wroth existed in England at a time when women were expected to be silent and obedient. In fact, in “Lady Mary Wroth and Women’s Love Poetry”, Naomi Miller mentions that “letters that document the Court Furor indicate that Wroths’s gender, her choice of genres, and her social position outside the inner circle of power rendered her authorship unacceptable” (196). Wroth’s family was extremely literary, her father was a poet and she was the niece of Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney, both of who wrote. Her father’s poems were only stumbled upon of late, and it is uncertain whether Wroth read them or not, although some critics claim that influence can be seen in several of her poems (Roberts 47). She grew up active in the courts of Elizabeth and James I and she performed for Queen Anne in Ben Jonsons’ The Masque of Blackness, Her position in the court and later, her fall from the court and status as a widow, are topics that influence her works. Characteristics of both her Aunt and her Uncle can be found in her works, "Departing from Sidney’s marked preference for one major sonnet form (abbaabba cdcdee). . . Lady Mary favored a rhyme scheme using a slightly different sestet (abba abba ccdeed). She included a total of twenty-one variations in rhyme scheme" (Roberts 46-47). Wroth also made use of her Uncle’s compound epithet, such as “my woe-kil’d heart” and “theyr love-burnt-harts desires” (Roberts 46). She wrote about similar subjects but she also made a point to differentiate herself from them by using a different point of view and by presenting the material in a different manner. In Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, the woman is the passive object of adoration and simply “Star”, while the male is “Star-lover”. Lady Mary Wroth uses the idea of names to give her female character power, which is a male characteristic. She uses the name Pamphilia for her female character, which means “all-loving”. Within this, the female is not passive, she is openly loving. Wroth’s Male character, Amphilanthus, means “lover of two”. Wroth choose to write in the sonnet form because it was “the genre of her male relatives” and “a potential model for her own subjectivity" (Dubrow 161). She created a paradox of her sonnets, they were Petrarchan yet completely anti-Petrarchan in appearance. To defy Petrarchan tradition, Lady Mary Wroth does a great deal of things to give her female speaker Pamphilia, male power and characteristics. To give her character the authority to speak, Wroth has Venus direct her,
“Butt one hart flaming more then all the rest
The goddess held, and putt it to my brest,
Deare sonne, now shutt sayd she: thus must wee winn;

Hee her obay'd, and martir'd my poor heart,

I, waking hop'd as dreams itt would depart

Yett since: Oh mee, a lover I have binn.” (Moody 511).
Pamphilia now has a reason to search for love and to love Amphilathus, therefore she has taken on “the voice of a lover rather than simply beloved” (Miller 197). Two of the reoccurring themes in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus are autonomy versus passivity and constancy versus infidelity. Throughout Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Pamphila finds herself alone and speaking to shadows, “Sweet shades why doe you seeke to give delight/To mee who deeme delight in this vilde place”. Sometimes, she gives the shades Amphilanthus’ face, so he is watching her as she struggles with her inner emotions and confusion. Pamphilia endures through her rollercoaster of feelings, something that is characteristic of a male hero, but yet Wroth gives it to a female. This assigning of a male trait to her female character strengthens Pamphilia’s persona and subverts the views of females in Wroth’s time. Wroth also bestows Pamphilia with the gifts of stamina and fortitude when Pamphilia feels she can not continue to be hurt by Amphilanthus any longer,
I mourne, and dying am’ what would you more?
My soule attends, to leave this cursed shore Wher harmes doe only flow Which teach mee butt to know
The sadest howres of my lives unrest,
And tired minutes with griefs hand oprest:
Yett all this will not pacify thy spite;
No, nothing can bring ease butt my last night. (Roberts 112)

When males write in the Petrarchan form, they frequently use an unreachable object of affection, a “dark lady” of sorts. This lady is usually objectified and defined by her aloofness. Usually she will remain voiceless, showing the male need to dominate by not having her define herself. Waller notes that “one of the recurring metaphors of male Patrarchanism is the controlling power of the male gaze” (211). Men are actively living, and dominating, in this sense. They gaze at the woman, not the other way around. Male poets often used a blazon, which is the almost clumsy dismemberment and comparison of female body parts to various objects. In Early Modern English Poetry, Miller mentions how in Petrarch’s use of the blazon “indicates how the fragmentation of Laura into different body parts encourages a distorted view of the woman as an assortment of scattered particulars to be assembled by the male sonneteer’s governing eye” (198). No such gauche demolition of male body parts is found in Lady Mary Wroth’s sonnets. Oddly enough, both Wroth’s uncle and father give a female a voice at some point in their works. This might be considered a step forward but all is taken away when they both spend the rest of their sequences silencing the woman. In contrast, Wroth gives her female the power and authority that male sonneteer’s too often take away. In Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Wroth closes the first section with Pamphilia coming to the conclusion that she must love as decision made by herself, “rather than as an edict imposed by the gods” (Roberts 44). In doing this Wroth is giving her female character the things that male sonneteers were taking away from her, which would be her power to decide and act on her own. There are other women poets who face the same subjugation that Wroth tackles in her writing. Elizabeth I wrote “On Monsieur’s Departure”, in which she addresses her own ambiguity, “I am and not, I freeze yet am burned,/ Since from myself another self I turned” (Miller 200). With this statement, Elizabeth is acknowledging that she has to alter a part of herself to become the part of a governing woman.
Another was in which Wroth slides away from the Petrarchan tradition is within the content of her sonnets. Most of Wroth’s sonnets are about Pamphilia looking inward and withdrawing into the shadows,
If ever love had force in humaine brest?
If ever hee could move in pensive hart?
Or if that hee such power could butt impart
To breed those flames whose heart brings joys unrest
Then looke on mee; I ame to thes adrest,
I, ame the soule that feeles the greatest smart
I, ame the hartles trunk of harts depart
And I, that one, by love, a griefe oprest; (Masten 74)
This is the opposite of open, available and showy Petrarchan discourse. This relates back to having a male speaker, males are more likely to me commanding and are actually allowed to bring attention to themselves in society. Women, on the other hand, are not. So by withdrawing in her poetry, Wroth is having Pampilia obey the rules of society, but Pamphilia is doing it by choice. The fact that she is choosing to do so gives her power. Masten says that “Pamphilia refuses to construct herself of circulate as a Petrarchan sign, eschewing the signifying body of both the Petrarchan master and mistress” (75). In a bold move, Wroth rejects all of the main characters in Pertrarchanism and creates a new one for Pamphilia, thus maintaining a sense of self-control. Jeff Masten asks the question: “How did Wroth, writing in a culture which generally denied women a stable place from which to speak, negotiate the gendered positions of speech and silence to construct an emergent subject’s voice?” (81). I argue that one of the ways is that Wroth gives both female characteristics and male characteristics to Pamphilia to make her stronger and to make her voice louder, in hopes of it striking a chord with someone.