Female Roles Revisited in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

Abstract

Lady Mary Wroth (1587-1653) was an English noblewoman and one of the significant literary figures of the English Renaissance. She is renowned for her works, namely, Love’s Victory (c. 1620), The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621), and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621). In Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Lady Mary Wroth challenges the patriarchal ideology that excludes women both as sonneteers and lovers who are able to express their love in Petrarchan sonnet tradition. The dominant tradition centralizes the male lovers and marginalizes women as idealized silent beloveds. Thus, it transforms female characters into docile objects to be loved by their male lovers. In order to confront the misogynistic treatment of these concepts of female author and lover in the sonnet tradition, Lady Mary Wroth writes within and against the sonnet tradition and manipulates the masculine genre to insert the female voice into it. First, she assumes submissive roles the dominant tradition appropriates. She negotiates these roles and accordingly manipulates them to her own advantage. Her contestation and later manipulation of these traditional roles create opportunities to resist the oppression she faces by rewriting the disempowering tradition. Hence, she subverts the limited roles of female characters in the dynamics of sonnet tradition by employing specific strategies. In this regard, this article analyzes Lady Mary Wroth’s strategies of subversion of the conventional roles for female characters in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and explores Wroth’s poetic innovations that challenge the gendered concept of the male poet in the sonnet tradition.