Abstract
I would like to start by suggesting that our readings of Wroth have not yet done justice to the idiosyncratic and even perverse unfolding of her sonnets. “Moving means, meaning moves,” as poet-critic Heather McHugh observes.1 Moving through the little maze of the sonnet, Wroth takes her readers to rather unexpected places; to appreciate her lyrical tangents and her teasing recursivity we need to map her utterances fully, from their first to their last words. Through an accident of history, this has not seemed a particularly attractive approach to her work.2 The exciting efflorescence of Wroth scholarship took place after the displacement of primarily formalist approaches to literary texts by alternative methodologies (such as gender studies, psychoanalytic criticism, New Historicism, and cultural materialism). Her sonnets did not enjoy those prefatory decades of formalist attention that canonical male authors received—the critical labor that worried away at textual ambiguity and interpretive cruxes and produced, for example, article upon article analyzing tricky poems like Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94. As a consequence, many rich discussions of the poems’ biographical, social, and political contexts, of their gendered revision of available genres (most notably Petrarchism), and of their enactment of both female agency and “transgressive” female authorship rarely confront a preexisting history of interpretive wrangling at the level of the individual poem and tend not to offer complete readings of complete poems.3
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Notes
Heather McHugh, “Moving Means, Meaning Moves: Notes on Lyric Destination,” in Poets Teaching Poets, ed. Gregory Orr and Ellen Bryant Voigt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 207–20.
There are, of course, some notable exceptions. See, for example, Maureen Quilligan, “The Constant Subject: Instability and Female Authority in Wroth’s Urania Poems,” in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 307–35;
Mary Moore, “The Labyrinth as Style in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” SEL 38 (1998): 109–25;
Heather Dubrow’s discussion of Wroth in Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 134–61;
and Ilona Bell’s superb “‘A Too Curious Secrecie’: Wroth’s Pastoral Song and Urania,” Sidney Journal 31 (2013): 23–50.
Jeff Masten, “‘Shall I turne blabbe?’: Circulation, Gender and Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Sonnets,” in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 67–87, 67.
See also Kim Walker, Women Writers of the English Renaissance (New York: Twayne, 1996), 189. In a fine recent article that shares some concerns with my own (although its emphases and conclusions are quite different), Paul Salzman argues that Wroth consciously offers a “poetics of suggestion, rather than certainty.” See “Not Understanding Mary Wroth’s Poetry,” Parergon 29 (2012): 133–48, 146.
Another edition—one that consciously modernizes Wroth’s spelling and punctuation as if intending to make the poems more “accessible”—is almost as sparsely annotated as Roberts’s, thus reaffirming their transparency. See Lady Mary Wroth’s Poems: A Modernized Edition, ed. R. E. Pritchard (Keele, UK: Keele University Press, 1996).
The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine Roberts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), P46. Subsequent quotations from this edition will be noted parenthetically by sonnet and line number.
Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 5, line 14, in Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), xlviii.
For a rich discussion of the larger dynamics of “turning” in early modern lyric poetry (and not only the sonnet), see Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 27–31.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 3.466.
In her brief discussion of this poem, Susan Lauffer O’Hara does not address its syntactic instability; see The Theatricality of Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2011), 45.
Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 77, emphases in the original.
Clare R. Kinney, “Mary Wroth’s Guilty ‘Secrett Art: The Poetics of Jealousy in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” in Write or Be Written: Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints, ed. Ursula Appelt and Barbara Smith (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 69–86.
The most recent and most complete account of Wroth’s life is to be found in Margaret Hannay’s fine biography, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).
For an interesting account of the way in which this poem rewrites a similarly monorhymed sonnet by Philip Sidney, see Naomi Miller, Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 43.
On the Urania’s topicality and autobiographical “shadowing,” see Roberts’s introduction in Lady Mary Wroth, The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Binghamton, NY: MRTS/RETS, 1995), lxix–lxxi;
Jennifer Lee Carrell, “A Pack of Lies in a Looking Glass: Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the Magic Mirror of Romance,” SEL 34 (1994): 79–107;
and Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 185–8.
For explorations of the Lindamira episode that do include some discussion of the sonnets, see Quilligan, “The Constant Subject,” 325–7; and Rosalind Smith, Sonnets and the English Woman Writer 1560–1521: The Politics of Absence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 109–12.
On the conventions of the early modern complaint, see John Kerrigan’s introduction to his anthology Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female’ Complaint: A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
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© 2015 Katherine R. Larson and Naomi J. Miller with Andrew Strycharski
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Kinney, C.R. (2015). Turn and Counterturn: Reappraising Mary Wroth’s Poetic Labyrinths. In: Larson, K.R., Miller, N.J., Strycharski, A. (eds) Re-Reading Mary Wroth. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137473349_6
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