Female Roles Revisited in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
Öz
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.
Anahtar Kelimeler
Lady Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Renaissance poetry, Sonnet tradition, Female poet
Kaynakça
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