Pamphilia's Cabinet: Gendered Authorship and Empire in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania
2001; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 68; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/elh.2001.0011
ISSN1080-6547
Autores Tópico(s)Irish and British Studies
ResumoPamphilia--prototype for female authorship in Lady Mary Wroth's The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (1621), daughter of the king of Morea on the Greek peninsula, and eventually queen of the kingdom of Pamphilia in Asia Minor--appears throughout Wroth's long prose romance as a contained woman writer divorced from the political movements that occupy her beloved Amphilanthus, Prince of Naples, King of the Romans, and ultimately Holy Roman Emperor. 1 In an exemplary scene of writing, Pamphilia, who is caught in one of the many love triangles that motivate the interwoven plot of the Urania, retreats to her chamber "taking a little Cabinet with her"; this cabinet contains her collected works, she "being excellent in writing" (U, 62). She reads her verse, writes some more, re-reads what she has written, and "[t]hen tooke shee the new-writ lines, and as soone almost as shee had given them life, shee likewise gave them buriall" (U, 63). I shall return to the poem Pamphilia simultaneously births and buries, a poem Wroth pointedly preserves by embedding it in the narrative structure of the Urania (by contrast, Amphilanthus's poetry is merely described, and none of it is transcribed, in the published romance). 2 For now, however, I wish to stress the central paradox our introduction to Pamphilia as poet foregrounds: even as her poem is preserved at the metanarrative level, thus preventing her erasure as the Urania's prototypical woman writer, the local narrative framing her poem reinscribes the contained position of the woman writer in the romance (and, by extension, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English culture). She may write, but only from the limits of her own room; she may preserve her writing, but only within the confines of her own mind. 3
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