Ankuda 1 Alexis Ankuda Lit. 352 Prof.

Raubicheck Paper 2 4/11/11

Imagery in Lady Mary Wroths Sonnets

Lady Mary Wroths collection of sonnets titled Pamphilia to Amphilanthus was a change to the content of 17th century writing. The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth Century verse and prose explains that It was the first sonnet sequence published by a woman in England. Wroth revived the genre of the sonnet sequence to examine the theatre of female desire against the backdrop of the inconstant masculine other (Rudrum 230). In edition to this, Because the rhetoric of wooing or courtship is largely absent from her collection, the poet places far greater emphasis on the personas internal struggles, as she comes to recognize the potential dangers inherent to romantic love (Roberts 48). Pamphilia is the heroine of the story and Amphilanthus is who she maybe in love with. The sonnets eight, sixteen and Song seventyfour are three different poems that have the same idea. These three poems are examples of the speaker talking about love and whether she should give in or not. The author uses descriptive imagery to illustrate that these poems share the common theme where the speaker is being conquered by love. In Sonnet 8, the speaker, Pamphilia is conflicted between whether she should give in to love or to let it go. In the first stanza, the speaker says: Love, leave to urge, thou knowst thou hast the hand; / Tis cowardice, to strive where none resist (Wroth 8.1-2). In the first line, Love is imagined as having power over Pamphilia. This is a reference to Cupid who is the son

Ankuda 2 Alexis Ankuda Lit. 352 Prof. Raubicheck Paper 2 4/11/11 of Aphrodite, the Greek Goddess of Love. Wroth named her characters by choosing a Greek derivation [and] may also have wished to identify her protagonist with one of the most famous women writers of antiquityPamphilia, who lived under the reign of Nero (Roberts 42). The reference to Cupid is often seen in other sonnets in the sequence. Wroth inserted sonnets stressing the capricious activities of Cupid, who is portrayed as a tiny mischievous boy. This Anacreontic Cupid amuses himself by trifling with human emotions (Roberts 45); For the speaker, she feels that Cupid is forcing her to make a choice and she is giving in even though she doesnt like it. Wroth is using the image of Cupid to illustrate how much Pamphilia is struggling within herself to decide about love. In the second stanza she says: Behold I yield: let forces be dismissed; /I am thy subject, conquered, bound to stand (Wroth 8.5-6). In this stanza, Pamphilia is giving in to Cupid who has become present in her struggle to decide if she is going to love or not. In this stanza Pamphilia is described as being conquered but she is still has not made a choice. In the stanza, Pamphilia uses forces. This is a reference to the Greek gods of love, like Cupid, who still have power over her. She wants the forces to stop, so that she can choose for herself. The final stanza of Sonnet 8 is Pamphilia realizing that she has been under the influence of Cupid and that he is making her believe that she should be in love. She states that: But now, it seems, thou wouldst I should thee love; / I do confess, twas thy will made me choose

Ankuda 3 Alexis Ankuda Lit. 352 Prof. Raubicheck Paper 2 4/11/11 (Wroth 8.9-10); She is realizing that Cupid has played a trick on her and she is blaming him for causing this to happen. She believes that Cupid is playing games with her, but he is a way for her to keep Amphilanthus at a distance. The second sonnet is Sonnet 16. In this sonnet, Pamphilia is questioning the desire of her lover and decides to run from his intentions so that she will not remain conquered by him. In the first stanza, she feels that she is forced to stay: Must I be still while it my strength devours / And captive leads me prisoner, bound, unfree? (Wroth 16.1-2) Pamphilia feels that she is a prisoner of love and that she will be unable to escape and be her own person. Josephine A. Roberts states that: Rather than offering a steady progression of attitudes, Lady Mary chooses to dramatize the mental processes through which Pamphilia seeks to discover the truth of her own feelings (Roberts 44). To do this, Wroth uses the image of Pamphilia as a hostage to her feelings and to those of Amphilanthus. The second stanza is a comment on the view of mens desires. Pamphilia says that: Love first shall leave mens fantsies to them free, / Desire shall quench loves flames, spring hate sweet showers (Wroth 16.5-6). Pamphilia is stating that men are able to go from one woman to the other in search of a way to fulfill their desires. She illustrates this with an image of love as flames which are quenched by desire. In Daniel Gils article The Currency of the Beloved and the Authority of Lady Mary Wroth, Gil states that The text's refusal to submit to

Ankuda 4 Alexis Ankuda Lit. 352 Prof. Raubicheck Paper 2 4/11/11 masculine management may result from its complicating Wroth's status as a noblewoman who seemingly had nothing to gain and everything to lose from causing her work to appear in print(Gil 87). This is important to this stanza because the speaker of the poem is a woman who is criticizing male desire and the author is also a woman. Helen Hackett in her article Courtly writing by women states that Gender makes a difference to the role of courtly lover, in that Pamphilias grief is created by Amphilanthuss very masculine freedom to go out and be active while she remains fixed in one place (Hackett 183). This is interesting because a woman speaker was uncommon. The final poem is Song 74. In this poem, love is once again imagined as Cupid. The song begins with Pamphilia saying in the first stanza that Love, a child, is ever crying, / Please him, and he straight is flying, / Give him, he the more is craving / Never satisfied with having (Wroth 74.1-4); This is Wroths way of explaining that a woman must please a man. She is also explaining that Pamphilia confronts the fundamental inequity of the double standard, in which women are expected to remain constant whereas men are not (Roberts 49). Pamphilia explains that she is expected to do what Cupid forces her to do and that there is no way for her to escape. The sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is interesting because it was written by a woman who is struggling within herself to be conquered by love or to resist it altogether.

Ankuda 5 Alexis Ankuda Lit. 352 Prof. Raubicheck Paper 2 4/11/11 These two sonnets and one song are examples of her struggle to overcome being conquered. Using Cupid as a image of this struggle is interesting because it allows the speaker to struggle within herself and imagining that it is a force that she cannot control.

Ankuda 6 Alexis Ankuda Lit. 352 Prof. Raubicheck Paper 2 4/11/11 Works Cited Gil, Daniel. "StudiesThe Currency of the Beloved and the Authority of Lady Mary Wroth." JSTOR. Modern Language Studies, 1999. Web. 5 Apr. 2011. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3195408 .>. Hackett, Helen. "Courtly Writing by Women." Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700. By Helen Wilcox. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print. Rudrum, Alan, Joseph Laurence Black, and Holly Faith Nelson. The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-century Verse & Prose. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2000. Print. Wroth, Mary, and Josephine A. Roberts. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ., 1983. Print.