"This stage of woe" : the petrarchanism of Mary Wroth

Mary Wroth, the first Englishwoman to write a Petrarchan sonnet sequence, creates a counterdiscourse which comments on and contributes to English love poetry. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is addressed from a female lover to a male beloved, and this thesis discusses the implications of this unusual Petrarchan gender configuration .It explores the ways in which Wroth's Pamphilia encounters, is affected by, and alters, the poetics of English Petrarchanism, showing how English Petrarchanism had developed into a discourse that assumed a male poet and a female addressee. By paying attention to Wroth's socio-historical context, as well as her genre, I discuss how and why Pamphilia encounters elements of English Petrarchanism that do not easily allow for a female speaker. Illustrating that gendered subjectivities form the basis of English Petrarchan poetics, I show how this is relevant in terms of the gender climate of the Renaissance. By paying attention to common-sense assumptions about 'appropriate' female behaviour, and the dynamics of the public performance that (especially Petrarchan) writing entailed, I explore the implications for Pamphilia, and her responses. I show that a female poet had different access to many of the poetic and social assumptions of Petrarchanism and of Renaissance society, which affects what she can say, and how she can say it. I look at Pamphilia's interactions with the relentlessly public world of a courtly love poet, and explore how her gender complicates her position as a Petrarchan subject. I am concerned with poetic and political aspects typical of Petrarchanism. These include the role of the beloved; the lover's emotional isolation; the multifaceted nature of Petrarchan desire, both erotic and socio-political; the importance of the gaze and the symbol of the eye; and the drive within Petrachanism for the poet's of constitution selfhood.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Department of English Language and Literature

Year dc:date.issued

1997

Author dc:creator

• Distiller, Natasha

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Schalkwyk, David

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/21690

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/21690