“Injoying of true joye the most, and best”: Desire and the Sonnet Sequences of Lady Mary Wroth and Adrienne Rich

Abstract

ADRIENNE RICH'S CLASSIC DEFINITION OF RE-VISION--the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction' (Lies 35)--not only presents a critical model for reclaiming early modern women's writing, but also suggests the possibility of using Rich's own texts to analyse and re-vision earlier works. Mews contemporary and political interest in re-visioning traditional forms such as the sonnet sequence makes her Twenty-One Love Poems (1976,1978) (1) a particularly apt lens through which to read the first such sequence to be written by an English-speaking woman: Lady Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, published in 1621. Wroth radically inverts the focus of male writers on the physical charms of the female beloved, disclosing instead the bodily pangs of the female lover. Rich, although not definitively familiar with Wroth's work, continues Wroth's tradition of reworking and re-visioning the sonnet sequence from a twentieth-century, lesbian-feminist viewpoint. Wrotns expression of unrequited and concealed love is revisited and extended through Richs more explicit discussion of lesbian desire, thus developing a rarely discussed continuity in the variety of women's writing about love and longing. Through the constraints of the sonnet form and the use of traditional Petrarchan tropes such as the dream, both poets negotiate private and internal space within the public realm of the printed word. They turn the blazoning gaze back on the narrators to suggest the disintegration both of the love affairs and the speakers' bodies under the force of forbidden desire. At the same time, Wroth and Rich paradoxically re-birth the desiring female lover, using the sonnet structure to reform the lover's body within the new, external space of the poem. Intertextual consideration of these two poets is a particularly useful way to build on formalist discussions of both sequences, which are less on than criticism that focuses on subjectivity, and, in the case of Mary Wroth, which too often attends primarily to biographical detail. (2) I will re-vision Wroth's groundbreaking expression of female desire through Rich's extensive descriptions, while drawing attention to the formal and linguistic overlaps of the two sequences. I argue that these revelations of forbidden desire are specifically tied to the sonnet form, as is the breakdown and re-formation of the distressed narrator. Rich's more radical working of the sonnet sequence draws attention to Wroth's earlier text as likewise refusing to be circumscribed or colonized by the tradition ... refus[ing] to let form become format and claim[ing] a personal space and time and (Rich Format 5). (3) For despite the emptiness, lack, loss, and absence' (Masten 81) depicted in Wroth', sonnets, the desiring voice becomes a notable presence within the fourteen-line form. As numerous critics have shown, it was necessary for early modern women to discover methods of negotiating the tensions around public expressions of desire. (4) When omen put pen to page they risked their reputations, as their words, whether in manuscript circulation or appearing in print, became associated with promiscuity (Wall 281). The author herself, not simply her words, was seen to be making incursions into a world in which a woman was expected to be silent and chaste, thus transgressing boundaries and theoretically permitting herself to be read, and uncovered, by men. Wroth found legitimacy for her writing through her status as a member of the prominent and literary Sidney family and, in her poetry, appears to make use of the implicit controls around her direct expression of desire to represent her narrator's dissolution and reconstruction. As Diana Henderson points out, the tensions within Wroth', sonnets--between waking and dreaming, public and private--become expressions of the opposition between her active desire and externally enforced passivity (47). …