“Wanton Child”: Infanticide, Abortion, and Monstrous Birth in Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

Abstract

Abstract: I argue that Mary Wroth uses visceral portrayals of the maternal body in various stages of pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and infant care to describe the frustrations of female erotic experience in the manuscript version of her lyric sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus . Building upon Ilona Bell’s recent editorial research, I maintain that Wroth’s 1621 print rearrangement effectively severed some of the sequence’s most striking descriptions of the maternal body from their original contexts in the earlier manuscript version. In foregrounding the manuscript ordering of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus , I demonstrate that Wroth articulated a distinctly materialist vision of female erotic grief.