‘satt upon the bed (a little more then sitting), bending towards her and discorsing of many matters, yett all of love, wee passed till day breake the time away’ ( U, II: 126), and ripples with erotic desire, as he throws himself on to the bed and holds her trembling hand as she tells how they met before. Her praise of him provokes sharp criticism of her lack of honour and modesty, and he reminds her that he is a married man and ‘nott in any way fitt for you to thinke of in that kinde’ ( U, II: 128).
He declares himself amazed at her behaviour as he realizes that the trembling he thought arose from fear that he might take advantage of her really ‘proceeded from over-much plenty of desire and … inward flames, which grew to that heigth which made modesty to strongly move’ ( U, II: 129). His subsequent lecture to her is a masterpiece of high-mindedness, telling her to go home to her father, to purge herself of ‘this swelling Vapour of fond and unworthy (though aspiring love)’, repent, abolish ‘loose and wanton love’, purge her soul of Cupid, Venus and blasphemies, and to ‘wrap your self up as in your winding sheete in the truthe of chastity and modest love’ ( U, II: 130). Stricken by conscience, and shamed by his words, the lady vows to obey his commands and go home. The final comic element of the scene is added when, in recalling his lather of self-righteousness, Philarchos admits to Pamphilia how close a call this was: ‘butt deerest Sister, beeleeve mee, I never was soe neere by temptation like to breake my faith to my faithfull Orilena’ ( U, II: 130).
It is hard to see this extended account as anything other than a wry satire on male pretensions, particularly given that this dangerous situation could have been avoided had he left the room as soon as he realized it was a lady’s bedroom, and given that he stumbled upon it on his way to visit Claribella with intentions at least dubious. While Philarchos’s target is the lascivious attentions of a woman who speaks immodestly of her desire, the text’s is surely masculine egotism, lack of self-awareness and restraint, and the tendency to blame women for
58 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre male vulnerabilities. A more briefly told story involves Selarinus who is magicked into sin, succumbing to a beautiful lady who lures him into staying with her and having two children before he is rescued by Melissea. In incidents like these we see hapless men seduced by mysterious and magical women intent on destroying their honour and constancy in ways that emphasize the men’s feeble will power as much as the wickedness of the women.
An incident that similarly represents conventional tropes about positive and negative femininities occurs again in part two, focused this time on the female perspective, and taking the form of an allegory concerning Fancy and Love. Just as Philarchos’s words in their extravagance and intensity undermine his credibility, so too Fancy’s description of her attitude to marriage and love resonates beyond its overt and ostensible context. While what she says fits convention, the way that she says it undermines the convention, producing more sympathy for Fancy’s position. The story, in brief, is this. Amphilanthus, Steriamus, Parselius, Urania, Pamphilia and others come across a lad and lass by a riverside in a typically pastoral setting, and overhear their conversation. The lad accuses the lass of cooling in her affections to him, and asks why. Conventional enough so far. Her reply starts to move away from conventions by effectively accusing him of becoming dull, of being complacent about her attentions, of giving up the courting that she enjoyed, such as presenting her ‘with fruite, with flowers, with girlands, with poesies, with pretty taulke, with songs, with riddles, with any thing that hath pleasure, profitt, or witt in it.’ In short he has become dull: ‘thy dullnes, I hate; thy slobring abhorr; thy silly twatling dispise’ ( U, II: 36). Presented with such a compelling list of his short-comings, the lad offers to learn from his mistakes and to change, only to be met with the reply that he would need to have wit before he goes to learn. That the lad learns from this to go and seek a kinder maid is explicitly presented in the text as punishment for the lass’s pride and fickleness. The narrator makes the listeners’ contempt clear. Her poetry is damned with faint praise as ‘truly nott contemptable’, and Parselius reminds her of the danger she runs: ‘your scorne must have a fall, as your pride must be abated when your groves a wither branch of an once flourishing tree, and learne to weare willow as your last ornament.’ ( U, II: 40). At this level the tale is clearly a warning about female pride and its likely results.
Yet the lass’s own story and the way she tells it set up strong emotional waves that run against the overt moral. Initially she laments that while she had many suitors, very few of them spoke of marriage,
‘Free Gift Was What He Wished’ 59
that the lad was one who did and the one she liked best. It seems perverse that it is precisely his honourable intentions towards her that inspire her dismissal of him. Yet this speech graphically portrays the limited options of the single woman in the seventeenth century, caught between choosing a certain kind of liberty and freedom, and the comfort and security of a good marriage. Marriage itself would involve unattractive aspects, Fancy argues in a description redolent of the realities of a working woman’s domestic life: ‘mee thought a little mirthe was better than ties att home, bawling of bratts, monthes keep-ings-in, houswyfery, and daries, and a pudder of all home-made troubles.’ Yet against this she acknowledges the attractions of ‘A fin house, a good fire, a soft bed in winter, noe wants, good clothes for all seasons, hansome discourse with a reasonable husband, children to pass away the time withall: thes are speciall good, and all thes a happy wyfe hath to comfort her in her yeers’ ( U, II: 38). The text, in the form of its central aristocratic figures, condemns the unhappy lass, but the words that she speaks, and the vivid way that she describes the options she sees, strike a jarring note that refuses any easy condemnation.11 If Philarchos’s story is a parody of male vulnerability to female sexual desire, the story of Fancy and Love illustrates the stark choices that confront a woman with agendas of her own.
Two final examples illustrate our sense that Urania is explicitly concerned with anatomizing different forms of female desire. First there is the Brittany Lady, a widow ‘brave, and confident … sweet, and grave … mild and discreet’.12 While initially she enjoys the attentions of the myriad suitors who pursue her, affected by none of them,
‘free, and bold’ in her freedom, glorying ‘like a Marygold in the Sun’
( U, I: 322), she comes to love a man with ‘a noble mind, a free disposition, a brave, and manly countenance, excellent discourse, wit beyond compare, all these joyned with a sweete, and yet not Courtier-like dainty Courtship’ ( U, I: 268). He indicates his interest in her but does not ask her directly:
‘He shewed enough to make me see he would rather aske than deny, yet did not, scorning refusall as well he might; free gift was what he wished, and welcom’d, daintynes had lost him, for none cold winne or hold him, that came not halfe way at the least to meete his love, I came much more …’ ( U, I: 323).
The Brittany widow’s story is an illustration of the problems that women face in determining how far to go in the pursuit of love in
60 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre romances that see love as a gift freely given, not passively endured or reciprocated.
The problems confronting the fishing maid are different. She is pursued by suitors, and her father wishes her to marry his choice of suitor. Furthermore, she loves but is kept by her modesty from indicating her affection to one who, unlike the Brittany Lady’s suitor, hated a forward woman, and could love none but such an one, who he must win by suite and love, and who would love him so, as though most earnestly, yet pretily to make him thinke, neglect did governe her, which would be like Cordials to his heart, or a diet to increase the stomack of his love’ ( U, I: 294).
Her task is to avoid the marriage advocated by her father without losing her reputation and she reviews the options using the image of a spider weaving its web, discussed in our introduction:
then was I to
worke my end, having no meanes, save mine owne industrie, and strength of mind busied like a Spider, which being to crosse from one beame to another, must worke by waies, and goe farre about, making more webs to catch her selfe into her own purpose, then if she were to goe a ordinary straight course: and so did I, out of my wit weave a web to deceive all, but mine own desires. ( U, I: 293).
Having avoided one suitor through his death, she sees the only bar to her love as ‘a little nice, and childish modesty, which would a vertue prove in shewing modest love’ ( U, I: 294), only to find that the object of her love, unaware of her affection, has married elsewhere. The tangle of the web and the necessity of taking only indirect action have left her short of her target. Her own marriage follows when ‘all was lost, and hope of joy quite dead’ ( U, I: 294). The final part of the story, however, is taken by the listening princes, Amphilanthus and Ollorandus, to be happiness beyond compare. Her original lover she now meets again and shares with him ‘all pleasures we can wish, content, and love, and happines in that’ ( U, I: 294), her husband learning not to be jealous and that ‘more innocency lyes under a fayre Canope, then in a close chest, which lock’t, the inward part may be what it will’ ( U, I: 295). Unable to marry as she chooses, the fishing maid nevertheless negotiates her way to a position that affords her
‘affection discovered at the height, and as true love would wish, freely
‘Free Gift Was What He Wished’ 61
given and taken’ ( U, I: 295). While her stratagems, her web making, her thoughts busy as bees in a swarm to set her ‘mind, and ends aright’
( U, I: 294), have not entirely worked out as she intended, the happy resolution to her situation is a compelling contrast to more conventionally described relationships. She has negotiated the demands of obedience to patriarchal authority (represented by father and husband here) and the social expectations of female modesty within and outside marriage in a situation characterized by reciprocity, and lauded by observers as an example of felicities they do not yet enjoy. In doing so she redefines the parameters of virtue and signals possibilities beyond the assumption that marriage is the ultimate and only reposi-tory of female desire, however much her position is marked by its singularity and the difficulty of its attainment. The image of the wife, her husband, and her lover co-existing in amiable and loving content-ment is an unconventional and arresting tableau among the plethora of images within Urania, particularly in so far as it shows life beyond marriage. Where Sidney’s Gynecia struggles to accommodate her sexual desires in an unsatisfactory marriage, Wroth’s fishing lady finds a way beyond the impasse. In the next section we explore how these images of unconventional relationships sit alongside and are related to the central relationship between the lovers Amphilanthus and Pamphilia as part of the register of desire that the text explores.
Virtues and necessities
In the second part of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania, Pamphilia places herself under a vow of silence in relation to Amphilanthus whom she has long loved. Faced with the knowledge of his marriage to the princess of Slovenia she decides to protect herself with a vow of silence towards him: ‘I must nott’, she says, ‘abase my self-felt wrongs soe farr as to converce with my ruin’ ( U, II: 199). At one level Pamphilia’s decision seems entirely consistent with conduct book advice concerning female silence, retreating to a position of ‘womanly propriety’.13 What is invoked is so much part of our understandings of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century assumptions about female behaviour that it hardly needs referencing – the notion that women should be chaste, silent, and obedient. As Christina Luckyj points out, since the publication of Suzanne W. Hull’s 1982 book, the notion of the ideal renaissance woman as ‘chaste, silent, and obedient’ has become a cliché, and feminine silence has been taken to be the adoption of ‘a simple and monolithic patriarchal injunction’ – an
62 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre internalization of the discourse of the oppressor.14 Yet silence as a category, as a description, and as a state of being, has for too long been assumed to be monovalent in its meanings and significances. Silence can be seen as a powerful rhetoric in itself, even if it is not without its contradictions and inherent dangers: ‘On the one hand feminine silence appears to offer no meaningful point of entry into literary history. On the other hand, as soon as woman uses language, she can be defined and controlled’ (Luckyj, p. 6). Maureen Quilligan rethinks the relationship between silence and passivity in describing Pamphilia’s refusal to respond as ‘an active desire that looks like paral-ysed stasis.’15 In this sense she can be linked back to the heroic fortitude of her antecedent, Sidney’s Pamela, and the notion of ‘withstanding’ as a positive and Christian virtue, rather than a negative and passive obedience.16 Yet a closer examination of Pamphilia’s vow reveals the complexities of this discussion of acting on female desire and brings into debate not only how a female protagonist is seen but how she sees her own position. The interpretation by others of a woman’s actions becomes increasingly important as Richardson’s Pamela is to find out. Urania itself focuses on the representation of female desire and the contradictory assessments to which it was, and still often is, susceptible.17
The conditions under which Pamphilia’s vow is undertaken and the conditions under which the vow is finally ended are anything but consistent with the association between silence and passivity or obedience to patriarchal structures that the invocation of silence traditionally assumes. Far from suggesting a capitulation to masculinist assumptions that women should be seen and not heard,18 refusing to speak to Amphilanthus becomes the means by which Pamphilia seeks to assert some control over a situation that threatens her reputation. As Amphilanthus is now out of her reach as a marriage partner, her relationship with him can no longer even potentially be sanctioned through marriage. In this sense Pamphilia tries to use silence, making the necessity of this particular virtue work for her own ends.19 By examining the circumstances of the vow of silence we can draw out interconnections between a literary text and the social and ideological terrain that it negotiates, again emphasizing the strategies that female characters devised to deal with specific situations.
As other critics have remarked, while the text takes its name and starting point from Urania, the resolution of her romantic situation occurs within the first part of Urania whereas the second part ends abruptly with Pamphilia and Amphilanthus still ambiguously posi-
‘Free Gift Was What He Wished’ 63
tioned in relation to each other.20 The obstacles to Pamphilia’s and Amphilanthus’s love become the mechanisms that sustain the narrative of both parts of Urania but the beginning of their story raises its own questions. None of the obstacles that Lysander identifies as standard problems in the pursuit of love seem to be involved here.
Pamphilia and Amphilanthus seem compatible in rank, age, and circumstances, and parental choices do not seem to be an issue. The awkwardness of the narrative here in the absence of an obvious obstacle perhaps suggests a dimension of Wroth’s own position that she chose not to confront in print – that the list of impediments might include marriage to someone else. In fiction, the initial stumbling block is Amphilanthus’s failure to realize what is good for him (which again could shadow Herbert’s failure to marry Wroth after the death of her husband).
From the beginning readers are given insight into the feelings of Amphilanthus and Pamphilia. The narrator makes it clear that Amphilanthus is misguided from the outset in his affection for another woman, Antissia, not least because she has made her interest in him so obvious. It is Antissia’s ‘shewing’ of her love for Amphilanthus that results in his ‘receiving’ it, and that results in their mutual folly, according to the narrator, so that ‘they were content to think they loved’ ( U, I: 61). In this sense Amphilanthus is hoist with the petard of his chivalric obligations.21 Put another way, he is caught up in the rhetoric and expectations about courteous or ‘civile’ behaviour, to the detriment of both of
them, suggesting some of the problems associated with the representation of masculinity and its responsibilities.22
From a different perspective again, Wroth describes the competing claims on her lover William Herbert by Mary Fitton, in the guise of Antissia.
Confronted with Amphilanthus’s praise for Antissia, Pamphilia is betrayed, in these early stages of her emotions, by words that suggest her feminine weakness, and earn her criticism from Amphilanthus.
His praise of Antissia’s beauty provokes Pamphilia’s rebuke that ‘hee had spoke sufficiently in her praise’, followed by some derogatory comments concerning Antissia’s ‘extreame whitenesse’. Just as the narrator has indicated that these comments arise from a feelings
‘betweene dislike, and a modest affection’ ( U, I: 61), Amphilanthus replies: ‘That hee till then had neuer seene so much Womanish disposition in her, as to have so much prettie enuie in her’ ( U, I: 62–3).
Pamphilia’s hasty remarks may indicate a lack of the caution that she is subsequently to develop but Amphilanthus goes on to indicate that
64 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre his mistake is not to take seriously what he knows even at this stage –
that Pamphilia is superior to every other women he knows or is yet to meet: ‘in his opinion (except her selfe) he had not seene any fairer
[than Antissia]’ ( U, I: 62). Pamphilia’s retreat to solitude allows her to explore her own feelings without criticism and to begin to practise that self-restraint that becomes a hallmark of her character and the guarantee of her virtue. If the lesson that Amphilanthus has to learn concerns his lack of constancy, and his poor judgement, then Pamphilia’s is the necessity of measuring her actions and words against their public and private perception. By this means may she avoid the kind of censure visited upon her here by Amphilanthus himself. So, very early on in Urania, the narrator illustrates the difficulties besetting the desiring woman. Expressing her feelings, even as indirectly as Pamphilia does here, is likely to earn condemnation, even if the obtuse Amphilanthus does not understand their origins. One lesson that Pamphilia learns here is that silence can help her maintain her integrity while exploring her own emotions and feelings, though silence may also be misinterpreted, for example as dullness or pride.23
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