Pamphilia’s use of silence is explained in the first part of Urania in terms that are compatible with the general injunctions upon women not to be the first to speak of their love. What happens in part two of Urania, however, moves away from this ‘silence-chastity equation’, and illustrates the argument that silence is more variably used and understood than the equation suggests. The obstacle to Pamphilia’s and Amphilanthus’s relationship in part one could generally be said to be Amphilanthus’s inconstancy, and his tendency to be diverted by other women who demonstrate their interest in him. This is partly explained as driven by his uncertainty regarding Pamphilia’s feelings for him that she cannot express because he is unreliable and inconsistent in his conduct towards her. The couple are caught in a loop caused by expectations of gendered behaviour. Pamphilia cannot indicate her feelings for Amphilanthus until he has declared himself to her, and he is reluctant to force his attentions on her without indications that they would be received sympathetically.24
Amphilanthus seems to undergo a course of self-revelation in part one as he comes to understand his fickleness through a series of adventures and in discussions with other knights and with Urania and with Pamphilia herself, but early on in part two an understanding seems to have been reached to the extent that the lovers undergo a verba de praesenti marriage ceremony, witnessed by others ( U, II: 45).25 While
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this ceremony arises as a result of Amphilanthus’s jealousy that Pamphilia is giving her attention to Rodomondro, the harmony is short-lived as Amphilanthus is summoned overseas. From this point, Amphilanthus’s inconstancy becomes different in kind from his previous dalliances, and is related to his inability to trust that Pamphilia has not transferred her affections elsewhere. While in Crete, ‘lulled in the sweet delights of an infectious Queene’ ( U, II: 131), Amphilanthus again falls victim to a desiring woman’s assertions, and is then cast off by her. Not content to leave him to Pamphilia, however, the Queen exercises female spite against another woman to push his marriage to the princess of Slovenia – a move he does not make until he is persuaded that Pamphilia is married to Rodomondro, the King of Tartaria, jealousy of whom triggered the marriage ceremony between Pamphilia and Amphilanthus in the first place. Whatever obstacles there were to the lovers’ relationship before, this formal and public wedding, assisted by ‘the Queene of lust and mischiefe’ ( U, II: 133), significantly alters the nature of Pamphilia’s and Amphilianthus’s relationship. This is an event that Pamphilia has feared and dreamed of (U, II: 108), and from this point on Pamphilia vows not to speak to Amphilanthus, driven by two different kinds of determinations. On the one hand, it is now inappropriate for her to act in his company as she did when there was an understanding of their commitment, witnessed by others. On the other hand, there is also the matter of Pamphilia’s self-respect, ‘cast of’
( U, II: 199) as she has been by Amphilanthus while she herself ‘inviolably kept [her] love and hart pure’ ( U, II: 198). Their public positions make it likely that they will still have to meet, and her vow of silence will ensure that there can be no words spoken by her that will suggest any change of feeling. The dilemma is this: she cannot speak to him as she would have done once because he is now married, but to speak to him differently would indicate that her feelings towards him have changed and suggest her inconstancy. The vow of silence avoids public misperception of her as either immodest or inconstant. Having lost him, she has ‘lost all hapiness’, but she will ‘nott bee thought in this world, this changing world to inconstancie’ ( U, II: 199).
Amphilanthus’s marriage directly alters Pamphilia’s course of action.
As a princess and then queen Pamphilia has obligations and responsibilities symbolized by her bearing the same name as the country that she comes to rule. Pamphilia’s marriage and the disposition of her body are a more than personal matter, and have considerable implications for the welfare of the Pamphilians. While an unmarried woman, Pamphilia was both sought after and vulnerable to alien advances from
66 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre the likes of the Sophy of Persia and the King of Lycia that threaten not only Pamphilia the person but also Pamphilia the country. Believing that Amphilanthus might yet become her husband Pamphilia refused to marry, but his marriage removes that possibility and at the same time removes the impediment of her marrying elsewhere. In this context her marriage to Rodomondro is highly problematic, as is the character of Rodomondro himself. On the other hand, as King of Tartaria and the great Cham, Rodomondro is at many levels a worthy companion of Pamphilia. He comes to protect her from unwelcome sexual and political advances, and his characteristics are suggestive of loyalty, constancy, and bravery. On the other hand, he quite simply is not the object of Pamphilia’s affection, and Urania draws attention to the importance of this by making him otherwise acceptable.
Dressing in black, with her hair up rather than down, Pamphilia publicly attributes her behaviour to her sorrow for the death of her brother, Poliarchos. But what might wash as an excuse with other characters in the text will not wash with the reader who knows quite well that Poliarchos is an excuse to mask her own lack of enthusiasm for her marriage. Pamphilia’s vow of silence observes certain public proprieties that we outlined before, but it is also clear that there is more than one way of communicating feeling. While the courtiers are told of Pamphilia’s mourning, readers are informed of a different set of motivations:
With thos words, her eyes hapened (itt may bee) by chance, butt I thinke rather truly ment, on Amphilanthus, who blusht, then wept bitterly, turning him self to a window close by, as desiring non should be wittness of his loss and shame. ( U, II: 275).
The narrator refuses to let the reader be in any uncertainty that Pamphilia speaks differently from what she means on more than one occasion. A little after her marriage to Rodomondro, Pamphilia is consoled by the Queen of Naples, Amphilanthus’s mother, for Rodomondro’s absence, and she responds: ‘“Indeed, Madame,” sayd Pamphilia, “if hee showld stay too longe away, it might much more molest mee, butt I ame” (with that she sighed) “assured the Tartarian can nott bee longe from hence, since his and my occasions call us both speedily home”’ ( U, II: 280). Again the narrator refuses to allow any uncertainty about what is happening here: ‘Amphilanthus had with infinite content marked her words, and knowing her hart, perfectly understood them’ ( U, II: 280).
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What these events signal is the complex tension between narrative development and moral integrity. Whereas, as we argued in the previous chapter, Sidney is at pains to absolve the princesses of any moral turpitude, and even Gynecia is right as well as wrong, the nature of Pamphilia’s behaviour here falters. While her reasons for the vow of silence are consistent with social proprieties and maintain her modesty at a public level, this is an illusion that cannot be sustained in terms of the narrative itself.26 Pamphilia is caught between competing discourses. The injunctions concerning female decorum and propriety suggest that she terminate her relationship with Amphilanthus, given their marriages to other people. The chaste heroine ought not to be conducting adulterous affairs, even in the heart, but Pamphilia’s constancy to Amphilanthus is never in doubt and he is seen as inherently worthy of her in spite of his male weaknesses and his capacity to be tricked by others. The predicament is that Pamphilia is caught between personal and public interest, between constancy and propriety.
It is also important here to acknowledge that class and social rank play an important role in trying to understand Pamphilia’s dilemma.
As a princess and then queen she also figures forth the circumstances of people like Wroth herself – that group of aristocratic women who married for political and social reasons as much as for love. Wroth’s own case has been extensively discussed – her marriage, the jealousy of her husband, their alleged incompatibility, her relationship and two children with her cousin William Herbe
rt.27 There are also the examples of Anne Clifford and Penelope Rich, to whom Wroth had connections. Rich of course was known to Wroth through her uncle Philip Sidney, while Clifford married Philip Herbert whose first wife was the Countess of Montgomery to whom Wroth dedicated Urania.
Clifford refused to agree to financial arrangements her first husband intended to make, and enjoyed a degree of autonomy with her second husband until widowhood and financial independence gave her greater freedom,28 and Penelope Rich, the star of Sidney’s sonnet sequence
‘Astrophil and Stella’, had a well-known extra-marital relationship with Charles Blount before she married him. Lawrence Stone estimates that
‘something like one third of the older peers were estranged from or actually separated from their wives.’29 Clearly for some members of the higher social ranks there were alternatives to the stark choice between independence and marriage identified by Fancy. It is, however, worth making a different kind of a point here. If adulterous relationships were not uncommon or necessarily stigmatized then moving beyond them often was. Critics have made the interesting point that Rich’s
68 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre adultery with Blount caused fewer disturbances than her marriage to him after her divorce from her husband in 1605. As Ringler put it,
‘their adultery could be countenanced, but not their illegal marriage,’ –
illegal because of her divorce and because she did not have specific permission. In Qulligan’s terms it is not the sexual relationship that is the issue but the sacraments of marriage and the institutions of the state.30
Adultery by definition occurs beyond the laws while remarriage involves redefining the laws and could threaten the apparatus and structures of the state.
While these situations can be seen to represent some pragmatic realities of a certain group of aristocratic men and women’s lives, at the level of narrative and reader response, they raise particular problems of interpretation. The reader becomes involved in what might be described as ‘difficult knowledge’, knowing that Pamphilia means more than she says for reasons that have merit and authority but nevertheless involve her in various kinds of duplicity – not least of all with Rodomondro and her father. Earlier, when Amphilanthus accused her of dissembling and pretending that she was not married to the Tartarian, Pamphilia responded by addressing her father.31
In so doing she maintained her silence towards Amphilanthus, truthfully refuting Amphilanthus’s claim, and implicitly restating her constancy to him. When her father indicated that she would have his permission for marriage to Rodomondro, Pamphilia used the conventions of female modesty: ‘How unlikely is itt then that I showld be contracted ore promised when the man never asked’ ( U, II: 260). Yet, in invoking the trope of modesty, Pamphilia’s actions clearly run counter to her words: ‘With that, and a looke full of dis-dainfull pitty, she looked as if by chance her eyes (against her will) had cast them selves that way butt as passengers, nott to rest’ ( U, II: 260–1). The clear presumption is that this is a piece of non-verbal communication with Amphilanthus and part of their ongoing coded conversation. While Pamphilia’s actions and behaviour might be understandable, products of the constraints that she is under, there is nevertheless a disjunction between words and actions here that endangers her reliability in terms of the qualities that she is supposed to represent – predominantly in relation to modesty. A heroine becomes a morally unreliable figure. How one judges the situation (as justifiable given the constraints, or as devious and slippery) becomes a matter of interpretation.
It is a significant admission of the intractability of the situation, of the horns of the narrative and moral dilemma, that such resolution as
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there is in this incomplete text comes from external sources. The nymph Leutissia appears to Pamphilia and advises her not to torment herself, reminding her that she has ‘a brave Kinge to your husband’, who is so much hers as she ‘can nott please him better then to com-maunde him’, and that she should ‘co[nte]ntedly and chastely’ enjoy the company of Amphilanthus unless she does not trust her ‘owne power in having absolute commaundness’ ( U, II: 378) of her self.
Pamphilia’s resolution is then to be ‘an new woeman, yett the same constant lover still’, retaining the vow of silence until she can see how Amphilanthus will react.
A cognate kind of resolution takes place in Amphilanthus only a few pages later as a result of his developing self-awareness when he resolves (albeit with some uncertainty as to the outcome) to seek Pamphilia’s pardon and to ‘bee a new man as new borne, new fram’d, and noe thing as I was beefore; and yett the Very same in deere affection as when wee first loved.’32 While this decision results in the threat of suicide (‘End like thy self, like Amphilanthus self’) the passage concludes with an admonishing ‘hasty voice’ that warns him to ‘End like a Christian and nott otherways’ ( U, II: 384). It seems that only external forces can break the impasse, and provide Amphilanthus with the reassurance about his reception from Pamphilia that he needs to end his self-destructive impulses. Forsandarus appears, twists his ankle, goes into a terminal decline and produces a deathbed confession that acquits Amphilanthus of some parts of his inconstancy, given that Forsandarus led him to believe that Pamphilia was married to Rodomondro before she was (precipitating Amphilanthus’s marriage) and failed to deliver letters from Amphilanthus to Pamphilia that might have clarified the situation.33
Amphilanthus is thus partially exonerated, allowing Pamphilia to indicate her forgiveness by sending for him, thus ending her vow of silence. Pamphilia ‘wowld noe more bee so strange, her Vowe beeing now safely concluded without breach. Butt she wowld speake, and bee as others in all civile manner’ ( U, II: 389). So it is that reconciliation of a sort is achieved through a combination or mesh of self-analysis and external forces – incorporeal voices and narrative twists
– that suggests the intractability of the real life social dilemmas.
Wroth is here exploring in fiction the difficulties facing a woman whose affections are widely known but cannot be directly or openly discussed, and an extract from the seventeenth-century memoir by Lady Anne Halkett provides a parallel example of a knowing contrivance to avoid censure. Having promised her mother that she would
70 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre not see her suitor Thomas Howard again, Anne comes up with a strategy to be with him without directly disobeying her parent.
In the midst of this dispute with my selfe what I should do, my hand being still upon my eyes, itt presently came into my mind that if I blindfolded my eyes that would secure mee from seeing him, and so I did not transgresse against my mother.34
That Anne realizes her moral precariousness is evident in an exchange between herself and her mother that implicates her precocious self-awareness. When she declares to her mother ‘that noe child shee had had greater love and respect to her, or more obedience,’ her mother replies ‘Itt seemes you have a good opinion of yourselfe.’35
That Wroth was experimenting in this second part of Urania with solutions to real problems is also suggested by an inconsistency concerning what happens to Rodomondro and how that relates to earlier repeated patterns. In the first part of Urania there are various examples of happy endings to marriages unhappily begun. Perissus and Limena, after some considerable and violent events, are encouraged to marry by Limena’s errant husband, Philargus ( U, I: 86).36 Later on, as we have seen, there is also the story of the fishing maid. In cases like this, husbands conveniently die (liberating their wives) or come to see the error of their jealous ways and condone their wives’ relationships with their lovers. At the end of part two, however, it seems that Wroth was uncertain how to treat her two central characters and their relationship.
While she first has Rodomondro die, as well as their son ( U, II: 406), Rodomondro is alive and amiably chatting on the next page, thus bringing together the two alternati
ve solutions to the problem of Pamphilia being married – widowhood, and an implied amicable sharing of Pamphilia with both husband and lover. While it is of course possible to read too much into an inconsistency that at some level reflects the incomplete nature of this section of the text, the alternatives are suggestive and repeat other incidents in the text. It is perhaps also possible to suggest that what was narratively feasible in relation to relatively minor and lower-ranked characters represents more of a problem in relation to more central characters. The notion of the King of Tartaria sharing, in whatever kind of way, the attentions of his wife with the King of the Romans, presents some problems at the level of masculine dignity, not to mention international relations.
The text contains both the threat of deceit and resistance to masculine control, and the fantasy of a non-proprietorial masculine investment
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in female companionship. That Wroth was uncertain which path to take for her central characters suggests the problems attendant on either solution.37
Controlling fortunes: Melissea and Lady Mary Wroth
At many levels Urania can be seen as exploring and underlining the difficulties of female self-determination. While the female figures here are predominantly queens and princesses, and therefore possess a high degree of power, status, and privilege, in their relationships with men they consistently struggle with the necessities of pursuing their interests both against specific threats (such as men who threaten their chastity, or are simply not their choice of partner) and more generally against negative interpretations of their actions. The exception to this is the deus ex machina, Melissea, the other-worldly, providential figure who oversees, prophesies, and generally controls or advises characters and actions. Melissea introduces herself to Amphilanthus as ‘having skill in the Art of Astrologie’, and as having ‘found much concerning you, and as much desire to do you service’ ( U, I: 139), thus beginning the thread running through Urania of overseeing and intervening to help out the princes and princesses. Consistently described as ‘grave’,
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