by Steven Moore
“My ears now open to all complaints and complainers” (1:546), Wroth provides a space for women to air their grievances, which go far beyond the storybook sorrow expressed by other romantic heroines of the period and which give Urania its tone of modernity, despite the chivalric trappings. Most of her women are not inexperienced virgins but unhappily married women, and their complaints have the ring of truth. In her extensive annotations, editor Roberts notes that many of sob stories were drawn from the experiences of Wroth and her female friends, confirmed by early readers (like the baron who tried to suppress it), and metafictionally hinted at within the novel: at one point Pamphilia tells of an incident, “feigning it to be written in a French story,” which her auditor suspects is autobiographical because it “was something more exactly related than a fiction” (1:499, 505). The exactness of Wroth’s insights into “women’s fortunes” is apparent in her treatment of Pamphilia, who suffers not merely from unrequited love but from debilitating, Wallace-grade depression. She is often almost literally paralyzed by depression, stricken in a chair or bedridden, and in numerous soliloquies and complaints she mentally tortures herself trying to understand why Amphilanthus treats her the way he does (which is indeed a mystery) and why she seems to be punished for her constancy. Surfacing throughout the novel—“being alone she thus began, or rather continued her complaints which could have no new beginning never having end” (1:467)—these monologues have a psychological depth that is unusual in the fiction of the time, and exemplify the turn toward interiority in some 17th-century novels.
Like the woman who takes and discards men as needed, Wroth takes a casual approach to the male conventions of chivalric/pastoral fiction. For structural purposes she uses the interlacement pattern that had been in use since Arthurian fiction, weaving between multiple storylines like a soap opera, avoiding the big climax that characterizes male-authored novels (epic battle/finding the grail/group marriage) in favor of little peaks and valleys. Amphilanthus’s escape from an enchantment at the end of part 1, which seems positioned as a climax, is told briefly at second hand, and leads seamlessly into part 2 without even a paragraph break, or a wedding ring for Pamphilia. Similarly, a war with Persia looms as the climax to part 2, but is disposed with long before the novel ends (or stops: Wroth didn’t finish the novel.) In the spirit of an adult joining in on a children’s game, Wroth plays along with the rules of the chivalric genre with Cervantine subversion. Winking that it is “impossible for knights and ladies to travel without adventures” (1:397), she lets the genre generate her material: every time a knight walks by a seashore, he encounters a woman alone in a boat approaching the shore to ask for his assistance; every time anyone goes hunting, someone with a distressing story is flushed from the woods; almost every sea voyage ends in shipwreck or piracy. Countless coincidental meetings strain credulity, even the credulity of a character who notes “the rareness: that they should thus from so many diverse parts meet all here, as in a third place, to make the wonder greater and stronger” (2:220). There are supernatural elements, increasingly so as the novel progresses: enchanted palaces, seers, griffin-like creatures, fairies, wood nymphs, giants, dwarfs, even what sounds like a UFO.13 There’s a Lady of the Lake and a sword in the stone right out of Arthurian myth. Many of these are standard for the genre, of course, but often Wroth uses chivalric conceits for metaphoric purposes: in Urania, a “Dungeon of Despair” is both a psychological state and an actual place, and just as Don Quixote blames all his problems on “enchanters,” Wroth wryly notes “we must attribute all to enchantments, when certainly they are a devilish kind of natural charm, which leads men to unworthy ways” (2:329, my italics).
Wroth also has some fun with the flowery language of pastoral, pushing personification to goofy lengths (“he discerned a man come from under the rocks that proudly showed their craggy faces, wrinkling in the smiles of their joy for being above the sea, which strove by flowing to cover them” [1:84]), parodying the effusive language of the court, and indulging in puns, sarcasm, and black humor. Her funniest parody of the rhetoric of chivalry that some writers, like Gervase Markham, were still using comes near the beginning of part 2, when Pamphilia’s brother Rosindy tells of his encounter with a madwoman dressed like a storybook shepherdess who began speaking to him “but whether prose or verse I cannot tell. But her speech savored something to me . . . of some poetry, though old, sickly stuff, as if poetry were fallen into a consumption, at least in that poor, fruitless place of wits to have birth in, and friendless to be nourished in” (2:34). By this time, the chivalric novel was over 200 years old, and despite the intellectual upgrade Sidney gave it, the genre had deteriorated from beautiful stylization (as in Sannazaro’s Arcadia [1504]) to shopworn clichés, which an intelligent and bitter woman like Wroth couldn’t allow to pass without some ribbing. She throws in some crossdressing escapades—one of them recalls those in Astrea where Celadon fondles his beloved with lesbian gusto (1:435)—and several occasions in which a woman strips (or is stripped), apparently intended for those Wroth bluntly addresses as “you men” (1:413).14 For the ladies, she arranges for two knight to swordfight “naked” (i.e., only in their nightshirts): “Well was this liked, and so performed. Then did Leonius and the castle lord fight so daintily and valiantly as never was any combat like it, naked men gravely performing what discourses or romances strive with excellentist witty descriptions to express in knights armed, curious in their arming and careful. Here is no defense but valor and good fortune; armor but delicate shirts, and more delicate skins; shields but noble breasts of steel sufficient, being strong in worth” (1:475).
The reference to “romances” is one of many metafictional moments when Wroth comments on the genre, usually disparagingly, as though it’s silly to treat real-life problems in such an artificial medium. Pamphilia reads a little of one romance about “the affection of a lady to a brave gentleman, who equally loved, but being a man it was necessary for him to exceed a woman in all things; so much as inconstancy was found fit for him to excel her in, he left her for a new”; disgusted, “threw she away the book” (1:317). In a novel in which everyone sports pastoral names, one female character rebels: “Must her sacred virtue be tried like other questionable, or she be named as if in a romancy that relates of knights and distressed damsels the sad adventures?” (1:595). On the other hand, another woman is content to turn her story into a pastoral ballad, giving her acquaintances pastoral names (1:613–23), just as Wroth did with her acquaintances for the purpose of her novel. The most stunning metafictional twist—and I mean it literally stunned me with amazement—occurs at the beginning of part 2, when Wroth switches back again to the supernatural mode. (Although part 2 picks up exactly where part 1 left off, it takes place a dozen or more years later.) While mournfully wandering one day, the widowed Selarinus—one of the two buff shepherds who rescued Urania from the wolf at the beginning and later became a king—encounters yet another enchanted palace inhabited by a “grave lady” seer. There are some references to Christian magic, whereby the dead ascend to heaven and “look down” on the living (2:5), and then Selarinus encounters a beautiful woman, who begins to tell her story. Here we go again, the reader thinks, episode 103 of the Real Housewives of Arcadia. Her story is similar to many we’ve heard, and when Selarinus predictably offers his knightly service, she hits him with this:
“I thank you, Sir,” said she, “but serve me only this: to believe this but a fiction, and done to please and pass the time away with, and many of these shall you see and be beguiled with before you part hence. Therefore credit nothing but the grave lady, who is oftentimes deluded by us vain spirits here, who delight in ourselves only in abusing mortals.”
With that Selarinus found himself but at the old sandy gateway where he came in, and there was fain to stay till the lady sent for him, charging him no more to follow vain fantasies there, for it was a place wholly for delusions, and what he desired to have: if music or what else, he should have it so as he woul
d tell her of it.
“And happy it is,” said she, “that you met these gentle spirits, for here are some most devilishly dangerous, but from me you shall have all real dealings, and what you can desire, if you will be contented.” (2:10).
Of course all characters in novels are “spirits,” but it is rare for an author to throw a bucket of water in our face to remind us so. Wroth does so for a reason; fiction is “a place wholly for delusions,” and while some novelists offer “vain fantasies,” some “devilishly dangerous,” Wroth promises “real dealings.” In this magical episode, she warns us against complacency and demonstrates she still has a few tricks up her sleeve.
And like all pastoral and most chivalric novels, Urania is marbled with poetry and songs. Pamphilia in particular formalizes her feelings in numerous poems, and in fact the original edition of Urania concluded with a separately-paginated sonnet sequence entitled Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, omitted for reasons of space from Robert’s modern edition but available in her edition of The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth (85–142). Amphilanthus condescendingly praises Pamphilia’s poetry as “the best he had seen made by woman” (1:320) but chides her for being a lover only in poetry, not in her life, which she weakly disputes, once again sublimating her true feelings. Many of the other female characters—plus a few men—also write poetry, finding in art the satisfaction they cannot find in life, and representing the entrance of women into the lists of literature, still a novelty at the time.15
Part 2 of Urania is less impressive than part 1, though it is unfair to criticize it too harshly because it is merely a working draft, with gaps left in the manuscript for later insertions (of poems, characters’ names, etc.,), and is missing a few crucial pages near the beginning in which Amphilanthus evidently has a quickie affair. The manuscript ends midsentence after 418 pages, but whether Wroth abandoned it or meant to end it thus is uncertain: Sidney abandoned the revised Arcadia midsentence, and some critics, like Gavin Alexander, suggest that Wroth may have did likewise in imitation/homage, as well as for thematic reasons: “Amphilanthus’ centrifugal restlessness cannot be reconciled to Pamphilia’s centripetal constancy; the plot conspires to prevent any lasting union and break up any temporary accord” (303). If deliberate, Urania’s nonending would anticipate some modernist works that also break off midsentence (see p. 817n273 below). There are two story arcs that loosely bind the episodic narrative: the search for some young lost royals by the aging knights of part 1, which has a getting-the-band-back-together vibe, and a threatened attack by the usurper of the Persian throne, who is infuriated at Pamphilia’s rejection of his marriage proposal, by which Wroth shows that romantic problems can cause political as well as personal turmoil. Tedium sets in as one episode follows another, and another, like a long-running soap opera, which Wroth tries to alleviate by some jump-the-shark tactics: relying on more supernatural events, spreading the plot over a wider geographic area, and introducing some comic relief in the person of the flibbertigibbety Marquise of Gargadia. There are some striking passages, some metafictional nods to the conventions of the “old fictions” Wroth is following (2:203), and some self-reflective praise for women who like books. This includes not only Pamphilia—“only books about her, which she extremely loved” (2:270)—but also a young queen who owns an enviable library (2:170). (Like many of the princesses in Urania, she’s 14, which one male says is “the desired age of all great men’s desires” [2:170]). But even in its unfinished state, part 2 is consistent with the entire novel’s ongoing interrogation of the vicissitudes of love, the problem of constancy, and the difficulty women experience trying to negotiate these challenges in a society that robs them of much choice in the matter.
Two other spirits responded to Sidney’s invitation to continue his Arcadia. In 1624, Richard Beling published A Sixth Book to the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, which was added to the 1627 edition of Sidney’s novel and to many others up to the early 20th century. Unlike Wroth’s imaginative work, Beling’s novella merely ties up some loose plot ends concerning three of the couples Sidney mentions in his final paragraph. It’s memorable for the sensuous way the heroine punctuates her speech: “At length Helen, gracefully shaking her head as if she would shake away drops that, like the morning dew on full ripe cherries, hung on her rosy cheek: ‘O Amphialus!’ she said, and then kissed him, as loth to leave so perfect a sentence without a comma; ‘I will not say you were unkind, but―,’ and there with his lips (loth, loth, belike to accuse him) she closed up her speech.”16
A bit longer, and a bit better, is A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1651) by Anna Weamys (pronounced Weems), who evidently wrote the novel in her teens.17 Like a determined matchmaker, Weamys focuses on four loving couples left unmarried at the end of book 3 of Sidney’s revised Arcadia—including his principal ones, Musidorus+Pamela and Pyrocles+Philoclea—and manipulates her paper dolls toward the group wedding that occurs about two-thirds through the short novel.18 After some comic relief supplied by the ditsy Mopsa, Weamys brings in Strephon and Claius, the two shepherds whose loquacious laments open the new Arcadia: the shepherdess Urania, the object of their affection, has agreed to allow Musidorus and Pyrocles decide which of them she’ll marry. After the lovesick swains make their cases, the princes chose young Strephon; old Claius dies of a broken heart, as does the melancholy poet Philisides (Sidney’s persona), and Weamys ends her novel on that sad note, reminding us that even Eden comes to grief: Et in Arcadia ego.
Weamys is clear about her motive: like Markham and Beling, she mentions Helen’s laments for the comatose Amphialus (the third of her four couples), but skips over them: “I will only rehearse those particulars that united those rare persons together to both their abundant felicity” (27). She’s uninterested in Sidney’s heroic ideals except insofar as they relate to women, which means achieving an ideal marriage, and skips over fight scenes (“Then entered they into so fierce a fight that it goes beyond my memory to declare all the passages thereof” [60]), though she seconds Sidney’s view that nobility extends to animals: after Musidorus knocks the villainous Plaxirtus to the ground, the latter’s horse, “for joy that he was eased of such a wicked burden, pranced over his disgraced master, and not suffering him to die such an honorable death as by Musidorus’s sword, trampled out his guts, while Plaxirtus, with curses in his mouth, ended his hateful life” (60–61). Weamys’s style is simpler than that of Sidney (and other Arcadians), which may be due to the author’s youth, but is more likely a deliberate choice. At one point, Helen struggles with the right style for her letter to Philoclea: her first draft “was not sufficiently adorned with rhetoric for so rare a Princess” (35), but she’s critical of her rhetorically adorned final draft, which may be a critique of the elaborate style employed by Sidney and his followers. Weamys’s Arcadia is not a great novel, but (unlike Markham and Beling) she makes Sidney’s themes her own: a hopeful bride’s vision of Arcadia, not a bitter widow’s, like Wroth’s admittedly greater novel.
I’ve often noted during this history of the novel that the appearance of a massive masterpiece tends to silence the field for a while. After the publication of Wroth’s Urania in 1621, no major English novels appeared for three decades, although a number of interesting minor ones sprouted up as novelists continued to explore different genres. In the 1620s, an Anglican bishop named Francis Godwin (1562–1633) wrote the first British science-fiction novel, published posthumously in 1638 as The Man in the Moon. Set at the end of the 16th century, it is the first-person account of a distressed Spanish nobleman named Domingo Gonzalez—a little man with big ambitions—who, after a series of unfortunate incidents, winds up on the island of St. Helena, where he invents a method of aerial transportation via wild swans. On a ship back to Spain to share his invention with the king, he is attacked by an English fleet near the Canary Islands, and escapes via his swan-powered craft: it happens to be their migration period, so they take him on a 12-day journey to the moon. Gonzales discovers it is inhab
ited by gigantic, long-living humanoids who enjoy a perfect, conflict-free existence. After two years there, missing his wife and family, Gonzales obtains permission to return to Earth in 1601; he lands in China, where he is initially suspected to be a sorcerer, but then is taken under the wing of a Mandarin and eventually turned over to some Jesuits, who listen to his story and encourage him to write it down, promising to return him to Spain. Despite Gonzalez’s often-declared intention to write a second part, we hear nothing more of him, which is highly suspicious: early in the novella, eager to reveal the secrets he learned on the moon, Gonzalez says he will postpone “publishing these wonderful mysteries till the sages of our state have considered how far the use of these things may stand with the policy and good government of our country, as also with the Fathers of the Church, how the publication of them may not prove prejudicial to the affairs of the Catholic faith and religion. . . .”19 Since Gonzalez’s report is highly “prejudicial to the affairs of the Catholic faith”—Godwin’s Lunars are essentially Protestants—there’s every reason to believe the Jesuits deep-six him.