A Woman to a Man: Femininity and the Sonnet Genre in 'Pamphilia to Amphilanthus' Annalia Kate Hopper College

In Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Mary Wroth becomes one of the first women in history to write a sonnet sequence, which was first published in her romance story The Countess of Montgomery's Urania. Pamphilia, meaning "all-loving," is the main character and Amphilanthus, meaning "lover of two," is her cousin and lover, suggesting that Pamphilia and Amphilanthus mirror Wroth and her lover, William Herbert (Norton 1560). Within Renaissance literature, poets like John Donne, Shakespeare and Wroth's uncle Philip Sidney write about love as a result of a voiceless woman's irresistible beauty. Wroth ends the female silence and shows that women can be the patron of love as well as the recipient, determining that love and desire are universal feelings fabricated internally. Through the persona of Pamphilia, Wroth transforms stereotypes of seventeenth-century women set forth by contemporary male poets, limiting them as the object of the male gaze, by supplementing her own version of the sonnet form with an inverted rhyme scheme while reversing the gender roles as a female poet in love with a man in the sonnet "16" of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Furthermore, the diction of the sonnet portrays love as a pervasive, ruthless force that does not...