University of Virginia Library

Pamphilia's Constancy as a Universal Virtue

The means of attaining "honor" available to women of Renaissance and Reformation England was, as in most of Western history, limited to one: Constancy, an extension of the medieval virtue of chastity. The same idea is expressed in both: a man must know whether the offspring he supports are his own. Men might attain honor through excellence in various arts, such as war, horsemanship, loyal service to a prince, or authorship, but constancy, not to mention chastity, was not a requirement to their attainment of honor. That constancy might be the measure of honor for both genders alike was an extraordinarily unavailable idea. Yet this idea is the central and almost only theme of the powerful seventeenth-century sonnet cycle by Lady Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus.

Societies that have sexual division of labor also tend to have division of virtues. Penelope was true to Odysseus because it was a Greek woman's virtue to remain faithful under all circumstances. This feminine virtue was retained by the Christian civilization that succeeded the classical era: women were taught to honor their husbands according to the teachings of Paul and the example of the Good Wife in Proverbs. Though Paul also stressed that husbands should honor their wives, this was easily forgotten in a world in which women were property. It was considered sufficient evidence of virtue in a man if he proved a good steward of his property by spending himself in its maintenance:

The power of this social division appears in the work of Christine de Pisan, an original and authoritative fifteenth century writer who nevertheless is always careful to assign originality and authority to men, and counsels the wife to live in complete submission:
...she will humble herself towards him, in deed and word and by
curtsying; she will obey without complaint; and she will hold her
peace...suppose he is unloving towards his wife or strays into a
love affair...she must put up with all this and dissimulate
wisely, pretending that she does not notice it and that she truly
does not know anything about it (Treasure of the City of Ladies
63-4).

De Pisan likens the ideal wife to the biblical Queen Esther, who, obedient in all things, was eventually granted whatever she asked. The virtuous woman, on this model, is one who adheres to virtues specifically regarded as feminine: patience, humility, chastity. Like the famous Griselda, she is to bear all in silence with a good will.

The social pressure on women to conform to this model defined by men, and the possibility that women might adopt the masculine model as a means of escape, is acutely analyzed by Baldesar Castiglione in the second book of his Il cortegiano. The courtiers have been discussing the playing of practical jokes as a social strategy, when one of them, Bernardo Accolti, takes exception to the playing of such tricks, involving imputation of unchastity, on women: such jokes, he informs all present, are not funny because a woman's honor is all she has: ..we ourselves have set a rule that a dissolute life in us is not
a vice, or fault, or disgrace, while in women it means such utter
opprobrium and shame that any woman of whom ill is once spoken is
disgraced forever, whether what is said be calumny or not (188).

An antifeminist, Ottavio Fregosi, defends the double standard on a principle of natural inequality: ...since women are very imperfect creatures, and of little or no
worth compared with men, and since of themselves they were not
able to do any worthy thing, it was necessary, through shame and
fear of infamy, to put a curb on them which would give them some
good quality. And it was chastity that seemed more needful for
them than any other quality, in order for us to be certain of our
offspring (189).

Gasparo Pallavicino seeks to bolster this argument with a striking assertion — ...it greatly argues the perfection of man and the imperfection of
women that all women without exception desire to be men, by a
certain natural instinct that teaches them to desire their own
perfection (217).
— to which Giuliano de' Medici responds with acerbity: The poor creatures do not desire to be men in order to become more
perfect, but in order to gain freedom and to escape that rule over
them which man has arrogated to himself by his own authority (217).

Even though Emilia Pia and the Duchess of Gonzaga and other women are present, what they thought of the assertion that they wanted to be men they either did not divulge, or it was not recorded by Castiglione. His courtiers go on to describe the virtues of the Courtier and the Court Lady as largely gender-specific.

Elizabethan and Jacobean literature in England intensifies the tradition of sex-specific virtues and the proper forms for exercising those virtues (heroisms). A lively debate raged throughout the period on the topic of whether women could even exercise their own proper virtues. Some assumed it is possible and argued for this by compiling lists of examples: Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women is an instance. Shakespeare appears to believe in good women: Marina, Ophelia, Hermione, and Desdemona are succesors to the patient Griselda and easily enlist the sympathy of an audience that appreciates "womanly" virtue in women.

Some Renaissance authors (all male) enjoyed creating female characters who crossed over into the exercise or attempted exercise of masculine virtues. Many examples found in Shakespeare are unflattering; of Lady Macbeth, Joan of Arc, Volumnia, or Goneril, the kindest that may be said is that they seem to be out of place in women's bodies. Admirable characters on this model do exist, but are more often allegorical figures than representations of imitable action. Spenser's Britomart goes about in armor defeating villains, but is a figure of Chastity. Another instance is Lyly's Cynthia, who successfully crosses the gender-role boundary because she is a ruler: though she is forever chaste (and hence yet another figure for Chastity), she may kiss Endymion awake because as sovereign she may do what as a woman she may not. Several of Shakespeare's engaging comedic heroines do get to explore a man's world without losing our sympathy, but significantly they do this by dressing as men; Viola, Rosalind, and Portia are examples.

What these male-virtue success stories have in common is that they are drawn upon a living model: Elizabeth I, whose political survival depended on convincing everyone that she was the sole exception to the rule that male roles must be inhabited by males. Britomart and Cynthia are acceptable as allegories, but their martial and stately powers are not intended to fall into the wrong hands — those of women in general.

Women writers of the Renaissance and Reformation were few, and they were limited by social pressures almost exclusively to polemical writings. They might write in response to misogynists, defending women from attacks that claimed they could not even uphold their one allocated virtue of constancy, or they might write on religious topics. Interestingly this limitation provided an opportunity for women to produce an ideology of virtue that identified womanly virtue with Christianity, and to suggest to men that male heroism consists not in the practice of "manly" virtues but in joining in the practice of those virtues traditionally allocated to women. Elaine Beilin, in Redeeming Eve, traces this approach from Christine de Pisan's The City of Women to Anne Askew, Rachel Speght, Elizabeth Carey, and others. If the Church is the bride of Christ, ran the argument, especially among women of the Reformation, then men as well as women should act the part of a bride in the life of faith. An instance of this argument is a letter from Lady Jane Grey to one John Harding, protesting his conversion to Catholicism, reported in Foxe's Actes and Monuments: He was, she says, "sometyme the unspotted spouse of Christ, but now the unshamefast paramour of Anti-Christ" (920). This strategy is rhetorically effective, opening to women a new opportunity to participate intellectually and authoritatively in the creation of the new Reformation society. But the ground gained was specifically in the arena of religious writing. Philip Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke, was praised as a writer because she had limited herself to producing versified translations of the Psalms (Quilligan, "The Constant Subject" 307-8).

It remained for Lady Mary Wroth to break new secular ground with this feminine model of virtue and honor. The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, published in 1621, is, like her uncle Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia which it imitates, a long and rambling prose romance interspersed with poems. To it is appended a sonnet sequence entitled Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, which, like Astrophil and Stella, contains not only sonnets but a number of strategically placed lyric songs. Both the romance and the sequence were written in genres long out of favor, but which had been successfully used by the Sidney family. Wroth consciously imitates her uncle and also her father, Robert Sidney, but adapts their genres and styles to her own purpose (Quilligan 308).

The central characters of the romance are Pamphilia, queen of the island kingdom of Pamphilia, and the man she loves, Amphilanthus. "Pamphilia" is from Greek roots, as befits a Greek romance, and means "all-loving." "Amphilanthus" is "lover of two." The conflict of aims represented in these contrasting names is that produced by the traditional male privilege of a double standard. At first, it appears that Pamphilia will be presented to us as a paragon of the Griselda model of traditional female virtue ("chaste, obedient and patient," remarks Beilin [Redeeming Eve 221]), but the story in the Urania fails to focus, as one might expect, on the patience and humility of the heroine. She is, after all, an unmarried queen with a people to govern, like Elizabeth I, and therefore is potentially an exemplar of the woman who has appropriated male virtues. Wroth, however, stresses Pamphilia's traditional femininity throughout, yet introduces an innovation: Pamphilia's constancy is upheld as a universal model. Amphilanthus' lack of this virtue is his one failing, and it is viewed as an actual failing and not something to be passes off as simply lacking because he is male. Pamphilia is constant, Amphilanthus is not, and this discrepancy drives the plot. Neither will find happiness until Amphilanthus attains honor, without which he will be unworthy of Pamphilia. And he will not find his honor until he finds constancy. Wroth's conception of female virtue then is that it is normative for both genders. A new possibility arises: human virtue.

It should be noted that Pamphilia is not married to Amphilanthus, which helps to force the issue, as traditional marriage relations thus have no bearing on the plot of the Urania. Maureen Quilligan observes: Pamphilia enacts a traditional, Griselda-like virtue, yet for the
woman who is specifically not fulfilling the duties of a wife. We
are forced to ask, what purpose could Pamphilia's obstinate
constancy be serving? One answer is surely that her constancy
becomes the stable position from which she can complain
(poetically) of her lover's inconstancy (323).

As we have seen in Castiglione, however, inconstancy is a traditionally sanctioned male prerogative. Quilligan correctly catches the irony in passages in which Pamphilia's friends critique female and male attitudes toward fidelity, and correctly identifies these passages as doing the main business of the text, but assumes that the reversal of gender roles implied in the irony merely inverts the social value associated with those roles, so that woman's virtue, rather than man's, is to be found superior. Such is indeed is the view of one of Pamphilia's friends: It was laid to our charge in times passed to bee false, and
changing, but they who excell us in all perfections, would not for
their honours sake, let us surpasse them in any one thing, though
that, and now are much more perfect, and excellent in that than
wee, there is nothing left us, that they excell us not in,
although in our greatest fault (Urania I.iii 375).

But this voice, like that of Urania herself and others in the romance, whose views contain much wisdom and have influence on Pamphilia, is not Pamphilia's own voice, and does not direct her eventual course. Men may be inconstant by nature, and Amphilanthus is a man; yet Pamphilia does not bewail his inconstancy as an unalterable fact of nature but as a fact that can and must be altered for the better. The critique of Amphilanthus implicit in the narrative of the Urania has the force of a call for conversion. If this man (and by implication, mankind) would be truly worthy of the constant Pamphilia he would not cause her to suffer as he does by accepting the double standard.

The sonnet cycle, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, shares with the Urania the project of turning Amphilanthus from the path of inconstancy, and concentrates on a single argument: constancy is not a gender-specific virtue. This project by itself stands on its head the Petrarchan tradition of courtly love poetry, for Amphilanthus, unlike Stella, Caelica, Phyllis, and a hundred others to whom sonnet cycles were addressed, is not an object. He is instead enlisted in Pamphilia's quest for a mutually supported happiness founded upon the relinquishing of objectification, the mode by which oppressive power relations are constructed.

In the first sonnet, Venus adds fire "To burning hearts which she did hold above" (1), an image of exposure. Because the sequence is expressly addressed to Amphilanthus, he is implicated in the crime of exposure and objectification which this public display exemplifies. His heart is not held aloft, but hers is: "Yet since: O me, a lover I have beene" (1). "O mee" publishes her pain to him and reminds him that it is hers and not his, though he is its focus. In the second sonnet she adds that he is not merely the focus of her pain but its producer: his eyes "can triumph in their harms" (1). The third sonnet encapsulates the rhetorical method of the sonnet sequence as a whole:

In the fifth sonnet she presses the argument more forcefully:

In the sixth sonnet Pamphilia declares that grief itself pities her grief, and scorn is ashamed of its scornfulness, "And would give place for joyes delights to flow" (3), while in the first Song a shepherdess decries inconstancy at the foot of a willow, the emblem of betrayed maidens (4).

Up to this point all is familiar enough from traditional literature of unrequited love; but there is a shift in the seventh sonnet, addressed to Cupid, signalling the presence of a "resolv'd soul":

Cupid's famous blindness does not impress her. She admits her powerlessness before his charms but will not allow this as an excuse for not taking responsibility for her own actions. This ethic is the basis for her honor and is the ethic she is recommending to Amphilanthus. In the twenty-first sonnet, she makes this recommendation explicit:

Wroth uses the Petrarchan convention that an act of fealty must be recognized and rewarded by the beloved. Masculine voices use the argument to gain sexual access — the woman, if she consents to "ease his paine," consents to being treated as an objective. Pamphilia's objective, however, is not Amphilanthus (whom she has already attained) but his constancy. She is so faithful that she dreams of him: "my faith is such." The dream image, however, is not the Amphilanthus ("lover of two") of experience but the Neoplatonic potential she sees in him ("true Louer-like").

In the fifth song, in very compact language, Pamphilia explains to her lover that the true end of even such erotic love as theirs is that unity with the divine of which earthly faithfulness is a symbol:

The test, she says, of an unworthy or dishonorable love is its preoccupation with "ends," or objectification. A worthy love seeks only worth. This argument may seem to be undercut by the paranomasia of "Wroth" in "worth"; May Paulissen points out that "worth" was at the time the common pronunciation of "Wroth" (Paulissen 22). If a worthy love seeks only the author, is she not an object? But her self-identification with worth is its own answer to this objection: if, as the Petrarchans have always said, the beloved's superior qualities indicate the immanence of divinity, Mary Wroth expects to be treated accordingly.

Amphilanthus apparently finds the argument unconvincing. The pain and darkness expressed throughout the first part of the sequence continues unrelenting, and if anything becomes more despairing. Pamphilia at length can only reaffirm what action she will unilaterally take, ending the section with defiance in the face of potential loss of identity: "Yet loue I will, till I but ashes proue." She signs this poem with her name, as if it were a pledge, which indeed it is. The probable paranomasia of the stressed "will" for William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, Wroth's lover (Roberts, The Poems 115) unites Wroth with her persona, the "all-loving" Pamphilia, and serves to remind us that their views on love coincide. If the poems ended here, we might conclude that her stance is heroic enough to command attention but is suicidally Griselda-like. If publishing her pain to Amphilanthus has not moved him, why not serve him as he has served her, and give him up? In the Urania Pamphilia replies to this suggestion by pointing out that love is not love when it has only one's own satisfaction in view: "To leave him for being false would shew my love was not for his sake, but mine owne, that because he loved me, I therefore loved him, but when hee leaves I can do so to (400)." She will not objectify, for to do so would deprive her beloved of the only example available to him of a non-objectifying love, and so seal his fate.

Following the signed poem, there is a "turn" or volta in the sequence that resembles a moment in the Urania in which Pamphilia arrives at the entrance to a cave in which Amphilanthus has been imprisoned by a hellish spell. She finds that she cannot rescue him, because the cave's entrance filters out true lovers:

Elaine Beilin notes this passage and rightly finds it significant that Pamphilia "has no choice but to return to court where 'more like a religious, then a court life, she liued some yeares.'" (Redeeming Eve 229).

In like manner the remainder of the sonnet sequence turns inward, with many poems meditative and contemplative in character, or self-exhortatory: "Yet Faith still cries, Love will not falsifie" (32). The echo (and reversal) here of Philip Sidney's "But ah, Desire still cries, give me some food" (AS 72) is instructive: where Astrophil seeks escape from virtue through the voice of personified Desire, Pamphilia seeks to hold to the virtue of constancy through the personified voice of Love. The disorientation of the steadfast lover brought to the edge of despair is expressed by the randomness of the early poems of the second section, and then becomes the focus of a highly organized analysis in a fourteen-sonnet corona, or "crown" of sonnets, in which each poem begins with the last line of the preceeding one. The problem is stated in the first stanza of the first sonnet:

And it is resolved in the eighth:

While the mode of this poem in its setting is soliloquy, the generic pronoun with which it begins reminds us that Pamphilia's advice is not to herself alone but to all. The love that here is "shunned" is the non-objectifying love Pamphilia has herself embraced, and she argues to herself that she must not now waver; at the same time she universalizes the argument, and suggests that the grace of honor is accorded only to perseverence in constancy. Remembering in her crisis that constancy is for everyone, she achieves a spiritualization of love that, unlike the spiritualization of earthly love by Petrarch and so many of his masculine followers, does not depend upon dressing up the beloved as God. Instead, the beloved is pointed the way to become like Pamphilia herself, who in her constancy has found a way to union with the divine. She attains a costly clarity in so doing: she sees she must be prepared to give up her self-interested pursuit of Amphilanthus if her constancy is to remain exemplary.

This clarity stays with Pamphilia as she pens her farewell sonnet. Though it is ostensibly a "farewell to love" addressed to her muse, it is a farewell not to love but to immaturity in love. The poem shifts in address until it ends in advice not only to herself but to Amphilanthus, to whom the sequence as a whole is addressed:

The concluding signature, found in the manuscript, strengthens the address. Only his conversion to the "womanly" virtue of constancy will make Amphilanthus the man of honor Pamphilia knows he can be. Assuming his thoughts are addressed to truth, Lady Mary Wroth's argument that a single standard of virtue precedes gender proves to be an argument from a position of strength.