Introduction: intersections of race and sexuality

To extend the previous chapter's discussion of representations of female same-sex intimacy in early modern texts, this chapter focuses on the public status of bonds between women in the work of Lady Mary Wroth. While I have discussed drama in the last three chapters, by shifting genres I hope to show that the definitional struggle over intimacy was carried out in multiple literary venues in the period. Wroth's prose romance and verse are not literary in the same way as the period's commercial drama, though the dramatists themselves hardly agreed on the literariness of plays. Nevertheless, Wroth's texts and the dramatic texts I discussed in previous chapters share many of the same concerns about relationality. I hope that the scope of my analysis will encourage Renaissance scholars to develop their own rubrics through which they might assemble unexpected canons, break down traditional generic boundaries, and bring women writers into further dialogue with male-dominated milieux of literary production, such as the commercial theatre.

Several affective economies structure Wroth's work, but the relationship between Pamphilia and Amphilanthus seems to be the organizing principle of both the prose romance The Countess of Montgomery's Urania and the sonnet sequence that bears their names. Yet the centrality of this relationship is complicated by the significance Wroth invests in her texts’ female-female relations, which interact with the cross-gendered bond of Pamphilia and Amphilanthus and other heteroerotic bonds. Wroth repeatedly returns to the problem of publicizing intimate bonds that are based on private, interiorized desire. This psychic depth model's near-exclusive control over intimacy in Wroth's work is also exclusionary. As I will show in this chapter, homoerotic and heteroerotic bonds do not achieve representational parity despite both being underwritten by interiorized desire in her work. In fact, the psychic depth model inhibits the achievement of parity. Though her sonnet sequence and prose romance are different as narratives, the teleology structuring both erases, appropriates, and transforms female-female bonds in order to advance the public status of marriage and heterosexual coupling.