『팸필리어가 앰필랜더스에게』에 나타난 메리 로스의 문학적 모델 찾기와 자아형성

Abstract

Mary Wroth’s Search for a Literary Model and Self-Fashioning in Pamphilia to AmphilanthusHong, Ok-SookThis article explores how Mary Wroth established herself as a woman writer in her sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Women in early modern age were often contained to keep silent and prohibited from expressing themselves through writing. Instead of translating male authors' works or focusing on religious writing, Wroth authored works of secular genres, which were shunned by women writers. In terms of the genres she chose and the contents of her works, Wroth owed a lot to her uncle, Philip Sidney. However, she did not just follow her uncle’s path in the process of writing Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. She changed the conventions of the sonnet form by reversing the traditional gender role of the male poet-lover and the female loved. Pamphilia who is the narrator of the sonnet sequence as well as the heroine and sonnet writer of Wroth’s romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, reveals her love through writing sonnets. In spite of Pamphilia’s passive confinement and preference for retreat from public life in the sonnets as revealing Wroth’s vulnerable stand as a female sonnet poet, the fact that Wroth published her sonnets clearly shows her attempt to seek new readers who could sympathize with her. However, her withdrawal of the published romance and sonnet sequence after the male aristocrats’ criticism demonstrates the situation hostile to women writers in early modern England.