Frances Seymour, Lady Mary Wroth, Sidney family, discursive, dissimulatio, Castiglione, female discourse
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242
first married around half a century earlier.
401
Frances Seymour had enjoyed a meteoric rise in social status, while Lady Mary Wroth, although young, enjoyed the social status and literary prestige of being a member of the Sidney family. While age and social status conferred sufficient autonomy upon these women to allow them to situate themselves socially in interactive, discursive and not wholly private contexts that might be regarded as enabling, the extent to which male poets can be seen to devise for them their roles as critics of courtly and poetic performance is noteworthy. Just as Donne and Googe manipulate their respondents through the deferential technique of dissimulatio, the male role in these poems is often that of choreographing the verse conversation.
Answer-poetry might seem biased towards complaint, protest and contention, and a form of expression that allows the female respondent to assert intellectual superiority, and to triumph over her male interlocutor. This dynamic relationship, however, is often facilitated by male poets in their initiating verses and, even disregarding this, women’s literary voices had already been constructed to a significant extent by those advocates of Castiglione who defined and policed the boundaries of appropriate female discourse. Even where women answer-poets enter into aggressive conflict with their male interlocutors their verses are notable for their adherence to the bounds prescribed by the stereotype of the courtly female respondent. This said, in answers by Elizabeth and Frances Seymour they wrest the subject position from their correspondents in order to appropriate control of their own representation.
Social dynamics were a significant determining factor behind many women author’s freedom to respond. Assertive female respondents tend to be of markedly higher social
for this text are given in parentheses following quotations.
401 May (1999), p.245.
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