female, sensuality, masculine, reason, impropriety, libelling, Ovid, Narcissus, Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, deviant, archetype, satirist
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276
possesses the female quality of sensuality rather then the masculine one of reason and is therefore an “hirmophradite in sense”. This is a neat, economical means of overcoming the impropriety of a woman libelling a man. Furthermore, just as masculine traits remain predominant in Ovid’s Narcissus, the gender specificity of the abuse exchanged here means that both protagonists remain fixed within their original gender categories. Thus, Wroth can not escape the fact that her equivalent in the Narcissus story is Salmacis, and that she has chosen to identify herself with a female rapist. As in the case of Margaret Douglas and Thomas Howard’s modelling of their exchange upon Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (see p.245), or that of Whitney’s abandoning reliance upon her friends in order to assume the mantle of an independent female satirist, Wroth is only able to find discursive space for herself by identification with a lascivious or deviant archetype. It might be said, however, by way of analogy with the fate of Narcissus at the hands of Salmacis that, figuratively speaking, Denny’s libel becomes sandwiched or folded voluminously between the Urania and Wroth’s answer-poem. His masculine aggression becomes walled in on both sides and imprisoned by Wroth’s initial objectification of him as the “father-in-law of Seralius” and her subsequent reflected objectification of him as hermaphrodite.
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