Mary Wroth, Edward Denny, Baron of Waltham, libel, Urania, James Hay, Earl of Carlisle, Seralius, adultery, 1621, Sir Philip Sidney
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golden mean prescribes a formula for women’s social interaction which, through its paradoxical and circular logic, enables him to narrow and problematise ad infinitum the limits of the mean from within which female speech maintains its propriety. Lady Mary Wroth, in a response to a libel from Edward Denny, Baron of Waltham, appropriates and exploits precisely the rhetorical dilemma posed for female self-representation by this edict and presents a strategy for re-seizing autonomy of self-expression from within the margins of the mean. Late in 1621 Wroth, niece of Sir Philip Sidney, became involved in a heated exchange of libel with Denny. Her caustic rebuke to his libellous attack is hardly what Guazzo had in mind, but she nonetheless crafts a response that manipulates the tensions between the impropriety of assertive social interaction and the propriety of social passivity that are inherent in the paradoxical courtly mean of female conduct, and fashions out of them a stinging rebuttal that simultaneously abnegates its stake in original literary creativity. Testimony to her achievement in doing this are the numerous and slippery readings to which her poem lends itself, which show her to be both self-effacing and unrepentantly unleashing an aggressively forthright rebuke simultaneously.
In his libel Denny accused Wroth of having satirised his family in a section of her controversial prose romance, The Countesse of Montgomerie’s Urania, that he considered with justification to allude to his brutal treatment of his daughter, Honoria, following a supposed act of adultery, committed against her Scottish husband, James Hay, Earl of Carlisle. Wroth appeared to infer that Denny’s cruelty was the cause of his daughter’s premature death and, writing under the name of the character representing him in the Urania, “the father-in-law of Seralius”, Denny retaliated with vehemently misogynist accusations that leave the reader in little doubt about his feelings regarding unrestrained female sexuality. Wroth returned Denny’s allegations in kind, matching them point for
Daniell (London and New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1989), p.3.
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