Urania, self-identity, speech, voice, self-knowledge, trope, mirroring, subjectivity, Petrarchan

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grapples with her loss of self-identity upon discovering that she is adopted. ⁴⁴⁰ Through her echoed dialogue with herself Urania develops a sense of an autonomous identity, and in effect becomes the parent and author of herself. As Moore writes, “She can know herself by hearing her own speech, linking voice and self-knowledge in ways that parallel the meanings implicit in the trope of mirroring”. ⁴⁴¹ In the Urania then, the trope of mirroring is predisposed to the pursuit of female intellectual inquiry and self-assertion and, by extension, Wroth’s use of the same tropes to abnegate her creative presence in her quarrel with Denny recalls this fact.

A further way in which Wroth manufactures contiguity is also achieved through her echoing of Denny. In the Urania she had deployed sonnets as companions of, or answers to, ones in her uncle’s Astrophil and Stella conspicuously, by substituting the male subjectivity of the Petrarchan lover, Astrophil, for that of the female Petrarchan lover, Urania. In effect, in the Urania she replaces the Petrarchan objectification of the idealised lady with a female counter-perspective, and in her response to Denny does likewise with his antifeminist representation of her. Thus she completes what might be regarded as a feminist project of providing an antidote to the limitations imposed upon female self-representation by both idealised and misogynistic representations of women.

It is also noteworthy that Wroth appropriates from Denny the theme of coitus as combat that originated in the Metamorphoses. She conjoins her verse with Denny’s just as Salmacis wraps herself around, and becomes one with, Hermaphroditus. As mentioned already, there are advantages for her in accepting the charge of hermaphroditism. By imagining Denny as a fellow hermaphrodite she can wage her war on equal terms; he

⁴⁴⁰ Moore (2000), p.137.
⁴⁴¹ Moore (2000), p.138.

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