From Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: 2 *** by Lady Mary Wroth

Lady Mary Wroth’s short Biography:

She was the first one woman in England that wrote sonnet and work as an original prose fiction. Wroth wasn’t scared to write poems about love and romances on the sixteenth century that it wasn’t usual to write about this giving the repression of society and women that used to write during this century wrote about different genres because they were scared of the consequences that society could bring to them.do or talk about them. Ben Jonson was an important poet of the sixteenth century and he liked a lot her sonnets and poems. She adopted the Petrarchan sonnet sequence and gave women a voice through her poems as well.

Sonnet:

From Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: 2

Lady Mary Wroth’s sonnet Pamphilia to Amphilanthus emphasizes the levels of love, desire and passion through a perspective of a female character writing the opposite sonnets regarding the male voice that we can see in most of the sonnets. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus explores women being dynamic and having full autonomy giving a voice for women, criticizing the way that they were treated and questioning their desire at that age. She wrote this poem at a time that women were oppressed by society. Wroth’s poem explores the lack of freedom and the lack of autonomy that Pamphilia, her main character had. The poem illustrates the impact and importance of freedom for women, the author represents that trough Pamphilia. She was a prisoner that has a lot of desire and love and her captor was mean and unfriendly. Pamphilia had an allusion about love that was greater than her but at the same time she had a negative response regarding the power of love. Through a fictional point of view Pamphilia has autonomy of herself (strong desire that she had) due the fact that women were property of their husbands and single women had to devote their lives for the Church following every single step regarding religion and the rules of the Church.