The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender.

Gary Waller. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. 328 pp. $39.95.

This book, in its author's words, is "unapologetically a book with an agenda, trying to provide a glimpse of past struggles in order to help create another world" -- one in which gender hierarchy and patriarchy are replaced by mutuality, egalitarian social norms and a "revelling in difference" (286). Waller seeks to advance that agenda by constructing a psycho-cultural history of two cousins who were prominent court figures in England and also lovers parents of two illegitimate children, and authors. William Herbert, first Earl of Pembroke, wrote love lyrics and other minor verse in a witty Cavalier mode. Lady Mary Wroth, daughter of Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester and niece of Sir Phillip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, wrote the first sonnet sequence, the first romance, and one of the first dramas by an Englishwoman.

Eschewing what he terms the "somewhat archaic function" of conventional biography (53), Waller nonetheless attends to the rather considerable documentary record -- letters, manuscripts, editions, circumstances of writing and publication -- of his two principals. His primary concern, however, is to construct the "inner life" of Wroth and Herbert as they embody (and in Wroth's case sometimes struggle against) norms of gender assignment and cultural control in early modern England. Drawing psychological and cultural paradigms from Freud, Jessica Benjamin, Nancy Chodorow, Giles Deleuze, Jane Gallop, Philip Greven, Coppelia Kahn, Louise Kaplan, Camille Paglia, Gayle Rubin, Klaus Theweleit and other psychoanalytic, feminist, and cultural critics, he uses those paradigms as grids through which to read the lives and writings of Wroth and Herbert as well as to illuminate the dominant literary convention--Petrarchism--within which both wrote.

Waller's study yields some important insights into Early Modern familial patterns and also into the ways in which Wroth's works encode melancholy, helplessness, passivity, and socially constructed constancy, as well as fantasies of mutuality and empowerment. (He is admittedly less interested in, and pays less attention to, Herbert.) Yet for all Waller's desire to recognize the two cousins as "actual human beings, not just `historical subjects,'" his constant appeal to psychological and cultural paradigms makes that difficult. Though Waller gives some attention to Wroth's resistance to gender norms, his paradigms nevertheless lead him to emphasize how thoroughly her texts embody those constraints. Accordingly, he does not explore the significance of the near-displacement of "Amphilanthus" from the sonnet sequence, with Cupid standing in for the male beloved. Nor, in the romance, does he say enough about the ways in which Urania's experience and views play off against Pamphilia's, nor about the power of the female seer Melissea, nor, especially, about the portrayal of Pamphilia as the most prominent poet and storyteller within the text.

Finally, though I honor Waller's identification of himself as a "feminist man" seeking an appropriate way to write from that position, I think he overdoes the confessional mode and reiterates too insistently the contemporary and personal relevance of his story. It is important to make these points, but not at such length and so often.

Such reservations aside, this is a worthy experiment in writing family history and biography in terms attentive to postmodern psychoanalytic and feminist theory. And it places these Sidney-Herbert cousins in an illuminating perspective.