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Female Silence in Wroth's Urania Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2010, vol. 5 “[T]he art to desifer the true Caracter of Constancy”: Female Silence in Wroth’s Urania Elisa Oh n a ca.1617 portrait, Queen Anna of Denmark displays three jewels on Iher ruff that form letter ciphers.1 They refer indirectly to specific people and ideas that inform this representation of her identity: a crowned “S” stands for her mother, Sophia of Mecklenberg; a crowned “C” surround- ing a “4” indicates her brother, Christian IV of Denmark; and the “IHS” monogram encodes her rumored Catholic sympathies.2 At first glance, these symbols do not convey their precise familial and ideological allusions, but they do immediately proclaim the existence of a hidden significance that, if known, would enrich the representation of the queen’s interiority. If the viewers are able to decipher the jewels’ encoded meanings, as they are prompted to do by the ciphers’ prominent display, then the portrait reveals new dimensions of the queen’s otherwise invisible loyalties and subjectivity. For instance, we might note that she chose to align herself more clearly with her Danish royal heritage than with her husband, James I, though she also wears a crossbow jewel in her hair that he gave her as a gift early in his reign.3 Using the same representational pattern as these multivalent letter ciphers—moving first toward secrecy and then toward revelation—Lady Mary Wroth describes intentional female silence in The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, Part I (1621) and Part II. Female charac- ters who choose to be silent in place of expected speech advertise the hid- den existence of a complex gendered subject position, and, although their silences initially conceal their secret thoughts, the character herself or the 45 EMW_2010.indb 45 7/15/10 7:57 AM 46 EMWJ 2010, vol. 5 Elisa Oh omniscient narrator eventually reveals the key information to deciphering this “code.”4 Male silences in Wroth’s romance are comparatively straightforward and unconcerned with concealment: male characters generally fall silent because of overwhelming emotion, such as sorrow or erotic anxiety in the presence of a potentially unreceptive beloved.5 Wroth’s female silences, however, comprise a more diverse nonverbal “vocabulary” or gendered sig- nifying system to represent noble female subjectivity. This essay contends that the intentional female silences in Wroth’s Urania signify interiority in many of the same ways that early modern letter ciphers do and that Wroth’s detailed exploration of nonverbal self-representation expands existing discourses of feminine virtue and silence. The first important simi- larity between Wroth’s female silences and contemporary material ciphers is that they are intentionally assumed behaviors or objects of artifice meant to represent an abstract component of the subject’s identity. Some aspects of that identity will be reassuringly conventional. Just as Queen Anna’s elaborate jeweled ciphers reinforce traditional class and gender ideologies of her queen consort identity, noble female characters in Wroth’s work who “put on” silence in place of expected speech reproduce a behavior frequently prescribed as one of the most important socially enhancing feminine graces for early modern women. My comparison between ciphers and female silences takes quite literally the much repeated early modern precept that “silence is the best ornament of a woman.”6 According to this popular construction, a woman can apparently exercise the highly intentional self- fashioning agency of putting on and taking off her silence—like a jeweled ornament—at will. A second point of comparison exists in the way both the letter ciphers and Wroth’s female silences initially move toward secrecy by hiding an embedded meaning behind a tantalizing but not immediately penetrable surface. However, both ciphers and silences ultimately turn toward revela- tion by inviting the viewer to decipher the meanings hidden by the evoca- tive surface puzzle. Third, the hidden meanings of ciphers and silences can be multiple, contradictory, subversive, and unstable. We will see below how a variety of personal and political references could be simultaneously kept “in play” by a letter cipher worn by Sir Philip Sidney and by female silences EMW_2010.indb 46 7/15/10 7:57 AM “[T]he art to desifer the true Caracter of Constancy” 47 in Wroth’s romance. When Wroth represents women choosing not to speak, she incorporates elements of the dominant early modern discourse of feminine silence as chaste, obedient virtue, but she is also clearly in con- stant, creative dialogue with it. While embracing many conservative gender values, her female silences also sustain more dissident meanings, such as erotic love, resistance to patriarchal authority, and righteous anger. Finally, ciphers and silences are meant to be read and understood after the proper investment of intellectual effort. Every cipher and silence has a special key to decode its meaning, and, rather than guard this specialized additional knowledge, Wroth teaches her audience how to parse the many meanings embedded in her female characters’ silences. The effect of Wroth’s explana- tion of all the silences is didactic and inclusive: she inducts us into a coterie of understanding readers. Subjectivity and Silence The early modern feminine subject as it is represented through inten- tional silences in Wroth’s Urania exists at the intersection of individual and social constructions of the term “subject,” in that it is both a site of unique thought and a product of external social and cultural forces.7 The feminine subject’s social contingency and simultaneous claims to self-fash- ioning agency appear when Wroth’s female characters recognize the code of silence as part of the gender ideology that women are subject to, and then, asserting an independent subject position apart from the dominant discourse, intentionally use silences as part of their signifying repertoire. In order to examine that repertoire, which is both linguistic and nonlinguistic, I propose to follow Louis Montrose’s interdisciplinary premise of studying both texts and images.8 That is, I draw an explicit parallel between the cultural work performed by objects such as cipher jewels, embroidery pat- terns, heraldric imprese, masque “hieroglyphics,” unique scribal signatures, and the seemingly cryptic but ultimately decipherable female silences in Wroth’s romance texts. My conclusions are also informed by Patricia Fumerton’s work on social ornamentation and the aristocratic subject when she asserts that “[w]hat the ornament is expressive of cannot be seen: the overall order or EMW_2010.indb 47 7/15/10 7:57 AM 48 EMWJ 2010, vol. 5 Elisa Oh cosmos that the wearer inhabits (e.g., the upper class). Decoration, in other words, allegorizes or alludes to a world of cultural value that could not otherwise be represented except by means of oblique, allusive adornment.”9 If “ornament” and “Decoration” were replaced with “silence,” this assertion would articulate my claim that female silences in the Urania function as a kind of social ornament or intentionally donned symbolic “clothing” or veil- ing code to represent an otherwise intangible interiority and social identity. Wroth’s explanations of these silences attempt to induct the reader into her literary, upper-class “cosmos.”10 However, Fumerton posits that this early modern inner “self ” required a perpetual retreat into ever deeper lay- ers of privacy: “there never could be any final moment of privacy. If ‘privacy’ were ever achieved, then the need for further privacy would immediately arise.”11 By contrast, in Wroth’s romance intentional female silences cre- ate the existence of a secret inner space of subjectivity and then reveal the contents of that private space in the words of the omniscient narrator or the silent woman herself. The works of Mary Wroth have proved to be fertile ground for criti- cal investigation of the early modern feminine subject. Many critics have considered Wroth’s representations of female subjects as “shadows” of her own autobiographical experiences and her web of relationships within the Sidney family.12 Others, like Jeffrey Masten, have located feminine subjectivity in characters’ acts of privacy, withdrawal, and solitude.13 A more recent development in critical studies of Wroth turns outward from the exclusively “private” self to examine the constructions of the politi- cal subject in the Urania.14 As in the case of other early women writers, much Wroth criticism celebrates her literary production of diverse female characters and representations of gendered subjectivity in terms of a voice metaphor. Most of these studies reproduce Catherine Belsey’s terminology of the “speaking subject” to discuss Wroth herself as well as her characters, predicating the existence of feminine subjectivity and discursive agency on the production of audible, linguistic self-expression. One representative example appears in the work of Naomi J. Miller: Mary Wroth claims a position of agency as a speaking subject who cannot be silenced. Wroth moves beyond the Petrarchan trope EMW_2010.indb 48 7/15/10 7:57 AM “[T]he art to desifer the true Caracter of Constancy” 49 of the female beloved as a voiceless object of desire to indicate that Pamphilia’s emergent sense of self is predicated upon her growing ability to fashion a voice for her desire. Mary Wroth’s narrative of “the woman’s part” in The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania conveys the potential for women . to find not one but many voices of their own.15 I propose a revision of the governing theoretical terminology of the “speaking voice,” which takes for granted that early modern women aspired to have the same audible, public voice valued by twentieth-century femi- nists.16 The metaphor of “being silenced” is indeed a potent representation of patriarchal restrictions on women’s social, sexual, and intellectual iden- tities in any age.
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