2022 Volume 2022 Issue 32 Pages 82-94
This article chiefly deals with Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and discusses the obvious characteristics of them through analyzing their lives, education, court experiences and the patriarchal social system of the period in which Mary Wroth lived.
Sidney created and portrayed his “arcadia” by way of the manneristic style of writing, reflecting his ways of thinking after retiring from the Elizabethan court by the order of Elizabeth I and being forced to live at Wilton House, the house of the family his sister married into. His tactics in writing include the manneristic ways of writing, the serpentine ways of lines, and deconstructing the harmonious world of perfect concord reflecting the Renaissance world.
As she was Sidney’s niece, Wroth tried to rewrite her uncle’s works from the female point of view as a woman living under the 17th century patriarchal English society. Her tactics is to make use of the baroque techniques of confusion, conversion, contradiction and the images of labyrinth.
