SOURCE: “‘Watch, Gaze, and Marke’: The Poetry of Mary Wroth,” in The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender, Wayne State University Press, 1993, pp. 190-219.

In the following essay, Waller contends that Wroth seeks in her sonnet sequences to construct a gender-neutral autonomy, and explores the ways in Wroth fit into, defied, and influenced poetic images of women in the late Renaissance.

The women I have seen in clinical practice who present such images of spatial containment and inner space also have masochistic fantasies in which surrender is called forth by the other's power to penetrate, to know, and to control their desire. Yet in these fantasies we gradually discern a strand of seeking recognition for a force that originates within, a force imbued with the authenticity of inner desire … what is experientially female is the association of desire with a...