Wroth's Clause

I. "And"

Finishing The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania is a strange experience: "Pamphilia is the Queene of all content; Amphilanthus joying worthily in her; And [.]"¹ The most apparent source of this strangeness—because it introduces blank space rather than a continuative clause—is "the dangling 'And'" with which the volume ends.² Although incompletion is not unfamiliar to the Sidney circle, the kind of work performed by this coordinating conjunction is unique. While the midsentence break of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia abandons its reader in the midst of a fight and suspends this reader at a moment in which historical mortality meets narrative danger, Lady Mary Wroth's "And" propels her narrative beyond the centripetal tension of its estranged central couple.³ Contentment achieved, we might expect—as Maureen Quilligan has observed—a period of silence to ensue.⁴ The 1621 Folio of the Arcadia (published the same year as The First Part of the Urania) tells us that "we must be content to suffer" Sidney's abbreviated sentence, the "unfortunate maim" of his midsentence break.⁵ It proceeds, however, by introducing William Alexander's bridge narrative, an attempt to suture that "maim" with words. Wroth's "And," her own exposed articulus or "joint," also renounces the silence of contentment.⁶

"And" exceeds the finality of the union between Pamphilia and Amphilanthus and is thus also familiar as a version of Spenserian endlessness. If multiple narrative threads push the union of Florimell and Marinell beyond the bounds of book 4 of the Faerie Queene, Wroth's multiplying narrative threads could exhaust themselves in this reunion.⁷ The narrative emphatically insists "now all is finished," but the succeeding clauses of "still continuing . . . pleasure" turn demonstrative closure into lingering and straggling extenuation (U, 661).⁸ At least one of The First Part's early readers, completing this final sentence by hand, detailing marriage and childbirth in just a few more, thought that Pamphilia's contentment was stronger than Wroth's syntactical addition. "So my history has an End. Finis," this version concludes.⁹ Wroth is not—as Spenser is—playing the part of self-conscious romance narrator keeping track of too many story lines. The kind of endlessness that the "dangling 'And'" points to is stylistic—what the editors of The Second Part describe as Wroth's "trailing sequence of full or partially reduced clauses strung together with coordinating conjunctions"—rather than narrative—the loose ends of plot.¹⁰ Wroth's stylistic endlessness is, in fact, not only proleptic of the narratives of separation and estrangement that occupy The Second Part. Stylistic endlessness is also generative of plot. Wroth's clausal style produces "And [.]" as an indication that, in spite of all professions of "nothing amisse" in an apparent kingdom of contentment, something is missing (U, 661).

Wroth's "And" pulls together Sidneian incompletion and Spenserian endlessness in a break that points to its own mending as superfluous continuation. ¹¹ "And" also suggests that Wroth's prose style exerts a kind of control over her narrative: "And" introduces yet another additive clause of the sort so characteristic of Wroth's style and, in doing so, unravels narrative closure. Syntactically, as a coordinating conjunction, "And" does not indicate an adversative turn by the errant Amphilanthus—as we might expect from "But." Nor does it—as "Although" would—anticipate a concessive exception to Pamphilia's contentment. It is in this purely additive quality, the rejection of syntactical logic in favor of syntactically organized excess, that the proliferation of Wroth's prose comes closest to Patricia Parker's early description of "dilation" as an "expansion, or dispersal in space but also a postponement in time," a kind of copia associated with both garrulity and female corporeality.¹² Parker's account understands "dilation" as always "circumscribed finally by a telos," an end that she characterizes as "mastery" and—in an image that couples narrative control with punctuation—the "point."¹³ In addition to the finalizing revision of "So my history has an End. Finis," Susan Light records two instances in which o wners of Wroth's romance either placed a...