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5 Romances That Matter: Lady Mary Wroth's The Countesse of Montgomerie Urania and Erna Brodber's Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home
- University of Virginia Press
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5 Romances That Matter Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countesse of Montgomerie Urania and Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home In García Márquez’s “The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother,” as we have seen, young Eréndira’s emancipation depends primarily on her ability to steer away from past templates. Significantly, the name of Eréndira’s ancestors is “Amadises,” an allusion to the Iberian romance Amadis of Gaul, a product of Berman’s pre-modernity as well as of his first phase of modernity. It was (apparently) written in Portugal by João de Lobeira in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, but when García Rodríguez (o Ordoñez) de Montalvo edited, expanded, and gave it to the printers in the sixteenth century, it became a best seller all over Europe. Like other romances, it owes its popularity to print and to the fact that it was written in vernacular and not in Latin. The plot is, as usual, both intricate and fairly traditional (a knight in shining armor fighting against dangerous monsters and saving the lives of damsels in distress) and displays the conventions and rules of chivalry. The development of romance in the Middle Ages, that is, when Amadis of Gaul was originally conceived, runs more or less parallel with the Crusades and originally derived from the projection of the ideals of the dominant class and gender.1 It is not surprising, therefore, that at its root is a conceptualization of the “other” as a threat to be either annihilated or assimilated. The success of Amadis of Gaul in the sixteenth century is concomitant with the aftermath of the discovery of the New World, the end of the Reconquista, and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal. Early modern romances, therefore, could comfortably rely on the “othering” practices at the basis of the medieval structure. This continuity between North Atlantic premodernity and modernity suggests that something is paradoxically—but strategically—being overlooked when North Atlantic modernity defines itself as the product of a qualitative break and a reorientation toward the 88 Romances That Matter future. The Manicheistic division and binary structuring at its core are in fact not modern at all but rather part of the baggage of “superstitions” usually associated with pre-modern/non-modern Europe.2 In García Márquez’s short story, discussed in the previous chapter, the binarism typical of romance is instead replaced by a more complex vision. Despite the fact that she is heartless, the grandmother is not a character without dimensions, and the text indicates, repeatedly, that her terrible behavior might be caused by a broken heart. Ulises, the knight in shining armor, is characterized by disturbing conquistadorial habits3 and is a multifaceted character: if he is neither terribly brave nor effective to begin with (a trait he might share with those knights who—necessarily—fail some tests in order to learn the code of chivalry and become worthy of it), his sensitivity is unusually complicated by remorse.4 Most important, the quest at the core of the short story is not Ulises’s but Eréndira’s and it is a quest for emancipation, identity, and self-definition. Arguably, when Eréndira runs away at the end of the short story, she also disassociates herself from Ulises and the Amadises and renounces, with García Márquez, both binarism and the redoubtable but strong fascination of traditional romances. With “Innocent Eréndira,” one could argue, García Márquez approximates a different tradition of romance writing that explodes instead of confirming the “self”/“other” dichotomy that supports North Atlantic conceptualizations of modernity. This neglected tradition is the one to which, I would argue, the early modern writer Lady Mary Wroth and the Jamaican sociologist Erna Brodber also belong. At first, the two authors I want to put side by side in this chapter seem to have in common only the fact that they are women. Erna Brodber was born in Jamaica in 1940. She is a poet, a fiction writer, and a respected sociologist and has published both fictional and academic works. Lady Mary Wroth was (probably) born in 1587 and died around 1651. Her home was the Sidneys’ estate, celebrated in Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst,” and she is considered the most accomplished woman writer in English before Aphra Behn.5 She is the author of The Countesse of...