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 this essay, Waller presents an overview of the traditions, influences, and seventeenth-century gender roles that shaped Wroth's poetry.

Despite their apparent obviousness, the words we use to describe gender assignments are sites of continual struggle. "Man" and "woman" are sliding, not stable, signifiers. Nor are the material practices that embody our lived sexual roles adequately descibed by the tragic limitations of such binarism. New forms of gender assignment emerge; new patterns of what we persist in calling "masculinity" and "femininity" are engendered. Representations never fully correspond to lived experiences, yet experiences are given form only by means of their representations. No literary text attempting to articulate gendered experiences is, therefore, ever "merely" literary; inevitably part...