The labyrinth's enclosure, furthermore, reinforces another trait of Wroth's work - what Jeffrey Masten calls "a movement which is relentlessly private."ŠThis reading, however, overlooks the mode's simultaneously public and private nature, on the one hand exaggerating the role of public display, and on the other hand ignoring the ingenious paths women poets found around injunctions against public speech.ŠFar from denying female subjectivity, Wroth depicts a female sense of self through the labyrinth - presenting a self that is isolated, enclosed, difficult, and complex.ŠWroth's labyrinth derives from three sources familiar to English Renaissance readers - classical descriptions, Petrarchan poetry, and Protestant theology. A woman poet whose family heritage included classical reading, artistic accomplishment, Petrarchism, and Protestantism, but whose life and choice of genres transgressed Renaissance norms for female behavior, Wroth implicitly appealed to the labyrinth's other contexts for meaning and authority.
Seen from inside, the labyrinth confuses the wanderer,(12) as it does Pamphilia in Wroth's work. Seen from outside, the perspective the reader takes, the labyrinth reveals its complexity and artistry.(13) Labyrinthine images thus amaze and please.
Related to complexity, Petrarch's labyrinths provided Wroth a model for symbolizing difficult self-knowledge and for creating labyrinthine style. ŠWroth's labyrinth and her themes of blindness and lost self-knowledge recall Petrarch and manifest Pamphilia's complex subjectivity as a maze of self.
From sermons and emblems, Wroth also might have known the labyrinth as symbolizing Protestant inwardness and emphasizing both the necessity and difficulty of self-analysis.ŠFrances Quarles's emblem of a wanderer guided by "a winged figure, identified as Divine Love, who directs man's way."(19) This figure strongly echoes Wroth's "thred of love" in her corona's labyrinth. Š The thread, representing precepts of faith, guides Christians through what Diehl calls "the subjectivity of self and the endless maze of consciousness."(20) In Diehl's view, Protestant emphasis on humanity's fallen senses makes the labyrinth a spiritual knot whose serpentine coils complicate the possibility of self-knowledge.(21) Wroth probably also drew on more general Protestant attitudes to inwardness; both Catholic and Protestant sources argued the necessity of self-knowledge in contrast to curious study of nature, often symbolized by knowledge of the stars.(22) Her uncle, furthermore, associated the labyrinth with the poet's ethical role as guide.(23) Wroth's claim in the corona poem 81 that love helps us see "hidenest thoughts" suggests that Pamphilia's journey in the labyrinth at least in part transcends the difficulty of achieving self-knowledge (line 12).ŠSimilarly, the labyrinth's enclosure evokes the motif of entrapment, manifested in Ovid and in Petrarch and implied in the Protestant soul entrapped in a desirous body.
Thus, both Petrarch's and Wroth's labyrinths represent, paradoxically, human frailty and artistic power, perplexity and the power to represent perplexity.ŠThe dream vision's isolation introduces an element of Wroth's sequence related to the labyrinth - intense enclosure. The absent beloved is of course a central topic of Petrarchism, but the physical beloved, conventionally depicted in ways explored by many scholars, appears as image, imagined or remembered. Wroth's absent beloved occupies a more substantial than usual gap, as noted earlier. He never appears descriptively, as in the blazons of male sonneteers, a kind of poem that clearly can be adapted to the female poet's purposes.(25) Nor does Wroth's beloved become narrative presence, punning name, visual icon. This absence further isolates and encloses Pamphilia in her own complexity.
Finally, Wroth's labyrinth of style illuminates a fertile contradiction between Renaissance theology and cultural constraints on women. While the culture controlled and inhibited a woman's sense of self by defining her as owned by another and prohibiting her access to "public language" - a primary aspect of subjectivity as Catherine Belsey, Stephen Greenblatt, and others have shown(33) - self-knowledge is urged as a theological necessity. A theology of self-knowledge, further, implies the existence and value of a self. A woman creating a poetic labyrinth in a Petrarchan sonnet sequence speaks from the very center of this contradiction, transforming public self-analysis - and erotic desire - into a spiritually respectable search for self-knowledge. Wroth's labyrinthine style dramatizes this search, engaging her reader in the very process she represents in this difficult but accomplished work of art.