Revisioning: Mary Wroth's challenge to the patriarchal utopias of male writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

In Urania, Mary Wroth creates a utopian community where her female characters possess a freedom of behavior and thought for which there are no parallels in the utopian prose fiction of male writers of the English Renaissance. These writers—Bacon, Godwin, Neville, Sidney, and More—model their ideal communities upon the patriarchal family. To do otherwise is unthinkable. Wroth, however, imagines a society based upon more egalitarian relationships between the sexes, permitting women to exercise greater autonomy than was enjoyed by women in the male writers' utopias or by Wroth herself.; Wroth wrote in a time when there was a stigma attached to publishing that could not be easily ignored. Male writers who published often risked their reputations. If the writer were also female, public censure became more scathing. The triune virtues of chastity, silence, and obedience bounded women's lives. Publishing violated all three strictures, thus those women who dared to challenge this expectation paid dearly for their temerity.; This Wroth discovered all too painfully. When she shared her writing only within a select circle, she was praised and encouraged through comparisons with her illustrious uncle and aunt. The moment she dared to emulate them in an additional manner, by actually publishing, she was denounced as unwomanly and publicly ridiculed. Humiliated, Wroth never again attempted to publish.; Wroth chafed against the limitations imposed upon her by her gender; in the end, she was unable to overcome them. However, in her utopian romance, she was able to challenge the restrictions placed on women's roles by “revisioning” them. She created a world in which her female characters act, speak, and love with a freedom denied her. They are effective leaders, counselors, scholars, and poets, serving as models of what women can become when given intellectual, social, and sexual liberty. Separate standards of behavior for men and women are minimized as the females in her idyllic world are not enjoined to be only “chaste, silent, and obedient.” Because of this “revisioning” of women's roles, her Urania can be described as truly “utopian”.