Dark Impersonations: Complexional Indeterminacy in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

This essay extends one of the key arguments in Kim F. Hall’s pioneering work of feminist critical race studies, Things of Darkness (1995), by offering a reading of Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) that attends to the sonnet sequence’s intersecting discourses of gender and race. Hall’s discussion of Wroth focuses mainly on the Urania, interpreting Queen Pamphilia as a binary-transcending figure who rejects ascriptions of both Blackness and Whiteness. Testing this argument for the first time against Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, I propose that the sequence’s incessant alternation between images of fairness and darkness—what I call its complexional indeterminacy—is a key pillar of Pamphilia’s “constant Art,” and thus of her virtuous self-fashioning. Insofar as Wroth carefully applies the hues of difference she uses to paint Pamphilia’s subjectivity, however, the work offers only a partial model for how feminist critical race scholars can eschew binary thinking to resist forms of intersectional discrimination. [E.R.]