Bellamira’s Trauma: Engaging the Sympathetic Reader in Mary Wroth’s Countess of Montgomery’s Urania

Taking seriously the painful experiences in love confessed by literally scores of characters, primarily women, this essay engages a reading of Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania as trauma fiction, a genre that moves beyond the fictional boundaries of a text to offer receptive readers a sense not only of what trauma is, but of how trauma feels. Rather than an exclusive locus of meaning, reading Wroth’s romance as trauma fiction represents a choice. This essay considers the marks of trauma obscuring the self-narrative and the poem (“As these drops fall”) by Bellamira, whose character conforms to the definition of PTSD by the APA. Marked overlaps in the histories of Bellamira, Pamphilia, and Wroth herself extend the implications of Bellamira’s trauma within and also beyond the romance to allude to contemporary traumas. A reading of Wroth’s romance as trauma fiction acknowledges the seriousness of the work it might accomplish outside its fictional boundaries. Trauma fiction allies itself with the ethos of postcritique studies in this emphasis on the reader’s affective engagement as one source of a text’s meaning and on the work this engagement might perform in the world. [M.L]