The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (review)

Poetry in Italian literature has long been the favoured genre of writers and scholars alike. While many of the strongest voices of the lyrical tradition followed Petrarch in his praise of the ethereal, captivating, if fragmented, beauty of the beloved, Patrizia Bettella has rightfully turned her attention to the rather neglected underbelly of woman's role in Italian poetry: the depiction of female ugliness. This careful study has merit because it enriches our understanding of the perception of woman as an aesthetic object in male discourse, and more importantly because it provides a thorough demonstration of the evolving misogynist portrayals of women in poetry. Bettella combines a feminist conviction that texts 'presenting woman as marked by various degrees and forms of physical ugliness or evil are by definition misogynist' with a rhetorical analysis of abundant examples of verse. She weaves frequent reference to secondary material throughout, which works well to frame her own interpretations, but, at the same time, a more conscientious use of this material would have allowed her own voice to sound out more clearly.

Divided according to poetic shifts in the early Middle Ages, the trecento and quattrocento, the Renaissance, and finally the baroque, a straightforward diachronic structure effectively delineates specific characteristics of female ugliness: for example, in the medieval comic realism used to identify the old hag; the transgressive roles of the guardian, slanderer, and witch; the Renaissance mock encomia of the peasant; and the baroque praise of ugliness through conceits and witticism. What emerges is a rich overview of the changing perception of female ugliness. And though the first chapter provides the historical foundation for misogyny and the common disparagement of the older woman as an old, smelly hag (at age forty-seven, as one poet clarifies), it is in the ensuing chapters that the solid descriptive analysis leads to insightful discussions of ugliness. Traditionally masculine acts, such as looking, speaking, or seducing, are linked to physical and moral deviancy in woman. The new combination of the high- and low-poetic canon of beauty in the Renaissance gives rise to mockery. Or, as in the final chapter, praise even of blackness (nera sì, ma se' bella) challenges classical categories of fair beauty but all the while draws attention to the poets' unique abilities to speak of attractiveness in unusual faces. In short, there is a wealth to be discovered in this book.

I find, nonetheless, that it could have been an even stronger work had it provided greater explanation of the cultural impetuses behind the different versions of the ugly woman. While Bettella does argue that a general atmosphere of misogyny is partly responsible for the presentation of female ugliness, little else suggests what may have also been shaping the specific nuances of these verses. She analyses transgressive roles, but not why they seem to be threatening, primarily in the Middle Ages. The natural world is invoked for comparison in Renaissance paradoxical praise with only the suggestion that it served as 'a negative pole ... to ... the aesthetic values of hegemonic culture.' In the chapter on the baroque, however, which deals with the praise of physical strangeness as beautiful, much time is spent explaining why this praise is motivated less by a growing appreciation of the realistic variety of woman than by anti-Petrarchism and the joy of poetic lusus. Perhaps misogyny was taken too easily as an umbrella for the obvious invectives of earlier work. Last, given that the majority of Bettella's examples are from minor, occasionally anonymous sources, their impact still needs to be addressed so that the resonance these works may have had with the literary community and other circles may be properly gauged.