Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture

15. Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo (With a Brief Excursus on Cecco d’Ascoli)

c h a p t e r 1 5 Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo (With a Brief Excursus on Cecco d’Ascoli) D ante’s poetic apprenticeship, both formal and ideological, occurred while he was a writer of lyric poems. The ninety or so lyrics that Dante wrote harbor the wellsprings of his ideological convictions ,1 with the result that we must turn to these poems to analyze the paths that Dante took to becoming the poet of the Commedia. The lyrics contain implicit and at times explicit debates on cultural and societal issues of great immediacy for Dante’s mercantile audience: issues such as the nature of chivalry and nobility, the desire for wealth and its relationship to avarice, the limits and constraints of political loyalty, and—intertwined with everything else—the role of women and implicitly the construction of gender. I believe that the key to approaching the construction of gender in the authors of the early Italian tradition is the ambivalence they display in their treatments of love and desire.2 This ambivalence is manifested in the competing ideological systems to which they subscribe : on the one hand, they subscribe to the ideology of courtly love, and, on the other, to an often violently anti-courtly ideology that permeates their moralistic poetry. These two ideologies are both present in Dante’s lyrics, where they underwrite very different attitudes toward women and toward gender. Courtliness, the set of values associated with what Dante and his peers call cortesia, is by definition a gendered issue, since its logic is constructed around a male/female binary. In the courtly lyric, the male lover/poet voices his aspiration to possess the unattainable perfection that the lady represents. On the other side of this binary stands the courtly lady, who represents, embodies, serves as goal and point of reference, but does not, in the courtly lyric, do, act, or speak. Dante Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture 334 started life as a courtly poet; he ended life as the author of the Commedia , a text in which women act, speak, and possess moral agency. How do we account for Dante’s development from a courtly poet into the poet of the Commedia, that is, into a poet who assigns moral agency to all human beings, including women? The traces of this evolution, I argue, are to be found in Dante’s lyrics. In this study I will sketch the development of Dante’s thinking about gender, using three poems as developmental signposts: an early sonnet, Sonar bracchetti, and two mature canzoni, Poscia ch’Amor and Doglia mi reca. We will proceed chronologically and begin with Sonar bracchetti, written most likely when Dante was in his early twenties. This sonnet interests me because it offers such a clear vision of the world as polarized and dichotomized by gender; indeed, female and male serve as the poles around which two totally divergent ideologies crystallize. Sonar bracchetti takes off with a verbal explosion of enormous vitality , presenting a male world of action through seven infinitives that evoke hunting as a swirl of activity: Sonar bracchetti, e cacciatori aizzare, lepri levare, ed isgridar le genti, e di guinzagli uscir veltri correnti, per belle piagge volgere e imboccare . . . (Sonar bracchetti, 1–4) Baying of hounds, hunters goading them on, hares leaping from cover, shouting people, swift greyhounds slipping the leash, dashing about through beautiful meadows and snatching prey . . . All this—the baying hounds, pursuing hunters, leaping hares, screaming crowds, greyhounds slipping their leashes to turn and grasp their prey—all this, declares the poet, must delight a heart that is free and unburdened by love: ‘‘assai credo che deggia dilettare / libero core e van d’intendimenti!’’ (such things must greatly delight, I think, a heart that is free and empty of amorous understandings) (Sonar bracchetti, 5–6). Love and its stylized lexicon (‘‘core,’’ ‘‘intendimenti’’) enter this poem as that which the hunt is not, for the hunt and the world it stands for can be enjoyed only by one who possesses a ‘‘libero core’’—a free heart. Love is thus introduced in opposition to the male world of action that has been sketched in the opening verses. Love is that which could transform someone free and unburdened into someone unfree and Sotto benda: Gender in the Lyrics of Dante and Guittone d’Arezzo 335...