Women and the Making of Poetry in Ariosto's Orlando furioso (review)

Ita Mac Carthy's book, in her own words, "offers the most comprehensive study to date of Ariosto's women and endeavors to make sense of their place within the poem as a whole" (xi). This is a worthy goal that cannot possibly be accomplished in the roughly 170 pages that Mac Carthy has dedicated to the subject. She does, however, accomplish some other very useful things. The introduction gives an excellent overview of the essential feminist studies of the past few decades, identifying both their positive contributions and their deficiencies. Mac Carthy is wary of Pamela Benson's attempt in The Invention of the Renaissance Woman (1992) to establish definitively Ariosto's perspective toward women. She notes that Valeria Finucci successfully avoids this reductive tendency in her study The Lady Vanishes (1992), but criticizes Finucci's method of imposing a psychoanalytic, ahistorical perspective on the Furioso's sixteenth-century discourses about sexuality and gender. Mac Carthy observes that Deanna Shemek (Ladies Errant, 1998) and Constance Jordan ("Writing Beyond the Querelle: Gender and History in Orlando furioso," 1999) accomplish the task of combining theoretical approaches with consideration of the poem's larger context, but also remarks the incompleteness of their studies; Jordan, for example, examines only three of the poem's episodes in the course of her inquiry.

Many of the problems Mac Carthy identifies in feminist criticism are common to Ariosto scholarship in general, and to her credit, she attempts to avoid them. Her book is relatively wide-ranging: five of the chapters are dedicated to important female characters (Alcina, Angelica, Marfisa, Olimpia and Bradamante). Another focuses not on particular individuals but on geste episodes, which involve knights coming to the aid of relatively minor female characters. This is an important inclusion, as Ariostan scholarship, feminist and otherwise, has traditionally given much attention to characters with "starring" roles in the poem at the expense of those that contribute in a less obvious but equally integral way to its various discourses. The geste episodes, Mac Carthy points out, are given to considerations of virginity, faithfulness and chastity; their female characters embody contemporary preoccupations with female sexuality and its control.

Mac Carthy also refuses to waste time trying to define Ariosto's "true" viewpoint. In her first chapter, which examines the poem's exordia, she establishes the "duplicity" of the poem (xvi)—a perfect term, as it pinpoints the intentionally deceptive and disingenuous qualities of the Furioso and its narrator in a way that words like "ambiguity," "ambivalence" or "contradiction" do not. The reader is led to hope that Mac Carthy will remain alert to this duplicity for the duration of her study, but this is unfortunately not the case. Too often she falls into the trap of accepting the narrator's representation of events at face value, as when she interprets his defense of Ruggiero's attempt to rape Angelica as a profession of the "faultlessness of lust" (35). For Mac Carthy, Ruggiero here typifies "the struggle between sensuality and reason for control of human behaviour without moral judgement" (35). She sees no irony in the incompatibility between Ruggiero's role as dynastic hero and his reprehensible behavior, nor in the contrast between the depictions of Ruggiero's "faultless" lust and that of Alcina, who is shown as malevolent and false.

While Mac Carthy, to her credit, doesn't attempt to impose a unitary perspective on her material, she fails to recognize pertinent connections between the characters and episodes she examines; a thread that runs throughout the poem will be analyzed in one chapter and neglected in another. Mac Carthy is surprisingly inconsistent in her treatment of gender-specific aspects of Orlando furioso, alternating between recognition and disregard of the fact that the Furioso treats male and female characters differently, especially with regard to sexuality. Virtually every female character in the Furioso incorporates, in some way, anxiety about female sexuality, yet while Mac Carthy identifies this concern in the context...