"Componimento mio anch'essa": Annibale Guasco's Ragionamento a Donna Lavinia sua figliuola

Annibale Guasco's Ragionamento (1586) offers a didactic counterpoint to Baldassarre Castiglione's Cortegiano, in reconstructing his daughter Lavinia's upbringing as a prospective lady-in-waiting and in laying out the rules of conduct that will dictate her tenure at the Savoia court. Drawing from Castiglione's male prototype as well as from Stefano Guazzo's Civil conversazione and Sperone Speroni's Dialogo della cura familiare, Guasco's treatise prescribes the qualities and talents a young patrician woman has to master in order to navigate the princely court in Turin. In its meticulous account of the education of a dama-to-be, the text displays the obsessive training Guasco imposed on his daughter. By devising such a rigid teaching process, patriarchal discourse enforces a rhetoric of masochistic acceptance. Since her childhood, Lavinia is constantly measured against standards of excellence and subjected to a painstaking discipline, with Foucaldian overtones: her learning takes place under the unremitting control of male instructors and requires from her exceptional endurance. The entanglement of pedagogical techniques, fatherly pressures, and sense of guilt fashions an effective strategy of indoctrination. But even though Lavinia deserves high praise for her dutiful acceptance of this strict regimen, the celebration of her virtues ultimately extols her father-creator. By enacting the Oedipus complex, Guasco, furthermore, erases the mother figure from the picture and represents himself as the mighty yet caring master of his daughter's destiny. [End Page S-224]

If, as Vittorio Cian has remarked, in Baldassarre Castiglione's Libro del cortegiano, the expression "formar con parole" derives from Cicero's oratione fingere,¹ it is in the discourse on women that this syntagm carries its full rhetorical force. The donna eccellente sketched in the Cortegiano is, in fact, a linguistic construct, a figment of male imagination. As the object of a verbal dispute, this exemplary woman is not endowed with subjectivity, as the courtier himself is occasionally afforded. Even in terms of syntax, she is merely the product of a prosthetic activity on the part of her creators.

In Castiglione's narrative, Giuliano de' Medici (the "Magnifico Juliano") delivers an apologia for women, having been recognized as their patron and champion.² Unable to invoke any authentic example of a "Donna di Palazzo," he resorts to invention.³ Giuliano's proposal, however, is attacked by the misogynists of the group for its hyperbolic, numerous "virtú," deemed "impossibili e sopranaturali."⁴ As Giuliano argues, any criticism of the abstract nature of this feminine archetype could also be leveled against its male counterpart. Still, these allegations appear to wear him down, weakening his faith in his project and preventing him from asserting the autonomy of this figure from his demiurgic gesture. Thus, contrary to the formula used to describe the courtier's emulation of living models—which relied on the naturalist analogy of the bee ("come la pecchia ne' verdi prati sempre tra l'erbe va carpendo i fiori, cosí il nostro Cortegiano averà da rubare questa grazia da que' che a lui parerà che la tenghino, e da ciascun quella parte che piú sarà laudevole"⁵)—in this case, the selection and assembling process through which the "donna di palazzo" takes shape evokes a dangerous precedent. Giuliano jokes that, if the court lady that he is "forming in words" should be too detached from reality, he will at least indulge in a personal fantasy: "dirò di questa Donna eccellente come io la vorrei; e formata ch'io l'averò a modo mio, non potendo poi averne altra, terrolla come mia a guisa di Pigmalione."⁶ He repeatedly quips that his charge gives him the freedom to follow his whims, to, as he says, "formar questa Donna a modo mio," despite his opponents' disapproval.⁷ He addresses the duchess: "[i]n vero, [End Page S-225] Signora, a me par d'aver detto assai, e, quanto per me, contentomi di questa mia Donna; e se questi signori non la voglion cosí fatta, lassinla a me."⁸ As Giuliano's "creatura," this accomplished lady is ultimately unable to stand on her feet and needs her...