Genealogies of Fiction: Women Warriors and the Medieval Imagination in the "Orlando furioso"

Chapter Four The Poem as a Prophecy Gendered Gifts in the Orlando furioso

c h a p t e r fou r The Poem as a Prophecy Gendered Gifts in the Orlando furioso In the Western canon, genealogical prophecies are given to men, by men, and are about men. Dynastic knowledge is transmitted from fathers to sons, in a replication of the patrilineal nature of family trees. In the Aeneid, when Aeneas descends to the Underworld and receives prophetic knowledge of his future lineage, a female intermediary, the ancient Sybil, guides him to his destination . Yet it is his father Anchises who conjures the images of the souls in front of his son’s eyes and interprets them for him. Book VI of the Aeneid, which contains this foundational episode, is punctuated by references to the patrilineal nature of Aeneas’s genealogy. Pater (father) and natus (son) are the most common words in the dialogue between Aeneas and his father, and the vocabulary of male generation and paternity predictably dominates the description of the future lineage of the Trojan hero. In another foundational text of European literature, the Commedia, Dante traces another, poetic and theological but still patrilineal, genealogy when he claims that he is not worthy of his mission: “I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul.” Beatrice and the various saints, as well as the Virgin Mary herself, are intermediaries who intercede The Poem as a Prophecy 117 for Dante. Not dissimilarly, the Sybil is a medium, literally and technically a voice without a body. When Ariosto writes the Orlando furioso, however, he deals with the theme in a completely new fashion. By making Bradamante the recipient of the predictions of the future Este dynasty, Ariosto shatters this foundational principle of prophetic knowledge in such a profound way that the consequences of this operation, after centuries of analysis and critical work, are still unclear. The gender shift is accompanied by the introduction of another female figure, the sorceress Melissa, who imparts the prophetic knowledge to Bradamante. Neither narrative element is a simple, innocent variation on the tired old theme of the dynastic vision. Rather, they are part of a complex textual strategy that builds an alternative, potentially liberating mode of knowledge transmission. Ariosto, scattering dynastic visions throughout the poem, constructs a revolutionary pattern of prophecy giving that operates as gift giving and, at least in principle, resists the court’s logic of exchange. On one hand, Ariosto elaborates on the traditional portrait of Bradamante as an interpreter; on the other hand, he associates her with the figure of Melissa, coded as a gift giver throughout the poem, from the prophetic gifts of cantos III and XIII to the more conventional gifts of canto XLIII. By gendering the gift of prophecy and its reception as female, the poem reflects on the logic of the gift as an alternative to the logic of commerce, coded as male. Furthermore, the final vision of the poem is the work of a never-believed prophetess, Cassandra, a foil for the poet himself.1 Presenting Cassandra as the last of the poet/prophet figures of the Furioso, Ariosto identifies with a true seer who was never believed, ambiguously pointing to the misinterpreted truthfulness of his poetry . In this instance, Ariosto seems to connect his poetry with the losing side of history and storytelling: the Furioso is a gift, freely given like Cassandra’s tapestry, and like it potentially undervalued .2 This model of gift circulation and knowledge transmission, which ties Bradamante, Melissa, Cassandra, and the poet himself, however, is not immune from contradictions and is predestined to failure within the poem itself. The Poem as a Prophecy 118 The centrality of the gift to the exchange system of the Furioso and its oppositional connection to the concept of betrayal will become clearer as we probe the figure of Melissa in her double incarnation of good prophetess and evil sorceress. It is important, however, to introduce the model of gift circulation I am proposing for the Furioso.3 The explicit presentation of the gift in the poem is connected with the poetic activity itself and with the tales told by the Mantuan host and the nocchiero to Rinaldo during his journey over the Po River (canto XLIII). In this episode, as Ronald Martinez has shown, the gift is framed in opposition to the commerce of tyranny.4 The element of gender, however, comes powerfully into play in these episodes and changes our perspective on the gift...