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"BOOK OF THE CITY OF LADIES" (CHRISTINE DE PIZAN).   Term Paper ID:26711 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Reviews work counteracting misinterpretations about women's character in male-written classics, Virgil's "Aeneid" & Dante's "Divine Comedy."... More...

8 Pages / 1800 Words 4 sources, 18 Citations, MLA Format $32.00 Return to List of Papers

Paper Abstract: Reviews work counteracting misinterpretations about women's character in male-written classics, Virgil's "Aeneid" & Dante's "Divine Comedy." Paper Introduction: Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies (1405) was written to counteract the lies and misrepresentations about women's character that the author found in literature in which all the male writers seemed to "speak from one and the same mouth" (4). She resolved, with the help and guidance of the allegorical figures of Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, to write a demonstration of the invaluable contributions of women throughout history. She intended to counteract the ridiculous claims by male writers "that the behavior of women is inclined to and full of every vice" (4). Her examples range from the mythological Amazons to the women of the Old Testament and examples from more recent history. The greatest number, however, derived from classical history and literature. One of the best known, or, as Pizan put it, the woman whose "fame has surpassed that of all Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. Aeneas' wife dies at the fallof Troy, he is forced to flee and, eventually, he arrives in Italy tofulfill his destiny and found a great race--under the protection of Venus. New York: Persea, 1982.Virgil. Almost immediately, however, Venus induced "heryoung godling son, Desire [to] use his gifts to make the queen /Infatuated, inflaming her with lust / To the marrow of her bones" (I.897-9 1). His stay in Carthage is the framework for Aeneas' account of hisstory of the end of Troy and his flight. They do not know what it is but "what they knew of a greatlove profaned / In anguish, and a desperate woman's nerve, / Led everyTrojan heart into foreboding" (V.7-9). She resolved, with the help and guidanceof the allegorical figures of Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, to write ademonstration of the invaluable contributions of women throughout history.She intended to counteract the ridiculous claims by male writers "that thebehavior of women is inclined to and full of every vice" (4). "Sons and Lovers: Sexuality and Gender in Virgil's Poetry." The Cambridge Companion to Virgil. The fact that Pizanignores the Christian implications of suicide does not seem like evidencethat she is looking at the act from the Roman point of view (in which itwas not considered a disgrace but a means of escaping disgrace). For Dante she was merely the embodiment of the femalesins of lust (for Aeneas) and infidelity (to the memory of Sychaeus) forwhich so many famous women seemed to find themselves in the second circleof the Inferno--where more women than are found than in any other circle inDante's Hell. Roman readers of Virgil knew thatthis avenger was to be Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who occupied muchof Rome's territory for 15 years and nearly destroyed the city. She is also clearly seen as worthy ofAeneas and is practically a female version of the hero. In herbook Pizan went about rehabilitating Dido's reputation by recounting hergreat prudence as leader of her people and her constancy in love. What is most interesting, however, is that Christine continues toadmire Dido even though she has committed a major sin by taking her ownlife. One of the best known, or, as Pizanput it, the woman whose "fame has surpassed that of all other women of hertime," was Dido, the Phoenician widow of Sychaeus, who escaped herbrother's tyranny by fleeing from Tyre to North Africa (189). But in Book IV the narrativereturns to the present and to the story of the love between the queen andher guest. She allows that "as experienceshowed, Dido's love for Aeneas was far greater than his love for her"(189). She merely says, "and so the noble queen Dido died in such a pitifulmanner" and does not worry about condemning her for her suicide (189).But, stranger still, neither does Dante worry about Dido's suicide eventhough it is clearly a major Christian sin. Trans. The Book of the City of Ladies. Sisson. Thus, under that name, / She hid her fault"(IV.237-38). Robert Fitzgerald. The problem with his speculations is that Virgil explainsthe two names of the queen and even uses Elissa on occasion--most notablyin Book V when the sailors shudder in fear at the consequences that mightfollow from the profaning of this great love. The Aeneid. Even if they wereimplied promises--implied by becoming the queen's lover--he broke them. / A wedding this will be"(IV.176-77). She is so famous that when Virgilpoints her out to Dante in the second circle of Hell she is unnamed and isonly evoked by periphrasis: The other is she who killed herself for love, And broke faith with the ashes of Sychaeus (Inferno V.61-62).That is all that is left of the woman who was also famous for outwittingvarious male leaders and for her successful founding and leadership of agreat state. There shefounded, and ruled over, the great city of Carthage. In her account, two people fall in love, but one lovedless and then, "even though he had given her his pledge never to take anyother woman and to be hers forever, he left her" (189). With the sanction of Juno, Dido neglected her duties as queenand "called it a marriage. Her story is mostfamously recounted in Books I and IV of Virgil's Aeneid in which she fallsdeeply in love with his hero, Aeneas, and, when he abandons her, commitssuicide. Venus'spell on Dido drives her to extremes and love simply makes her neglectthose aspects of her life that made her more Aeneas' equal. This led her to examine the stories of others and stillshe could not, "no matter how long I confronted and dissected the problem,"understand how the claims of male writers "could be true when compared tothe natural behavior and character of women" (4). The Divine Comedy. H. She also understood exactly how to counter these claims by tellingthe story straight and insisting that men, such as Aeneas, take as muchblame for their faults as women. ByDante's time Dido's name had become synonymous with female lust and thebetrayal of an oath to her dead husband. But in the Aeneid Dido is clearly a woman of considerablepower and great accomplishments. As depicted by Virgil in The Aeneid Didowas an admirable character and a perfect match for Aeneas in most ways.The problem was that Aeneas was meant to fulfill another destiny that waspredicted by the gods, including his mother Venus who worked hard on hisbehalf. Dante's account of Dido, 13 years later, is very different. In addition, there werecertainly many books between Pizan's time and Virgil's in which Dido'sstory was recounted and, as Dante's poem seems to imply, reduced in scopeand meaning. Thus, asFitzgerald notes in the postscript to his translation, Aeneas' departurefrom Carthage "would seem to the Roman reader as narrow an escape as thatof Rome when beset by Carthage" (4 6). It even seems possible, in fact, that she is merelysupplementing his account--from other versions of Dido's story, from herown invention, or both. Richards noted in hisIntroduction to the text that there is always some question regardingPizan's "actual familiarity with particular Latin texts," but he seems toassume her familiarity with Virgil (xxvii). Pizanobviously does not rely on the pagan gods as part of her explanation ofDido's behavior. Her examplesrange from the mythological Amazons to the women of the Old Testament andexamples from more recent history. The greatest number, however, derivedfrom classical history and literature. More importantly, it seems, Dido triedto impede Aeneas in fulfilling his destiny whereas his first wife, Creusa,and his Roman wife, Lavinia, "prove their virtue precisely by submitting tothe masculine plot of history" (Oliensis 3 3). She neglectsher duties as ruler and perhaps, although this is not clear simply fromreading Fitzgerald's translation, her duty to her dead husband. What she did understandwas how the notion of women's instability and excesses in love wasdeveloped by Virgil and how women's salacious character was constructed byDante. Thus there was to be a rivalrybetween the descendants of Aeneas' kingdom and those of Dido's Carthage.This rivalry paralleled the fact that the Trojans and the TyrianPhoenicians were also deadly enemies in Dido's day. In Pizan'sversion it is Aeneas' infidelity that is stressed in order to counter theclaim that women cannot be faithful. Thus,although the two meet as equals, to a degree unusual in ancient literature,they are unequal in terms of the main connection between them. 19 BCE. Earl Jeffrey Richards. Her opposition to Virgil's story does not seem,therefore, to be centered in this chapter since everything she admiresabout the queen's prudential government is, at least in outline, includedin Virgil--where it is equally admired. Aeneas falls in love with Dido when they seek the shelter of acave during a storm. Clearly Dante had a somewhat different way of looking at Didothan Virgil did. Thus it is not until the chapter on Dido's fidelity that Virgil'sversion of events is called substantially into question at all. AsOliensis notes, "Virgil associates the feminine with unruly passion, themasculine with reasoned (self-) mastery [and] in narrative terms, thistends to mean that women make trouble and men restore order" (3 3). Yet Richards claims in his notesthat Pizan's opposition to Virgil is obvious here. Virgil, he says, is"conspicuously absent in [Pizan's] account" and she uses the name Elissafor Dido which, Richards claims, is "an unusual feature of this passage[I.46.1]" (262). When Pizan recounts the story of Dido in thechapter regarding her prudence, she does not contradict anything inVirgil's account. 14 5. Dante, however, is so intenton illustrating the sexual lust and infidelity of women in this canto that,rather than place Dido with the other suicides in the second ring of theseventh circle of hell (below the murderers), he keeps her in the circlereserved for those whose sins are sexual in nature. Insteadshe is countering Dante (and, perhaps, other male Christian writers aswell) who gave the more important crime a lesser status because he was somuch interested in demonstrating the poor character of women. Thus Virgil saw her administrative and leadership qualities asadmirable--as did Pizan. Dido became, as Richards puts it in a note to his translation ofPizan, "one of the most vilified women of world literature" (262). But the major difference between the pair (other than the separatefates the gods have in store for them) is the nature of their passion.Here even Pizan admits a difference. New York: Vintage, 199 . Thisaccount of Dido counteracts, in very different ways, the versions of Dido'scareer in Virgil and in Dante's Divine Comedy. Trans. Trans. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.Oliensis, Ellen. She is widowed,forced to flee, founds a new city, and her descendants become a powerfulcivilization--under the protection of Juno. This poorcharacter, as Pizan said, simply could not be found when she went lookingfor it in herself. C. Despite their happiness, however, Aeneas had to fulfill hisdestiny and, always obedient to the gods, he prepared to leave her.Distraught, she tried to persuade him to stay, but, "Duty-bound, Aeneas, though he struggled with desire To calm and comfort her in all her pain, To speak to her and turn her mind from grief, And though he sighed his heart out, shaken still With love of her, yet took the course heaven gave him (IV.545-5 ).When Aeneas leaves, Dido, driven mad with grief, kills herself afterpronouncing a curse on his descendants and hoping that a Carthaginian willsomeday avenge her. The chapter on Dido's clever planning, her resistance to her brother,the tricks she played, and the success of her leadership in Carthage isnot, at least not extensively, addressed toward Virgil's version, wheremost of these things are admitted and admired. He was a Trojan fleeing the destruction of Troy by the Greeks and,on his arrival in Italy, he was to found the line of the Roman emperors.The Romans would eventually face many decades of war with Carthage--one ofthe most powerful enemies Rome ever knew. Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies (14 5) was written tocounteract the lies and misrepresentations about women's character that theauthor found in literature in which all the male writers seemed to "speakfrom one and the same mouth" (4). Dido, of course, is so passionatelyfaithful to Aeneas that she kills herself, thereby demonstrating thegreater strength of the women's constancy. But for Virgil, and the Romans in general, the difference betweenthem was an essential difference between the love of women and of men. Works CitedDante Alighieri. It is not clear from a reading of Dante and Virgil where the changein Dido's reputation came about. Pizan makes thepoint that Aeneas made promises and failed to keep them. 1321. The chapter on her prudence, therefore, opposesDante's version simply by restoring her many accomplishments. Inher account of Dido's constancy in love Pizan includes no mention of Dido'sfirst marriage and works only from the situation between Aeneas and Dido.Thus the implied vow of permanent widowhood (specified by Dante) is notonly left out, but Aeneas' implied vow of fidelity replaces it. Aeneas and hisfriends, on their way to Italy, had been blown off course toward Africabut, because she was a fugitive from Tyre, Dido became his willing host inBook One of the Aeneid. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 294-311.Pizan, Christine de. As Aeneas and his friends sail away they see herfuneral pyre. It must, therefore, bedirected largely at the reductive approach to Dido's history that occurredin the intervening centuries and turned her into a mere symbol of femalelust and infidelity. Venus, protector of Rome's future, has no intentionof having Aeneas remain in Carthage but Juno, patron of Carthage,announces, "I shall marry them and call her his. The faultshe hides, according to Virgil, by claiming that their marriage is real isher betrayal of her people's interests--not her betrayal of Sychaeus.There is, however, a hint that she might be expected to be faithful to himwhen Venus announces that she will soon make Dido forget her dead husband.But it is unclear whether Virgil regarded remarriage as immoral, or as aserious character flaw, for women. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.