Ladies Errant

Abstract

IntroductionL a donna e mobile.! In the strains of Verdi's best known aria, from the third act of Rigoletto, the spirited lover offers his memorable encapsulation of women's "fickle nature" while he chases a lithe young maid about the room.If the amusing irony for Verdi's audience lies in the evident fact that it is the Duke-and not his sweetheart, Gilda-who is "mobile," no matter. 2 The lilting refrain marks men's age-old dismay at their failure to "fix" woman in her place, to prevent her straying from the express wishes of fathers, husbands, brothers, and lovers.Mobility in this instance carries both the positive connotations of adaptability and free flow, and the negative overtones of inconstancy and error.Its double edge cuts both ways through the concerns of this book.Errancy, at least since the Divina commedia's Christian pilgrim confronted Dante's dark wood, has named a wandering away-be it spiritual, moral, or geographical-from the straight path that is thought to be right and good.Errant spirits both diverge from the norm and stray from the course of truth, rectitude, or purpose.Everyday usage often recalls the second meaning recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary for wayward: "Capriciously wilful; conforming to no fixed rule or principle of conduct; erratic"; but my subtitle dwells equally on an additional sense of the word: "Disposed to go counter to the wishes or advice • of others, or to what is reasonable; wrongheaded, intractable, self-willed; froward, perverse.Of children: disobedient, refractory."Taking as its backdrop the vast literature devoted in the Italian Renaissance to the "proper" conduct and education of women,3 this book presents the problem of wayward feminine behavior in five different cultural articulations of that period.Each text examined here presents "woman" as the site of potential disorder.Each entertains in a different way the possibility that woman might exceed whatever bounds society b set for her, might

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 60 citations exist upstream.