SOURCE: Finucci, Valeria. “(Dis)Orderly Death, or How to Be In by Being Out: The Case of Isabella.” In The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto, pp. 169-97. Stanford, Calif. Stanford University Press, 1992.

[In the essay that follows, Finucci compares Isabella to Medusa and posits that Isabella's self-willed death in Orlando furioso reaffirms gender roles and social power relations.]

In Orlando furioso, Ariosto reserves the highest praise and the longest eulogy for Isabella. Not coincidentally, she is the only major female character to die. Isabella stages her own death in Canto 29 when she asks the Saracen hero Rodomonte to strike at her neck in order to test her newly invented herbal salve. As a result, she masochistically delivers herself from a threatened rape and circumvents her beloved Zerbino's deathbed injunction not to commit suicide for his sake. Like Ariosto, critics have praised this character and have compared her favorably to other more fickle, less faithful, or simply more sexual, women in the text.

It is my intention to scuttle these bourgeois pieties and to emphasize—both at the mimetic and at the diegetic level—the reasons for the (male) canonization of Isabella's self-willed homicide. By focusing in the first part of this chapter on the connections between power and sex, pleasure and violence, and rape as pollution (for women) and as assertion of mastery (for men), I show how a politics of rape postulates the death of woman as subject. Ariosto canonizes Isabella, I argue, precisely because she chooses death over rape; self-erasure is the road that virtuous women often take in narrative. Had she survived her rape, Isabella could have stayed in the Furioso, but only as a defiled, diminished princess. In opting for death to remain faithful to a dead beloved and for self-victimization over survival, Isabella confirms the workings of both a gender ideology that idealizes disembodied women as proper objects of love and a Christian ideology that canonizes what the dominant culture finds praiseworthy. Paradoxically, as the critics' responses make clear, this very gesture of self-denial guarantees her literary survival as encomiastic matter.

The second aim of this chapter is to link the manner of Isabella's death—decapitation—to man's fear of female sexuality and eventually to the myth that most commonly embodies it, that of the Medusa. Rodomonte rationalizes his murder by transforming woman into a fantasy. This idealization allows him to overcome the sense of inadequacy and discomfiture that female unavailability has fostered in him in the past and to deny that he has committed a crime. Such a peculiar program of pleasure protects him from sexual defeat, for it centers not on sex but on a repetitive mourning for a perfect, forever unpossessable, and thus forever desirable woman. Given his arrogant nature, however, it is not sufficient that Rodomonte mourn by himself. He needs an audience of other knights to join him in his idolatry, both to emphasize the worthiness of his choice of an unreachable beloved and to obliterate his responsibility for the mourning process.

This cycle of domination by intimidation carries its own ironies, for it gives Rodomonte a psychological victory, even if a Pyrrhic one. By making every knight, of any religion, worship a person that he has chosen to invest with meaning, Rodomonte eventually becomes the true knight of courtly romances: not simply a fearsome, unbeatable warlord but a compassionate, caring hero. The fact that in order to derive a sense of self he has to bury this seraphic woman three times, first inside a casket, then within a church, and finally deep in a mausoleum, speaks volumes about the depth of his fear of the other sex. His conception of this process of mourning in phallic terms (he defends in a combat of lances the memory of a woman dead for the sake of her chastity) is evident in his later abandonment of the project when his masculinity is questioned anew and his pseudo-piety finally smashed by a reempowered woman, Bradamante.

The narration of Isabella's ordeal is one of the fourteen diversions that punctuate the Furioso.¹ As in the episode of Olimpia, the action is divided into two distinct parts for the sake of entrelacement. In the first, Isabella tells Orlando a woeful story of typical feminine problems: love, pain, and virginity. True to the codes of romance, the paladin saves her and reunites her with the man of her choice. Some cantos later, the reader unexpectedly finds that Orlando's solution was temporary. This time, again as with Olimpia, the author relates the new developments. Orlando is no longer present, however, and Isabella's life ends in a tragic way.

Isabella—the offspring of a Spanish Saracen king of the House of Aragon (she is, as usual, motherless)—first meets Orlando in a cave where she has been imprisoned for nine months. She is fifteen and a paragon of beauty: “Era bella sì, che facea il loco / salvatico parere un paradiso” (“Such was her beauty, she made this inhospitable place look like a paradise” [12, 91]). Like Olimpia, Isabella tearfully tells Orlando a story of incredible misfortune. In tones that often echo those of Francesca in Dante's Inferno V, she introduces herself as the daughter of the king of Galizia and reminisces on her former, happy state: “Già mi vivea di mia sorte felice, / gentil, giovane, ricca, onesta e bella” (“Mine used to be a happy life. I was well-born, young and beautiful, rich and esteemed” [13, 5]). Having fallen in love with the Scottish prince Zerbino, a participant in jousts organized by her father, she soon realized that, given their different religions, only elopement would permit their union. Since Zerbino was busy waging war, she accepted his solution of waiting in her father's garden one night for some men, including Zerbino's most trusted friend, Odorico da Biscaglia, to take her to him by boat. In the Furioso, Fortuna plays with destinies, and journeys by sea are usually unreliable. The boat capsizes, but Isabella survives. She is no sooner ashore than Odorico tries to rape her, and only the sudden arrival of pirates provides a providential rescue. They in turn leave her in her virginal state, not out of pity, but because they plan to sell her to a rich procurer from the East. The story ends as it usually does when Orlando is at hand: the paladin gives Isabella a new life by destroying her enemies with understated gusto, and he even manages to reunite her with an incredibly happy Zerbino, fortuitously in the area. This is the narrative of Cantos 12 and 13.

The story of Isabella continues in Cantos 28 and 29. In the meantime, Orlando goes mad (Canto 23), and Zerbino is killed by Mandricardo while defending Orlando's sword (Canto 24). Just before dying, Zerbino asks a desperate Isabella to promise to go on living. She is still crying over his corpse when a monk passes by. He consoles her, converts her to Christianity, and offers to lead her to a convent to retire for the rest of her days. Soon they encounter Rodomonte, who has just been rejected by Doralice in favor of Mandricardo. Disturbed by the monk's arguments about the need to respect Isabella and her new faith, the Saracen kills him first and then plays the part of the Petrarchan lover in the hope of piercing the princess's heart. What he has in mind is hardly love, of course. Aware of the danger of rape, Isabella resorts to a ruse: she claims that she can make a salve that bestows immortality and offers to prove its virtues on her body first. Being a paragon of narcissism, Rodomonte accepts, deferring the rape. Isabella spreads the concoction on her neck and urges him to strike her there, conscious throughout of what she wants to accomplish. Her head rolls down. Overcome by what he has unwillingly caused and more puzzled than ever, Rodomonte decides to cast aside his hatred of women, forget his sexual urge, and worship Isabella as an exemplar of chastity. He feverishly builds a mausoleum for her and a lookout tower for himself, with a narrow bridge connecting the main road to this sanctuary. There he vows to joust with any passing knight for the sake of Isabella's honor, which he alone, it seems, can understand and protect. Only the arrival of Bradamante in canto 35 puts an end to this show of piety. Utterly ashamed at being bested by a woman, Rodomonte retires to a cave until his climactic return in the last canto for a final, deadly combat with Ruggiero.

In this chapter I concentrate on the second part of the Isabella story. My aim is not only to cast some light on the construction of Isabella's femininity but also to examine Rodomonte's masculinity. The knight most identified as virile in the Furioso, Rodomonte is surprisingly characterized as having problems with his masculinity. From his never-finished tower to the broken sword that dooms him in his final joust, from his record of failures with women to his whining attitude when things do not go his way, Rodomonte seems metonymically associated with “broken” manhood. He may appear manly, but he is not necessarily so.

A second, more significant reason for my concentration on a man is that death is essentially unrepresentable: a dead Isabella has little value in representation. Yet, precisely because she is dead and because her death has been beautified through the construction of a proper burial ground, Isabella becomes pure representation. Her corpse safely stored away, she can be cast as the object best authorizing Rodomonte's new courtly incarnation, because her shadow (as a corpse and as a memory) makes it possible to read her life and her death purely in relation to him. As was already clear in Petrarch's case, a woman's death can be the starting point for the reinscription of a man's poetics of contrition, self-discovery, and self-celebration. A story of violence and rape can then slowly recede into the background in order to make room for a story of the survival (by forgetting the violence) and the empowerment (by remembering courtly ideals) of a hero whose overblown sense of self makes him sadly unable to read the meaning of his own actions.

Paradoxically, the celebration of Isabella's death takes place not only in the mimesis of the text, with the ritual combats that Rodomonte fights in her honor, but also in the diegesis, with the author's lengthy narrative mourning. Ariosto's program is no less subtle than Rodomonte's jousts, which are plainly invented for his own aggrandizement and subsequent recasting as a man of piety. By aestheticizing Isabella's murder, Ariosto too is able to transform an outrageous death into a charming one. “Alma, ch'avesti più la fede cara,” the poet offers in his valediction, “e 'l nome quasi ignoto e peregrino / al tempo nostro, de la castitade, / che la tua vita e la tua verde etade, / / vattene in pace, alma beata e bella! / … / Vattene in pace alla superna sede, / e lascia all'altre esempio di tua fede” (“Depart in peace, then, beautiful, blessed spirit, who preferred fidelity and a name for chastity [virtually alien and unknown in our day] to your life, your green years! … Go in peace to the supernatural seat, and leave to other women an example of your faith” [29, 26-27]). This mourning becomes the pretext for the celebration of another, much more powerful Isabella, the author's as well as Boiardo's patron, Isabella d'Este. Once again the narrative appropriates a woman's death in order both to reassert an ideology of chaste womanhood and to reinscribe the desirability of chastity in an influential woman, who as a result becomes an exemplar for real women. This process is similar to that found in Castiglione, where the duchess stands as a paragon of chastity, no matter the reasons that require her to embody this virtue, and thus can be endlessly offered for imitation to all ladies of manners.

Reflecting on the difficulty of achieving closure in a text offering seemingly endless repetitions of “errore/errare,” Patricia Parker argues that Ariosto brings his work to a satisfying conclusion through a series of deaths, of which Isabella's is the most unexpected. “We are shocked by Isabella's death when it occurs,” Parker writes, “its finality stands in such sharp contrast to the deathlessness of the poem's enchanted knights that it jolts us, momentarily, back into the world of waking reality” (Inescapable Romance, 37). The celebration of Isabella's sacrifice undoubtedly engenders some of the most touching verses in the Furioso; as Edgar Allan Poe fondly wrote, the death of a beautiful woman “is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (265). Chaucer highly praised five out of nine women in his Legend of Good Women because they committed suicide; Castiglione, like Boccaccio in De claris mulieribus, has also hailed some ancient women for choosing self-destruction for the sake of love and honor. Throughout the centuries, famous suicides like those of Dido, Lucretia, Ophelia, Emma Bovary, and Anna Karenina have unfailingly aroused readers' sympathy and engendered vicarious identification.

Like Lucretia, Isabella is a paragon of masochism for the sake of faithfulness and of audacity for the sake of self-respect. Whatever the historical truth behind the legend of Lucretia, this Roman matron's martyrdom has enjoyed enduring literary fame. The classic rendering of her ordeal—rape followed by public suicide for the sake of husband and father—can be found in Ovid, but offerings come from, among others, Livy, Plutarch, and Coluccio Salutati. Like Lucretia, Isabella chooses suicide to avoid defilement and, in so doing, shifts the boundaries of victor/victim and victimizer/victimized.² Saint Jerome praised women's decision to commit suicide when their chastity is at risk: “In persecutions it is not lawful to commit suicide except when one's chastity is jeopardized” (1129). Saint Augustine, however, condemns the suicide of true Christian women in any circumstance, including women seeking to erase their now-contaminated body for the sake of husbands and relatives. “If she was adulterous,” he asks about Lucretia, “why is she praised? If chaste, why was she put to death?” (80)

What makes female suicide so compelling? Or, to put the question as Nancy Miller does, “What is the appeal of the feminine death: if it is a literary strategy, what is its objective; if it is a code, what message does it transmit?” (“Exquisite Cadavers,” 37) Miller shows that woman's death, which is usually connected to spurned love or sexuality, often turns into man's celebration of himself and the world of men. Dying for chastity may render women powerful, but this power is defined by men, since they are willing to bestow it on women as long as they remain the way men desire. Of course, this power is not so much actual political/social power, but the power of a role model to affect others' lives or to be used in that way. Thus, a chaste woman may posthumously be given power because a dead role model is even more likely to influence female behavior along desired lines. No power given to chaste women, however, compares to that enjoyed by chaste men, since men claim that their choice of chastity is a thoroughly difficult achievement, given their natural urgings. Women's chastity, on the contrary, as the Cortegiano's courtiers have made clear, has been traditionally cast as easy to attain: in Western ideology good women have an inborn dislike for promiscuity. In the case of Isabella, although her virginal status is debatable, her standing as a figure of chastity is not. Described as a monument of chastity, she is equated in the end to a literal monument, a mausoleum built in her honor to stand for the everlasting celebration of chastity in women. In this process of incorporation, the real female body is made expendable by having the woman request her own narrative disposal. Technically speaking, Isabella does not commit suicide; rather, she stages her own murder. Her action is in keeping with Nicole Loraux's argument that in Greek tragedy wives usually kill themselves, but virgins are customarily killed (31).

Critics show no hesitation in their choice of adjectives to best describe Isabella. Attilio Momigliano calls her a beautiful and heroic virgin (“vergine bella e eroica,” 152), and Marcello Turchi refers to her as a martyr of faith (“fantastica martire della fedeltà,” 133). Together with Fiordiligi, Isabella is the only woman in the Furioso consistently and endlessly eulogized. She also shares with Fiordiligi the same macabre destiny. Since neither woman can opt for suicide after her beloved's death (one for religious reasons and the other for the sake of a promise), each circuitously chooses to be forever near him. Isabella prompts her homicide; Fiordiligi practically buries herself alive in a chamber next to her dead husband, Brandimarte. Both enjoy oratorial praise, for rhetorical flourishes are often easy to come by for women already dead or ready to die for the sake of their men. Their death is celebrated because it ennobles man by magnifying his standing among his peers, due to the sense of self-worth that woman's fidelity to him generates; it also ennobles woman when one of her sex is memorialized as exemplary, usually for social reasons (as with the praise of female chastity). Even more than Lucretia's, the story of Isabella stands as a hymn to women's pudicitia, since Isabella chooses suicide in the Furioso not simply to keep faith with the memory of a living beloved, but—in a twist that Ariosto uses to full effect—with that of a dead one.

Throughout Orlando furioso, Isabella is powerless: men take command of her life but are unable to provide any security; in fact, their very presence as protectors threatens her safety. From the moment she leaves home, Isabella's fate is grief. She herself recognizes the losses generated by her choice to live outside parental jurisdiction and disavows her right to be considered a good daughter: “Isabella sono io, che figlia fui / del re mal fortunato di Gallizia. / / Ben dissi fui; ch'or non son più di lui, / ma di dolor, d'affanno e di mestizia” (“I am Isabel. I used to be the daughter of the luckless king of Galicia. I say I used to be—for now I am no longer his: I am daughter to grief, misery and sadness” [13, 4]). Isabella ceases to be the victim of a baffling destiny only when she starts preparing her self-directed death; her body is a burden she no longer wants to carry. Having absorbed Christian doctrine, she looks to heaven for a proper reward for her pain and her love. Her self-immolation is bathed in liturgical, baptismal overtones.³

Had Ariosto not created an elegiac reason for Isabella to disappear, there would hardly be a plausible role in the text for her after Zerbino's death and Rodomonte's rape. A polluted Isabella cannot go back home, for she has already strayed from her father's law and the social order. Even Olimpia did not defy her father, and Doralice chose a man different from the one willed on her only because circumstances had changed so radically in the meantime. But Isabella has not simply disobeyed her father; she has also opted for a political and religious enemy, thereby symbolically mutilating paternal authority. There is no turning back for her. Yet Isabella could hardly survive without parental protection; unlike Bradamante and Olimpia, she is completely unable to defend herself against man's violence. Like Angelica, she exists only as an image of undefended womanhood, the maiden-to-be-raped. Utterly unassimilable, she is eventually given the freedom to choose not the manner of her life but that of her death.

Rodomonte stands as Isabella's virtual opposite. A powerful, proud, heroic Saracen knight, he is described principally through his cruelty. As pure energy and darkness personified, as snake (17, 11), demon (16, 86), and Satan (16, 87), he represents masculinity equated with physical power.⁴ In Boiardo's work, Rodomonte's ancestor is Nimrod, the giant who defied God to do battle with him (2, 14, 34), and his boorish and capricious nature is properly highlighted in the English term rodomontade. Not only is Rodomonte constructed in an exaggerated fashion, he also narcissistically loves to boast of his physical attributes. He enters the war, for instance, sure of being the best in either camp and fulfills his desire for superiority with the sight of the carnage and fright that his sudden appearance customarily creates. Throughout the epic, Rodomonte is constructed as the unassimilable Other, the scapegoat necessary to the completion of the “right” hero's (Ruggiero's) process of self-fashioning.⁵ In this sense, Aldo Scaglione (“Cinquecento Mannerism,” 125) is correct in judging Rodomonte to be “the most intriguing, the most puzzling, the most ‘human’” character in the Furioso.

A man consistently in need of magnifying his valor must have a scant sense of self-worth. Rodomonte proves himself pathologically unstable. He consistently accuses others of his own faults and, what is worse, makes them pay for his faulty rationalizations. He chastises women for inconstancy, for example, although his own claims to constancy are flimsy. Later, he finds himself so accustomed to what he believes is women's constitutive characteristic, fickleness, that he cannot understand its opposite, fidelity, when Isabella comes his way and pays dearly for his blindness. He accuses Ruggiero of betraying Agramante but could justifiably be reproached himself for that very sin, and he fights a duel for this reason that strategically can end only with his death. In short, this hero is unable to learn from any lesson.

Rodomonte's problems begin when a bride is offered to him. He boasts that his prowess is sufficient to obtain the love of any woman, for in his mind women are objects of exchange to be given to the worthiest men in battle. After winning his battles, however, he finds that he cannot get women as a result. His masculinity is challenged, a crisis that is evident each time he tries to marginalize the wounds to his ego inflicted by the other sex. Following Doralice's choice of Mandricardo, for example, he decides to cast away his fealty to king and country and leave the world of men. Full of unabashed Achillean pride, he feels rejected because of both his promised bride's determination to bypass him and his companions' decision not to side with him following her choice. He comes across as reflecting not only unhealthy pride but also whining femininity (“Di cocenti sospir l'aria accendea / dovunque andava il Saracin dolente”; “Wherever he went the grieving Saracen scorched the air with burning sighs” [27, 117]).

Later, Rodomonte decides to float aimlessly down a river and take lodging in a chapel, thus moving from the world of fathers to that of mothers. Again, he is perceived as having emasculated himself. When Isabella commits suicide because she prefers a dead man to his prized sexual prowess, he chooses to stay beside her burial ground rather than rejoin his fellow men in war and hence comes across as having feminized himself anew. Later, his desire to drown any knight not paying respect to his idealized woman allows him to mentally erase his own drowning in alcohol the night she died, a drunkenness he recognizes as a secondary cause of the reckless murder. As Luce Irigaray points out, however, fluids are associated with the feminine world (This Sex, 116), and so once again Rodomonte casts himself on the side of femininity. Finally, his confinement to a cave for a year, a month, and a day after Bradamante's victory over him symbolizes a metaphoric return to the maternal womb. In this context, his last fight in the epic, the brutal one with Ruggiero, can be read not only as a struggle to live in the world of men but also as a struggle to deny any femininity within himself.

Rodomonte's masculinity may be in crisis, but his masculinism is very much in place. In fact, Rodomonte uses the ideology that supports masculinism to bolster his shaky masculinity. Such an attitude can only doom Isabella by making her the hinge upon which man's power is exercised and gender inequalities come to be predicated. As a cultural construct, masculinity—like femininity—has had various meanings in different historical and social situations. But masculinism, as an ideological construct, is firmly in place in society. As Andrew Britton writes in Masculinity and Power, “Masculinism is the ideology that justifies and naturalizes male domination. As such, it is the ideology of patriarchy. Masculinism takes for granted that there is a fundamental difference between men and women, it assumes that heterosexuality is normal, it accepts without question the sexual division of labour, and it sanctions the political and dominant role of men in the public and private sphere” (4). In the Furioso, Rodomonte's expressions of masculinity are violent, and his understanding of masculinism reflects the social customs of his day among both Christians and Saracens.⁶

Rodomonte's aggressiveness, both at the linguistic and at the physical level, is well marked in the text. Lacan links aggressiveness with narcissistic traits in the individual. “Aggressivity is the correlative tendency of a mode of identification that we call narcissistic,” he writes, “and which determines the formal structure of man's ego and of the register of entities characteristic of his world” (Ecrits, 16). I have already pointed out that Rodomonte's repetitive boasting and showing off of his bravery accurately reflect his narcissism. His verbal aggressiveness toward women results directly from the threat he associates with them, since his martial side has served him better in the past than his amorous one. In Freudian psychoanalysis, man's contempt for woman is linked to fear of castration, for the boy's reaction at the first sight of female castration is, in Freud's words, one of “horror of the mutilated creature or triumphant contempt for her” (“Some Psychical Consequences,” 252). Not only do women make Rodomonte appear ridiculous and feminized, but they also induce men to question his abilities and judgment and to laugh at him for being duped and dumped by the women. Most of all, Rodomonte is enraged by the fact that women, who are not even his equal, shamelessly dare to choose what they want.

Such an attitude also explains why Doralice's choice of Mandricardo is traumatic for Rodomonte. Doralice has chosen a knight so similar to him in strength, nobility, personality, and even religion, that the difference between them, if any (and Doralice must have found some), can be located only in a different perception of their sexuality. For Ariosto, woman is not simply different from man; she helps differentiate one man from another (“la donna da cui viene lor differenza,” 27, 103). As the Angelica story fully illustrates, the possession of a prized woman helps the winner assert his mastery over an equally qualified man of the same rank. It makes him feel powerful, and it aggrandizes his ego. A rebuff, on the other hand, creates crises of manhood and self-worth.

The need to contain Doralice's show of independence goes without saying. Not only does Doralice lose Mandricardo, but her final characterization in the Furioso is a devalued one: she becomes a coquette. At her lover's death, she goes through the obligatory motions of mourning while casting an eye at Mandricardo's possible successor, the victorious Ruggiero. This unflattering (and unjustifiable) picture of Doralice has led a number of critics to embrace Rodomonte's view that all women are fickle and that Doralice exemplifies female moodiness. I would claim instead that Doralice was practical, rather than wanton, in choosing to transform Mandricardo's inevitable rape of her into a seduction and that she showed self-respect in refusing Rodomonte's claim to her person as a prize.⁷ In any case, like Isabella without Zerbino, there is no meaningful place for Doralice without Mandricardo in this romance epic, and she is conveniently forgotten.

Women's fickleness, the Furioso tells us, drives men mad. Orlando, who believes Angelica is inconstant, is only the first example. Rodomonte fares no better. One might then imagine that woman's faithfulness is the crucial element for men, and the story of Bradamante's unwavering love for Ruggiero could demonstrate the point. But what is Olimpia's reward for her faithfulness? Men as well as women betray in the Furioso, it seems; if it appears that women change their minds more often, it is because, being objects of desire, their selves are articulated from the point of view of the other.⁸

Rodomonte pits woman's inconstancy against his own constancy. But his feelings for first Doralice and then Isabella have nothing to do with either constancy or love. They simply reflect his instability and his view of manliness. Rodomonte wants Doralice because she has been described as beautiful and has been desired by somebody else; he continues to joust for her because his honor is at stake once others know that she is his promised bride. Rodomonte's love for Doralice neatly fits Girard's logic of mimetic desire. In the Innamorato, Ferraù states that he stopped loving Doralice, for whom he came to France in disguise, once he saw Angelica. Yet, piqued by Rodomonte, he decides to fall back in love with her: “Amai colei; lo amore ebbe a passare: / Per tuo dispetto voglio ancora amare” (“I loved her; love passed away: because I despise you, I want to love again” [2, 15, 37]). As a result, Rodomonte jousts with even more fervor for Doralice, since his fame as a warrior is at stake. When the Rodomonte-Doralice-Mandricardo triangle is formed, once again the logic is that of mimetic desire. Mandricardo's interest in Doralice is stimulated by the knowledge that she is affianced to Rodomonte (14, 40), and Rodomonte's interest in Doralice deepens when he sees Mandricardo desire her to the point of challenging his authority over her. Rodomonte puts more emphasis on being slighted by a fellow man than on acting out of love.

The Saracen knight's desire for Isabella is not mimetic in the sense that other knights are present as alternative male desiring subjects. Rodomonte simply sees Isabella and decides to have her. Like the lovers evoked by Andreas Capellanus, he is seduced through the eyes, for love is “a certain inbred suffering caused by sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex, causing desire for embrace” (28). But unlike Capellanus's courtly lovers, Rodomonte forgets to meditate on what he sees. Contrary to Orlando, for whom desire is associated with deferment, he believes in instant gratification, since delays in the past caused him to lose both Doralice and his reputation among men. Thus, Rodomonte decides to stand with Ovid and brushes aside the inscrutability with which Isabella has wrapped herself.⁹ He is sure that visceral instincts and flattery will inevitably seduce any woman, since for him female chastity is hardly a credible virtue. Isabella's intention to live in a convent heightens, rather than lessens, his desire for possession through transgression.

Of the two attempts at Isabella's chastity, the first is the most difficult to understand, for it is made by a Christian described as an honorable and faithful man. His abduction of Isabella is foiled only by the timely arrival of other abductors, who abstain from raping their victim not in the name of morality but in the name of money (“Se mi serban, come io sono, / vergine, speran vendermi più molto”; “By keeping me a virgin they hoped to sell me for a far better price” [13, 31]). Odorico justifies his attempted rape as a form of libidinal release: alone with a beautiful woman, he is unable to control himself or to remember social and cultural conventions (“Io mi sforzai guardarla; ma al fin vinto / da intolerando assalto, ne fui spinto”; “I made every effort to guard the fortress … but in the end I was defeated by the irresistible onslaught and was driven out” [24, 32]). Odorico admits no loss of honor for attempting to rape the maiden he was asked to protect. He would have behaved honorably indeed, he explains, if he had been assigned a manly task, such as defending a city. Zerbino does not question his explanation, since he too seems to think that the call of the flesh can bestialize man's nature.

The second attempt at rape, by Rodomonte, is not rationalized; it is understood, in the gender system defining feminine and masculine roles, sex can be used to affirm male superiority, and a woman can be conquered in the same way as a country. Rodomonte clearly states this in a later combat with Bradamante. He will give her the phallic symbols she requests—his horse and arms for her to put on Isabella's tomb—if she defeats him. But if he defeats her—and he has no doubt about this outcome—he wants to possess her body: “Ma s'a te tocca star di sotto, come / più si conviene, e certo so che fia, / non vò che lasci l'arme, nè il tuo nome, / come di vinta, sottoscritto sia: / … / … basti / che ti disponga amarmi, ove m'odiasti” (“But if you are the one to succumb—which is more plausible and is bound to happen—I would not have you surrender your arms or leave your name to be inscribed among the vanquished. … It is enough if you dispose yourself to love me where before you hated me” [35, 46]).¹⁰ As he boasts, “Io son di tal valor, son di tal nerbo, / ch'aver non dei d'andar di sotto a sdegno” (“Such is my valour, such my strength, that you should feel no disgrace at being beneath me” [35, 47 (modified)]).

Rodomonte is first attracted to Isabella by a strange combination of factors: sorrow, eroticizing mysteriousness, and pervasive passivity give this woman an enigmatic allure. But such a hold over a restless man proves dangerous to Isabella, for Rodomonte has no intention of repeating his previous mistake with Doralice. In his mind, if a lonely and beautiful maiden appears available because she has no guardian, any man can possess her with or without her consent.¹¹ Since he views women as commodities, Rodomonte claims ownership when no one is around to object. As Marx was to write, commodities need guardians to guarantee the rightness of an exchange: “Commodities cannot themselves go to market and perform exchanges in their own right. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians, who are the possessors of commodities. Commodities are things, and therefore lack the power to resist man. If they are unwilling, he can use force; in other words, he can take possession of them” (I, 178). Rodomonte judges Isabella according to masculinist stereotypes and ends up with a loss he did not know he could feel.

A second reason for the rape of Isabella is that Rodomonte can vindicate himself through her body for what he perceives as Doralice's sexual profligacy. By punishing a woman who seems to have nothing to do with promiscuity, he can externalize his rage at having been discarded by another, more powerful one and at having subsequently suffered the scorn of other men. His attitude runs counter to that of courtly knights, since it is their duty to help, defend, and protect damsels in distress.

A third reason for the rape is that it reinforces in Rodomonte an image of himself as invincible in and out of bed, an image in reality so tenuous that it consistently needs to be confirmed. Through rape, he can use the body of a person he sees in reified terms to enhance the feelings of self-assurance that previous events have shaken in him. By humiliating a particular woman, he can deny that he has ever been humiliated by women and thus heal his narcissistic wound. Rape does not constitute a crime in this version; rather, it is a part of the spoils of war, a political act meant to take possession of an inferior.¹²

A fourth reason for Isabella's rape is more paradoxical, since Rodomonte may unconsciously be motivated to defile an indecipherable Isabella precisely in order to cancel any admiration he feels for her, an admiration at cross-purposes with his earlier misogynous tirade. In other words, Rodomonte needs to rape Isabella not only because she is potentially unchaste (as are Doralice, Angelica, and Fiordispina), but also because she is chaste, and this may tempt him to fall in love with her. However, the prospect of reappearing on the stage of love as madness, or of being lured into woman's net in the name of incommunicability and unknowability, is too dangerous to entertain anew. Isabella's mysteriousness has to be demystified. By conquering a woman, moreover, Rodomonte can conquer his own perceived femininity.

Yet even rape can be delayed when immortality is promised. Because of his vainglory, Rodomonte accepts Isabella's reasoning that the wonders of her herbal concoction should first be tried on her: “Chi si bagna d'esso / tre volte il corpo, in tal modo l'indura / che dal ferro e dal fuoco l'assicura. / / Io dico, se tre volte se n'immolla, / un mese invulnerabile si trova / … / Io voglio a far il saggio esser la prima” (“Whoever bathes himself with this juice three times so hardens his body that he becomes proof against fire and steel. / Truly, whoever applies the liquid three times is invulnerable for a month. … I want to be the first to try [it]” [29, 15-16, 24]). He will live to regret his consent, for the “little death” usually associated with sexual climax now becomes a literal one. I strongly disagree in this context with Giuseppe Resta's psychoanalytic reading of the episode leading to the murder of Isabella. Resta writes that Rodomonte differs from Orlando in his reaction to a woman's refusal of him only in that he acts more aggressively. Rodomonte kills Isabella, the critic argues, in order to avoid falling victim once again to feminine seduction and beguilement. Isabella's unconscious complicity in her seduction is evident for Resta in her preparation of herbs, in her subsequent invitation to Rodomonte to strike her, and in her willing exposure of her neck. What is bewildering in this reading is the critic's absolute desire to put women on trial and declare them complicitous with their rapist because of their inability to defend themselves. Continuing this rational displacement of responsibilities, Resta finds Rodomonte's behavior after Isabella dies full of affection and delicate sentiments (“delicatezza dei sentimenti,” 70).

Being close to the head and connected to lower body members, the neck links ratiocinative (head/thinking), sensitive (heart/courage), and nutritive (abdomen/pleasure) elements. In De partibus animalium, Aristotle organizes these parts hierarchically, with what is closer to the brain as more important. In Greek tragedy, necks are by custom the most vulnerable female part, Loraux writes, since “it is by that part that one hangs, and by that part also that death comes to young girls chosen for sacrifice. … It is as though, quite apart from ritual practice and its requirements, the throats of women invited death” (50-51).

Man wounding woman's neck can substitute for man raping woman as, for instance, in Francesco Berni's remake of Boiardo's Innamorato, where Malagigi is bent on wounding Angelica in the neck, then changes his mind, opts for rape, and drops his sword (I, 1, 45). In the Furioso, Marganorre slits women's throats on the tombs of his sons, as if they were sacrificial victims, precisely in order to punish them for their femaleness. Loraux (61) points out that in Greek gynecology women have two necks, the upper and the lower (the cervix), as well as the notorious two mouths.¹³ In Freud's “Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” the most frequent of Dora's symptoms is a cough, which Freud reads as a displacement upward, the throat having become an erogenous zone.

When Isabella offers herself to Rodomonte's gaze, she offers him her neck: “lieta porse / all'incauto pagano il collo ignudo” (“[she] joyfully offered her bare neck to the unwary pagan” [29, 25]). He beheads her: “Quel uom bestial le prestò fede, e scorse / sì con la mano e sì col ferro crudo, / che del bel capo, già d'Amore albergo, / fè tronco rimanere il petto e il tergo. / / Quel fè tre balzi” (“The brute believed her and used his hand and his cruel sword to such effect that he lopped her fair head, once the abode of love, clean from her shoulders. / Her head bounced thrice” [29, 25-26]). Since Perseus, too, killed Medusa through her neck, we have a seemingly unlikely myth to connect with the Isabella story—that of Medusa.

We know that Perseus slays Medusa, the only mortal among the three Gorgon sisters, as a wedding present to Polydectes, king of the island where Perseus and his mother, Danaë, live.¹⁴ Although Polydectes publicly declares that he will marry Hippodamia, his private strategy is to have Danaë instead. Danaë has been described throughout the story as an asexual, virginal figure, a woman whom even Zeus did not touch with his body when he impregnated her, for he appeared as a shower of gold. Indeed, Danaë has been compared to the Virgin Mary.¹⁵ On his return home after slaying Medusa and rescuing Andromeda, Perseus kills Polydectes by turning him into stone through the display of Medusa's head, for during Perseus's absence, the king has become a menace to Danaë and wants to force marriage on her. “The aim of the myth,” William Tyrrell writes, “is the suppression of the negative side of the mother, which it defines as her physical sexuality. … On the narrative level this is worked out by slaying Medusa, preventing Danaë from using her sexuality, and eliminating sexual males. … The Perseus myth endeavors to remove sexuality from the mother in order to make her solely a virginal nurse. In the ways of myths Medusa is done away with and Danaë turned into a virtual virgin” (107, 110).

The killing of Isabella, Perseus-style, testifies to the fact that Rodomonte can have women only by sublimating their sexuality. It is important to remember that Ariosto has already literalized in Isabella the disfigurement associated with sexual threat by linking her almost oxymoronically with rape. The connection with bodily violation extends to Danaë and Medusa. Famous for their beauty, these two mythical women have also been raped by gods and then punished for being raped. One can theorize that if women's allure entices men to rape, this allure must be eliminated after the violence because it reminds the rapists of their loss of control.¹⁶ The best way to punish such women is to make other women responsible for the punishment. Thus Athena, rather than Poseidon, retaliates against Medusa for having allowed rape in Athena's sacred place by turning her hair into a writhing serpentine mass.

In the myth of Perseus, the movement of the hero is from mother (Danaë) to wife (Andromeda). In order to become a man and grow from the status of son to that of father/king, Perseus has to conquer his fear of femaleness by killing the Medusa. What is missing in the Rodomonte story is the myth's final stage, the hero's rescue of an Andromeda-like, passive heroine representing proper femininity. Perseus's achievement affirms the correct, reproductive side of male sexuality and the value of conjugality, a point that the Andromeda story confirms because it promotes the corollaries of matrimony, societal acceptance, and kingly rule.¹⁷ In other words, the myth tells us that sexuality needs to be regulated for social purposes in both women and men. But Rodomonte is unable to overcome his narcissism, rein in his sexuality, and take his place in society. Such an inability to govern his instincts is evident in his fight against Ruggiero, the champion of faith, honor, and law in the Furioso. The fact that Ruggiero tries to wound Rodomonte on the head and finally succeeds whereas Rodomonte aims at the groin explains the two men's different natures and destinies. In the final analysis, rationality, and not simply faithfulness to king and God, is what differentiates Ruggiero not only from Rodomonte but from Orlando as well.

Another aspect of the myth of Medusa is relevant. As Tyrrell writes, since Medusa represents the physical aspect of the mother, she “must be slain because the purpose of the myth is the denial of birth from a female” (108). Rodomonte, too, cannot accept that he was born through woman. “Perchè fatto non ha l'alma Natura, / che senza te potesse nascer l'uomo, / come s'inesta per umana cura / l'un sopra l'altro il pero, / il corbo e 'l pomo?” he laments after leaving Agramante's camp. “Non siate però tumide e fastose, / donne, per dir che l'uom sia vostro figlio; / che de le spine ancor nascon le rose, / e d'una fetida erba nasce il giglio” (“Why has not fair Nature arranged for men to be born without you, just as human skill can graft one pear or sorb or apple-tree onto another? … Do not preen and puff yourself up, women, with asserting that men are your children: roses are born on briars; the lily springs from a fetid weed” [27, 120-21]). Rodomonte regrets that men are unable to be generated by men or born parthenogenetically, autogenetically, or even autochthonously, that is, without the sexual encounter, the mediation of the female element, and straight from the earth.

Isabella finds herself playing both the part of Medusa (female sexuality as threatening, as in the case of Doralice) and the part of Danaë (female sexuality as nonexistent). Eventually, since a sexual woman is mysterious (and Medusa's mysteriousness is one reason Perseus wants to dominate/overcome her), Rodomonte prefers a second woman, one he can idealize and fetishize. This choice in turn allows him to dispose of his recurring fear of rejection. In the myth, Perseus overcomes Medusa's threat of petrification by killing her. Rodomonte responds to this threat first by expelling Isabella's physicality and then by literalizing her petrification by building a stone monument memorializing the only aspect of her he chooses to remember, her faithfulness to a dead man.

Decapitation of woman illustrates man's fear of castration. To assuage this threat, iconographic renditions of the Medusa multiply the number of phallic signifiers in the shape of snakes, meant to deny castration (Isabella, like Medusa, is shaggy-haired). Petrification is also a denial of castration in that it stands for erection.¹⁸ Rodomonte calms his fear through a staged externalized penance; by way of ritualized jousts, he proclaims anew with each victory that he is not castrated. He also erects a tower for himself, another apotropaic emblem meant both to deny woman's threat and to symbolize his own phallic power.

This identification of Isabella with Danaë allows Rodomonte to renew an Oedipal fantasy in which the other as all-fulfilling entity becomes inscribed as loss. This loss in turn makes it possible for desire to be sublimated. To adore such an absent woman, to use an unrequited passion for an ideal other to protect the worshiper from his own sexual dread, makes man become like the person he reveres; he, too, is superior to other people. By identifying with Isabella and no longer with men or father figures (after all, he feels derided by his peers and king), Rodomonte further avoids castration anxiety. Isabella as Eternal Feminine now becomes his god, his ego-ideal, and the goal of his desire. But this god exists only to satisfy the need that required the creation of such a non-threatening icon in the first place.

Rodomonte displays no less misogyny now when he mystifies Isabella than earlier when he reviled womankind; both responses are founded on the denial of woman's value as subject. Since the core of a misogynist discourse is the rejection of woman and her desire, idealization is as pernicious as vituperation; both require the body of a universal, abstracted—and thus necessarily dead—Woman: a corpse. Idolatry (the myth of the Medusa is also linked with it) properly reflects Rodomonte's excessive nature, since it requires martyrdom and subsequent reification.¹⁹ In this context, Isabella's salve—which she claims would render its user unassailable and unpierceable—does indeed work, postmortem. Although it kills her, it functions in the same way as the Medusa's head on Athena's shield, an emblem that renders the goddess unassailable, beyond desire and beyond sexual pollution, and for this reason worthy of worship.²⁰

Isabella's death inaugurates in Rodomonte a period of ritual purging of inner excesses, a period of neurosis, self-abjection, and melancholia. “To take one's life,” Margaret Higonnet writes, “is to force others to read one's death” (68). This is not true in Rodomonte's case, for rather than displaying shame and a bad conscience, he chooses to anesthetize his sense of guilt with a perverse narcissistic solution. By commemorating Isabella rather than once more vituperating her, by in a sense giving birth to a new woman, formed in his own image, to replace the woman he has just killed (“poi ch'a morte il corpo le percosse, / desse almen vita alla memoria d'ella”; “though he had slain her body, at least he could give life to her memory” [29, 31]), Rodomonte manages to fashion himself into a man with a mission and to change a story of imposed self-sacrifice into one more acceptable to his solipsistic nature, a story of homage and retribution.

Rodomonte fancies that he cannot be faulted for beheading Isabella because this was hardly his intention and that he cannot reproach himself for once again failing to possess a desired woman since the present one is unavailable to everybody and has chosen death over submission. He refuses to read Isabella's death as a response to a series of utterly victimizing moments he himself generated. He equally refuses to read her gesture of escape through self-annihilation as a form of masochism or the opposite, as a moment of self-empowerment, albeit through utter negation. Instead, he takes her death as the expression of a desire for chastity. In short, Rodomonte sees Isabella as Lucretia. Just as Lucretia's suicide made it possible for the Romans to further their political agenda, so Isabella's bloodied body makes it possible for Rodomonte to reconstruct his identity. Just as Shakespeare's Collatinus was unable to see that he was endangering Lucretia by boasting of her virtues, Rodomonte must forget that in order to preserve what he plans to memorialize Isabella had to die.

Unlike Orlando, who desires a woman thoroughly elusive but at least alive and thus available in principle, Rodomonte truly desires Isabella only after she is dead. His earlier desire had been simply sexual; once it had been satisfied, Isabella would have become discardable. But satisfaction would have thrown Rodomonte back into the world of uncertainty in which Doralice had placed him. Sublimation instead enables him not only to renounce his sexual appetite (or simply displace it) but to use the loss of an object as a way of creating himself as a subject.²¹

What better way to implement this program of self-empowerment than by constructing a public display of a knight's contrition? Built in memory of what Isabella would not give up, the mausoleum both reflects Rodomonte's sizable ego and testifies to the construction of woman according to man's desire.²² This construction requires, first, that the woman be silent, so as not to impinge on the story that Rodomonte chooses to narrate to himself and everybody crossing his path. A reborn Pygmalion, he makes this phantasmatic woman stand for what the other woman he wanted, Doralice, declined to stand for. The message is that Rodomonte is worthy of woman after all. When the other knights ridiculed him, he had simply fallen in love with the wrong one; had he known Isabella, he would not have been the object of their scorn. In this version, Isabella still represents sexuality but, once again, in the perverse form of being beyond it.

By reading Isabella as the maiden who prefers chastity to life, Rodomonte can finally cast himself in the role of the perfect courtly lover, a role that allows him to enforce the universal cult of such a paragon of faithfulness. This new agenda of hagiology permits him to rephallicize himself, for now he can invest Isabella with signifiers that are important to him and are easily understood by other men.²³ Moreover, by exhibiting Isabella's corpse as the commodity that gives him a pretext for engaging in combat, he can prove his mastery to passing champions and finally undertake the jousts that he was never metaphorically able to fight with women. The knights take his argument at face value, inquire not at all about his need to tyrannize over them, and rush into combat in the name of male honor: “alcuni la via dritta vi condusse, / … / altri l'ardire, e, più che vita caro, / l'onore” (“Some arrived in the course of their journey. … Others were attracted hither by adventure and by honour (dearer than life itself) to try their mettle” [29, 38]). In accepting Rodomonte's challenge because they want to emulate one another rather than because they are morally engaged, they end up fighting, as usual, not for the sake of a wronged, real woman (Isabella) or an exemplary, ideal one (the body in the mausoleum), but for the sake of being homosocially recognized as worthy by their peers.²⁴

Once again the discourse of demonology and angelology vis-à-vis woman is a discourse by men, to men, and for men. Rodomonte's requirement that combat take place only between knights, a distinction based entirely on gender and class requirements, confirms this. When he meets Orlando—naked, dirty, and unrecognizable—he angrily explains that the pact applies only to those of higher status: “Indiscreto villan, ferma le piante, / temerario, importuno ed arrogante! / / Sol per signori e cavalieri è fatto / il ponte, non per te, bestia balorda” (“Stop, you rash, reckless peasant, you impudent, meddlesome oaf: / this bridge is for lords and knights, not for the likes of you!” [29, 41-42]). In other words, Rodomonte plays a game his opponents thoroughly understand. And the game is so rewarding, the emulation so ingrained in chivalric ideals, that when he is offered the hand of Agramante's cousin in return for rejoining the Saracen camp, he finds it preferable to remain where he is.

That this service to the lady is not only self-justifying and self-ennobling, moreover, but also self-empowering is evident in another, all-consuming activity that Rodomonte now begins: collection. He requires that after losing the joust with him on the bridge, each and every passing knight deposit on the walls of Isabella's mausoleum his arms, armor, and armorial bearings. He also makes Christian knights prisoners. The reasons behind collecting are psychologically complex; accumulation both boosts the collector's ego by displaying his strength and uniqueness and allows him to control compulsive desires by regulating repetition.²⁵ With this requirement, Isabella's death guarantees Rodomonte his masculinity, since the arms decorating her mausoleum testify that he is as omnipotent as his ancestor Nimrod. The value of the arms as fetishes depends on others' willingness to risk their lives for their possession. By taking them away from men, Rodomonte is metaphorically castrating his male enemies (he requires both the knights' armor and the inscription of their names); by displaying his masculinity through a personal arsenal of phallic signifiers, he can assure himself that he indeed possesses the phallus.²⁶

Woman has become both subject and object of the representation, both the catalyst engendering a story and the content of a story of loss that is being refashioned into one of male one-upmanship. From object of Rodomonte's desire, a position that brings her death when she finds herself unprotected by other men, Isabella becomes a collective object of desire for the men called on to test the laws of chivalry that her “lover” has newly redefined. Killed because her sexuality lured men, Isabella finds herself killed in representation as well, a derealized body important only for the political choices of passing courtly knights and for the psychological need of her murderer to reinforce his sense of self-worth.

It takes a woman to disrupt such a game and offer a posture of moral indignation. Bradamante, on her arrival on the bridge for a joust that she is undertaking for the sake of another woman, Fiordiligi, tells Rodomonte that she will fight for Isabella rather than for his right to have others, through defeat, accept his right to determine whom and why they should worship. As Isabella's alter ego, Bradamante rightly understands that to vindicate her and restore the social order, Rodomonte himself needs to be defeated and his narrative of mastery revealed: “Perchè vuoi tu, bestial, che gli innocenti / facciano penitenza del tuo fallo? / Del sangue tuo placar costei convienti: / tu l'uccidesti, e tutto 'l mondo sallo” (“Why do you make the innocent do penance for your crime, you brute? It is with your own blood that you should placate her: you killed her and the whole world knows it” [35, 42]). She also tells him that her victory as a woman will better satisfy Isabella. In short, Bradamante knows that the mausoleum should not replace a woman, dead or alive, but should represent a woman's right to choose a life of her own, even if this right masochistically requires her death. Bradamante makes clear that the power of the phallus can be detached from that of the penis.

Rodomonte's compulsion to challenge any knight indicates that he is in mourning, and that he needs to be libidinally attached to the lost object in order to disavow, or at least postpone, the inevitable pain and sense of guilt he must feel as the cause of that loss. In another sense, however, Rodomonte has not yet even begun to mourn—mourning being a finite mode of understanding what has been lost and of coming to terms with that loss—but instead has remained fixed in the state of melancholia. The melancholic ego chooses to identify with the lost object, often eroticizes it, and refuses to let it go.²⁷ In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud couples melancholia with incorporation and idealization of the lost object and thus with the subject's inability to regain the mother's love or to separate from her world. In short, the melancholic individual cannot accept castration. Unable to cut himself off from the lost other whom he perceives as powerful, he chooses to retain the loss within himself through imitation and identification (“In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty, in melancholia it is the ego itself,” 246). Since it is impossible for him to accept and forget and in the process to constitute his self, the melancholic prefers to hide his bereavement, indeed to entomb it. Successful mourning, instead, postulates the subject's recovery from his sense of loss and the subsequent creation of a self. It is easy to see in this sequence how for Freud melancholia comes to be associated with narcissistic drives: “The narcissistic identification with the object then becomes a substitute for the erotic cathexis. … The ego wants to incorporate this object into itself and in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase of libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it” (“Mourning,” 249-50). In other words, a melancholic individual feels as powerful as a narcissistic child.

Rodomonte, who has exorcized Isabella's sexuality and transformed his sexual desire for her into one for a lost object that he retroactively invests with meaning, narcissistically feels pleasure in the imaginary plenitude of the identification with his ideal. This identification, however, is one of misrecognition. Like the child caught in a dyadic relation to his mother in Lacan's description of the mirror-phase, Rodomonte needs to identify with an other perceived as whole. However, such a perception only reconfirms his incompleteness and his distance from that whole other, which conversely fosters the very desire that makes him seek identification. The fact that Rodomonte cannot let Isabella go not only hides his fear of dissolution but also empowers him, because it fosters closeness to a person he clearly perceives in transcendental terms. Only then, by projecting nurturing and maternal qualities onto her, can he protect himself from the danger of being engulfed in female sexuality.

Although Freud saw melancholia and mourning as two distinct processes initially, he corrected himself in a later essay. In “The Ego and the Super-Ego (Ego-Ideal),” he writes that not only the melancholic individual but also the mourner needs to identify with the lost object for the process of healing to be successful.²⁸ The melancholic is at times aggressive, since in mourning a loss to the self (and also a loss to his sense of self-worth) he ends up hating what he chooses to idealize and idolize. Such is Rodomonte's case during his misogynist rampage after Doralice rejects him. Later, his compulsive request for a joust with each and every knight in the hope of throwing them off his bridge has definite sadistic connotations. Rodomonte has become a pathological mourner with no sense of shame (“Feelings of shame … are lacking in the melancholic,” Freud writes [“Mourning,” 247]).

For Julia Kristeva, melancholia is tainted less by aggression than by a hurt ego, for sorrow would contribute “the most archaic expression of a narcissistic wound, unable to be symbolized or named, too precocious for any exterior agent (subject or object) to be correlated to it. For this type of narcissistic depressive, sorrow is in reality his only object; more exactly, it constitutes a substitute object to which he clings, cultivating and cherishing it, for lack of any other” (107). This sort of depression and moroseness leads the individual to cut his ties with the outside world and to regress into his own universe, a withdrawal that points to a symbolic death. In his rereading of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Samuel Weber links the death drive to narcissism and thus to the desire for mastery. As the compulsion to repeat leads to narcissism, so the death drive “might be just another form of the narcissistic language of the ego” (Legend of Freud, 129). Lacan sees repetitions tied to moi fixations, and therefore once again to the death drive. Rodomonte heals the wounds to his ego caused by previous sexual failures precisely through moroseness, as when he decides to return to Africa after Doralice's rejection. His death-in-life stance is later symbolized by his decision to effect a distance from others following Isabella's death and, more specifically, by his self-willed burial in a cave following Bradamante's victory.

As has progressively become clear in this essay, the Isabella story has slowly become the Rodomonte story, for even when the signified (Isabella's corpse) is refashioned into an outside signifier (the mausoleum) and made to stand for the body, representation can take place only by progressing further and leaving death behind. What comes to be represented, then, is neither Isabella's life nor her sacrifice, but Isabella as projection of male desires. Petrified and penned down, she is slowly turned into the silent Laura of Petrarch's sonnets in mortem, the void around which male identity can be predicated, the simulacrum and guarantor of a melancholic man's shaken sense of self-worth. Petrarch could not have written of this loss, and of his own subsequent birth as a poet, with more poignancy: “E viva colei ch'altrui par morta / e di sue belle spoglie / seco sorride et sol di te sospira, / et sua fama, che spira / in molte parti ancor per la tua lingua, / prega che non estingua, / anzi la voce al suo nome rischiari” (“She is alive who seems dead, and she smiles to herself at her beautiful remains and sighs only for you; and she begs you not to extinguish her fame, which sounds in many places still by your tongue, but rather to make bright your voice with her name” [Rime sparse 268, vv. 70-76]).

Notes

1. This number is from Dalla Palma, Le strutture, 139. Little is known about the sources for the episode. Rajna (Le fonti, 227-33, 458-63) mentions Apuleius's The Golden Ass for the section in the cave; the French romance Palamedès (f. 334, f. 532) for the octaves covering Odorico's treason; Boccaccio's episode of Alatiel (Decameron, Day 2, Novella 7) for Isabella's voyage from her father's house and the shipwreck. From Boccaccio also comes Zerbino's name (a dialectical spelling of Gerbino), whose story in the Decameron (Day 4, Novella 4) resembles the love story between Isabella and Zerbino. Doralice's choice of another man comes from Tristan (I, f. 42) and Palamedès. Isabella's choice of death originates from a story in Francesco Barbaro's De re uxoria.

2. For more on sources for and adaptations of Lucretia's story, see Donaldson. For a study of her characterization in Salutati, see Jed; for the same in Shakespeare, see Vickers, “‘This Heraldry.’” Other oft-cited examples of women choosing self-inflicted martyrdom to avoid rape can be found in Christian exegesis (e.g., Pelagia).

3. See Di Cesare for a reading of the classical and scriptural references in the scene.

4. Describing the assault on Paris, Ariosto compares Rodomonte to a serpent ready for action after a lengthy winter hibernation (17, 11), a simile that repeats Virgil's description of Pyrrhus roaming through a wildly destroyed Troy (Aeneid 2, 469-75). Rodomonte is also compared to Turnus (like him, he will be killed by the “right” dynast, Ruggiero-Aeneas) and is linked to Nembrot, who built the unfinished Tower of Babel (14, 119), as Rodomonte will leave his own tower, unfinished, next to Isabella's mausoleum. On the linking of Saracens to devils in the Carolingian cycle, see Comfort. Marinelli gives two references for Rodomonte's name that connect him to demons, although Ariosto stops short of dehumanizing him: “There is the curious similarity of his name to that of Rhadamanthus, the infernal judge of Greek myth; and also to that of the fallen angel in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, ‘Radamant’” (Ariosto and Boiardo, 56). Earlier, in connection with the episode of Dalinda, Ariosto had compared a woman killer to an infernal spirit (5, 3).

5. As Greenblatt argues, “Self-fashioning is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile. This threatening Other—heretic, savage, witch, adulteress, traitor, Antichrist—must be discovered or invented in order to be attacked and destroyed” (Renaissance Self-fashioning, 9).

6. The latter is illustrated in the cuckold story that Rodomonte hears at the inn at which he spends the night just before his encounter with Isabella. Stories of cuckoldry are usually told for misogynistic purposes; man's lopsided representation of woman as an unreliable, unfaithful, and uncaring human being victimizing him usually ends with her disposal. On the other hand, man's desire to know about his mate's infidelities is obsessive because of what it can reveal about him to his male friends. By ridiculing her, however, he can retaliate against her capacity for mocking him and putting him in the position where he usually puts her, that of object of a discourse. At the same time, if men are victims—which is what stories of cuckoldry imply—the problem rests no longer with them, their behavior, or their inadequacies (an assumption threatening to their sexuality), but with women. Since all men are equally fooled, these stories eventually reinforce feelings of camaraderie among them. In this case, the twin examples of a queen choosing a dwarf and of a wife choosing an unkempt servant over the two most handsome men in the world are illuminating illustrations of men's fear of women's sexuality. The two women do not cuckold their husbands for worthy rivals, the teller implies; instead, their betrayal is the unavoidable result of their nature. Not surprisingly, stories told by men for men reinforce rather than question male narcissism and transform women into what best fits male fantasies. Rodomonte does not lack for vitriolic words for describing them: “Troublesome, arrogant, spiteful, unloving, faithless, foolish, brazen, cruel, wicked, thankless, you are born into the world for a perpetual plague” (27, 121).

7. For a similar view, see Wiggins, Figures, 56. Also see Durling, 55-56, for a rebuttal of the accusation of fickleness regarding Doralice.

8. As Durling explains, “It is untrue that women are more changeable than men in the poem; it is man in general who is flux, like all things. The instability of earthly goods has a principal embodiment in the women of the poem because they are a principal object of desire” (175).

9. The distinction between the two kinds of love for woman, one focusing on the soul, the other on the body, is widely known. Both require a hierarchy in gender positions: man is the subject/activator; woman the object/recipient. In both cases male narcissism remains firmly in place. On Petrarchan echoes in the Rodomonte story, see Weaver, 392.

10. Ariosto plays with the pun on “above” (“sopra”) for men and “below” (“sotto”) for women more than once, as when he assesses Ruggiero's status at the end of the epic both in bed and in the field (46, 100). But, more interestingly, he also uses it in rationalizing why, in the past, poets have kept their female colleagues out of the halls of fame: they “would never allow women the upper hand, but did their utmost to keep them down, as though the fair sex's honour would cloud their own, as mist obscures the sun” (37, 3).

11. This attitude is quite common among knights collecting spoils of war. When Mandricardo sees Marfisa dressed as a woman, he decides to conquer her to give her to Rodomonte in what he thinks amounts to a quasi-even exchange for Doralice. Thus, he jousts with Marfisa's companions, routs them, and claims her as his property. Marfisa refuses with perfect logic: he could have her if she had been under the protection of other knights, but since she takes care of her own safety, he should engage her directly (26, 79).

12. See Sanday, 85.

13. In Greek tragedy, Loraux (61) emphasizes, these coincidences are not merely fortuitous. Men rarely die from wounds on their necks; rather, their most vulnerable parts, according to Loraux (54), are the side and the liver.

14. Ariosto reads the myth through Apollodorus's Library 2, 4; Fulgentius's Mythologies, already in print at the turn of the sixteenth century; Boccaccio's De genealogie 14, 10; Pierre Bersuire (Petrus Berchorius); and, of course, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book 4, 5 (which offers the most common recounting).

15. Zeus's transformation into a shower of gold for seductive purposes is also recounted by Homer in the Iliad 14, 319-20; and by Horace in Odes 3, 16, 1. On the comparison of Danaë to a virginal figure, see Graves, 1:238.

16. For a study of rape in mythology, see Zeitlin.

17. For a reading of the second part of the Perseus story culminating in the rescue of Andromeda, see Chapter 5 above on Olimpia.

18. For the classical linkings in psychoanalysis of the decapitated Medusa with castration, see Freud, “Medusa's Head.” See also Hertz; McGann; and L. Schneider. For further references, see Chapters 4 and 5 above on Angelica and Olimpia.

19. As John Freccero argues in discussing the Medusan power, “Its threat is the threat of idolatry. In terms of mythological exempla, petrification by the Medusa is the real consequence of Pygmalion's folly” (“Medusa,” 13).

20. Freud (“The Infantile Genital Organization”) links the head of the Medusa with the mother's genitals and Athena cum shield with unapproachability. See also “Medusa's Head,” 273.

21. In The Freudian Body, Bersani argues for the creative potential that sublimation of a dangerously hurt sexuality eventually offers. In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous comments on man's need to transform a monstrous, Medusan (sexual) female into a positive (asexual) one (“She is not deadly. She is beautiful and she's laughing,” 255).

22. Entombment returns Isabella to her starting point, since she was imprisoned in a cave before Orlando's arrival. Caves are feminine enclosures in the Furioso, the most obvious case being the cave inhabited by Merlino, in which Bradamante learns of the dynastic future she will put into motion. For more on tombs and enclosures, see Chesney, 158; and Ascoli, Ariosto's Bitter Harmony, 371.

23. As Lacan was to say, “The body as ultimate signified is the cadaver or stone phallus” (“Le corps comme signifié dernier, c'est le cadavre ou le phalle de pierre”). The French quotation comes from an unpublished seminar paper by Lacan entitled “La relation d'objet” (Dec. 5, 1956), cited in David-Menard, 191.

24. The indispensable text on homosocial desire is Sedgwick's.

25. On the collector's reasons for subsuming “the environment to a scenario of the personal,” see Stewart, 162-63.

26. A reversal of this custom takes place at the conclusion of the Marganorre episode. After defeating him, Bradamante and Marfisa inscribe a new law in the column previously used to assert Marganorre's law. They also add his armor, shield, and helmet (37, 119). Rather than being an emblem of man's power, as it was for Rodomonte, here the accoutrement symbolizes man's utter powerlessness.

27. On the melancholic's eroticization of the lost object, see Agamben, 27.

28. Abraham and Torok connect introjection to mourning (the mourner takes stock of his loss of the loved one) and incorporation to melancholia (the mourner refuses to come to terms with his grief). See also Lacan's reading of Freud's term “incorporation” (“Desire,” 37). By foregrounding gender, Schiesari rewrites melancholia as male and shows how the appropriation of the poetics of melancholia/mourning varies with the gender of the mourner.

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