Romance Review

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/romancereview61bost Romance Review Graduate Student Literary Review Romance Languages and Literatures Boston College Volume VL, Number I Fall 1996 Romance Review * Fall 1996 • Volume VI • Number I Editors Louissa Abdelghany, French Studies Stephen Ross, O.C.D., Spanish Studies Cristiana Fordyce, Italian Studies Editorial Board Simona Barello Ann Cantu Alessandra Corigliano Marco Antonio Miranda Daniel O’Sullivan The Romance Review is a referredjournal ofliterary and cultural criticism published annually by the graduate students ofthe Department ofRomance Languages and Literatures at Boston College. The Romance Review is listed in the MLA International Bibliography and Index ofPeriodicals. Articles prepared for submission, editorial correspondence or subscription requests may be addressed to Romance Review, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Boston College, 304 Lyons Hall, Chestnut Hill, MA 02167. The deadlinefor submissions to the 1997 issue ofthe Romance Review is January 8, 1996. Table of Contents Space of the Performance: Aminta , the Court, and the Theater by Maria Galli Stampino • Washington University in St. Louis 7 Seducing the Seducer: From Obligation to Seduction in La princesse de Cleves by Susan Bree • Stanford University 29 “II ruolo del mito delfermafrodita durante il rinascimento e le sue manifestazioni nella letteratura delfepoca” by M. Lynn Scappini • Boston College 49 “La propagande par le geste”: Shifting Codes of Violence in the Modernist Aesthetic by Eduardo A. Febles • Brown University 57 Flaubert’s “medieval trifle”: “La Legende de saint Julien l’FIospitalier” by Nancy Aykanian • University of California at Berkeley 69 Assertions of ‘algerianite’: Intellectual Production of a Colonial Identity ^Jonathan Gosnell • New York University 85 Ecos maimonidianos en la poesfa de Juan de Mena y el Marques de Santillana by Luis M. Giron Negron • Harvard University 97 Experiencias inmediatas en las Cartas marruecas de Cadalso by Scott Dale • University ofPennsylvania 115 Sobre el “Prologo al lector” del Teatro critico universal de Feijoo: la modernidad como “distancia” en el discurso prologal by Jose E. Santos • Brown University 137 La busqueda de la identidad en La nave de los locos de Cristina Peri Rossi by Margarita Saona • Columbia University 149 Space of the Performance: Aminta, the Court, and the Theater Maria Galli Stampino Washington University in St. Louis orquato Tassos Aminta, written in 1573 and performed soon after that date, both as a text and as a performance seems to have T been a courtly creation. This aspect has received extensive atten- tion on the part of literary historians, who have stressed how the text reflects courtly ideals and their practical embodiments at court. However, this position is predicated on a semantic inaccuracy, as “courtly” seems to carry two separate meanings: one that is more general, and the other that is particular to the Este court of Alfonso II. As early as 1891, Solerti and Lanza emphasized that even though commedia delTarte troupes were regularly performing at Ferrara, their environment was the courtly one and not the popular one (165). The two elders of Italian theater criticism aimed at subtracting the space of the local theater from the sphere of influence of the so-called popular theater, in order to claim it for the learned circles of the court and the academies, where it could be legitimately performed, i.e., staged, in a classical vein. Later critics have gone further, asserting that the locus of production of Tasso’s pastoral influenced its content and ideological posture. In 1933, Giuseppe Petronio pointed out that preceding pastoral plays had already been filled with “riferimenti al tempo attuale” (4), hence Tasso could not avoid adopting a similar strategy in his own work: Tutto cio e tutto cio che ne deriva e pur nell Aminta, e la Corte, non la Corte in astratto, ma quella tal Corte d'Alfonso II con quegli uomini che, movendosi ogni giorno intorno al poeta, eran presenti e simponevano alia sua attenzione, non solo poetica, ma pratica; questa Corte dunque e il sot- tinteso principale del dramma, di cui tante battute e tutta Timpalcatura stessa non possono comprendersi senza di quella, sicche alcuni personaggi non sono che allegorie di uomini vicini al poeta, e tanti versi e tante battute non possono capirsi se non si pensi che non sono tanto per Tin- 7 terlocutore quanto per il pubblico, per quel determinato , pubblico. (4-5) According to Petronio, the text, rather than being self- referential, feeds off the circumstances within and for which it had been written. Although this hypothesis justifies the lack of appeal of Aminta on subse- quent audiences, it does not take into consideration its fame with the pop- 1 ular audiences of the commedia dell’arte, for which Aminta was a staple. Mario Fubini tempers Petronio’s judgment in his introduction to a 1976 edition of Tasso’s pastoral. In his opinion, the appeal of this text resides in the bridge that the latter builds between the events on stage and the audience: Tirsi, vale a dire il poeta, quale a lui place presentarsi e atteggiarsi in un momento della sua vita di cortigiano e letterato, e Dafne, quale essa sia tra le dame della corte estense, vengono a essere quasi mediatori tra il pubblico della corte e quei personaggi dArcadia, e con la duplice parte che e loro propria, di esseri viventi e fin il pubblico e sulla remota scena silvestre, congiungono quel che sem- brerebbe cosl disgiunto e a un tempo, interpreti del sentire del poeta e del pubblico, diventano figure necessarie alio svolgimento deWazione. (23) If this is the role played by Tirsi and Dafne on stage, all the other characters seem, by implication, to belong to the theatrical and pastoral frame tout court without any possible links to the people constituting , the audience. Giulio Ferroni disagrees: in his opinion, “la pastorale tas- siana vuol apparire. .come un diretto specchio delle relazioni cortigiane” (556). Consequently, all characters and the network of relationships linking them can be interpreted as a trace (a “mirror ) of actual courtly relationships. Dante Della Terza attempts to strike a balance between the two positions: la fiavola di Aminta si appoggia ad unimpalcatura cortigiana si da presentare al limite, se vista nel suo insieme, due diverse strutture di rifierimento. Ci sono dei punti, pero, in cui realta cortigiana e fiavola pastorale si toccano ed opportuni schemi d’interferenza vengono creati dal poeta intorno ad essi al fine di fiavorire un passaggio da una struttura all’altra senza cadute di tono. La creazione d’un codice unifiorme di trasmissione degli schemi della verita poetica e della realta cortigiana che la sottende consente irre- versibili risultati di convergenze di toni e di contenuti. (56) 8 If "tones" and "contents" seem to converge, it so happens for a specific audience that Tasso envisioned while writing Aminta : it "mira, in prima istanza alia persuasione e all edificazione di uno spettatore insieme fer- rarese e cortigiano. E costui che e continuamente sollecitato a riportare farabesco evasivo, lo stile circonlocutorio del racconto pastorale verso orizzonti familiari" (51). In other words, for Della Terza Tasso’s pastoral falls into the genre of epideictic rhetoric, aiming at instructing those in 2 power through examples, that is, only indirectly and covertly. It is clear from the preceding observations that for Della Terza, too, Aminta had been composed with a very specific and identifiable audience in mind: the court of Ferrara under Alfonso II. There is, however, a potential tension between the pastoral set- ting and its epideictic exploitation, of which Della Terza himself is aware and which he tries to accommodate: “lo stile circonlocutorio non e... veicolo d’evasione dal reale, ma piuttosto rispecchiamento attenuato delle cose, e la vacanza dello spettatore non e oblio di vivere i propri impegni nel travestimento pastorale, ma depotenziamento momentaneo di essi" (52). The performance o{Aminta, then, is for its audience a time and a place where everyday reality is somehow suspended, and its roles and rules defused. Other critics disagree with such reading: for Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, Aminta functions as a masque where Estense courtiers can don shepherds costumes in order to explore the mysteries oflove. In place of comparing the inequities of structured social authority at the court and the liberty from moral restraint in the shepherdly realm, Tasso's play serves to reinforce the reigning order of society and to celebrate the values of a court that provides models ofunsurpassed excellence (75) In other words, for Radcliff-Umstead, far from constituting a distancing from courtly realities, the pastoral is but a means towards the goal of reinforcing the status quo by presenting idealized examples on stage and holding them up to view. However, Giovanni Da Pozzo claims that the pastoral genre in general, and Tassos work in particular, aims at building an escape precisely for the courtiers forming its privileged (and some- times only) audience: lo spazio ideale che si crea tra scena e pubblico cortigiano finisce per funzionare da luogo in cui e possibile, e piu benevolmente accolta da tutti, anche dalprincipe stesso, la critica al presente e ai presenti, il dubbio o il compati- mento sull’eccellenza delle istituzioni e della vita della 9 corte. Solo che, nella commedia, il gioco dei riferimenti alia contemporaneita e alia sua non sempre aurea esisten- za, avviene per necessita in maniera pin caustica, per I'insieme stringente degli elementi comici, irridenti che il genere stesso obbliga pure, in qualche misura, a porre in atto. Nella pastorale invece, questo gioco di allusioni avviene necessariamente in maniera assai piu sfumata, anzi tendenzialmente non e nemmeno sospettabile, tanto il reticolo dei riferimenti istituzionali del genere tende a trasferire altrove I’attenzione, nei boschi, in altro tempo, in piu edenica societa.

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