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Motherhood and the Identity Formation of Masculinities in Sixteenth-Century “Erudite Comedy”

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Motherhood and the Identity Formation of Masculinities in Sixteenth-Century “Erudite Comedy” MOTHERHOOD AND THE IDENTITY FORMATION OF MASCULINITIES IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY “ERUDITE COMEDY” A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Yael Manes February 2010 © 2010 Yael Manes MOTHERHOOD AND THE IDENTITY FORMATION OF MASCULINITIES IN SIXTEENTH CENTURY “ERUDITE COMEDY” Yael Manes, Ph. D. Cornell University 2010 The commedia erudita (erudite comedy) is a five-act drama that is written in the vernacular and regulated by unity of time and place. It was conceived and reached its mature form in Italy during the first half of the sixteenth century. Erudite comedies were composed for audiences from the elite classes and performed in private settings. Since the plots dramatized the lives of contemporary, sixteenth-century urban dwellers, this genre of drama reflects many of the issues that preoccupied the elite classes during this period: the art of identity formation, the nature, attributes, and legitimacy of those who claim the authority to rule, and the relationship between power and gender, age, and experience. The dissertation analyzes five comedies: Ludovico Ariosto’s I suppositi (1509), Niccolò Machiavelli’s Mandragola (1518) and Clizia (1525), Antonio Landi’s Il commodo (1539), and Giovan Maria Cecchi’s La stiava (1546). These plays represent and critique idealized visions of patriarchal masculinity among the elite of Renaissance Italy through an engagement with the problems that maternity and mothering present to patriarchal ideology and identity. By unpacking the ways in which patriarchal masculinity is articulated in response to the challenges of maternal femininity, this dissertation gives a rich account of the gender order and the ways in which it was being problematized during the Italian Renaissance. This dissertation offers a series of interrelated analyses that employ motherhood as an analytical category, examining how the anxieties of the Renaissance male elite about emasculation and male impotence pervaded the ideological assumptions underlying the identity formation of the gendered individual. It argues that, in order to resolve these anxieties, femininity, masculinity, motherhood, and fatherhood are constructed in these plays as intersecting categories of identity. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Yael Manes began her undergraduate studies in the Department of General History at Tel-Aviv University, Israel, in 1994. She received the Rector’s List Award in 1996, and in 1997, she was recognized for academic excellence by the Israeli Parliament. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree, summa cum laude, in 1998 and was the class valedictorian. As a student in the Master’s program in the School of History at Tel-Aviv University, she taught a Freshman Critical Reading Seminar for which she received an Excellence in Teaching Award in 2001. In 2002, she entered the doctorate program in the Department of History at Cornell University where she specialized in Renaissance and Medieval history and Italian literature. She is currently a Hanadiv Postdoctoral Fellow in European and Western History, and her next project will focus on the history of fifteenth-century Italian religious drama. iii To Gadi, just as I promised. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are many benefits to completing a dissertation, not the least of which is the opportunity to give public thanks to those who were instrumental in its completion. It is with great pleasure that I thank my advisor Professor John M. Najemy for his academic and personal generosity, for respecting my methodological assumptions even when they differed from his own, and for remaining calm when I presumptuously exclaimed in my first year at Cornell that “events are redundant.” My many conversations with Professor Paul Hyams on the nature of history and historical truth have influenced how I perceive the discipline and my position within it, and his wit and humor helped me not to take myself too seriously. I would also like to thank Professor William Kennedy for the rigorous critique he has offered my work and for never failing to do so with kindness and good form. Thanks are also due to Professor Marilyn Migiel for her assistance and insights and for sharing with me her unique expertise in Italian Renaissance literature and gender studies. I would like to give special thanks to Professor Peter Dear for constantly offering me intellectual challenges, for generously showing interest in my work for all these years and, most of all, for treating me like a colleague and a friend. I feel extremely fortunate to have met several people at Cornell who enabled me to continue writing even when I no longer remembered why it mattered. Professor Medina Lasansky, a friend and mentor, continues to be an inspiring role model for women in academia. My dear friends Ada Kuskowski and Ryan Plumley offered their encouragement at difficult moments, and they v provided intellectual feedback and editing assistance that proved invaluable in the completion of this dissertation. I would also like to thank Boaz Nadav-Manes for believing me when I told him that I was going to become an historian and for continuing to tell me that I am good at what I do. To Michal Ben-Aryeh and Alan Ledet, who always stood by me, my love and gratitude are more than I can express. I am very thankful to have had Ed Goode offer me his unflinching strength, reassurance, and love during this last, difficult year. His steadfastness, determination, and insistence on asking “what do we need to do to make it happen,” indeed, made it happen. Finally, I am blessed with the love of parents, Rhoda and Leizer Manes, who have always made sure that I know how much they are proud of me. My father’s love of history as well as the five decades he has worked in the theatre and my mother’s insatiable passion for reading and the arts is present in this dissertation in many ways. Any intellectual curiosity and self-confidence that I might posses is due to the way they raised me. I love them both very much. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Part I. Introduction: Machiavelli’s Concept of virtù as a Category of Analysis 27 Chapter One: What Is a Mother’s Worth? The Negotiation of Motherhood and Virtù in Machiavelli’s Mandragola (1518) 40 Chapter Two: Replacing the Father—Negotiating Motherhood and the Battle for Authority in Machiavelli’s Clizia (1525) 84 Conclusion, Part I: The Performance of Maternal Authority 117 Part II. Chapter Three: Ideal Motherhood in the Prescriptive Discourse of Humanism 121 Chapter Four: Renegotiating the Ideal Mother and the Father-Son Conflict in Giovan Maria Cecchi’s La stiava (1546) 148 Chapter Five: Prescribing the Ideal Mother in Antonio Landi’s Il commodo (1539) 169 Conclusion, Part II: The Performance of Maternal Roles and Patriarchal Masculinity 191 Part III. Chapter Six: The Regrets of Fathers—Surrogacy and the Dysfunction of Fatherhood in Ludovico Ariosto’s I suppositi (1509) 200 Conclusion: Motherhood as the Object of Desire of the Masculine Identity 236 Bibliography 243 vii Introduction I. Feminine Fatherhood? In I suppositi, a comedy written by Ludovico Ariosto in 1509, a man travels to Ferrara to find his son, whom he misses dearly, and take him home to Sicily. Once in Ferrara, he shares the details of his arduous trip with a local man whom he met on the street. He tells the man from Ferrara that he would not even have considered undertaking such a trip except for his unyielding desire to reunite with his son. In response to something that the man from Ferrara tells him off-stage, the Sicilian father declares that “certainly, my dear worthy man, what you say is indeed true, that no love can be compared to a father’s love.”1 The two men agree that, in the hierarchy of emotions, paternal love has the highest standing. As the dialogue continues, however, they disagree on the specific nature of that love. Soon after his son left home to study at the University of Ferrara, the father discovered that he could not bear to be separated from his son; he is afraid he will eventually die without his son by his side. He also tells the Ferraran how concerned he is that his son is studying so hard that he neglects to eat properly and take care of his health. The Ferraran replies immediately that “To love one’s children is human, but to 1 Ludovico Ariosto, The Pretenders, in The Comedies of Ariosto, trans. and eds. Edmond M. Beame and Leonard G. Sbrocchi (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 76. “Sii certo, valent’ uomo, che come tu dici, é cosi veramente, che nessuno amor a quel del padre si puó agguagliare.” Lodovico Ariosto, “I suppositi,” ed. Giovanni Tortoli, Commedie e satire di Lodovico Ariosto, vol. 1 (Florence: Barbèra, Bianchi e Comp., 1856), 523 (IV:3). 1 have such tenderness is womanly,” to which the father responds, “That’s the way I am.”2 This scene underscores a particular gendering of emotions: the two male characters seem to take for granted that there are different types of love and that their classification is determined by gender—paternal love and feminine love, the love of a man for his son and the love of a woman, presumably a maternal figure, for her child. Yet, while the two men agree that the relationship between fathers and sons is the best of all, they do not share an understanding about the desirable nature of that relationship. The man from Ferrara equates the need for the physical presence of one’s child, separation anxiety, and tenderness with femininity, and he is judgmental towards the father who loves his son in this way.3 The father is unapologetic about his feelings and simply states that this is the way he is.
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