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University Mfcrdrilms International 300 N. Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 8418915 Bertagnolli, Ann Therese THE CELEBRATION OF IMPERFECT HEROES AND HEROINES IN "ORLANDO FURIOSO," "DON JUAN,” AND "LE MORTE DARTHUR" The Ohio State University Ph.D. 1984 University Microfilms International300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 Copyright 1984 by Bertagnolli, Ann Therese All Rights Reserved THE CELEBRATION OF IMPERFECT HEROES AND HEROINES IN ORLANDO FURIOSO, DON JUAN, AND LE MORTE DARTHUR DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University by Ann T. Bertagnolli, B.A., M.A. The Ohio State University 1984 Reading Committee: Approved by Professor Christian K. Zacher Professor Richard T. Martin Professor Robert C. Jones Adviser Department of E Copyright by Ann Therese Bertagnolli 1984 To Mona and Mary i i Acknowledgements This dissertation owes much to the encouragement and work of others. A true friend and guide, Professor Robert C. Jones has that rare ability to reach into another's mind and understand the thoughts lurking there, some barely formed. He has helped me to draw mine out and to express them in the writing he has so patiently overseen. Professors Richard T. Martin and Christian K. Zacher offered helpful, provocative comments that directed me in making needed revisions. Both were always encouraging. Kezia V. Sproat deserves special thanks for her generosity of spirit—for her words of wisdom and support that have influenced me both professionally and personally—as does Roseanne Rini, my friend and sister and the mentor who has so often sustained and enriched me. I am particularly grateful, as well, to Kay de la Cruz, whose reassurance, honesty, and friendship I have come to prize. Without Joyce Davenport's skill at the word processor and avid interest in Arthurian tales, the preparation of this manuscript would not have been so satisfying. To Dr. John Kangas I owe a very personal debt of gratitude. He has been and continues to be an invaluable presence in my life. i i i The last debts tire often the most difficult. I have only one. Dennis Aig, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., is, and always has been, my most treasured friend, my most respected critic and colleague. VITA November 27, 1950 ................................................Born—Townsend, Montana 1973........................................................................... B.A., Carroll College, Helena, Montana 1975........................................................................... M.A., University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada 1975-1981 ................................................................ Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University 1981........................................................................... Lecturer, Department of English., The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: Renaissance Literature Professor Robert C. Jones Italian Renaissance Literature Professor Albert N. Mancini Medieval Literature Professor Christian K. Zacher Nineteenth Century British Literature Professor Richard T. Martin v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION.............................................................................. ii VITA............................................................................................. v CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION.........................................................1 IL ATTRACTIVE FICTIONS....................................... 25 III. "BUFFOONERY WITH A PLAN"........................... 70 IV. THE QUEST BROUGHT HOME...........................185 V. CONCLUSION.........................................................297 BIBLIOGRAPHY.....................................................................304 v i CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION Epic and romance literature generally elicits from its readers expectations of heroism and grandeur. Northrop Frye's description of the romance genre in his Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays emphasizes its typical idealism, depicted through characteristic gallant, virtuous heroes and heroines. Pitted against their moral opposites, these exalted figures consistently portray ideals they represent. Their marvelous actions allow them to be superior over an environment where the ordinary laws of nature are somewhat suspended. Frye's description of the epic closely parallels what he says about romance. Epic heroes are also idealized, superior in degree to others in their societies. They are distinguished primarily from typical heroes of romance in their limited ability to control their environment. Traditionally, they are leaders who exert their power and authority within the order of nature. Works th at present themselves to us as "heroic fiction" (as both epic and romance conventionally do) affirm the ideals they characterize. Their idealized worlds are created, according to Frye, from our own hopes and desires. He points out that the romance is the nearest of all 1 2 literary forms to the "wish fulfillment dream." It is marked by an "extraordinarily persistent nostalgia, {..a search for} some kind of imaginative golden age in time or space."! Irony "has no place in romance," he claims,because its suggested realism conflicts with this dreamlike, idealized world whose characters are what we would like to be. 2 Works that are mock heroic also use heroic ideals as standards of judgment. Frye's discussion points out that comedy and irony sometimes parody the epic to reveal a disappearance of the heroic in the actual world being posited. The discrepancy between this world and a traditional heroic world emphasizes the ludicrousness of characters in such a parody. They are ridiculed by the narrator's contrasting their shortcomings with the nobility of typical heroic figures. They are significantly beneath what they ought to be or could be, and the absence of the heroic in their natures and worlds is the object of satire. My study focuses on three works that elude the polarization between irony and romance characterizing both heroic and mock heroic fiction in Frye's term s. All three works, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Lord Byron's Don Juan, and Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, posit themselves heroically, but the narrators in each similarly undermine ironically the chivalric, idealized worlds traditionally uplifted in heroic fiction. Rather than satirizing or mocking characters by holding up their actual behavior against heroic ideals, the narrators celebrate, instead, in varying degrees of obviousness, the more realistic, human world that emerges in each work. My aim in approaching these texts through their narrators is to show how each 3 storyteller, either overtly as in Don Juan or almost purely by suggestion as in Le Morte Darthur, modifies the genre to which his work appears to belong. I do not attempt to define conclusively what the romance or mock-heroic are or to establish a new genre to account for the uniqueness I see in these fictions, but offer, instead, a way of discussing problems that appear to derive from inconsistencies and contradictions within a given framework. I thus use the romance and mock-heroic heuristically to highlight the modifications presented by each narrator and to illustrate how similar tendencies and characteristics emerge in three apparently diverse works. This study is meant to be suggestive rather than inclusive, to provoke further interest in seeing how the ironic/affirming perspective can be elsewhere applied. To approach the following works, or any other work, from this direction