Background on The Dream
of the Siren/Gates of Dis
Now, I (and okay a fair number of “actual”
Dante scholars, sniff) see a number of parallels/links between Dante’s
situation at the Gates of Dis Inferno IX and the Dream of the Siren Purgatorio
XIX.
Basic recap:
Gates of Dis – the Furies (Meagera, Alecto,
Tisephone) pop up on top of the gates and call upon Medusa as the Queen
of Hell to: a)attack Dante and Virgil and b) revenge the wrong done them
by Theseus (slight case of attempted Persephone napping. Hades, although,
similarly guilty, wasn't amused. Never annoy the god of the Dead.). Medusa
never shows up. Instead an Angel with a wand appears, pings the rebellious
angels(i.e., demons), the gates open, and Dante and Virgil go on their
way.
Dream of the Siren – So, Dante sees
this hideous and smelly woman, but by the quality of his gaze, she becomes
desirable and he is enraptured. Until, that is a Lady holy and alert shows
up and tells Virgil (reason) to break them up.
A few side notes:
Medusa was not the Queen of Hades in Greek
myth, Persephone was.
The Sirens were the handmaidens of Persephone
before (and after) she was kidnapped. When Hades grabbed her, Demeter turned
the Sirens into bird women so they could fly all over the world looking
for Persephone, which is incidentally one reason why they know so many
stories. They’ve been everywhere. So, when they aren’t singing on sea shores
beguiling sailors (like Ulysses/Odysseus), they are in Hades, attending
Persephone. They were frequently depicted on Greek funerary urns.
Medusa was, however, a beautiful woman,
whose name means Queen, with snakes for hair and who turned men to stone
when they looked upon her. Also, she was part of her own little trinity,
being the mortal sister of Stheno and Euryale.
Snakes work well in a Judeo Christian sense
for a retelling of the fall from innocence.
Also, Dante wrote a series of erotically
charged poems to a Stony Lady (not to be confused with his Beatrice/she’s
an
angel poems, which are not eroticized). In the Stone Lady poems, Dante
made a number of very clever word plays on: stone, hardness and the whole
male desire thing.
So, when you link the Gates of Dis, which
is defended by spirits of Vengeance and Fallen Angels, and a Siren, can
both stand in for Medusa (looking at her fills Dante with desire like the
Stone Woman) and Persephone, who represents a fall from innocence (a time
when there was no winter), well golly gee willickers, you get several books
worth of analysis and commentary.
Whew, that’s a lot of background.
Dante and Reading/(w)Rriting/’Rithmatic
As a writer, Dante took language very seriously.
There are several places in the Commedia where he was particularly concerned
with where a writer’s responsibility as the creator of the text ends and
where the reader’s responsibility to be a “good” and careful reader begins.
One section where this particularly true
is Inferno Canto V, where Francesca, in describing how she and her adulterous
lover fell in love, blames the book and author of the book that she was
reading when they first kissed. “A Galeotto indeed, that book and he /
who wrote it, too” In the version that Francesca is reading, Galeotto,
serves as an intermediary between Gwen and Lance. She slides the blame
for her kissing Paolo and entering into adultery onto the book and its
author.
However, if she’d gotten slightly farther,
as opposed to getting distracted by kissing, she’d have gotten to the bit
which basically said, adultery, a bad idea, don’t do it.
Thus, Francesca’s excuse for adultery,
the book it made me do it, is a wonderfully subtle (on Dante’s part) chiding
against interpreting a text before you get to the end. Or for that matter
blaming an author for your sins.
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