In the Margins

Even today I have trouble understanding what he did. Gorni has correctly pointed out that Beatrice “is the only woman in all of Western literature to be invested with such an honorable role.” But why does Dante alone place his woman so high in the contemporary hierarchy of the female? What strategies does he use to get to the point of plausibly assigning her such an honor?

At this point I’d like to make a small correction. I said that I decided to write this essay out of love for Dante. And it’s true. But since I intend to make an effort to speak as “truthfully” as possible—truth is always at the top of a writer’s thoughts, especially Dante—I want to explain that that love for Dante immediately became one with his boldest creation: Beatrice. In fact, if I’m faithful to my memories as an adolescent reader, I should add that it was she who made me love Dante right away. I was immediately grateful to him for the way he had portrayed the fearful man, lost in the dark wood, subject to weeping and fainting at the suffering of others, and saved by a believable Florentine woman who started the work of salvation by refusing to greet him and then, having gone to a better life, re-educated him by removing him conclusively from the condition of a delirious child.

I got the impression, at the age of sixteen, that love was suffering, exposing oneself to certain danger. And not so much because death was always around the corner but because of the very nature of love, because of an energy it had that heightened and at the same time stunned and humiliated the spirit of life. Meanwhile, however, deeply etched in me was the notion that without love it was impossible to greet others, and thus save ourselves, in heaven as on earth, since exposing oneself, risk, was inevitable.