Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present.

Maria Omella Marotti, ed., University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. ix + 285 pp. $19.95. ISBN: 0-271-01505-5.

Both these volumes deal with Renaissance and early modern writings only in relatively small sections, but the pertinent essays can be said to offer together an integrated view of the constraints shaping the lives of women and conditioning male and female representations of them. Two of Maggie Gunsberg's chapters analyze the effects of gender constructions in the commedia erudita, while Constance Jordan and Flora Bassanese, whose articles are included in the collection edited by Maria Ornella Marotti, give us a view of how women writers challenged, adapted to, or reformulated patriarchal assumptions.

Gunsberg's study very effectively argues that in early sixteenth-century comedy the presence of female characters, both in visual and audible terms, was in reverse order to their position in the socioeconomic scale, with the upper-class girls being described and ventriloquised on stage mostly by male characters, while the women at the other end of the scale - servants, prostitutes and procuresses - took subsidiary part in the plot. This scarcity of female representation is shown to be the effect of the interaction between the ideological principles of patriarchal bourgeois society and the formal qualities of the plays. Both the unity of time and the unity of place, with the customary outdoor set, have the result of limiting the action of women characters and of practically suppressing their use of prologues, endings, soliloquies, and asides, which, being the theatrical vehicles that establish a direct rapport with the audience, as Gunsberg tells us, are best suited for the projection of an autonomous femininity. At the same time, the plot, which by and large consists in devising means to trick a woman into conceding her sexual favors, is seen as the feature that most effectively commodities female sexuality.

The function served by this Renaissance section of providing a starting point in the evolving theatrical representation of femininity understandably leads Gunsberg to stress women's invisibility, and focus on common features rather than on differences of representation. But a minimal variety exists in the way the commedia erudita depicts women. What the critic here calls "commodification" of women does not exclusively occur in terms of sexuality, for they are desired for other qualities too, as Ligurio's description of Lucretia, in act one, scene three of Mandragola, proves ("beautiful woman, wise, well-mannered, and capable of governing a kingdom"). Moreover, female sexuality is more widely represented than the reader would infer from this study. Once we reject the social and sexual categories embedded in the texts, we come to realize, for instance, that some women, usually thought of as prostitutes, such as Togna in La cortigiana, are working-class women who, faithful to the novella tradition, avail themselves of the chance for the sexual and financial gratification denied to them by their spouses and by society. There are also a few self-motivated agents among the female characters. The cast of Gli ingannati, for one, includes an upper-class virgin who, in harmony with the free spirit generated by Siena's Accademici Intronati, seeks out and manipulates the man she desires, thus becoming a participant in the theatrical action.

The landscape of femininity would greatly vary if the analysis were extended to non-erudite plays, such as those of Ruzante, to La veniexiana, and to the performances of the Cornmedia dell'arte actresses. The suggestion of other possible investigations is in fact one of the many merits of Gunsberg's work. What could rather be questioned is the way in which she disposes of gender deceptions, by which we are to understand both female characters dressing up as men, and male actors playing women's parts. Gunsberg maintains that all forms of female sexuality - including the lesbian situations created by female characters disguised as men - are voided and turned to male sexual gratification when they are witnessed or reported on stage by men, and that they are ultimately preempted by the all-male cast, which reaffirms the homoerotic nature of the entire production. Notwithstanding the formal restrictions of the texts and early sixteenth-century theatrical practices, I find it questionable whether boys playing women's parts could not produce a sustained suspension of belief, at least in part of the audience, and that the perception of female sexuality could not coexist with an homoerotic turn, added for the gratification or amusement of another section of spectators, or of the same, for that matter. However that may have been, if we wonder how some real women reacted to contemporary gender constructions, we may turn for an answer to Marotti's volume.

In "Selling the Self: or, The Epistolary Production of Renaissance Courtesans," Fiora A. Bassanese turns to rhetorical conventions as revelatory of the image the writers wish to present to lovers and the public, and to the motivations behind their stance. In the letters sent to Filippo Strozzi by two courtesan friends of his, in those written by Tullia d'Aragona to Benedetto Varchi, and in the dedications of two published volumes, stylistic embellishment, protestations of inadequacy, and a tone of deference read not only as adherence to literary decorum and signs of a precarious social standing, but also prove to be a well-considered strategy of turning writing skills to practical uses. The courtesan seeks to flatter her male correspondents and she does so by fashioning herself on the model of gender correctness prescribed by courtly etiquette. On the other hand, when, in a volume of letters published in 1580, Veronica Franco runs a moral commentary on life, she defies gender stereotyping and both social and literary conventions. In Bassanese's deft analysis, the courtesan's letters turn from literary exercises into rhetorical instruments for the construction of a worthy image of her as woman and artist.

The cultural assumptions challenged implicitly by Veronica Franco are explicitly interrogated by Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinelli, the writers discussed by Constance Jordan in "Renaissance Women Defending Women: Arguments Against Patriarchy." In Jordan's reading of Fonte's II Merito delle donne (1600) two contradictions remain unexplained. On one hand Fonte envisions a female society informed by amicitia, as practiced among women and opposed to the fierce rivalry that characterizes men's world. On the other, she proposes to negotiate women's independence and equality following the model of Venetian commercial order, which was certainly hierarchical and competitive. Furthermore, women's freedom is predicated on women's differences which, in Fonte's separatist discussion, are mainly viewed as generated by the conditions imposed on women by men. Far more illuminating is Jordan's discussion of Marinelli's La Nobilta et eccellenza delle donne (1601). In exposing the contradictions in the concept of physics and in the use made of natural law, which grounded the idea of women's inadequacy, and sanctioned their inferior position in society, Marinelli was in fact dealing with the formation and the effects of ideology in the structures of power. Jordan rightly claims that some of the theoretical concerns of twentieth-century feminism were foreshadowed by this remarkable early modern writer.

RINALDINA RUSSELL City University of New York, Queens College