Purgatorio (126 page)
Authors: Dante
25–27.
This stream is Lethe, the river of oblivion in classical literature, in which Christians in Dante’s Eden leave the memory of their sins behind them for eternity, as Matelda will explain (vv. 127–128).
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32–33.
Beginning with Tommaseo (1837), commentators have suggested a source in Ovid (
Metam
. V.388–391) for the shaded garden here, the Sicilian scene of Proserpina’s rape (see vv. 49–51), where the forests above the pools in the hills of Enna keep them protected from Apollo’s rays.
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40–42.
The fascination of the character introduced anonymously here (we will not find out her name until
Purgatorio
XXXIII.119) has proven so great that in Dante studies there is practically a separate industry devoted to problems associated with her identity and her significance. The position taken in what follows is based on the following given: Matelda (that is the name that we eventually hear, and it is spelled with an “e” [and not an “i”] in all the manuscripts consulted by Petrocchi) is not “allegorical” but historical. Almost all the early commentators believe that she is Matilda of Tuscany (1046–1115). Their cases pleaded from ca. 1860 on, the two principal other historical claimants to the role are thirteenth-century German nuns, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Mechthild of Hackeborn, but they have both been mainly abandoned in recent and current discussions. Starting in the nineteenth century there was a reaction against all such historical figures and, led by Scartazzini, once he came over to this view, an attempt to establish her identity as one of the other women in Dante’s
Vita nuova
, a position given support in our own era by so eminent a student of the
Commedia
as Contini (Cont.1976.1), pp. 173–74. A calmer and more sensible survey than Scartazzini’s is found in Moore (Moor.1903.1), pp. 210–16; he ends up cautiously maintaining the claim of Matilda of Tuscany. As opposed to the nuns, who are contemplatives, Matelda’s service to the Church is clearly related to the active life, based precisely on the Church’s own favorite mode of the laity’s involvement: financial support. None of the young women in the
Vita nuova
are easily understood in any such role.
Matilda of Tuscany, by mere virtue of having so much support in the early commentaries (the first real opposition to her occurs only in Venturi [1732]), is probably the most intelligent choice. For an attempt to restore her identity see Villa (Vill.1987.1). However, she is nonetheless problematic for at least three reasons. (1) She was fiercely supportive of the political claims of the Church against the emperor; (2) she is presented here as a beautiful young woman, which little accords with her descriptions in the chronicles, which make her seem little less than a virago, a female soldier, and surely less “romantic” than would accord with such a portrait as Dante’s; (3) since the function she performs in the garden seems to be universal (but there is debate about this, with some believing that she is only here for Dante’s visit [see note to
Purg.
XXXIII.128–135]), the fact that she could not have begun her task until 1115 is a bar to her candidacy. This, however, is true for
all
candidates, as it was not, for instance, for that other
genius loci,
Cato (presiding over purgatory as Matelda presides over Eden), who died before Christ harrowed hell, before there were any souls in purgatory, and who thus was able to take up his function only when there were those who required it.
Someone (it may have been Charles Singleton) once made the remark that if we did not know Matelda’s name we would know much more readily who she is. In her role in the garden of Eden she is, there can hardly be a doubt, a representation of unfallen Eve.
As the “new” (or “original old” or “perpetually new”) Eve, she makes sense. She represents the active life that Leah led us to expect in her (as Rachel associates Beatrice with the contemplative life) and she can have been here from the beginning of purgation. And it is also true that, in Genesis, unfallen Eve is never named; she is only named
after
the fall, when Adam calls his wife “Eve” (Genesis 3:20). Matelda, too, is named belatedly.
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43–51.
Here the reader should probably be aware of a distinction between what the poet knows of Matelda’s significance and what the character makes of her. A strategic awareness of the evident difference in perspective between narrator and character as a general aspect of the poem is, surprisingly enough, a fairly recent development. See Spitzer (Spit.1946.1), pp. 414–22; Singleton (Sing.1949.1), p. 25; Contini (Cont.1976.1 [1958]), pp. 33–62; Montano (Mont.1962.1), pp. 367–76.
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43–48.
Dante sees that Matelda is “in love” and wants to understand what she is singing. The response of Venturi (1732) indicates that the current debate was already in progress nearly three hundred years ago. He takes Matelda to be singing “of divine love and not, as some ignorant fools understand, of the bestial kind.” However, many commentators, aroused by the sensual tone of the protagonist’s responses, disagree.
The first major use of Guido Cavalcanti’s poem, “In un boschetto trova’ pasturella” (In a little wood I came upon a shepherd girl), to amplify the meaning of this scene was made by Charles Singleton (Sing.1958.1), pp. 214–16, even if he was not the first to call attention to its importance here (see Scartazzini [1900]). This
ballata
is in a genre worked previously by dozens of French and Provençal poets, a genre in which poets who more usually wrote songs about unattainable ladies had their “revenge,” as it were. The
pastourelle
or
pastorella
(the genre is named for the willing and socially unimportant shepherdess it celebrates) generally, as in Cavalcanti’s lyric, has a highborn protagonist ride into a clearing in a wood where he finds a lovely and willing young woman who gives him sexual pleasure at his merest request (indeed, in Cavalcanti’s poem, it is she who proposes the amorous encounter to him). Any study of this
ballata
makes it immediately clear that Dante had it on his mind as he composed this canto.
Once we see Guido’s poem behind Dante’s we can also discern an authorial strategy behind its presence. Matelda does not come as a shepherdess, but as the unfallen Eve, virginal, upright, completely uninterested in sex. It is the protagonist, his head full of Cavalcantian sexuality, who imagines she is in love with him, just like a pretty
pastorella
. It will take him some time to discover the wrongness of his view of her, and some of his readers still have not made that discovery.
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49–51.
The protagonist first associates Matelda with Ovid’s Proserpina (
Metam.
v.391–401), seen, grasped, and carried off by Pluto. Dante, who has begun this scene believing that Matelda is in love with him, now lets his erotic misinterpretation show; he thinks he is in the role of Pluto to her Proserpina because he thinks she is a
pastorella
.
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52–58.
Playing off Dante’s carnal appreciation of her meaning, Matelda comes closer so that he can hear the words of her song, thus acceding to his request. She is portrayed, in simile, as being as chaste as virginity itself.
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59–60.
Dante’s wish, expressed at verse 48, to make out the words of Matelda’s song is here granted. Few texts in the poem have been as poorly treated by the commentators as this one. The protagonist’s wish made
us
want to know what Matelda was singing; and here we learn that Dante now can make out her words. However, the poet does not tell us what she sang. It is at least possible that he expected us to puzzle out the identity of her song. No one has. Perhaps it is the Psalm to which she refers at verse 80, perhaps it is another song altogether. Our teachers, with only one exception, are silent, merely saying the obvious, that Dante understood what she was singing, and, with only the exceptions of Isidoro Del Lungo (1926) and Charles Singleton (1973), not even bothering to point out that the poet refuses to share this information with us. About all that can safely be said is that she probably sings a song that is kindred in spirit to the Psalm to which she later refers (see note to vv. 80–81).
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64–66.
Matelda’s gaze, the poet remembers, was like the amorous gaze of Venus, wounded by mistake by the arrow of her son, Cupid, and consequently madly in love with Adonis, in a second Ovidian reminiscence (
Metam
. X.525–532).
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67–69.
Matelda, resuming her role as a latter-day Leah (and Eve as well), picks the self-seeding plants the nature of which she will disclose to Dante at vv. 109–120.
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70–75.
The first reference is to the Persian king Xerxes, who found a way to cross the wide Hellespont in 480
B
.
C
. by having his vast army build a bridge out of ships lashed together; defeated by the Greeks whom he was attacking, he had to sail home in ignominy in a small boat.
The sight of this lady moved the protagonist, the poet informs us, to lustful thoughts like those of Leander, unable to cross the rough seas of the Dardanelles from Abydos to make love to his girlfriend Hero at Sestos, the third Ovidian reference, this time to the
Heroides
(XVIII). Leander finally drowned in his attempt to swim to Hero.
These three classical allusions to destructive sexual passions, aligning Matelda, in the protagonist’s eyes, with Proserpina, Venus, and Hero, and himself with Pluto, Adonis, and Leander, function, as Hollander suggested (Holl.1969.1), pp. 154–58, much as did the associations with the dream in
Purgatorio
IX, in which three classical references, involving rape or other destructive behavior, were balanced and corrected by the Christian benevolence of St. Lucy. Here the protagonist’s sexualized vision of Matelda yields to a better understanding once she reveals the nature of her love: Christian charity. Once she does so, the protagonist, whose will came through his self-produced temptation well enough (he does not attempt to cross the narrow stream to be with her), finally has his understanding corrected and no longer thinks of Matelda in sexual terms for the rest of his six cantos in the garden.
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70.
Some readers have found the three paces that must not yet be crossed allegories of the three “steps” of confession, contrition, and satisfaction that await Dante later when he must deal with Beatrice’s accusation in Cantos XXX and XXXI. Others think they are only indicative of a short distance and have no deeper meaning.
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76–80.
Matelda, who has appeared at verse 40, finally speaks. Addressing all three poets (we have surely forgotten about the presence of Statius and of Virgil—as has Dante), she says things that at least Statius and Dante are able to understand. They are “new” (in the sense that they have never been here before but also in that they are “new men,” remade, sinless) and perhaps expect to hear a lament for the Fall, for the loss of this place by the human race because of original sin. Her message, however, is not the tragic message of the Fall but the comic one of recovery, of paradise regained.
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76.
With regard to the word
rido
: Matelda is probably not laughing, as some hold, but smiling; see König (Koni.2001.1), p. 441, citing
Convivio
III.viii.8 for a smile as the shining forth of delight in the soul.
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80–81.
Psalm 91 (92), “A Psalm or Song for the sabbath day,” begins as follows: “It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord, and to sing praises unto your name, O most High.” The verse that Matelda refers to, 91:5 in the Vulgate, runs as follows in the English Bible: “For you, Lord, have made me glad
(delectasti me)
through your work: I will triumph in the work of your hands” (92:4). Matelda is expressing her Leah-like devotion to the active life, her delight in “dressing and keeping the garden” as Eve was enjoined to do (but did not, eating the forbidden fruit instead). She is once again joined in our understanding to the unfallen Eve, her constant typological referent in Dante’s garden of Eden. If we ever had any doubt about the nature of the love she feels, we do so no longer. She is “in love” with God, not with Dante except as she loves him in God, as we shall see all the saved loving one another (and Dante) in
Paradiso
.
In his
Monarchia
(
Mon
. III.xv.7), Dante says that the earthly paradise signifies the
beatitudo huius vitae
(the blessedness of the earthly life).
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