We Need to Talk: Conversation in Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women and Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries
Abstract
In our last chapter, we examined the way Christine de Pizan and Virginia Woolf incorporated the symbol of the mirror into their respective works. The mirror is most often associated with female vanity, and both Pizan and Woolf write back to this stereotype, reinterpreting this image for their readers. For Pizan, the mirror is not about female self-love but a powerful symbol of self-knowledge, wielded by Lady Reason. For Woolf, women are not looking into mirrors but are, themselves, the mirrors into which men gaze in order to see their own reflections—their images pleasingly amplified to appear “twice [their] natural size.” The two works we’re examining in this chapter, Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women and Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries, draw on yet another female stereotype for their I-have-a-dream fantasies: women’s love of talk. Fonte and Satrapi both show us what happens behind closed doors, when women gather together and engage in a lively, spirited, and private conversation. In these books, the first from the late sixteenth century, the second from early in the twenty-first, women’s speech is celebrated rather than suppressed. In both books, women can speak most freely only when they are in rooms of their own, rooms where there are no men present at all.
Keywords
Picture Book Dine Room Closed Door Woman Writer Student ReaderPreview
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Chapter 3 Notes: Suggestions for Further Reading
- Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, edited and translated by Virginia Cox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), makes Fonte’s work accessible in English for the first time. The Worth of Womenwas originally published in 1600, but like Christine de Pizan before her, Fonte and her work disappeared. In her introduction to her edition, Cox notes that “there is evidence of an acquaintance with her writings in the works of several writers of the first half of the seventeenth century.” But after about the middle of the seventeenth century and “until very recently, Fonte’s writings appear to have attracted little serious critical scrutiny. …” As in the case of Pizan, “Her modern critical rediscovery began in the 1970s, under the impulse of the feminist movement.” A modern critical edition of Il merito delle donne, edited by Adriana Chemello, was published in 1988; Chemello’s Italian text is available online at http://www.intratext.com/IXT/ITA3097/ (I Edizione IntraText CT), accessed 13 December 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Aside from the essay by King and Rabil, noted above, one of the best sources for medieval attitudes about women is Women Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, edited by Alcuin Blamires with Karen Pratt and C. W. Marx (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).Google Scholar
- Although the classical and medieval sources I’ve used here are available in a variety of translations (many of them easily accessible online), I’ve quoted from Blamires’s anthology. For similar views about women at a slightly later date, see Suzanne W. Hull’s Women According to Men (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1996) or Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640 by Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985). All three books are still in print, and used copies are widely available.Google Scholar
- In an essay on women and the literary dialogue, Virginia Cox writes about the absence of women from Renaissance literary dialogues like Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. She notes that there is no previous text that would have “prepared Castiglione’s readers for the novelty of the appearance of women in a dialogue whose style and structure proclaim its affiliation to the hitherto exclusive masculine … tradition. The importance of this fact for our reading of the Cortegiano can hardly be overemphasized.” On women’s silence in male-authored dialogues, Cox notes, “Where modern readers are struck by the silence of Castiglione’s women speakers, his contemporaries would have been more likely to be struck by the fact that there were women present at all” (386). Her essay, “Seen But Not Heard: Women Speakers in Cinquecento Literary Dialogue,” is found in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, edited by Letizia Panizza (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 2000), 385–86.Google Scholar
- Two other excellent discussions of women’s absence from literary dialogues are Valeria Finucci’s The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
- Janet Smarr’s Joining the Conversation: Dialogues by Renaissance Women (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005).Google Scholar