by Jon Lackman | 31 May 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Medieval, Renaissance
In the February 2007 Renaissance Studies, Victoria Kirkham reviews Patrizia Bettella’s The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque. One chapter “devotes generous space to the ‘guardian,’ since whatever her incarnation — as duenna, chaperone, governess — her function is to ‘guard’ and ‘regard,’ that is, to protect the young woman under her care with a watchful eye. Misogynistic attacks on the old guardian, Bettela finds, express male fear of women in power. She actively ‘looks,’ whereas women are supposed to be the object of the gaze and lower their eyes.”
“Bettela asserts in conclusion, ‘We as women must come to terms with the onus to comply and conform with existing rules of bodily proportion, youth, blondness, and perfection or otherwise be called ugly old hags.’ Here, as throughout, one senses her wish to take her texts personally rather than as play, lusus in a long rhetorical tradition. Do Poliziano’s poems about an aging prostitute, and another on the anus, express his true psychological fears and anxieties? … Prose is replete with uncritical generalizations: ‘female ugliness is purely and unequivocally an expression of negativity, male fear, and misogyny.’ Style is repetitive, a problem for which Toronto press holds ultimate responsibility.”
“It is a pity when pressure today on young scholars to vacuum in theory helter-skelter and rush to print for tenure mar a project with as much potential merit as this.”
