When Adriana’s unmarried daughter Virginia asks if Helena is happy, Leonora sarcastically chimes in, “How can you ask such a thing, when everyone already knows the answer? For popular opinion dictates that no new bride can be anything but happy.” Helena’s response, however, is decidedly lukewarm. Although she enjoys her husband’s company, already he seems to be too controlling, prohibiting her from leaving the house to attend weddings and banquets. The others do little to comfort her, noting that newlyweds almost always suffer illusions of happiness that blind them to the reality of their new status in life. “What you mean,” Leonora clarifies, “is that everything seems lovely when it has the charms of novelty.”78 Married mere weeks, Helena has no response to Leonora’s somber pronouncement. Already, experience is putting the lie to popular opinion and received authority, revealing promises of marital happiness to be mere illusions that all too quickly give way to a cruel reality threatening ever new dangers and novel forms of suffering.
Fonte makes the dangers of popular illusions and false appearances explicit when the ladies ask Leonora to explain the symbolism of six statues, exquisitely sculpted figures of beautiful women each holding emblems and scrolls, that surround a fountain situated at the very center of her courtyard garden. Before describing them Leonora reminds everyone that her aunt, from whom she inherited the house and who had vowed from the time she was a little girl never to marry, procured the fountain and its statues “as a statement of the way in which she intended to live her life and of the views she held against the male sex.” The first three, Leonora explains, offer the keys to female independence, illustrating the need for chastity, solitude, and liberty. The next three emphasize the threats that men pose to such independence. The fourth figure is Naïveté, which signifies those women who “put too much faith in the false endearments and empty praises of men,” believing their husbands will always be kind and charming and, so deceived, “allow themselves to be caught in their snares and fall into the fire that burns and devours them.” Next comes the emblem of Falsehood, which “tells of the deceit and falsity of men” and the glaring divide between their sweet words and their vile hearts. Finally, there is Cruelty, which speaks to the violence men commit against the women “who become involved with them” and the feigned compassion men pretend for their victims.79
Now sitting around the fountain, the women decide to engage in a friendly debate, making official what has already become the central topic of conversation, the worth of men. They nominate Adriana to be queen and judge, and she, in turn, nominates Leonora (assisted by two others) to “the task of speaking as much evil” about men as she can and Helena, who is still “so captivated by the charms of her husband, along with two others, to speak in defense of men.”80 From this moment forward, the entire conversation will replay the same concerns about uncertainty, illusion, flattery, and lies that characterize court handbooks, but now explicitly transposed onto the register of gender and sexual difference. From the perspective of these women, it is men who lie constantly and uncontrollably. The discussion of husbands, invariably cruel and violent, prone to anger, fond of prostitutes and gambling, finally gives way “to talk about the worst type of man there is: the false and deceitful lover.”81 Adriana warns that this is a topic so vast, she “can’t imagine you’ll be able to cover the tiniest part of what there is to say on the subject.” Virginia, speaking on behalf men, argues that lovers, true lovers at least, cannot possibly be as flawed “as you have shown other conditions of men to be.” She refuses to believe that “a well-mannered young man, behaving respectfully, sensibly and politely,” neither begging for favors nor complaining of unsatisfied desires, a young man “showing with his burning sighs and other subtle signs” that he loves me, could be a deceiver. “On the contrary,” Virginia contends, “it would seem to me as though I could see his heart lying open before me and I should be overcome by his displays of love and humility and would not help loving him in return.”82
Cornelia warns Virginia against too easily mistaking appearance for reality. “You have just painted the outward semblance of a lover,” she counters, “as though his inner self must necessarily correspond to this appearance.” Fearing that Virginia has no real experience with men, Cornelia embarks on a scathing portrayal of lovers, young and old, who stop at nothing as they lie and scheme their way to a woman’s dishonor and ignoble rejection. Young men are too impetuous and hotheaded, quick to demand favors and even quicker to brag about them to anyone that will listen. Their only advantage is that youth and lack of experience makes it easier to strip away their lies, revealing that all their kind manners and bashful stutters are merely a “false coat,” like “bronze with a layer of gilding.” Middle-aged men are even worse: experience adds to their false charms as they lay “down traps for every woman they see, trying out each one in turn, deceiving them all, saying the same words to all and laying down the same nets.” Middle-aged men, Cornelia concludes, have one dubious advantage over younger men. Concerned with their reputation, at least they keep quiet about their self-serving seductions. If anything, old men are the worst of the lot. Having long lost their looks and their charms, deficient in so many ways, they would be better off finding happiness at the bottom of a bottle than in chasing pretty girls.83
While there is nothing original about depicting lovers, liars, and flatterers in terms of false facades, Cornelia’s reference to Virginia’s having “painted the outward semblance of a lover” links this discussion of male deceit with another discussion, one that takes place on the next day, when the women have reconvened in Leonora’s courtyard garden. Having begun a wide-ranging conversation about men, women, and natural philosophy, the women eventually turn to a discussion of the seemingly miraculous power of paintings to preserve the fame of heroes in noble poses, at their moment of greatest triumph or saddest defeat. Lucretia dreams of her own military victory, fighting for freedom from male tyranny like the Amazons of old, bearing the emblem of the phoenix “to boast of her chaste resolve to live forever without a mate.”84 Explaining the power of such symbols, Adriana notes that “[a]ll these various emblems and colors are like a language that doesn’t use words, that allow people to reveal the innermost reaches of their heart in a delightful manner.” Having apparently forgotten the previous day’s critique of false lovers, Leonora counters that she prefers the language of sighs to the language of emblems. For sighs constitute the most truthful and eloquent form of speech. For her part, Cornelia opts for the language of the eyes, those “eloquent orators” that “can in all truth be said to speak and to reveal in their outward gaze the innermost secrets of the heart.” Coming to the defense of sighs, Corinna replies that “eyes very often deceive … showing one emotion in place of another,” but the language of sighs never lies, “for it has to be admitted that although one can pretend to sigh without meaning it, it’s very easy to detect the lie.”85
As if suddenly coming to her senses, Leonora cuts short this digression on different forms of speech and immediately quashes any hope of an inherently truthful and transparent language enabling us to see the reality beneath the surface, the soul hidden within the body. “In men, everything is feigned: looks, sighs, colors, words, deeds. You can never discover the truth of their souls or tell whether they are acting sincerely—except when they are perpetrating some particularly grave offence against women.”86 Men are not just liars, they are inveterate liars. They are natural liars in precisely the same way that men claim women are liars.
Throughout The Worth of Women, Fonte undoes the traditional coupling that associates women with the body and men with the soul. Men are nothing but painted surfaces and superficial languages. At the very beginning of their conversation about the arts, Corinna contends that poetry is to painting as the soul is to the body. “Painting,” she argues, “is like a body the soul has left, while verse is like a soul without a body; and so just as the soul is far nobler than the body, so composition in words is far nobler than one in colors.”87 O
f course, it is Corinna who, throughout this second day of conversation, has quoted various lines of poetry, some of which the women suspect to be her own. By contrast, the women consistently associate men with the body, with makeup and adornment. Men will spend “a thousand years combing and setting the few paltry hairs they have on their head,” and when they are not wearing ludicrously long ties, more like napkins than clothing, tied so tightly around their necks they look like puppets, they will surrender hours each day to selecting from among any number of tight breeches with long doublets that make them look like frogs.88
Unlike Tertullian, who condemned adornment outright as altering the holy word of God’s creation, a trespass and lie against God’s truth, the ladies in Leonora’s garden place a positive valence on style and fashion. Style, Corinna says, should not simply be tolerated, “but accepted and praised, just as much as any other feminine adornment. Because this is nothing more than a fashion, a custom, and a pastime of ours.”89 But adornment can be more than mere fashion as well. Surfaces can, sometimes, reveal hidden truth, and the “refinement and neatness of our appearance is a sign of nobility of soul.” In her treatise On the Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Vices and Defects of Men, Lucrezia Marinella extends this conception of adornment beyond fashion. All the great handbooks on courtly life, she argues, such as the works of della Casa and Castiglione, advise the courtier to be “elegant and polished,” and if this applies to men why shouldn’t it apply to women, “since beauty shines brighter among the rich and elegantly dressed than among the poor and rude”?90 Beauty is like a gift from God that must be cherished, protected, enhanced. Men are no different. If a man is naturally strong, a gladiator or solider, for example, doesn’t he do everything he can to maintain his strength? Don’t courageous men learn the arts of war in order to take advantage of their fearlessness? If men adorn and improve their natural gifts and talents, why shouldn’t women? Invoking Augustine’s authority, however dubiously rendered, Marinella even contends that the Church fathers recognized the importance of feminine adornment.91
No one can deny that men always and in every way adorn themselves, Marinella asserts. How many men dress themselves in fine clothes to distract attention from their unattractive faces, dye their beards “when the dread arrival of old age causes them to turn white?” Men spend hours before mirrors primping their hair, powdering their face, scenting their body, while wearing shoes many sizes too small in order to make their feet seem more petite. Hortensius, “the famous orator,” spent whole days gazing at himself in the mirror, adjusting the folds of his clothing. Demosthenes, “the glory of Greek eloquence,” was no better, and Marinella’s list rolls onward with a litany of famous men who painted their faces, bleached their skin, and spent all their wealth on clothes and jewelry, extravagances that left them and their families destitute. If these sorts of examples seem to link adornment to feminine vanity, critiquing men when they become more like women, Marinella stresses that manliness itself is nothing but a kind of adornment. Try to find a man, she asks her readers, “who does not swagger and play the daredevil. If there is such a one people call him effeminate.” Men dress themselves up in uniforms and swords, with medals and boots, making sure everyone knows they are armed and dangerous. “What are these things,” Marinella concludes, “but artifice and tinsel? Under these trappings of courage and valor hide the cowardly souls of rabbits or hunted hares, and it is the same with all their other artifices.”92
As Fonte puts it, there are many types of languages: spoken languages and the language of sighs and of the eyes, the language of emblems, and the language of fashion. Men speak of their courage when they dress like soldiers and pace through the streets with a determined pounding gait no less than women speak of the beauty, refinement, and nobility of their souls when they color their hair or dress in clothes dyed in rich purples and gold. Of course, both Marinella and Fonte agree that each sex uses these languages differently. The languages that men use are almost always false and illusory facades to strike fear in other men and to seduce their next would-be and unsuspecting female conquest, whereas the language of women strives for truth, revealing their simple honest natures, even as they attempt to calm their husbands’ unruly tempers. However men and women put these languages to use, they are all forms of adornment, no longer understood as pertaining essentially to women but to both men and women, equally and essentially. If a popular Renaissance proverb asserted that “women are words, men are deeds,” then both Marinella and Fonte suggest that deeds are simply visible words and that men, no less than women, depend on them.
A threatening reduction for men, no doubt, and no men experienced that threat to their alleged superiority over women more intensely than rhetoricians and orators, that is, men who made their living plying that most feminine of things, language. In 1458, Pico della Mirandola famously contrasted the philosopher with the rhetorician, demanding that philosophy remain free from the feminine poison of rhetorical adornments. “Who will not condemn synthetic beauty, or rouge, in a reputable maiden? Who would not curse it in a Vestal?” he asks. “For what else is the task of the rhetor than to lie, to entrap, to circumvent, to practice sleight of hand.”93 Rhetoricians, like women, it would seem, are garrulous and decorative, wordy and deceitful. Faced with this dilemma, rhetoricians attempted to distinguish within rhetoric itself between a masculine and feminine style. The first-century Roman rhetorical theorist Quintilian had already contributed to this project when he contrasted a virile, “natural and unaffected” style of speech, like the body of a healthy man “enjoying a good circulation and strengthened by exercise,” with an emasculated style, more akin to “the man who attempts to enhance these physical graces by the effeminate use of depilatories and cosmetics.” Renaissance writers would pick up on these distinctions, contrasting a virile style of speech with a soft feminine style.94 Borrowing from Cicero, for example, the English rhetorician Henry Peacham invoked military metaphors to guarantee the masculinity of at least some forms of eloquence. Figures of speech, he explains, “are as martial instruments both of defense and invasion; and being so, what may be either more necessary, or more profitable for us, than to hold those weapons always ready in our hands.”95
Countering style with style as a means of demarcating the allegedly absolute differences between male and female seems a losing proposition even before begun, as if certain kinds of style are not styles at all. Peacham merely gives added credence to Marinella’s sarcastic description of all those men, carefully decked out in soldier’s uniforms, attempting to fool the world into thinking they are as brave as they pretend to be. Male rhetoricians may have tried to cordon off an effeminate style, but their efforts simply revealed that rhetoric was style all the way down or, in their language, inescapably feminine.96 If this troubled men who were worried about their masculinity, it troubled women too, though for a different reason. This final problem is less clear in Marinella’s treatise than in Fonte’s dialogue.97 So confident is she in her argumentation, Marinella offers no room for doubt, uncertainty, or second thoughts in her encomium for women, her deprecation of men. Women are prudent, intelligent, temperate, and strong. Men overflow with anger and envy. They are obstinate and ungrateful liars and deceivers. Certainly the women in Leonora’s garden would agree with all this, but where Marinella’s evisceration of male pretension operates entirely at the level of argument and assertion, confident in its proofs and exempla, seemingly freed from the tyranny of male deception, Fonte’s characters are not nearly as secluded in Leonora’s courtyard garden as they would like to be. Like the snake that slipped its way into Eden, the outside world constantly makes itself felt, intruding into the conversation often unrecognized, leaving the women confused, uncertain, and always already ensnared in a world of masculine lies.
Fonte signals this condition from the very start of her treatise when Helena voices concern about her husband’s sudden and unforeseen insistence that she remain at home, and then with the need for the o
ther women to remind her repeatedly of this potentially dread development.98 But it appears in other places as well. During the second day in the garden, a discussion about lawyers and judges suddenly transforms into praise of Venice’s leaders who, “like loving fathers, work unceasingly, unstintingly, and unwaveringly for the benefit of all, without any thoughts of the cost to themselves, in money and energy, of their labors for the common good.”99 Only after quite a while does Leonora free her friends from this propaganda that they have long accepted at face value. “Good Lord!” she exclaims, “I can’t believe what I am hearing…. Are not all these official functions exercised by men, against our interests?” But even Leonora finds herself deluded, if only momentarily, when, recalling a popular canzone, she accepts its platitudes about the truth of lovers’ sighs. Everything in society, it would seem, conspires to fool women, to make them act against their own interests, to accept second-class status and culturally sanctioned domestic violence. Perhaps this is most obvious in the lies men tell to seduce women, but these lies are everywhere, in institutions that limit a woman’s choices in life and in the love and devotion they are made to feel for their state, in well-known songs and poems, in sayings, maxims, and learned treatises. “For if we are their inferior in status,” Leonora explains, “but not in worth, this is an abuse that has been introduced into the world and that men have then, over time, gradually translated into law and custom; and it has become so entrenched that they claim (and even actually believe) that the status they have gained through their bullying is theirs by right.”100 And the power and ubiquity of these institutionally sanctioned lies are enough to fool women explicitly engaged in conversation to critique, unmask, and condemn them.
The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment Page 27
