Francesca's Style in Canto V of Dante's Inferno

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Francesca's Style in Canto V of Dante's Inferno

Canto V of Dante's Inferno begins and ends with confession. The frightening image of Minos who «confesses» the damned sinners and then hurls them down to their eternal punishment contrasts with the almost familial image of Francesca and Dante, who confess to one another. In a real sense confession seems to be defective or inadequate in Hell. The huddled masses who declare their sins to Minos do so because they are compelled to declare or make manifest in speech the character of their offenses and although they confess everything (each soul «tutta si confessa», v. 8) it is not an admission of guilt prompted by true contrition or the timely desire to reform their lives. In Hell confession is a formal ritual that is not especially «good» for the soul. This is a confession that serves only as a sign that identifies and seals their eternal fates. The brief and compressed description of Minos and his «offizio» would suggest that this confession of the sinners is largely a formal requirement full of sound and fury signifying only the level of their eternal degradation. Minos is not caught up in the sinners' confessions, and, indeed, Dante's concise description of the entire process of confession and judgment («dicono e odono e poi son giù volte», v. 15) is accomplished with dispatch and aesthetic distancing.1 Unlike Dante the wayfarer who will be moved to pity by Francesca's confession, Minos, the brutish judge, is not captivated by the texts provided by the sinners and seems to represent a fierce but orderly administration of justice. Within the moral architecture of the Commedia Francesca's own words identify and confirm the justice of her punishment, but as the structure a...

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Pagliaro, Antonino. Ulisse: Ricerche semantiche sulla Divina Commedia. Vol. 1. Firenze: D'Anna, 1967.

Poggioli, Renato. «Paolo and Francesca: Tragedy or Romance?». PMLA 72 (1957): 313-358.

Riddel, Joseph. «Keep Your Pecker Up: Paterson Five and the Question of Metapoetry». Glyph 8 (1981): 203-231.

Rougemont, Denis de. Love in the Western World. Trans. Montgomery Belgion. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

Schweickart, Patrocinio. «Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading». In Gender and Reading. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio Schweickart, eds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.

Shapiro, Marianne. Woman Earthly and Divine in the Comedy of Dante. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1975.

Tanner, Tony. Adultery in the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.

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