Essay on Beatrice as Death, Religion, and Love. Dante's La Vita Nuova

Brittanie Jones

Eng 333

Friday, October 8, 2010

In Dante’s La Vita Nuova, we can see the culmination and further evolution of a century and a half of the troubadour tradition. Medieval concepts of women are very standardized by this time; a woman of nobility is idolized, a love triangle is formed between the Lord, his lady, and the poet. The poet worships her, yet there is no socially acceptable direct contact beyond his words. He speaks to her through this screen of language, through the veil of his song. Dante escalates this practice of courtly love, warping the troubadour voice to new heights of idealized emotion. Through his use of language, he deifies Beatrice, his lady. He fluidly melds her with and then separates her from the god of Love, religion, and with his own emotions, while pushing her away from himself and toward the ethereal; even as she lives and breathes and walks before him. This spiritual, ephemeral character is created out of Beatrice in order to further lift her above Dante. He alludes to her death throughout the text, knowing that the only way to surpass the true hopelessness of unrequited love is to love a woman who has passed into the heavens. Only from that point can Beatrice truly become a mythology unto herself.

He begins describing her in the narrative as a young girl; however she is dressed in “a subdued crimson”, the color of blood, even as he falls in love at first sight. When he chances by her a second time, and subsequently dreams of her, again she is covered in “a blood red cloth”. Afterwards, Love feeds Beatrice Dante’s flaming heart, almost in the way one would offer a sacrifice to a deity, and surely it references death in that one cannot survive without one’s own heart. A more direct allusion follows this event; the God Amor rises up into heaven with Beatrice in his arms, causing Dante agony, which we can relate to his later state of un-assuage-able grief. Later in the text, he connects this fantasy of Beatrice with death yet again, through his description of the death of a young woman. The woman has been seen at times with Beatrice; however his cross connections between Beatrice and death are on a slippery slope from this point, with each example intensifying that desire to truly push her beyond his reach. The whole second stanza of the sonnet about the young woman’s death is directly parallel to his initial description in prose of his fantasy of Beatrice with the god of Love.

1.

His joy was changed to the bitterest of weeping. As he wept, the woman took shelter in his arms and I thought he arose toward the sky, holding her.

2.

Hear what respect and reverence that Love paid

To her as he shed his hot tears of regret

over the lovely corpse. Then, looking high

over his head to that fixed point in the sky

in which he noble soul was already set

He groaned his salute to that ever-cheerful

maid.

In both excerpts, Love weeps bitterly over a woman, and then she ascends into the sky. Although Dante clearly delineates one woman from the other, by using the same descriptive language in both segments, he inextricably links the two women together through both Love and through Death, which are, along with Beatrice, the very heart of this work.

As I said before, the instances linking Beatrice and Death snowball as the piece goes on. Beatrice’s father dies, and Dante’s description of their relationship binds them tightly together: “Death is painful to friends who are left behind, and there is no closer friendship than that which obtains between a good father and a good child. That lady was good in the highest degree, and her father, as many rightly believed, was also extremely good.”

By using the same word to describe both Beatrice’s father and Beatrice herself, they become linked as family and also as, ideologically, one and the same being. Section XXII also shows Beatrice’s own reflection of the god of Love, because she “is crying so heartbrokenly that anyone seeing her would die of pity,” in much the same way that Love himself weeps over her and over the dead woman on the street as they ascend to heaven.

In Section XXIII, Dante can no longer dance around his fantasy of Beatrice’s death. While contemplating the shortness and fragility of his own life, he thinks, “Even the most noble Beatrice will have to die one day.” He then has a vision of her dying while he is violently ill, in his dream a friend tells him, “Do you not yet know? Your wonderful lady has departed from this life.” Much like when he envisions the god of Love carrying Beatrice to heaven, in this fantasy he pictures her as a cloud, pushed to heaven by angels. In the sonnet, he even becomes more literal, almost demanding, “I thought in how few days or months or years/ my lady, too, must die”

As Dante’s ideal woman, Beatrice is scripted with language that alludes to, not only Death, but also a long tradition of medieval femininity, and a certain spiritual ephemerality. She is a white, glowing presence, and Dante is drawn like a moth to a flame. Beyond all else she is distant from him, and he seeks to press that distance to its limit, even as his desire for her eats away at him. He torments himself with his love for her, a one sided love that exists in a triangle between he, his “God of Love” figure, and his idealized conception of Beatrice as the ultimate woman. He continually describes her as noble; she is grace, gentle, and sweet, glorious, the Queen of Virtue, pure, faithful, and full of piety.

How modest, how genteel my lady seems

as she strolls, unself-concious, along the street

They are mute, as people sometimes are in

dreams,

and avert their eyes, as if the dazzling beams

from hers would blind them. Still, it is a sweet

kind of discomfort. It’s hardly a conceit

to say she is angelic for her head gleams

as if with a halo. And radiating from

her person, there is a quiet and delight,

inexplicable but undeniable too.

Anyone who has seen her knows it’s true,

And that for an instant all the world seems right,

One sighs in joy as they do in Elysium.

This reflects on more than the long troubadour tradition which predates Dante’s work. Rather than just being the unattainable ideal, the lady to a lord who stands in the way, she is more of an angelic being on Earth, a messenger of what awaits in paradise, or Elysium in this example. Beatrice is rendered untouchable, un-viewable even before her death, through the divinity of her existence in life. Far past the unattainable in the human sense of the word, he claims her to be not only angelic, but an actual angel, a divine presence, which he claims that heaven desires: “Our only lack in heaven is her fair/and splendid presence”.

In many ways, Beatrice’s presence in La Vita Nuova is ghostly as well. It is inconsequential to Dante, insofar as the vague way in which she exists, whether she is alive or dead. She is a spirit, a concept, which wafts from the real world and into his mind, permeating all his thoughts while never physically making contact. When Dante does get near her in the physical world, he becomes faint, physically affected, almost spooked by seeing the corporeal manifestation of his internal fantasies; he loses control of himself completely. This is exemplified in the text when his friend takes him, unknowingly, to view all the pretty ladies of the court and he accidentally comes upon Beatrice in close proximity. He claims he “was at the very precipice of life, beyond which one cannot pass with the expectation of coming back”, thereby equating the sudden viewing of her with a near-death experience.

Much like humanity’s inability to look upon the face of the divine, Dante cannot look directly at Beatrice. He must look at her through crowds (“She was walking between two gentlewomen”), through “screens” of other women (“making that gentlewoman a screen behind which I could conceal the truth”), through his thoughts (“my soul was entirely occupied by thoughts of that noblest of ladies”). She is the clear river which Dante claims brings joy to the dejected pilgrim (Love), in which she is Love and the water all at once; water, like love, can surround one, but it is ungraspable. Much like the deified Love himself, she is also fluid in her character. At times Dante fuses the two such as when he speculates: “Love and the noble heart? But there is no/difference between them”. Love, as a character, also points this out when he states, “If you took the trouble to think about it seriously, the lady Beatrice could be called Love, because of her resemblance to me.”

After Beatrice’s death, she is elevated into almost a higher position in Dante’s mind than the god of Love had held during her life. Whereas Love had been his deity, his religion to which he deferred, after her death, Beatrice becomes infused with the spirit of this god of love, and with religion itself. At first he does not admit that what happened was death, he refers to it as her being “summoned” by the Lord. By not giving her up to the literality of death, he erases his previous conception of her being carried there by Love, and elevates her to spirituality by allowing her to make the journey to heaven alone.

In a later sonnet, he describes her powerfully as:

when my lady traded her corporeal

existence to make her way

to a better one in that Elysium

she richly deserved. And radiating from

her loveliness a sacred beauty shines

to add its light to heaven’s glory. There

the angels beat their wings in rarefied air,

grateful for her presence that refines

and enhances their collective holiness

eternally blessed with perfect joyfulness.

Clearly she has been incorporated into his life in a spiritual way. She trades for her place in heaven, rather than being forced there by death. The angels themselves are grateful for her, and she enhances their holiness. Through her death, he is now able to elevate her to the heights that he dreamt of, she has become his perfect mythos, and from the high heavens she can now be truly worshipped. He even goes so far as to preach this religious idea of her to passing pilgrims towards the end of the work:

O pilgrims who walk lost in thought, do you

know where you are? The street? The house you

are near?

You must have come from somewhere far from

here,

not to be shedding tears as most of us do.

This is a city of sorrows in which there are few

songs and little laughter. Gloomy, severe

we are in deep mourning. The atmosphere

is like that of a church’s darkest pew.

If you would pause in your travels, I could tell

the story my sighing heart reiterates

day and night, and you would weep with us.

We have lost the source of our blessings, for the

fates

have taken our Beatrice, our nonpareil

the memory of whom is glorious.

In the final words of La Vita Nuova, Dante claims of Beatrice that he will “say of her what has never been said of any woman.” At the last word, he pushes this woman of his fantasies well beyond anything that had been imagined by the troubadours of the century past. Although Beatrice is technically the medieval ideal of what a woman should be, Dante pushes his courtly love for her and her perfection into new extremities. He elevates her beyond the ideal unto a religious status with his combination of prose and poetry, not only honoring her in his own time, but allowing her to truly live on forever through the myth he created for her.