Francescas Style in Canto V of Dantes Inferno Essay -- Inferno

Francescas Style in Canto V of Dantes Inferno Canto V of Dantes Inferno begins and ends with justification. The frightening kitchen range 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 unequivocal 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 longing 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 all as a sign that identifies and seals their eternal fates. The brief and compressed description of Minos and his offizio would suggest tha t 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, Dantes concise description of the entire process of confession and judgment (dicono e odono e poi son gi volte, v. 15) is accomplished with dispatch and aesthetic distancing.1 Unlike Dante the wayfarer who will be moved to pity by Francescas confession, Minos, the brutish judge, is not captivated by the texts provided by the sinners and seems to represent a fierce only orderly administration of justice. Within the moral architecture of the Commedia Francescas own words identify and confirm the justice of her punishment, but as the structure a... ..., 1985. Pagliaro, Antonino. Ulisse Ricerche semantiche sulla Divina Commedia. Vol. 1. Firenze DAnna, 1967. Poggioli, Renato. Paolo and Francesca Tragedy or Romance?. PMLA 72 (1957) 313-358. Riddel, Joseph. Keep Your Pecker Up Paters on 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 prank of Dante. Lexington UP of Kentucky, 1975. Tanner, Tony. Adultery in the Novel. Baltimore Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.