Arcangela Tarabotti and the Poetics of Confrontation in Seventeenth-CenturyVenice
The Department of Italian Presents:
Lynn Westwater (George Washington University)
Arcangela Tarabotti
and the Poetics of Confrontation in Seventeenth-CenturyVenice
Monday, March 21, 5:30 p.m., ICC 450
Seventeenth-century Venetian writer Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-1652) penned some of the most lucid and forceful analysis of women’s condition in early modern Europe. Forced to become a nun against her will, Tarabotti made it her life’s work to denounce this injustice, using the written word to breach the convent walls that kept her prisoner. But her interest in women’s condition ranged far beyond the personal. With little formal education and restricted access to books, she constructed astonishingly cogent criticism of patriarchal culture, exposing the misogyny in political, religious, philosophic and literary traditions. Despite Counter-Reformation strictures and a literary and cultural reality that was frequently hostile to female voices, she openly challenged religious and secular authorities who used their power to abuse or malign women. She built a literary network that ranged the peninsula and beyond, brought five books to press in her lifetime, and widely circulated several other manuscripts.
Because Tarabotti attacked basic societal assumptions and dared to cross pens with some of the most prominent writers of her day, she was dogged by continual controversy and hostility. This persistent antagonism conditions all of her works. Tarabotti fought back with astonishing aggression, outmaneuvering her antagonists to win every literary brawl she entered into. Tarabotti’s rhetorical skills translated into practical power which, while never freeing the nun from the convent-prison in which she lived, allowed her -- against all odds and in the face of many powerful foes -- to exercise a revolutionary freedom of thought and to gain a broad audience for the radical feminist notions she articulated several centuries ahead of their time.
