Ariosto's Marfisa: Or, Camilla Domesticated

Abstract

Ariosto's Marfisa is an example of that group of armed women warriors that descend from Virgil's Camilla, who is herself modelled on that even more ancient warrior maiden Penthesilea whom Homer mentions but does not allow into the action of his epic. Penthesilea's actions are really the invention of the Middle Ages by men who had read their Virgil well and had to give body to the Homeric ancestor of Virgil's Camilla. In all these medieval epics Penthesilea, noble and valiant, is fated to die because she, like Camilla, is fighting on the wrong side of the epic. The extraordinary power of these figures both in the Aeneid and in the sixteenth-century descendants of Virgil-Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser-is worth considering because of the essential ambivalence of the authors toward their female creation. I have argued elsewhere that this ambivalence is climaxed in Milton's portrayal of Sin in the second book of Paradise Lost, lines 745ff. where the primal disorder is figured as an armed woman begotten by single male parent: a Goddess arm'd Out of thy head I sprung (2.757758).1 The implications of this figure go far beyond the parody of Athene springing full grown from the head of Zeus. Milton poses an armed woman, male generated, as the primal threat to man's unfallen unity. Behind that array of mythological and allegorical allusion lies (perhaps) male fear of woman, certainly of armed