Elusive Females: The Coexistence of Submissiveness and Subversiveness within Female Characters in "Gerusalemme Liberata"

Abstract

Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata is hailed as an influential masterpiece in the tradition of Dante and Virgil. The most pervasive discussion emphasizes his intention to revive the epic by infusing new materials-elements of romance-into the tradition. For his attempt to fuse two different genres and to please all his readers-both the learned and the common folk, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata was strongly criticized by his contemporaries. Thus the inherent ambiguity in this work reveals an unstable structure and promises a multiplicity of transgressive interpretations of the text itself. In this essay, I would like to shed light on an alternative interpretation of reading Tasso's three prominent female characters-Clorinda, Erminia, and Armida. In a sense, Tasso challenges and further blurs the traditional definitions of female figures in the epic and romance-a female warrior, an Amazon, in the epic and a prize object in the romance. According to a rigid definition of what constitutes the romance and the epic, a female warrior acts and fights like a man and ceases to be a woman physically, whereas the prize object of the romances is voiceless, unidentifiable and submissive to male characters. Interestingly, Tasso's portraits of his female characters transgressed the boundaries of this predominant feature of both the genres. The nature of these three female characters is subversive, undefined and elusive, which cannot be manipulated or pinned down by any traditional definitions of gender. Therefore, these female characters are potentially endowed by nature with a subversive power to transgress the boundaries set by previous epic and romance writers. This convention notwithstanding, Tasso has made their process of conversion diversified and undermined by portraying them as distinct from other female characters in epics and romances. Clorinda, Erminia and Armida should be perceived as complicated heroines whose submissiveness and subversiveness coexist within them. This ambivalent coexistence contributes to an alternative way of reading Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata.