GENDER AND MYTH IN THEORLANDO FURIOSO

Abstract

There is a great deal in the ORLANDO FURIOSO about human sexuality, although the subject has traditionally been treated by critics under the (equally) problematic label of ‘love’, ‘amore’. That sexuality should loom so large is perhaps not particularly surprising given the text's concern with problems of human identity and, to quote Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, ‘the privileged position of sexuality within the development of the human subject’. Sexuality in such a context is not of course a matter of a purely biological drive; instead gendered identity is seen as socially constructed, as, in a sense, a fiction. It is with the nature of gendered identity as it is constructed in a particular work of literary fiction that this article will be concerned. The principal area of the poem to be scrutinized will be Cantos III to XII, foregrounding the dynastic thematic material from Bradamante's experience in Merlin's cave through the Alcina/Logistilla episode to Ruggiero's attempted seduction of Angelica, but also contrasting the experience of Ruggiero with that of Orlando, the two, despite a certain superficial parallelism, in fact moving in contrary motion.