La potenza femminile: le eroine della "Liberata" tra Eros e Thanatos

This essay, evolved as an analysis inside the female universe in Tasso’s GERUSALEMME LIBERATA, arises from the attempt to verify and highlight the deep modernity of Tasso’s heroines, with particular reference to them as “real persons” and not only just as “characters”. These heroines are presented with all the complexity of their personalities; this is why they are so distant from the traditional epic models . Considering the literary archetypes which constituted the topic models on which Tasso built his figures , we will investigate the deep meaning of his innovation detecting how the artist, though using a predefined series of archetypes, managed to create psychologically complex figures and succeeded in giving them a sort of “secret” power inside his masterpiece. The question is directly connected to the initial point of view of our research: that is to say, how the female heroines inside the GERUSALEMME LIBERATA embody the highest importance, since they are described as the real “deus-ex-machina”, the driving force of the whole action. In fact, if the liberation of the Sacred Sepulchre was materially carried out by the crusaders’ army and particularly by a very small group of crusaders, the ones that Buglione particularly considered, it was also carried out through these crusaders’ difficult (but necessary) emotional route. The urgency of this introspective journey inside conscience is revealed by the female figures that seem to start a self-knowledgeable process leading the hero to the awareness of his own “miles Christi”identity. Borrowing Aristotele's terminology, it is possible to say that the female figures, thanks to their complex nature, represent the “power”of the heroes' particular “act. Yet, such transcendental value, though specific and indelible, does not ever show Tasso's heroines too far from being persons subjected to the natural laws, and as such mortal, either weak or strong, victims of their human limits. As a consequence, we have analysed such figures giving particular attention to some related episodes (peculiarly to the Christian couples Sofronia and Olindo, Gildippe and Odoardo, that, in their being polarly built, are an important hint as regards what the poet actually thought of marriage, also taking into consideration what Tasso affirmed in his Discorso della virtù femminile e donnesca (Speech on female virtue) and Padre di famiglia (Father of a family). Subsequently, we took into consideration those principal erotic aspects which are implicit into the poem, always keeping in mind Tasso’ s Platonic and Christian creeds. The tassian couple does not evolve in the attempt of a literary-symbolic generalization on the struggle between the two sexes, (being this representation carried out by the good vs evil opposition), it is evolved by the poem subject itself. In fact, inside the poem, the “eros” is given both as an unreachable desire and as the ego’s impossibility to fulfil unity and communion with the beloved one: aims which can be obtained only by death. Sorrow, mourning and separation are the defining coordinates of Tasso’ s characters’ several erotic shades. These characters, ignoring their author’s veto, are deeply willing to possess and reach the beloved ones. The devious pursuit of a different self reflects the journey inside one's emotional world. Through the other, the self can get to know, to learn and to accept itself and is able to understand the true meaning of existence; the other, in this case the woman, becomes the vehicle through which man can reach full self-awareness and accept the painful inevitableness of immanence in the perspective of a transcendental dimension that ensures eternal bliss. It follows that Thanatos becomes the complementary, necessary side of Eros; in Tasso's epic, only tha painful overcoming of the fear of death allows the individuals to fulfil their ethical duty and attain eternal bliss. The antithesis governing the dynamic relationship between male and female does not characterize the two opposed negative/positive principles; it reveals, on the contrary, the need of a complementary relationship aiming at the platonic unity that is fully expressed in the transcendental perspective of eternity, detached from the needs of historical immanence.