Paolo and Francesca
Paolo and Francesca, two of the most famous lovers in the history of
literature, are the protagonists of a passionate and tragic love story made
immortal in European art, music and literature by a number of authors, among
them the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, who drew inspiration from the real
events of Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini. He dedicated them one of the
most beautiful and poetic cantos of the Divina Commedia (Inferno, Canto
V). The poet sets them in the circle of the lustful because in life they
were lovers and adulterers.
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Francesca,
married to Gianciotto Malatesta (called ‘the Lame’) for reasons of state, fell
in love with Gianciotto’s brother, Paolo (called ‘the Fair’), a love that led
them to death at the hands of her husband. Dante places them among a crowd of
very famous similar sinners, coming from different ages and places: from
classical antiquity, as Dido, Helen of Troy and Cleopatra, as well as from the
Arthurian legend, as Tristan, one of the knights of the Round Table, punished
there for his adulterous love story with Isolde, wife of his uncle King Mark of
Cornwall, who killed him in the end.
The
Arthurian legend actually enters Dante’s Divine Comedy also in
Francesca’s evocation of her tragic story of love and death, through which
Dante also pays literary ‘homage’ to the tales of medieval chivalry, a
witness to their fame throughout Europe. In fact, when Francesca tells the poet
of her love affair with Paolo, she reveals that they had become lovers while
reading the stories of the knights at the court of King Arthur. The words she
uses to relate how their love story began (Inferno,V, 127-138)tell us something
both about the medieval court, where the reading of romances was a common
activity, and the popularity enjoyed by the Arthurian legend which Dante evokes
with great precision, using the story of Lancelot as the emotional background
to the birth of the passion between the two Italian lovers.
The
tragic love story of Paolo and Francesca has been the source of inspiration for
many writers who have evoked it in their works. In particular the
Post-modernist Jeanette Winterson rewrites it in her novel The
PowerBook (2000). In fact, one of the peculiarities of
Post-modernism, as well as of Jeanette Winterson’s oeuvre,
including this work, is the frequent use of intertextual references to past and
contemporary literature, both of other authors and of her own, and to other
disciplines.
Winterson’s
central concern is the quest for absolute love, the axis on which all her
novels move, frequently deploying some references to typical motifs of the
traditional canonical romance with its conventions and topoi.
However, in doing so, she also foregrounds such literary borrowings explicitly,
actually entering a dialogic relationship with the ‘refracted’ text. This
happens also in The PowerBookat different levels; an example
is offered by the section in which the story of Paolo and Francesca is
introduced. It opens with a list of some “great and ruinous lovers”, couples
who are generally considered paradigmatic examples of great lovers, a list in
which she mixes real and fictional characters; among them there are both
Lancelot and Guinevere, and Paolo and Francesca, whose love story she
particularly focuses on in this part of her novel (in a previous section she
had also rewritten the narrative of Lancelot and Guinevere). However Winterson
gives a different representation of their adulterous love story, a more dynamic
and descriptive version if compared with Dante’s. In fact, while the Italian
poet focuses on the sinful act of the lovers and their punishment, the English
writer describes their meeting in detail.
The
first part of the extract presents the life of Francesca before the encounter
with Paolo. The young lady describes her father’s castle as a prison from which
she can’t escape, the objective correlative of her psychological condition.
There is the frequent use of the image of darkness, a metaphor for the intense
sense of submission and moral imprisonment in which she is kept by her father,
at the time a very common condition for women, prisoners of their patriarchal
families, subjects of ‘exchange’, and the image of the stone, symbolic of a
lifeless and oppressed existence (“built of stone”, l.8; “darkness”, l.8;
“stone”, ll.9/10; “dark”, ll. 9/12).
After
this initial section the narrator, Francesca herself, introduces her future
marriage and in her words there is the sense of her inner need for rebellion,
signified by the expressions “roars” (l.22) and “tamed” (l.23) and by the
frequent negatives: “not” and “nor” (l.26), “nothing” (l.30), etc. On the other
hand there is the positive image of the candles, “which forced the darkness off
a little” (l.19), that anticipates Paolo’s entrance on the narrative stage.
Paolo’s arrival represents the end of imprisonment and the hope for Francesca
to start a different life, free from her father’s control. This hope is
visualised by the objective correlative of her hair which is loose (l. 22) and
by the image of the light in the room, a light that isn’t produced by the fire
or the candles but that is the metaphor for Francesca’s emotional condition, in
opposition to the initial darkness. In this passage there are a lot of similes
that give a clearer representation of Francesca’s psychology: “as loose and
flowing as” (l. 22), “like a flute or a pipe” (l.31), etc. The day of the
meeting marks the beginning of the secret love story between the two
protagonists. After the first sexual experience Francesca’s psychology is
totally transformed: now she and Paolo are dressed in “white” (l. 47), a colour
that has a positive connotation, and they pass easily beyond the walls of the
castle, a metaphorical image that signals the disruption of the barriers of
oppression. Winterson skilfully enucleates all the psychological and emotional
changes in a single sentence: “Today was not like that” (l.50); Paolo is a
source of light for Francesca and the only possibility of escaping.
Soon
after Francesca’s psychological transformation is contrasted with the brief
description of her future husband, Gianciotto Malatesta, Paolo’s brother. With
the use of similes, there is a comparison between the two men: “My husband was
scarcely four feet tall and as twisted in body as Paolo was straight” (l.75).
Then she underlines his vulgar and lustful nature: “He cared for nothing but
hunting and women, and he lashed his dogs and his whores with the same strap”
(l.77-78). So it is evident that there isn’t any difference between her
“childhood life” (l.80) and the “grave of her married life” (l.80): she has
merely passed from one form of imprisonment to another. In this parallelism the
only one who represents her safety is Paolo, who had “raised [her] from the
dead for those few wide-open days.” (l.81-82). This last sentence is also one
of the most important intertextual echoes of the extract, a biblical reference
to Lazarus who was resurrected by Jesus Christ in the New Testament. However,
it isn’t the only intertextual reference: immediately after there are a few
lines where the similarity with the Italian version of Dante emerges very
clearly. In fact there is the reference to the story of Lancelot and Guinevere
(l. 86-87) and, above all, the perfect translation of an expression of the
Italian poet: “There was no more time for reading that day” (l.91), that
corresponds to the Italian version: “Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.”
By using a euphemism the Italian poet actually foregrounds, with less harrowing
words, Gianciotto’s discovery and killing of the two lovers. In Winterson, the
final moment of their story, is given terrible resonance and is even visualised
in a cruel image that, in its abruptness, is meant to transmit the reader all
the tragic, emotional intensity of the conclusion of the short
passionate love of the two.
Their
murder is made more touching by the last and the most important intertextual
reference to the Passion of Jesus Christ: “There is no love that does not
pierce the hands and feet” (l.102), a religious passion whose intensity and
accompanying suffering is also extended to Paolo and Francesca who died to
defend their feelings, somehow ‘crucified’ on the altar of their love for each
other. This sentence is also found in another novel by Winterson, Art
& Lies (1995), a device that the novelist frequently uses in her
literary production. However, the final image on which the story closes, is a
positive, liberating one, explicitly evoking the sensations which they had felt
when leaving her father’s castle at the beginning: “Hand in hand our souls flew
down the corridors and out of his brother's palace as easily as our bodies had
done when we left my father's house”. The couple’s love is so strong that it actually
outlives them and survives death, even stronger than God, who cannot separate
them even after death: “No one can separate us now. Not even God.” (l.108). An
image of unity that is the conclusive proud statement of the power of
love in their unhappy lives.
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Images
The Movie named ,
Paolo & Francesca (1950)
Director:
Raffaello MatarazzoWriters:
Vittorio Montuori (scenario), Vittorio Nino Novarese (as Vittorio Novarese)Stars:
Odile Versois, Andrea Checchi, Armando Francioli
( The tragic love story, already narrated by Dante in his Inferno, of Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Polenta. Francesca is married to Paolo's brother, Gianciotto an old and crippled man and secretly Paolo's mistress. When Gianciotto finds out tragedy ensues. writyten by - Salvatore Santangelo )
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