Reviving Beatrice’s Body in Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Feminist Depth Psychological Interpretation

Abstract

Epics capture the imagination of the public, occupying significant space in the collective unconscious and offering the opportunity for many to identify with various themes and images in those narratives. With teaching, criticism, and interpretations of canonical works sometimes spanning centuries, as is the case with Dante’s Divine Comedy, or Commedia, these works become such a part of society’s collective knowledge that it would be wise to explore not just the images presented and inspired by the text, which may be taken for granted, but those images suppressed and left out of the text through reiterated interpretation. With the literary canon, writers, readers, and critics may, deliberately or unknowingly, be prone to emphasizing some images and interpretations and suppressing others, depending on the cultural context, and perhaps perpetuating the cultural context. This elevation and suppression has psychological consequences not just for individuals experiencing the text within a cultural construct, but for society as a whole. Focusing on some interpretations of the literary canon to the conscious or unconscious exclusion of others creates a context for exclusionary practices.

This study develops a broad historical and critical basis for a postmodern feminist depth psychological hermeneutic of embodiment by establishing a lineage of considering embodiment from the points of view of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Lacan, and their feminist critics, tempered by depth psychology and its own feminist critique. The argument of the study is that Beatrice’s body is of crucial importance in Dante’s Commedia. After an exploration of how embodiment is central to the theme of Dante’s work, a rich literature review reveals that Beatrice’s body has been effectively ignored by critics for the past 800 years. An exploration of the Vita Nuova and Commedia offers insight into how Beatrice uses her body to communicate with Dante throughout the texts, and a depth psychological reading highlights the importance of the archetypal in these instances. The study concludes with an exploration of how reader response theory and Jungian active imagination exercises offer readers an additional way to gather critical information from texts.