I looked at statistics for this site recently and was surprised to see
that the most popular search terms that take people here include "Dante,"
"Paolo," "Francesca," and "Inferno." I am
surprised because I think of myself as a civics, democracy, and political-reform
guy; I have not contributed much to the study of Dante, and this website
certainly doesn’t offer much on the topic (beyond the one page
about my ongoing Dante project). Today, however, I posted one of my
published Dante articles, and I will add more soon—all in the interests
of serving my audience.
In "Why
Dante Damned Francesca da Rimini," I argue that there are
two explanations for Dante’s decision to place Francesca in Hell (even
though her real-life nephew was his patron and benefactor). First, he
may have sympathized with this fellow lover of poetry who tells her own
sad story so movingly, but he realized that she had committed the mortal
sin of adultery. Thus he damned her because his philosophical reason told
him that she was guilty, and he wanted to suggest that moral reasoning
is a safer guide than stories and the emotions that they provoke. For
the same reason, the whole Divine Comedy moves from emotional,
first-person, concrete narrative toward abstract universal truth as Dante
ascends from Hell to Heaven.
But there is also another,
subtler reason for his decision. Francesca loves poetry, but she reads
it badly. Her speech is a tissue of quotations from ancient and medieval
literature, but every one is inaccurate. In general, she takes difficult,
complex texts and misreads them as simple cliches that justify her own
behavior. Meanwhile, she says nothing about her lover or her husband—not
even their names—which suggests that she cannot "read"
them well or recall their stories. Her failure as a reader suggests
that Dante was not necessarily against poetry and in favor of philosophical
reason. Instead, perhaps he wanted to point out some specific moral pitfalls
involved in careless reading.