The ancient roots of gender-based violence
Literary episodes to redeem female characters who are victims of violence
“But did catcalling already exist in the seventeenth century?”
This is how one of my students began during our reading of the first chapter of I promessi sposi in poche parole, published by Einaudi Ragazzi and adapted by Davide Morosinotto. Lucia is returning home when she receives ungentlemanly advances from the local nobleman, who will then decide to ruin her wedding over nothing more than a bet.
This apparently marginal scene reveals how literature—always a mirror of the society that produces it—preserves traces of a cultural model founded on male domination. A model that, if not approached with the proper critical tools, risks justifying misogynistic behaviors.
The path can begin with Dante’s Comedy, where we encounter two female figures whose fate is marked by male violence. In Canto V of the Inferno we find Francesca da Polenta, killed by her husband and condemned for eternity among the lustful for her desire for love and sexual freedom. Francesca appears strong, her voice rising above the chorus of infernal laments, but her strength is not enough to redeem her: society and divine order punish her for daring to raise her head. “Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it: / that day we read no further” (Inf. V, 137–138).
In the Purgatorio, by contrast, Dante presents Pia de’ Tolomei, also killed by her husband. Pia does not raise her voice: she utters only a few gentle words that reveal her docile attitude toward the injustice she suffered. Her figure represents women deprived of the right to speak and to obtain justice: her reward is being placed among the penitents, as though silence itself were a virtue. “Remember me, I am Pia; / Siena made me, Maremma unmade me: / he knows it, the one who first, in wedlock, / had encircled me with his ring” (Purg. V, 133–138).
From Dante we move to Boccaccio, who, let us recall, addresses an explicitly female audience in the Decameron. In the eighth novella of the fifth day, dedicated to happy loves, Nastagio degli Onesti, who is in love with a woman of the Traversari family—who is not even deemed worthy of a name—witnesses the episode of the infernal hunt. A woman is condemned to run naked, pursued by a knight who pierces her with his sword. Her fault? She rejected the young man’s love, driving him to suicide. The most disturbing aspect is how the protagonist uses this spectacle: he invites the woman who spurns him to watch the scene, and she yields and agrees to marry him. Violence on the female body becomes a pedagogical tool, meant to terrify and subdue.
Dante and Boccaccio bear witness to the deep roots of a patriarchal culture. But to understand its long persistence, it is useful to return to Manzoni. The Betrothed offers us two complementary figures: Lucia and Gertrude. Lucia appears as a victim without agency, forced to endure threats, attempted abductions, and verbal harassment without being able to react; her only refuge is Providence, which saves her but does not restore her power of choice. Beside her stands the more ambiguous and tragic figure of the novel: Gertrude, the Nun of Monza. A noblewoman, victim of the psychological violence of a family that forces her into the cloister, Gertrude rebels only halfway: she loves, betrays, kills—manipulated by a violent man. Manzoni leaves her in an abyss of guilt and suffering, with no possible redemption. Her story is based on a true case, that of Marianna de Leyva, condemned and walled up alive for thirteen years in a convent cell.
These characters tell the same story: the normalization of violence against women through writing. Today we have the task of reading these stories critically, to restore to the classics their capacity to bear witness to what has been made invisible: women’s suffering and the ancient roots of gender-based violence. Only then can literature, from being a mirror of the past, become a tool for awareness in the present.