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Diana Described: Scattered Woman

and Scattered Rhyme

Nancy J. Vickers

The import of Petrarch's description of Laura extends well beyond the

confines of his own poetic age; in subsequent times, his portrayal of
feminine beauty became authoritative, As a primary canonical text, the
Rime sparse consolidated and disseminated a Ren~issance mode, Petrarch
absorbed a complex netw_orlz. of descriptive strategies and then pre-
sented a single, transformed model, In this sense his role in the history
of the interpretation and the internalization of woman's "image" by both
men and women can scarcely be overemphasized, When late-
Renaissance theorists, poets, and painters represented woman's body,
Petrarch's verse justified their aesthetic choices. His authority, moreover,
extended beyond scholarly consideration to courtly conversation, be-
yond the treatise on beauty to the after-dinner game in celebration of it,
The descriptive codes of others, both ancients and contemporaries,
were, of course, not ignored, but the "scattered rhymesn undeniably
enjoyed a privileged status: they informed the Renaissance norm of a
beautiful woman, 1

An earl}' \'ersion of this p;iper \\'as shared with the University Seminar on Feminist
lnquirr at Dartmouth College; I sincerely appredate the time, attention, and suggestions
of its members. I am particularly indebted to Richard Corum, Jonathan Goldberg,
Katherine Harles, ~Iarianne Hirsch, David Kastan, Stephen Orgel, Esther Rashkin, Chris-
tian Wolff and Holly Wolff for their contributions.
1. On this "thoroughly self-conscious fashion," see Elizabeth Cropper, "On Beautiful
Women. Pannigianino. Prtrnrr/1ix1110, and the Vernacular Strle,'' Art B11llf'!i11 58 (1976):
374-94. Cropper shares many of the obser\'ations on Petrarchan descriptiYe technique
outlined in the following paragraph (see pp. 385-86). I am indebtecl to O,wid Qllint for
btinging this excellent essay to my attention.

95
96 Nancy]. Vickers Diana Described

We never see in the Rime sparse a complete picture of Laura. This

would not be exceptional if we were considering a single "song" or even a
restricted lyric corpus; gothic top-to-toe enumeration is, after all, more
appropriate to narrative, more adapted to the "objective" observations of
a third-person narrawr than to those of a speaker who ostensibly loves,
and perhaps even addresses, the image he describes. But given an entire
volume devoted to a single lady, the absence of a coherent, comprehen-
sive portrait is significant. 2 Laura is always presented as a part or parts of
a woman. When more than one part figures in a single poem, a sequen-
tial, inclusive ordering is never stressed. Her textures are those of metals
and stones; her image is that of a collection of exquisitely beautiful
disassociated objects.' Singled out among them are hair, hand, foot and
eyes: golden hair trapped and bound the speaker; an ivory hand took his
heart away; a marble foot imprinted the grass and flowers; starry eyes
directed him in his wandering.• In terms of qualitative attributes (blond-
ness, whiteness, sparkle), little here is innovative. More specifically Pet-
rarchan, however, is the obsessive insistence on the particular, an in-
sistence that would in turn generate multiple texts on individual frag-
ments of the body or on the beauties of woman.
When the sixteenth-century poet Joachim Du Bellay chose to attack
the French propensity for I talianizing, his offensive gesture i',gainst the
Petrarchans (amorig whose number he had once prominently figured)
culminated in just this awareness: in his final verses he proposed to
substitute the unified celebration of female beauty for rhe witty cliches of
Petrarchan particularization:

De voz beautez je diray seulement,

Que si mon oeil ne juge folement,

2. Description is, of course, always fragmentary in that it is by nature enumerative.

Petrarch, howe\'er. systematically avoids those structures that would mask fragmentation.
On enumeration and the descriptive text, see Roland Barthes, Sil (Paris, 1970), pp.
120-22.
3. For length)' discussions of these qualities of Petrarchan descriptions, see Robert
Durling, "Petrarch's 'Giovene donna sotto un verde laura,' " ,\1otlern Language Notes 86
(1971): 1~20, and John Freccero, "The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics,"
Diacritics 5 (Spring 1975): 34-40.
4. On Petrarch's role in the popularization of this topos, see James V. :\Jirollo, "In
Praise of 'La ht'lla 1110110': Aspects of L,te Renaissance Lyricism," Comparative Literature
Studit•.1· 9 (1972): 31-43. See also James Villas, "The Petrarchan Topos 'Bel piede': Genera-
ti\'e Footsteps,"Romancr.Vo!r.~ 11 (1969): 167~73.

Nancy J. Vickers, an associate professor of French and Italian at

Dartmouth College, has published articles on Dante and Petrarch.
The present essay is part of a recently completed book on anatomical
blazon.
 W riling and Sexual Difference 97
,.
I

Vostre beaute est joincte egalement

A vostre bonne grace:

Si toutefois Petrarque vous p1aist mieux,

Je choisiray cent mille nouveautez,

Dont je peindray voz plus grandes beautez
Sur la plus belle I dee.
["Contre les Petrarquistes," ll. 193-96, 201, 206-8]

Of your beauties I will only say that, if my eye does not mistakenly
judge, your beauty is perfectly joined to your good grace: ... But if
you still like Petrarch better ... I will choose a hundred thousand
new ways to paint your greatest beauties according to the most
beautiful Idea. 5 •

Du Bellay's opposition of "beauties" and "beauty" suggests the idiosyn-

cratic nature of Petrarch's depiction of woinan as a composite of details. 1
It would surely seem that to Petrarch Laura's whole body was at times
less than some of its parts; and that to his imitators the strategy of
describing her through the isolation of those parts presented an attrac-
tiye basis for imitation, extenSion, and, ultimately, distortion. I will re-
d~fine that strategy here in terms of a myth to which both the Rime and
the Renaissance obsessively return, a myth complex in its interpretation
although simple in its staging. As a privileged mode of signifying, the
recounting of a mythical tale within a literary text reveals concerns,
whether conscious or unconscious, which are basic to that text. 6 It is only
logical, then, to examine Petrarch's use of a myth about seeing woman in
order to reexamine his description of a woman seen. The story of Ac-
taeon's encounter with the goddess Diana is particularly suited to this
purpose, for it is a story not only of confrontati<;m with forbidden naked
deity but also with forbidden naked femininity.
In the twenty-third canzone, the canzone of the metamorphoses, Pe-
trarch's "I" narrates a history of changes: he was Daphne (a laurel),
Cygnus (a swan), Battus (a stone), Byblis (a fountain), Echo (a voice), he
will never be Jove (a golden raincloud), and he is Actaeon (a stag). He
has passed through a series of painful frustrations, now experiences a
highly specific one, and will never be granted the sexual fulfillment of a
god capable of transforming himself into a golden shower and in-
seminating the object of his desire. His use of the present in the last full
stanza, the Actaeon stanza, is telling, for it centers this canzone on the

5. ltalics and translation mine.

6. For a recent summary and bibliography of the place of lll)'lh in the Renaissance
text, see Leonard Barkan, "Diana and Actaeon: The Myth as Synthesis," English literm)'
Re1uti.rsrmce IO (1980).
 98 Nancy]. Vickers Diana Described

juxtaposition of what the speaker was and what he now is: "Alas, what
am I? What was I? The end crowns the life, the evening the day." 7 The
end also crowns the song, and this song paradoxically abandons its
speaker in the form of a man so transmuted that he cannot speak:

I' segui' tanto avanti il mio desire

ch' un di, cacciando si com' io solea,
mi mossi, e quella fera bella et cruda
in una fonte ignuda
si stava, quando 'I sol pill forte ardea.
Io perch/: d'altra vista non m'appago
stetti a mirarla, and' ella ebbe vergogna
et per farne vendetta o per celarse
l'acqua nel viso co le man mi sparse.
Vero dirO; forse e' parra menzogna:
ch'i' senti' trarmi de la propria imago
et in un cervo solitario et vago
di selva in selva ratto mi trasformo 1

et ancor de' miei can fuggo lo stormo.

[RS, 23. I 4 7-60]

I followed so far my desire that one day, hunting as I was wont,

I went forth, and that lovely cruel wild creature was in a spring
naked when the sun burned most strongly. I, who am not appeased
by any other sight, stood to gaze on her, whence she felt shame and,
to take.revenge or to hide herself, sprinkled water in my face with
her hand. I shall speak the truth, perhaps it will appear a lie, for I
felt myself drawn from my own image and into a solitary wander-
ing stag from wood to wood quickly I am transformed and still I
flee the belling of my hounds.

Petrarch's account of Actaeon's story closely follows the subtext that

obviously subtends the entire canzone-Ovid's Metamorphoses. Actaeon is,
as usual, hunting with friends. At noon, he stumbles upon a grove where
he sees Diana, chaste goddess of the hunt and of the moon, bathing nude
in ·a pool. 8 In the Metamorphoses she is surrounded by protective nymphs,
but Petrarch makes no mention of either her company or of Actaeon's.
7. Petmrdi's Lyfr Pol'Jm: Tlir ''Rimr spm:w" and Other Ly,ics, trans. and ed. Robert M.
Duding (Cambridge, ~lass., 1976), m11w11e 23, 11. 30-31: all further references to the Rime
.~Jmnl' will be included in the lexl with poem and line number in parentheses and with
Durling's translatidn. For recent analyses of Rime sparse 23, see Dennis Dutschke, Francesco
Pt'!mrw: Canwne XX/llfrom Fil:1·1 lo Final Vn:~io11 (Ravenna, 1977), and Albert]. Rh,ero,
"Petrarch's 'Ne! dolce tempo de la prima etade,'" ,\Iodem Language Notes 94 (1979): 92-
112.
8, For an extremelr useful comparison of the O\'idian and Petrarchan narrations of
this scene, see Dutschke, Fra11Cl'scu Pe!rarca, pp. 200-209. On the relationship between
middar and sexualitr in this mrth, see Nicolas]. Perella, .\1iclday in Italian Literature: Varia-
tiom 011 au Ard1l'iypal Theme (Princeton, N.J., 1979), pp. 8-9.
 Writing and Sexual Difference 99

He thus focuses the exchange on its principal players. Actaeon is trans-

fixed (a stance Petrarch exaggerates), and Diana, both in shame and
anger, sprinkles ("spargens") his face ("vultum") and hair ("comas") with
water. Although in the Rime sparse Diana is significantly silenced, in the
Metamorphoses she utters, "Now you can tell ["narres ... licet''J that you
have seen me unveiled ["posito velamine"]-that is, if you can tell ["si
poteris narrare'l "9 Diana's pronouncement simultaneously posits telling
(d_escription) as the probable outcome of Actaeon's glance and negates
the possibility of that telling. Her vengeful baptism triggers a metamor-
phosis: it transforms Actaeon from horn to hoof into a voiceless, fearful
st_ag (Metamorphoses 3. 193-98). It is at this moment that Petrarch, with
his characteristic use of an iterative present, situates his speaker: No
other sight appeases me; "I am transformed"; 1 flee." 10 The speaker is
11

Actaeon, but, more important, he is a self-conscious Actaeon: he knows

his own story; he has read his own text; he is defined by it and even
echoes it in articulating his suffering. What awaits him is annihilation
through dismemberment, attack unto death by his own hounds goaded
on by his own devoted friends.
Seeing and bodily disintegration, then, are related poles in the
Ovidian context that Petrarch brings to his text; they also are poles Ovid
conjoins elsewhere. Actaeon's mythological antitypes in dismember-
ment, Pentheus and Orpheus, are both textually and experientially
linked to his sto~y." His is' the subtext to their suffering; he is the figur_e
for their pain. In Metamorphoses 3. 708-33, Pentheus gapes with "profane
eyes" upon the female celebrants of the sacred rites of Bacchus, and
they, urged by his mother (the woman who sees him), tear his body limb
from limb: "Let the ghost of Actaeon move your heart," he pleads, but
"she [his mother] knows not who Actaeon is, and tears the suppliant's
right arm away." In Metamorphoses 11. 26-27, Orpheus is so grief stricken
at having irrevocably lost Eurydice by turning back to look at her that he
shuns other women; falling victim to an explosion of female jealousy, he
is dismembered and scattered, "as when in the amphitheatre ... the
doomed stag is the prey of dogs."
All three men, then, transgress, see women who are not to be seen,
and_ are torn to bits. But the Orpheus-Actaeon analogy is particularly
suggestive, for in the case of Orpheus, seeing and dismemberment are
discrete events in time. The hiatus between them, the extended reprieve,
9. Ovid, ,Helm11mjJl10ses, ed. and trans. Frank]. ;'t,Iiller, 2 vols. (1921: London, 1971),
bk. 3, II. l 92-93: all funher references to the .Hetamorphvses will be included in the text with
book and line number in parentheses. The quotations from this work are based upon but
do not entirely reproduce :\Iiller's edition.
10. On the use of the present tense in relation to Actaeon, see Durling's introduction
to Petrm'ch's lyric Poe/115, p. 28.
11. On the association of Actaeon and Orpheus, see ibid., p. 29. On Actaeon and
Pentheus, see Norman 0. Brown, ":\Ietamorphoses II: Actaeon," American Poetry Review l
(November/December 1972): 38.
 JOO Nancy]. Vickers Diana Described

is a span of exquisite though threatened poetry, of songs of absence and

loss. Petrarch's "modern" Actaeon is in that median time; he is fearful of
the price of seeing, yet to be paid, but still pleased by what he saw. The
remembered image is the source of all joy and pain, peace and anxiety,
love and. hate; "Living is such heavy and long pain, that I call out for the
end in my great desire to see her again whom it would have been better
not to have seen at all" (RS, 312. 12-14). Thus he must both perpetuate
h~r image and forget it: he must ucry out in silence," cry out "with paper
and ink," that is to say, write (RS, 71. 6, 23. 99).
It is especially important to note that the productive paralysis born
of this ambivalence deterffiines a normative stance for countless lovesick
poets of the Petrarchan generations. As Leonard Barkan has recently
shown, "From that source [Petrarch] Actaeon's story becomes through-
out the Renaissance a means of investigating the complicated psych_ology
oflove." 12 When Shakespeare, for example, lends a critical ear to Orsino
in his opening scene to Twelfth Night, we hear what was by 1600 the
worn-out plaint of a languishing lover caught precisely in Actaeon's
double bind:

CURIO; Will you go to hunt, my lord?.

ORSINO: What, Curio?
CuRro; The hart.
ORSINO: Why, so I do, the noblest that I have.
0, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she ptirg'd the air pestilence! o1
That instant was I turn'd into a ha~t.
And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E'er since pursue me.
[Act 1, sc. 1, 11. 16--23]

Subsequent imitation, no matter how creative or how wooden, bears

witness to the reader's awareness of and the writer's engagement in. the
practice of "speaking" in Actaeon's voice. A reassessment of Petrarch's
use of Actaeon's fate to represent the status of his speaking subject, then,
constitutes a reassessment of not just one poetic stance but of many.
When we step back from the Petrarchans to Petrarch, the casting of the
poet in this role (and, by extension, the beloved in that of Diana) is less a
cliche than a construct that can be used to explain both the scattering of
woman and of rhyme in his vernacular lyric. Here the "metaphor of
appearance," so central to the volume, is paired with the myth of ap-
12. Barkan, "Diana and Actaeon." p. 335. On the use of this myth in medieval lyric,
see Stephen G. Nichols, Jr., "Rhetorical :\Ietamorphosis in the Troubadour Lyric," in
.\1(,/mige.f de laugue el de liufrature mh!ievales C![ferts aPierre Le Centi!, Prqfesseur a la Sorbo1111e,
j)(lr ses colll'gues, se.~ [,/'eves, f'I w.r amis, ed. Jean Dufoumet and Daniel Poirion (Paris, 1973),
pp. 569--85.
 Writing and Sexual Difference 101

pearance: the fateful first perception of Laura-an image obsessively

remembered, reworked, and repeated-assumes a mythical analogue
and mythical proportion. 13 What the reader must then ask is why that
remembrance, like the rhyme ("rimembra" / "membra" [remember/
members]) that invokes it, is one of parts: HClear, fresh, sweet waters,
where she who alone seems lady to me rested her lovely body
["membra"], gentle branch where it pleased her (with sighing I
reniember)" (RS, 126. 1-5). 14
Although traces of Diana are subtly woven into much of the imagis-
tic texture that progressively reveals the composite of Laura, only one
text refers to her by name:

Non al suo amante piu Diana piacque

quando per tal ventura tutta ignuda
la vide in mezzo de le gelide acque,
ch' a me la pastorella alpestra et cruda
posta a bagnar un leggiadretto velo
ch' a !'aura ii vago et biondo cape! chiuda;
tal che mi fece, or quand' egli arde 'l cielo,
tutto tremar d'un amoroso gielo.
[RS, 52]

Not so much did Diana please her lover when, by a similar

chance, he saw her all naked amid the icy waters,
as did the cruel mountain shepherdess please me, set to wash a
pretty veil that keeps her lovely blond head from the breeze;
so that she made me, even now when the sky is burning, all
tremble with a chill of love.

This simple madrigal based on the straightforward equation of the

speaker's pleasure at seeing Laura's veil and Actaeon's pleasure at seeing
Diana's body has, of late, received lengthy and suggestive comment.
Giuseppe Mazzotta, in an analysis centered on Petrarch's 0language of
the self," reads it in relation to a reversibility of "subject and object.""
John Freccero places Petrarch's use of the "veil covering a radiant face"
motif within its traditional context (Saint Paul to Dante), that of a "figure

13. See Giuseppe Jlazzotta, "The Cama11iere and the Language of the Self," Studies in
P/JiloloK)' 75 (1978): 277.
14. ·1·he connection between these verses and the Diana/Actaeon myth is noted by
Durling. T/11• Figure of tl,e Poet i11 Re11ai.ua11ce EJ1ic (Cnmbridge, ~lass., 1965), p. 73. See also
my "Re-membering Dante: Petrarch's 'Chiare, fresche et dolci acque,' ",v!odern Language
.Volt's 96 (1981): 8--9
15. See ~Iazzotta, "The Camo11iere," pp. 282-84 .

.'
 102 Nancy]. Vickers Diana Described

for the relationship of the sign to its referent." He concludes that Laura's
"veil, bathed in the water like the naked goddess seen by Acteon, func-
tions as a fetish, an erotic signifier of a referent whose absence the lover
refuses to acknowledge." That act of substituting the veil for the body,
previously linked by Freccero to the Augustinian definitio11_ of_idolatry,
ultimately associates the fragmentation of Laura's body and the "non-
referentiality" of Petrarch's sequence:

One of the consequences of treating a signifier as an absolute is that

its integrity cannot be maintained. Without a principle of in-
telligibility, an interpretant, a collection of signs threatens to break
down into its component parts .... So it is with Laura. Her virtues
and her beauties are scattered like the objects of fetish worship: her
eyes and hair-are like gold and topaz on the snow, while the outline
of her face is lost; ... Like the poetry that celebrates her, she gains
immortality at the price of vitality and historicity. Each part of her
has the significance of her entire person; it remains the task of the
reader to string together her gemlike qualities into an idealized
unity. 16

Freccero's analysis departs from a position shared by many contempo-

rary Petrarch critics-that of the centrality of a dialectic between the
scattered and the gathered, the integrated and the disintegrated. 17 In
defining PetrarCh's "poetics of fragmentation,'.' these same critics have
consistently identified as its primary figure the particularizing descrip-
tive strategy adopted to evoke Laura. 18 If the speaker's "self" (h~s text,
his "corpus") is to be unified, it would seem to require the repetition of
her dismembered image. "Woman remains," as Josette Feral has com-
mented in another context, Hthe instrument by which man attains unity,
and she pays for it at the price of her own dispersion." 19
Returning to Rime sparse 52, some obvious points must be made:
first, this text is read as an emblem of Petrarchan fragmentation; and
second, It turns on a highly specific analogy ("I am pleased by Laura's
veil as Actaeon was pleased by Diana's nakedness"; "My fetish equals
Diana's body"). It is the analogy itself that poses an additional problem.
While the enunciation of "I" 's fetishistic pleasure through comparison
with Actaeon's voyeuristic pleasure might appear incongruous, it is both
appropriate and revealing.

16. Freccero, "The Fig Tree," pp. 38---39.

17. See, e.g., Durling, introduction toPetrarch'J Lyric Poems; Freccero, "The Fig Tree";
and ).fa7.7.ott.1, "The Camoniere."
18. For the phrase "poetics of fragmentation," see :\fazzotta, "The Canzoniere," p. 274.
19. Josette Feral, "Antigone or The1rony qf the Tribe," trans. Alice Jardine and Tom
Gora.Diacritics 8 (Fall 1978): 7. I am indebted to Elizabeth Abel for calling this quotation to
tn)' attention. See also Durling, introduction to Petrm:ch'J Lyric Poems, p. 21, and Mazzotta,
"The Ca11zo11iere," p. 273.
 Writing and Se.wal Difference 103

The Actaeon-Diana story is one of identification and reversal: Ac-

taeon hunts; Diana hunts; and their encounter reduces him to the status
of the hunted. 20 This fated meeting, this instant of midday recognition,
is one of fascination and repulsion: it is a confrontation with difference
where similarity might have been desired or even expected. It is a glance
into a mirror-witness the repeated pairing of this myth with that of
Narcissus (Metamorphoses 3. 344-510)-that produces an unlike and
deeply threatening image. 21 Perceiving that image is, of course, pro-
hibited; such a transgression violates proscriptions imposed on power-
less humans in their relation to powerful divinities. Similarly, such a
transgression violates proscriptions imposed upon powerless men (male
children) in relation to powerful women (mothers):" "This is thought,"
writes Howard Daniel, "to be one of many myths relating to the incest
mechanism-punishment for an even accidental look at something for-
bidden.n23 The Actaeon-Diana encounter read in this perspective re-
enacts a scene fundamental to theorizing about fetishistic perversion: the
troubling encounter of a male child with intolerable female nudity, with
a body lacking parts present in his own, with a body that suggests the
possibility of dismemberment. Woman's body, albeit divine, is displayed
to Actaeon, and his body, as a consequence, is literally taken apart.
Petrarch's Actaeon, having read his Ovid, realizes what will ensue: his
response to the threat of imminent dismemberment is the neutralization,
through descriptive dismemberment, of the threat. He transforms the
visible totality into scattered words, the body into signs; his description,
at one remove from his experience, safely permits and perpetuates his
fascination.
The verb in the Rime sparse that places this double dismemberment
in the foreground is determinant for the entire sequence-spargere, to 0

scatter." It appears in some form (most frequently that of the past-

participial adjective "sparso, -i, -a, -e") forty-three times; nineteen apply
specifically to Laura's body and its emanations (the light from her eyes,
the generative capacity of her footsteps) and thirteen to the speaker's
20. See Barkan, "Diana and Actaeon," pp. 320-22, and Brown, "Metamorphoses II,"
p. 40.
21. See Barkan, "Diana and Actaeon," pp. 321,343; Brown, ";\·Ietamorphoses.II," p.
39; Durling. introduction to Petrarch's Lyric Poems, p. 31; and 1v1azzotta, "The Crm1.011iere,"
pp. 274. 282.
22. This mrth has often been used to point to relationships of power through p_lay on
the words cervm!.~en.ius, ce(f/.ferf (stag/slave): see Barkan "Diana and Actaeon," p. 328. The
identification of Diana with women in political power is perhaps best exemplified by the
frequent representation of Elizabeth I as Diana; see Barkan, pp. 332-35.
23. Howard Daniel, Eucydopedia qf Themes and Subjects in Painting, s.v. "Actaeon"
(London, l 971). Daniel's point is, of course, supported by the tradition identifying Ac-
taeon's hounds with the Law, with his conscience: "Remorse, the bite of a mad dog.
Conscience, the superego, the introjected father or animal: now eating us even as we ate
him" (Brown, "Metamorphose_s II," p. 39); see also Perella, Midday in Italian Literature, p. 42.
On Actaeon as "unmanned" or castrated, see Barkan, "Diana and Actaeon," pp. 350-51.
 104 Nancy J. Vickers Diana Described

mental state and its expression (tears, voice, rhymes, sighs, thoughts,
praises. prayers, hopes). The uses of spargere thus markedly gravitate
toward "I" and Laura. The etymological roots of the term, moreover,
virtually generate Laura's metaphoric codes: "I" knows that the outcome
of seeing her body is the scattering of his; hence he projects scattering
onto her through a process of fetishistic overdetermination, figuring
thqse part-objects in terms of the connotations of "scattering": spargere,
from the Latin spargere, with cognates in the English "sprinkle" and
"sparkle" and in the Greek O"?TELp(l)--"I disseminate." Laura's eyes, as in
the sequence of three canzoni devoted exclusively to them (RS, 71-73),
are generative sparks emanating from the stars; they sow the seeds of
poetry in the "untilled soil" of the poet (RS, 71. I 02-5), and they sprinkle
glistening drops like clear waters.• Her body parts metaphorically in-
seminate; his do not: "Song, I was never the cloud of gold that once
descended in a precious rain so that it partially quenched the fire of
Jove; but I have certainly been a flame lit by a lovely glance and I have
been the bird that rises highest in che air raising her whom in my words I
honor" (RS, 23. 161-66). Desire directed in vain at a forbidden, distant
goddess is soon sublimated desire that spends itself in song. That song is,
in turn, the celebration and the violation of that goddess: it would
re-produce her vulnerability; it would re-present her nakedness to a
(male) reader who will enter into collusion with, even become, yet
another Actaeon. 24
Within the context of Petrarch's extended poetic sequence, the lady
is corporeally scattered; the lover is emotionally scattered and will be
corporeally scattered, and thus the relation between the two is one of
mirroring. "!," striking Actaeon's pose, tells us that he stood fixed to see
but also to mirror Diana-Laura ("mirarla"). 25 He offers to eliminate the
only source of sadness for the "lovely eyes," their inability to see them-
selves, by mirroring them (RS, 7 I. 57-60). And he transforms the col-
oration of the lady's flesh into roses scattered in snow in which he mir-
rors himself (RS, 146. 5-6). The specular nature of this exchange ex-
plains, in large part, the disconcerting interchangeability of its partici-
pants. Even the key rhyme "rimembra/membra" reflects a doubling:
twice the membra are his (RS, 15 and 23); once those of the lost heroes of
a disintegrating body politic, a dissolving mother country (RS, 53); and
twice hers (RS, 126 and 127). In reading the Diana-veil madrigal cited
24. See Daniel, "Actaeon." On the casting of the male spectator (reader) in the role of
the voreur, see also John Berger, Ways qf Seeing (New York, 1977), pp. 45-64, and Laura
;>iful\'e}', "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16 (Autumn 1975): 6---18, On
women conditioned b}' patriarchal culture to see themselves as "sights," see Jessica Ben-
jamin, "The Bonds of Love: Rational Violence and Erotic Domination," in The Fultlre qf
Difference, ed. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (Boston, 1980), p. 52, and Berger, Ways
of Seeing, pp. 46--51.
25. I am, of course, alluding to the etymological associations and not the definition of
the verb mirare ("to stare"),
 Writing and Semal Difference 105

above, ~Iazzotta demonstrates this textual commingling, pointing out

that Diana's body, in the first tercet, is completely naked ("tutta ignuda")
in a pool of icy waters ("gelide acque") but, by the last line, her observer's
body is all atremble ("tutto tremar") with a chill of love ("un amoroso
gielo"). Mazzotta goes on to note that male/female roles often alternate
in Petrarch's figurations of the speaker/Laura relationship: he is Echo to
her Narcissus, Narcissus to her Echo; she is Apollo to his Daphne,
Daphne to his Apollo, and so on. 26 The space of that alternation is a
median one-a space of looks, mirrors, and texts.
Actaeon sees Diana, Diana sees Actaeon, and seeing is traumatic for
both. She is ashamed, tries to hide her body (her secret), and thus com-
municates her sense of violation. Her observer consequently knows that
pleasure in the sight before him constitutes transgression; he deduces
that transgression, although thrilling (arousing), is threatening (castrat-
ing). Their initial communication is a self-conscious look; the following
scenario fills the gap between them: "I ... stood to gaze on her, whence
she felt shame and, to take revenge or to hide herself, sprinkled water
["mi sparse"-cf. Ovid, "spargens") in my face with her hand[s]. I shall
speak the truth" (RS, 23. 153-56). She defends herself and assaults him
with scattered water; he responds with scattered words: "You who hear
in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs with which I nourished my
heart during my first youthful error, when I was in part another man
from what I am now" (RS, I. 1-4). Water and words, then, pass between
them; hands and transparent drops cannot conceal her but do p_re-
cipitate a metamorphosis, preventing a full sounding of what was
momentarily seen. Threatened rhymes try to iterate a precious, fleeting
image, to transmute it into an idol that can be forever possessed, that will
be forever present.
But description is ultimately no more than a collection of imperfect
signs, signs that, like fetishes, affirm absence by their presence. Painting
Laura in poetry is but a twice-removed,· scripted rendering of a lost
woman (body ---> introjected image of the body ---> textual body), an
enterprise by definition fragmentary. "I" speaks his anxiety in the hope
of finding repose through enunciation, of re-membering the lost body,
of effecting an inverse incarnation-her flesh made word. At the level of
the fictive experience which he describes, successes are ephemeral, and
failures becom·e a way of life.

Quella per cui con Sorga o cangiato Arno,

con franca poverta serve ricchezze,
volse in amaro sue sante dolcezze
ond' io gia vissi, or me ne struggo et scarno.

26. ~Iazzotta, "The Camo11iere," pp. 282-84. See also Durling. introduction to Pe-
trarch'., L)•ric Poems, pp. 31-3~.
106 Nancy]. Vickers Diana Described

Da poi piu volte o riprovato indarno

al secol che verra l'alte bellezze
pinger cantando, a ciO che l'ame et prezze,
ne col mio stile i1 suo bel viso incarno.

Le lode, mai non d'altra et proprie sue,

che 'n lei fur come stelle in cielo sparte,
pur ardisco ombreggiare, or una or due;
ma poi ch' i' giungo a la divina parte,
ch' un chiaro et breve sole al mondo fue[,]
ivi manca l'ardir, l'ingegno et l'arte.
[RS, 308]

She for whom I exchanged Arno for Sorgue and slavish riches
for free poverty, turn~cl her holy sweetness[es], on which I once
lived, into bitterness, by which now I am destroyed and
disfleshed [ I destroy and disflesh myself].
Since then I have often tried in vain to depict in song for the age
to come her high beauties, that it may love and prize them, nor
with my style can I incarnate her lovely face.
Still now and again I dare to adumbrate one or two of the praise's
that were always hers, never any other's, that were as' many as
the stars spread [scattered] across the sky;
but when I come to her divine part, which was a bright, brief sun
to the world, there fails my daring, my wit, and my art.

This text organizes itself upon a sequence of oppositions which contrast

fullness (presence) with emptiness (absence). The speaker has ex-
changed Arno (Florence, mother country) for Sorgue (Vaucluse, exile);
riches (although slavish) for poverty (albeit free); sweetness for bitter-
ness; a body for dismemberment; and union for separation. The
speaker's rhymes point to a past place (a body of water, "Arno") and to
two present, though fruitless {"indarno"), activities-he is at once
stripped of flesh ("me ne . . . scarno") and would give flesh to her
("incarno"). ·He acknowledges his inability to re-c·reate Laura's absent
face, and yet he maintains that he still tries, "now and again." Her praises
(that is, his poems) are but images he "dare[s] to adumbrate," shadows
"scattered," like their source, across the sky. Daring, wit, and art cannot
re-present her to him, but they can evoke her parts "one by one" and
thus generate an exquisite sequence of verse (RS, 127. 85-91 and 273. 6).
For it is in fact the loss, at the fictional level, of Laura's body that con-
stitutes the il1.to1erab1e absence, creates a rea.son to speak, and permits a
 Writing and Sexual Difference 107

poetic "corpus." As Petrarch's readers have consistently recognized,

Laura and lauro, the laur~l to crown a poet laureate, are one. 27
Petrarch's poetry is a poetry of tension, of flux, of alternation be-
tween the scattered and the gathered. Laura's many parts would point to
a unity, however elusive, named Laura; the speaker's ambivalent emo-
tions are spoken by a grammatically constant "io." In the space of ex-
change, the only space the reader is given, permutation is possible; each
part of her body can produce each aspect of his positive/negative re-
actions. A given text can expand any combination: infinite variety
spawns infinite verse. Petrarch's particularizing mode of figuring that
body, the product of a male-viewer/female-object exchange that extends
the Actaeon/Diana exchange, thus reveals a textual strategy subtending
his entire volume: it goes to the heart of his lyric program and under-
standably becomes the lyric stance of generations of imitators.
And yet such praise carries condemnation with it because it implies
at least two interdependent consequences. First, Petrarch's figuration of
Laura informs a decisive stage in the development of a code of beauty, a
code that causes us to view the fetishizecl body as a norm and encourages
us to seek, or to seek to be, "ideal types, beautiful monsters composed of
every individual perfection." 28 Petrarch's text, of course, did not con-
stitute the first example of particularizing description, but it did
popularize that strategy. by coming into fashion during the privileged
early years of printing, the first century of the widespread diffusion of
both words and images. It is in this context that Petrarch left us his
legacy of fragmentation. And second, bodies fetishizecl by a poetic voice
logically do not have a voice of their own; the world of making words, of
making texts, is not theirs. The status of Laura's voice, however, resists
easy or schematic characterization. Once dead, it should be noted, she
can often address her sleeping, disconsolate lover; while she is alive,
direct discourse from her is extremely rare. Her speech, moreover,
undergoes a treatment similar to that of her. body in that it ranks high on
the list of her exquisitely reified parts: "and her speech and her lovely
face and her locks pleased me so that I have her before my eyes and shall
always have wherever I am, on slope or shore" (RS, 30. 4-6).
Rime sparse 23, the canzone of the metamorphoses, strikingly
dramatizes the complexity of both citing and stifling Laura's voice.
Although each of its transformations repeats an Ovidian model, only
three stress the active participation of the Lady. In the first she lifts the

27. For recent analyses of the play on Luma llauro, see Frani;ois Rigo!ot, "Nature and
Function of Paronomasia in the Ca11wnierF," flalia11 Quarterly 18 (Summer 1974): 29-36,
and :\larga Cottino-Jones, "The :\Iyth of Apollo and Daphne in Petrarch'sCm1zo11iere; The
Dprnmics and Literary Function of Transformation," in Francis Petrnrclt, Six Centuries Later:
A Sy111pvsiu111, ed. Aldo Scaglione (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975), pp. 152-76.
· 28. Cropper, "On Beautiful Women," p. 376.
 108 Nancy J. Vickers Diana Described

speaker's heart out of his chest, utters two exceptional sentences, and
ultimately turns him (like Battus) into a stone; next, she reduces him
(like Echo) into a repetitive voice; and finally, she transforms him (like
Actaeon) into a stag. The Ovidian models are telling in that they all
eit,her limit or negate a voice: Mercury says to Battus, "Whoever you are,
my man, if anyone should ask you about some cattle,· say that you have
not seen them" (Metamorphoses 2. 692-94); Juno says to Echo, "That
tongue by which I have been tricked shall have its power curtailed and
enjoy the briefest use of speech" (Metamo,phoses 3. 366-67); and Diana
says to Actaeon, "Now you are free to tell ["narres ... licet") that you
have seen me unveiled-if you can tell ["narrare")" (Metamorphoses 3.
192-93).'"
The first model permits speech, but insists that it not be true, and,
when disobeyed, denies it; the second, by reducing speech to repetition,
eliminates its generative capacity; and the third, through irony, does
away with it altogether. In Ovid's retelling of that third encounter, Diana
is the only person to speak once Actaeon has had his first glimpse of her:
"narrare" is her word; she pronounces it; she even repeats it. Although
she cannot (would not?) prevent him from seeing, she can prevent him
from telling. Consequently, that Petrarch erases both her speech and the
verbal object of her interdiction (narrare) from his own narration is
significant. A review of the evolution of the Diana/Actaeon sequence of
Rime sparse 23, a text at many points explicit in its verbal echoing of Ovid,
shows that "I shall speak ["diro"J the truth" initiates the primary and
final versions of line 156: two intermediate variants read "I tell ["narro"]
the truth." 30 \-Vhat that rejected present, narro, affirms, in a mode
perhaps too obvious to be acceptable even to Petrarch, is that his speaker
as Actaeon does precisely what Diana forbids: u
1
Make no word of this,'"
said the "powerful Lady" of a preceding stanza (RS, 23. 74, 35). Not
only does Petrarch's Actaeon thus nullify Diana's act, he repeats her
admonition in so doing; by the time we arrive at the end that "crowns"
his song, her speech has been written out and his has been written in. To
the measure that he continues to praise her beauties, he persists in in-
verting the traditional economy of the mythical exchange; he persists in
offending her: "Not that. I do not see how much my praise i1zjures you
[the eyes]; but I cannot resist the great desire that is in me since I saw
what no thought can equal, let alone speech, mine or others' " (RS, 7 I.
16-21).
Silencing 'Diana is an emblematic gesture; it suppresses a voice, and
. it casts generations of would-be Lauras in a role predicated upon the

29. On the Diana /Actaeon myth and "the danger of losing the poetic voice," see
~Iazzotta, "The Ca11w11iere," p. 2·78; see also Durling, introduction to Pe!mrch's Lpic Poems,
p. 28. '
30. See Dutschke:FmncescoPdrarca, pp. 196--98.
 Writing and Sexual Difference 109

muteness of its player. 31 A modern Actaeon affirming himself as poet

cannot permit Ovid's angry goddess to speak her displeasure and deny
his voice; his speech requires her silence. Similarly, he cannot allow her
to disme·mber his body; instead he repeatedly, although reverently,
scatters hers throughout his scattered rhymes.

3 I. For the problem of women writing within the constraints of the Petarchan tradi-
tion, see Ann R. Jones. "Assimilation with a Difference: Renaissance Women Poets and
Literary Inlluence," Yale French Studies no. 62 (October 1981); on the impact of anothe1·
masculine lrric tradition on women poets, see 1Iargaret Homans, Womn1 Writers and Poetic
Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte and Emily DicRinso11 (Princeton, N.J., 1980), pp.
12-40.
Laura :-.tu Ivey comments on the silencing of women in her rereading of a different
medium, film: "Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other,
bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through
linguistic command hr imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as
bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning" ("Visual Pleasure," p. 7).