The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (35 page)

To Christine, this entire reading of Semiramis’s life is flawed. Christine simply ignores Semiramis’s cross-dressing, even as she admits that the widow did marry her son. Questionable though this behavior might seem to us, Christine adds that the widowed queen had good reasons for acting as she did. Had her son married another woman, Semiramis may well have lost some of her power and, the implication goes, the state some of its security. More
important, Christine notes, in those early days “people lived according to the law of nature, where all people were allowed to do whatever came into their hearts without sinning.”
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The appeal to ancient custom, to the differences between life before and after the introduction of law, is hardly original with Christine. In the late thirteenth century, Vincent of Beauvais had employed it in his
Speculum Doctrinale
to explain away both Abraham’s adultery (“In Paradise God praised marriage, he did not condemn adultery”) and Lot’s incestuous relations with his two daughters (“Lot and his holy daughters acted for the sake of posterity, otherwise the human race would have died out, thus their public service excuses their private guilt”).
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While Vincent is mostly interested in clearing the names of the long and revered dead, Christine is doing something much more interesting. Christine argues that not only were Semiramis’s actions moral given their time and place, she acted with foresight and a concern about the common good, about what she could and must do to maintain the security of her empire. Far from being “heedless of circumstance,” as Boccaccio claimed, she knew exactly what was allowed and what was needed. She acted with reason and prudence, not with lust and cunning, properly weighing means and ends for the good of her state.

Christine takes up the topic of prudence again a bit later in the text. After listening to Lady Justice recount the lives of several women of great learning who could “conceive, know and retain all perceptible things,” Christine asks “whether women can reflect on what is best to do and what is better to be avoided, and whether they remember past events and become learned from the example they have seen, and, as a result, are wise in managing current affairs, and whether they have foresight into the future.”
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Lady Justice responds that Nature bestows prudence on both men and women, some receiving more, some less, and then supports her contention with accounts of the lives of particularly prudent women such as Gaia Cirilla (the wife Tarquin, king of Rome), Dido of Carthage, and Ops, the queen of Crete. She concludes with the life of Aeneas’s wife, Lavinia. Suddenly widowed and pregnant
with Aeneas’s son, Lavinia fled to the woods fearful that “Aeneas’ son by another woman would have the child put to death in his desire to rule.” Despite these hardships and her long widowhood, Lavinia never remarried, treasured the memory of her dead husband, and treated her stepson so well he eventually “harbored no evil against her or his half brother.” She founded cities and governed wisely until her son was of age and assumed power.
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Perhaps not all women can be this prudent, this virtuous, but neither can all men. One should not expect anything more, nor anything less.

The recovery of prudence as both a male and female virtue is at the absolute center of Christine’s ideological critique of the misogynist tradition and her rediscovery of who she is and what she can do. It is also at the absolute center of her contention that women are not natural liars. Christine offers no shortage of examples to disprove misogynist claims that all women are seductive and deceitful temptresses, and such stories go a long way to demonstrate that women are perfectly capable of considering context and circumstance, of matching means to end, to achieve the good. Prudence frees women, just as it frees men, from slavishly following after the senses and the sordid satisfaction of every base desire. It allows the virtuous woman to reflect on and respond to whatever situation confronts her. Unfortunately and all too often, she will confront a world filled with lies and deception, with treachery and violence. In such circumstances, the noblewoman is no different from John of Salisbury’s man of eminence, no different from the heroes and heroines of vernacular romance. Lady Rectitude includes any number of stories of women who lie virtuously and out of necessity. Hypsipyle places herself in grave danger when she lies to protect the life of her father, as does Lady Curia to save her husband, and Tertia Aemilia, embodying the very wisdom Christine recommends in
The Treasure of the City of Ladies
, lies to conceal her husband’s extramarital affair.
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If possession of the faculty of prudence frees women from the charge of being natural liars, it also sets them free to lie when circumstance requires and virtue demands it.

A
LL
M
EN
A
RE
L
IARS

Revealing long-revered authority to be false, purposefully distorted to demean and slander women, reveals that authority to be nothing but base deception. Whether or not women are natural liars, men also lie and, all too often, those lies are anything but virtuous.

Pietro de’Zorzi, the eldest son of Moderata Fonte, who died giving birth to her fourth child in Venice in 1592, certainly understood this. Pietro appended two sonnets to the front of his mother’s posthumously published treatise,
The Worth of Women
, praising her efforts to call out the deceivers for what they really were. “Up to now,” he writes, “men could conceal all their misdeeds, but now their flaws, as well as women’s true qualities, will be known from one end of the world to the other.”
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Fonte’s book appeared in 1600, eight years after her death—all things considered, a relatively bad year for the reputation of men, at least in Venice. That same year another Venetian woman, Lucrezia Marinella, published her own table-turning work,
The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Vices and Defects of Men
, a spirited response to Giuseppe Passi’s 1599 diatribe
On the Defects of Women
, an all too typical, if particularly rabid, attack on the female sex. Marinella makes her intentions abundantly clear from the very outset: “My desire is to make this truth shine forth to everybody, that the female sex is nobler and more excellent than the male.”
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Nobler, according to Marinella, not simply because women possess all the virtues—prudence, intelligence, kindness, courage, and constancy—that men so often claim they lack, but nobler too because it is men themselves who lack those very virtues. Fonte would not have disagreed, and despite the stylistic differences between their two works, both Marinella and Fonte share an unshakable belief in the almost innate dishonesty of all men, a belief that every man is liar and that this belief must guide a woman’s every word and every deed.

Marinella and Fonte stand at something of a crossroads in the literary history of the defense of women. Among the most famous Venetian women writers of the late sixteenth century, they would
build on the arguments of Christine de Pizan and more immediate predecessors, while resituating and reframing them. The social and cultural world of turn-of-the-century Venice may well have encouraged women to deeper reflection and reassessment of their place in the world. The forced enclosure of so many Venetian noblewomen, both before and after marriage, contrasted not only with the freedom that foreign female visitors experienced but also with Venice’s famous and quite visible courtesans, not to mention actresses, who had only recently begun to appear onstage. The variety of roles women played in Venetian society almost begged for analysis.
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Not content, as Christine had been, to unmask the lies men pass off as truths about women, Marinella and Fonte return slander for slander, or better, argue that when men lie about women, they reveal the truth about themselves and in so doing reveal a truth about all men and all women. Their critique is subtle. If a tradition dating back as least as far as Tertullian had argued that women are natural liars because they are essentially artificial, covered, and adorned, Fonte and Marinella argue that to be human, male or female, is to be adorned. The difference between men and women does not rest in adornment but in the vile adornments men adopt to suppress and oppress women.
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Whereas Christine de Pizan worked her way through the slanders of the misogynists behind closed doors in dialogue with three allegorical figures, Fonte stages her attack as a conversation among seven women who, “despite their great differences in age and marital status,” are good friends. They often set aside time to gather together for “quiet conversation; and on these occasions, safe from any fear of being spied on by men or constrained by their presence,” they can speak freely on any topic they desire. On this day, Fonte tells us, the women have convened for the afternoon at Lenora’s house, a beautiful residence along one of the Venetian canals with a lovely and secluded courtyard garden filled with flowers and fruiting trees. The oldest member of the group, Adriana, a widow “of great discernment,” describes the garden as a paradise. Corinna, a young single woman, quickly adds that among the garden’s most charming aspect is “that there are no men here.”
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Men
might be physically absent, but from the beginning they are the topic of conversation, spurred on, no doubt in part, by the arrival of Helena, just returned from her honeymoon and still in the first thralls of love with her new husband.

When Adriana’s unmarried daughter Virginia asks if Helena is happy, Leonora sarcastically chimes in, “How can you ask such a thing, when everyone already knows the answer? For popular opinion dictates that no new bride can be anything but happy.” Helena’s response, however, is decidedly lukewarm. Although she enjoys her husband’s company, already he seems to be too controlling, prohibiting her from leaving the house to attend weddings and banquets. The others do little to comfort her, noting that newlyweds almost always suffer illusions of happiness that blind them to the reality of their new status in life. “What you mean,” Leonora clarifies, “is that everything seems lovely when it has the charms of novelty.”
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Married mere weeks, Helena has no response to Leonora’s somber pronouncement. Already, experience is putting the lie to popular opinion and received authority, revealing promises of marital happiness to be mere illusions that all too quickly give way to a cruel reality threatening ever new dangers and novel forms of suffering.

Fonte makes the dangers of popular illusions and false appearances explicit when the ladies ask Leonora to explain the symbolism of six statues, exquisitely sculpted figures of beautiful women each holding emblems and scrolls, that surround a fountain situated at the very center of her courtyard garden. Before describing them Leonora reminds everyone that her aunt, from whom she inherited the house and who had vowed from the time she was a little girl never to marry, procured the fountain and its statues “as a statement of the way in which she intended to live her life and of the views she held against the male sex.” The first three, Leonora explains, offer the keys to female independence, illustrating the need for chastity, solitude, and liberty. The next three emphasize the threats that men pose to such independence. The fourth figure is Naïveté, which signifies those women who “put too much faith in the false endearments and empty praises of men,” believing their
husbands will always be kind and charming and, so deceived, “allow themselves to be caught in their snares and fall into the fire that burns and devours them.” Next comes the emblem of Falsehood, which “tells of the deceit and falsity of men” and the glaring divide between their sweet words and their vile hearts. Finally, there is Cruelty, which speaks to the violence men commit against the women “who become involved with them” and the feigned compassion men pretend for their victims.
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Now sitting around the fountain, the women decide to engage in a friendly debate, making official what has already become the central topic of conversation, the worth of men. They nominate Adriana to be queen and judge, and she, in turn, nominates Leonora (assisted by two others) to “the task of speaking as much evil” about men as she can and Helena, who is still “so captivated by the charms of her husband, along with two others, to speak in defense of men.”
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From this moment forward, the entire conversation will replay the same concerns about uncertainty, illusion, flattery, and lies that characterize court handbooks, but now explicitly transposed onto the register of gender and sexual difference. From the perspective of these women, it is men who lie constantly and uncontrollably. The discussion of husbands, invariably cruel and violent, prone to anger, fond of prostitutes and gambling, finally gives way “to talk about the worst type of man there is: the false and deceitful lover.”
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Adriana warns that this is a topic so vast, she “can’t imagine you’ll be able to cover the tiniest part of what there is to say on the subject.” Virginia, speaking on behalf men, argues that lovers, true lovers at least, cannot possibly be as flawed “as you have shown other conditions of men to be.” She refuses to believe that “a well-mannered young man, behaving respectfully, sensibly and politely,” neither begging for favors nor complaining of unsatisfied desires, a young man “showing with his burning sighs and other subtle signs” that he loves me, could be a deceiver. “On the contrary,” Virginia contends, “it would seem to me as though I could see his heart lying open before me and I should be overcome by his displays of love and humility and would not help loving him in return.”
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Cornelia warns Virginia against too easily mistaking appearance for reality. “You have just painted the outward semblance of a lover,” she counters, “as though his inner self must necessarily correspond to this appearance.” Fearing that Virginia has no real experience with men, Cornelia embarks on a scathing portrayal of lovers, young and old, who stop at nothing as they lie and scheme their way to a woman’s dishonor and ignoble rejection. Young men are too impetuous and hotheaded, quick to demand favors and even quicker to brag about them to anyone that will listen. Their only advantage is that youth and lack of experience makes it easier to strip away their lies, revealing that all their kind manners and bashful stutters are merely a “false coat,” like “bronze with a layer of gilding.” Middle-aged men are even worse: experience adds to their false charms as they lay “down traps for every woman they see, trying out each one in turn, deceiving them all, saying the same words to all and laying down the same nets.” Middle-aged men, Cornelia concludes, have one dubious advantage over younger men. Concerned with their reputation, at least they keep quiet about their self-serving seductions. If anything, old men are the worst of the lot. Having long lost their looks and their charms, deficient in so many ways, they would be better off finding happiness at the bottom of a bottle than in chasing pretty girls.
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