Women as Text, Text as Woman

This chapter explores an ancient cultural theme: the links between women and textuality, involving images of female nudity (‘the naked truth’) and of clothing and make up (ornatus). It begins by exploring the mechanics of reading as a homoerotic exchange between a male author and a male reader through the guise of a personified female text, and it documents the evolution of such a theme in the age of Dante, with the flourishing of a rather independent form of female lyric textuality. In creating an embodied text that moves about, speaks, cries out in joy or sorrow, but also writes and reads itself, and, most importantly, opens itself up to the plurality of interpretation, poets promote a very nuanced image of textuality, which defies gender barriers and stereotypes. Eventually such ‘live’ texts, with their fertility, come to challenge the all-male myth of poetic generation and the masculinity of authority.