Letters from the Cloister: defending the literary self in Arcangela Tarabotti's Lettere familiari e di complimento

Italica, Spring, 2004 by Meredith Kennedy Ray

When the Venetian nun and protofeminist writer Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-52) published her Lettere familiari e di complimento in 1650, she positioned herself within a literary tradition that had gained new momentum in the sixteenth century and retained its cachet well into the next. No longer the sole province of Humanist writers, for whom letter writing had constituted a link to a classical tradition rooted in the letters of Cicero, Pliny the Younger, and Seneca, the epistolary genre had been revitalized with the publication of the first volume of letters of Pietro Aretino in 1538. (1) Written in the vernacular rather than Latin, the "new" epistolary genre was accessible to a broader public and supplied a discursive space in which nearly any topic could be broached--from quotidian observations to literary and political concerns, and, in some cases, religious dissent or social criticism. (2) Writers, male and female, were intrigued by the letter collection's boundless possibilities as a forum for public self-fashioning and responded with enthusiasm to Aretino's example. By the time of Tarabotti's collection, over 500 letter collections had been published in Italy, some 3/4 of these in Venice. (3)

Theorized throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as a natural, innately feminine practice distinct from other more "literary" forms of writing, the epistolary medium was, on one hand, considered particularly suited to women. Spontaneity and sincerity, thought to be "feminine" qualities, were prized in epistolary expression and, indeed, with the vogue for vernacular letter collections came a great interest in women's letters in particular, paving the way for collections by Lucrezia Gonzaga, (4) Chiara Matraini, Veronica Franco, Isabella Andreini and, of course, Tarabotti. (5) In spite of such gendered characterizations, however, epistolary writing was a complex endeavor for women writers, one that called into question not only ideas about "feminine" writing style, but also deepseated cultural conventions that equated female silence with that most prized of feminine virtues, chastity. (6) As literary texts which aspired to the appearance of unmediated personal exchanges, published letters blurred the gendered boundaries between public and private spheres, between speech and silence. The woman epistolarian engaged in what was considered a "private" or feminine literary medium, but, in giving voice to her experience, rendered that experience--and herself--public, available and accessible to her readers. The act of publishing her letters--or allowing someone else to publish them--was thus a transgressive one, likely to open her up not only to accusations of lack of literary merit in comparison to men, but to speculation about her moral character. As Elizabeth Goldsmith notes in a study of the French epistolary tradition, "To publish a woman's letters, even if the purpose of publication was to praise female epistolary style, was in some way to violate her personal integrity." (7)

What, then, did it mean for a cloistered nun such as Tarabotti to publish a collection of personal correspondence? As the author of a number of protofeminist and polemical works, Tarabotti was a well-known figure in Baroque Venice, a vocal participant in the ongoing querelle des femmes, or debate over women, that continued to be waged in the pages of pro- and anti-woman treatises in Italy, from Giuseppe Passi's Donneschi difetti (1599) to Lucrezia Marinella's Della nobilta ed eccellenza delle donne (1600), and Lucrezio Bursati's Vittoria delle donne (1621). (8) A fervent defender of women, Tarabotti was quick to respond to attacks against her sex: her Antisatira (1644), for example, was a biting response to a satire on female vanity by the Sienese academician Francesco Buoninsegni, (9) while a later work, Che le donne siano della specie degli uomini (1651), was composed to refute the more serious claim that women did not have souls, advanced in a sixteenth-century Latin treatise translated into Italian in 1647. (10) Tarabotti's earlier, unpublished works, the Tirannia paterna and the Inferno monacale, also took up the cause of women, condemning the practice of coerced monachization--the placing of girls with no religious vocation in convents, for primarily economic reasons--and arguing for the intellectual superiority of women to men. Both of these works circulated in manuscript; Tarabotti does not seem to have attempted to have the Inferno published, but we know from her Lettere that she tried repeatedly, and failed, to bring the Tirannia to press. (11) Her first published work was the more meekly titled Paradiso monacale (1643), in which she defended the convent for those with genuine vocation. (12) The Paradiso would bring Tarabotti her first real taste of literary recognition, yet even this seemingly orthodox text would eventually generate great controversy, as we will see further on.

As Tarabotti has become the increasing focus of scholarly investigation in recent years, attention has tended to center on her more overtly polemical works. Her letters, however, as is often the case with epistolary collections, have been largely relegated to service as a biographical resource: indeed, until recently, the most extensive treatment of the Lettere was to be found in Emilio Zanette's biography of Tarabotti, which is based largely on the information provided by the nun in her Lettere. (13) Yet such an approach does not account for the distinctly literary element of Tarabotti's letters or the degree to which the nun might have intervened in them in order to construct a public persona or respond effectively to her critics. Far more than a mere collection of correspondence, Tarabotti's epistolario is, first of all, a literary work. Although the fiction of a published letter is that it is a genuine, spontaneous document, untouched by artistic intervention, this was rarely the case with early modern letter collections. Many, if not most, early modern published letters were subject to revision prior to publication; still others were composed expressly for publication. Archival evidence demonstrates that Tarabotti, like many of her contemporaries, subjected her correspondence to a process of selection before unveiling it in public, choosing to exclude some of it from the printed collection, and publishing at least one letter in revised form, with an eye to her public persona. (14) The letters included in Tarabotti's epistolario are not a random sampling, but rather chosen, I would argue, to convey a particular image of the author. As Tarabotti's polemical works encountered increasing hostility among the Venetian literary community--manifested most clearly in accusations that she had not written them herself--the nun who devoted herself to the defense of all women found herself forced to defend a cause still closer to her heart: her own literary reputation. It was in this context of literary embattlement that Tarabotti, who had experimented with such genres as treatise and satire in the 1640's, turned her attention to the lettera familiare, a medium through which she could respond directly to her critics while rallying the support of her friends. Like Aretino before her, Tarabotti understood the power of the published letter as a tool with which to take note of one's friends (and profit from the public connection to influential figures) and punish one's enemies--and the nun had no shortage of either.