James Joyce Quarterly

Why is Gerty MacDowell lame? One might at first suggest that the solution to the riddle of Gerty (“But who was Gerty?”—U 13.78) can be found in Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio, Canto XIX, where an ugly woman with deformed feet, who symbolizes the sins of the flesh, appears to Dante in a dream.¹ The woman is both lame and maimed, defective in speech and vision and sickly pale, but she is progressively transformed into an apparently beautiful and seductive singing siren by the dreamer’s gaze.² Yet Gerty is not merely a “femmina balba . . . e sovra i piè distorta.”³ The persona of Dante’s siren who led mariners astray in mid-sea and turned Ulysses from his destination by her song is no conclusive solution to the riddle.⁴ And Gerty does not sing but, like a cancan dancer, exposes herself when she leans [End Page 493] backward to look at the fireworks so that Bloom has a full view of her “wondrous revealment half offered like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen” (U 13.731–32). We must move on and turn to the Purgatorio, Canto XXVIII, and Dante’s encounter with Matelda in the Earthly Paradise to understand why Gerty is lame.

When Dante enters the divine forest at the summit of the mountain island of Purgatorio and arrives at the stream of Lethe, he sees beautiful Matelda dancing and gathering flowers on the other side. He falls in love with her and is seized, for the last time, by an erotic passion equal only to that of Leander for Hero.⁵ Matelda, as I have previously argued,⁶ represents the fictio personae, or personification, of Dante’s most perfect poetical form, the Canzone,⁷ and he looks at her with the eyes of the passionate and unhappy lover who has lost her. Her dance discloses her metapoetical identity:

Come si volge, con le piante strette a terra e intra sé, donna che balli, e piede innanzi piede a pena mette, volsesi in su i vermigli e in su i gialli fioretti verso me, non altrimenti che vergine che li occhi onesti avalli; e fece i prieghi miei esser contenti, sí appressando sé, che ‘l dolce suono veniva a me co’ suoi indentimenti.

(XXVIII:52–60)⁸

Dante describes Matelda prosodically. She moves forward in her dance like the melody of the Canzone, piede after piede, metric foot after foot, and then she turns in what is technically a diesis or volta (a turn). One might imagine that the dancing Matelda, a unique figure in the Commedia and sole inhabitant of Eden, a place of biological and poetic originality, is Dante’s own creation, but she is not original. As the prosopopeia of the Canzone, she is citational and “second-hand.”⁹ If we turn to Ovid’s Amores, we realize, in fact, that, in the Purgatorio XXVIII, Dante wears—like Stephen in “Proteus”—second-hand boots cast off by that “elegant Latin poet” Ovid (U 14.995).¹⁰

At the beginning of book 3 of the Amores, we read how Ovid entering a shady grove sees a limping girl approaching:

Venit odoratos Elegia nexa capillos, et, puto, pes illi longior alter erat. forma decens, vestis tenuissima, vultus amantis, et pedibus vitium causa decoris erat.

(445)¹¹

The description of limping Elegia and of her endearing physical impediment—with one foot longer than the other—is metapoetical. It refers to the elegiac couplet, the asymetrical verse form consisting [End Page 494] of a hexameter and a pentameter, the second shorter than the first. If we look at Matelda with the episode from the Amores in mind, we see that Dante’s “beautiful woman,” like Elegia, personifies a prosodic form. She is, like the girls of the Augustan elegy, a “written woman” or metapoetic scripta puella.¹² The breezy thicket in Dante’s garden of Eden is intertextually, therefore, the “forest” where Ovid, before meeting Tragedia (the personification of the high style), allows himself respite to look at his beloved Elegia, the personification of erotic poetry. Like Ovid before being confronted by Tragedia, Dante lingers in...