Dante Alighieris The Inferno - Essay Example

?Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno is one of the three books of The Divine Comedy, the other two being The Purgatorio and The Paradiso. The Inferno can be seen as Dante’s spiritual voyage in search of the gateway to righteousness, as the settings in the beginning imply that he is currently lost in sin, in the form of a darkened forest without any trace of a straight path (I. 2). Upon meeting the dead poet Virgil, they both embarked on a journey into the depths of hell, wherein during such voyage Dante (the poet) can be observed to transform from a man that shows compassion and empathy to sinful souls, into a man that condemns all sinners in hell. The story ends with Virgil leading Dante up towards the other side of the Earth, and the latter having a change of heart after seeing and meeting many souls in the underworld. During the travels of the two pilgrims towards the center of hell, several notable characters are met and interviewed by Dante, despite being urged by Virgil not to talk to them. As the souls of the damned share each of their stories to the poet of Florence, certain parallelisms can be seen among them. One example of such stories would be Francesca da Polenta and her lover Paolo da Rimini’s tale in Canto V, and of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca in Canto XXXIII. As shown in the text, the two tales have different premises, wherein the two lovers were sent to hell due to their lust, and the count was sent to hell for being a traitor to his state, which caused him to become a victim of treachery as well. However, upon further inspection of the circumstances of the two tales, certain ideas and concepts are seen to be similar. For one, both Francesca and Count Ugolino were not alone in their predicament in hell. Francesca is eternally tied to her lover, Paolo, always appearing together, and both of them being swept by the wind. Count Ugolino eats the brains of his neighbor and the one who betrayed him, Archbishop Ruggieri, as both are stuck in the frozen lake of Cocytus in the deepest part of hell. The punishment of the two sets of people may be different, as the two lovers were only within the outer confines of hell, and the treacherous pair was sent into the farthest circle of hell, the two pairs are both sent to hell for the same reason. In this paper, the main concept that binds the two stories is that committing the act of betrayal would be the main reason why the two lovers and the count were sent to the depths of hell. The story of Francesca and Paolo would be described first. Dante was surprised to see that among what seems to be flocks of birds that fly in the wind were actually bodies that were being carried aloft by tempests, and according to Virgil, these were the souls of those who succumbed to the sin of the flesh. What set Francesca and Paolo apart from the other souls is that aside from being together amidst a flock of singularly-flying bodies, they seem to be braving the strong winds together (Hollander 105). This caught the attention of Dante and called the pair down to ask about their predicament. What brought the two down was that Dante was a living being that went down to the depths of hell, since he showed pity to their grievous plight (V. 93). After coming down, Francesca alone told Dante the story of their fall from grace. While in the canto itself it was not stated as to what or how Paolo and Francesca betrayed someone in particular, in Hollander’s notes it was written why the two ended up being lovers (Hollander 108). It is suggested that Francesca was married to an older, deformed man by the name of Gianciotto, whose younger brother is Paolo. Due to the allure of Paolo’s physical beauty, as well as Francesca’s despise towards her husband, she ended up succumbing to lust and betraying her husband, along with his brother. She felt that her predicament can be described in the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, and by reading such story her longing for Paolo became justified, in one solitary moment conquered them both (V. 130). This became the start of the two lovers’ betrayal, which eventually caught with them, and Gianciotto ended the pair’s actions in their deathbed (Hollander 108). All the while, in the passages, Francesca kept attributing her sins to love, but not to her own choices. Thus she kept putting the blame of being in hell on her love for Paolo: “Love, which absolves no one beloved from loving, seized me so strongly with his charm that, as you see, it has not left me yet. Love brought us to one death, Caina awaits for him who quenched our lives.”(V. 103-107) However, this kind of betrayal combined with lust made her and Paolo candidates for the second circle of hell. Due to the fact that Francesca is already married to Gianciotto, and Paolo should have been acting as a sister to her should have been a more righteous path. But since Dante just started his descent towards hell, he was still able to give sympathy to the two, and after hearing Paolo wept, Dante swooned as if in death, and fell down as a dead body falls (V. 141-142). After Dante already seen the other parts of hell, as he and Virgil were nearing towards the center, condemnation of souls started to take root in the former’s heart. Compared in the beginning when he was still able to sympathize with the souls of the damned, after reaching the innermost circle, in the lake of Cocytus he was already starting to feel that the bodies in the frozen lake rightfully deserved their demise. In this frozen lake another pair was seen, the souls of Count Ugolino and the Archbishop Ruggieri. The count seems only to gnaw the head of the archbishop, the former wiping his bloody mouth upon the former’s hair as he chews from behind (XXXIII. 2-3). Upon seeing Dante and Virgil, the count started telling his story as to why he was in the deepest part of hell, along with the archbishop. Both the count and the bishop were traitors, and their stories were well-known in Tuscany at that time (Hollander 617). However, due to the unsuccessful coup attempt, the bishop left the count alone to atone for his plans of taking over the leadership of Pisa in exchange of giving some of the outlying castles to the Florentines and the Luchesi (Hollander 616). After being betrayed, the count was imprisoned by the archbishop in the Tower of Hunger, along with his two sons and two grandsons (Hollander 617). After several months, the food stopped coming, and the king became cold toward his children, in order to hide his shame of bringing them into such sufferings unfairly: “For if Count Ugolino was accused Of having himself betrayed your fortresses, You had no right to crucify his sons. Their newborn years had made them innocent, You newborn Thebes! – Uguiccione, Brigata, And the other two my canto named above.” (XXXIII. 85-90) The count believes that his children should have been set free, however his feelings of betraying his children into a fate that they did not deserve made him feel cold towards them, and even in their deaths he has not uttered any word to console them: “At that I shed no tears, and I said nothing, In answer all that day nor the next night Until another sun rose on the world.” (XXXIII. 52-54) While the children were rather compassionate with their father, who had turned silent and cold as a stone, they still stood beside him, although at their dying day they kept asking their father why he didn’t help them. Such a thing even to this day is deemed immoral, and that a parent should be able to prevent the offspring from getting hurt, but instead the count just shut himself up, and even ate the flesh of his own sons so he could live a bit longer (Hollander 619). Such an action is also seen as a betrayal, because aside from not seeing to the welfare of the children, the count even put them into danger and ultimately death, and him outliving and consuming them can also be counted as betrayal to his own kin. It is interesting to note that while in the story the sons and grandsons were all children, in reality they were all of age when they were imprisoned in and starved to death around 1289 (Hollander 616). Dante made this in order to connect the impending death of the count and his sons with his nightmare of wolves being chased and killed by hounds. Also, because of the numerous betrayals that the count had to face, in the end he had to live the rest of eternity with his original betrayer in hell, and cannibalizing the archbishop’s head echoes the count’s sin when he was still alive. While initially, the poet and pilgrim Dante was able to give his sincere sympathies to the souls in the outermost layer of death, during his travels into the innermost circle of hell, his sympathies turn into hatred and condemnation of the sins of the souls of the damned. Thus he was not as mild to Count Ugolino as he was with Francesca and Paolo, even though the two were both weeping and speaking simultaneously (Hollander 617) . Such an action showed that while Francesca was able to win Dante’s heart over for sympathy, the count was very much unsuccessful with his attempt (Hollander 620). To conclude this paper, while the main reasons for being eternally damned were born out of different circumstances, the fact that both the lovers and the count committed betrayals were the main reason why they fell into the depths of hell. For Francesca and Paolo, betrayal of Gianciotto’s trust was a major sin in itself, the root of the pair’s betrayal was their lust for each other, which sent the two into the second circle of hell. In their case, the betrayal was not enough to send them into the ninth circle of hell, and that lust was their major sin. In the count’s case however, he had two major betrayals: betrayal to his state; and betrayal to his own children. Since traitors were given harsher sentences than fornicators in Dante’s hell, the count was sent into the farthest regions of the Inferno, near the place where Satan resides. The lovers and the count may have been punished quite differently, it is interesting to note that they are bound by the commonality of betrayal, of treachery, and of putting their own selves ahead of others. Such selfish reasons ultimately sent them to their deaths, and into the eternal sufferings in hell. Works Cited Hollander, Robert and Jean Hollander. The Inferno, Dante Alighieri . New York: Anchor Books, 2002. Print. Hollander, Robert. "Notes, Canto V." Hollander, Robert and Jean Hollander. The Inferno, Dante Alighieri. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. 100-112. Print. Hollander, Robert. "Notes, Canto XXXIII." Hollander, Robert and Jean Hollander. The Inferno, Dante Alighieri. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. 616-623. Print. Read More