Western Beauty: Exploring Questions Raised By Petrarchan Conceit

On the Standards of Western Beauty:

Exploring Questions Raised by the Petrarchan Conceit What is beauty? Is it truly in the eye of the beholder, or are there other factors that play a role in our perception of what is or is not beautiful? If you could go back in time and ask Sappho the same question, she might give an answer consistent with what she wrote in the first stanza of her poem “Fragment 6”, otherwise known as “On What Is Best”: “Some celebrate the beauty / of knights, or infantry / or billowing flotillas / at battle on the sea. / Warfare has its glory, / but I place far above / these military splendors / the one thing that you love,” (ll. 1–8). For our purposes, we will interpret what Sappho refers to in line eight as feminine beauty.

Her physical attributes were often described in a rhetorical formula called effictio (an example of a Petrarchan conceit); her moral and internal character, in a formula called notatio. This led to a prevailing stereotypical ideal of perfect feminine beauty in medieval times: hair blond or golden; mouth rosy or red as coral and smiling; flesh white, soft, smooth; neck like a tower of ivory; body well-formed, slender, without blemish but limbs slightly plump; breasts “white as snow.” Her moral features (notatio) demanded courtesy, kindness, refinement, good sense, and talents like a pretty voice or stately bearing. It was further assumed that the lover became the lady’s vassal. He must protest absolute submission and devotion to her; she had absolute power over his life. And it was assumed that the lover might well suffer effects of lovesickness before the lady-love granted her mercye. He might experience physical sickness, depression, sleeplessness, loss of hunger, confusion and loss of speech, trembling, pallor, and fever. Some of the cliché language of the Petrarchan conceit depicted the lady as a cruel foe or warden who kept the lover in submissive misery;

Unfortunately, these quotes don’t do justice to Madam Curie by elaborately detailing the contributions she made to science and medicine, but they allow me to briefly establish her as an important figure in the history of science and (of particular interest to us) the history of gender equality. In doing this, they also allow me to pose the following question: could Madam Curie have accomplished as much or any of what she did if Henri Becquerel, Pierre Curie, or any of the other men in her life had maintained the stranglehold that patriarchal societies have traditionally imposed on women (the kind of stranglehold that the Petrarchan conceits arguably contribute to)? If Pierre Curie had been the kind of man who demanded that his wife spend her time making herself look pretty instead of working in the lab, we might have developed X-ray technology much later, which would have cost history more lives. This is the effect that one emancipated woman had one history. Imagine the positive differences that could have been made by even a fraction of the countless women who have been shackled throughout history. It is a very revealing thought experiment. A well-known contemporary author named Christopher