Amazonian Knots: Gender, Genre and Ariosto's Women Warriors

Abstract

This article interprets Ariosto's women warriors as hybrid figures who stand between the literary genres of romance and epic. While Bradamante emerges primarily as a romance character and Marfisa as an epic one, each woman also symbolizes within herself the tension in the Furioso between the two genres. Through an investigation of two key episodes of the poem, where different dilemmas that stem from the women warriors' ambiguous identity are described through the common metaphor of a nodo or knot, the article shows how Bradamante and Marfisa enable the poet to interrogate the boundaries of difference, both sexual and generic.