The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (36 page)

While there is nothing original about depicting lovers, liars, and flatterers in terms of false facades, Cornelia’s reference to Virginia’s having “painted the outward semblance of a lover” links this discussion of male deceit with another discussion, one that takes place on the next day, when the women have reconvened in Leonora’s courtyard garden. Having begun a wide-ranging conversation about men, women, and natural philosophy, the women eventually turn to a discussion of the seemingly miraculous power of paintings to preserve the fame of heroes in noble poses, at their moment of greatest triumph or saddest defeat. Lucretia dreams of her own military victory, fighting for freedom from male tyranny like the Amazons of old, bearing the emblem of the phoenix “to boast of her chaste resolve to live forever without a mate.”
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Explaining the power of such symbols, Adriana notes that “[a]ll these
various emblems and colors are like a language that doesn’t use words, that allow people to reveal the innermost reaches of their heart in a delightful manner.” Having apparently forgotten the previous day’s critique of false lovers, Leonora counters that she prefers the language of sighs to the language of emblems. For sighs constitute the most truthful and eloquent form of speech. For her part, Cornelia opts for the language of the eyes, those “eloquent orators” that “can in all truth be said to speak and to reveal in their outward gaze the innermost secrets of the heart.” Coming to the defense of sighs, Corinna replies that “eyes very often deceive … showing one emotion in place of another,” but the language of sighs never lies, “for it has to be admitted that although one can pretend to sigh without meaning it, it’s very easy to detect the lie.”
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As if suddenly coming to her senses, Leonora cuts short this digression on different forms of speech and immediately quashes any hope of an inherently truthful and transparent language enabling us to see the reality beneath the surface, the soul hidden within the body. “In men, everything is feigned: looks, sighs, colors, words, deeds. You can never discover the truth of their souls or tell whether they are acting sincerely—except when they are perpetrating some particularly grave offence against women.”
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Men are not just liars, they are inveterate liars. They are natural liars in precisely the same way that men claim women are liars.

Throughout
The Worth of Women
, Fonte undoes the traditional coupling that associates women with the body and men with the soul. Men are nothing but painted surfaces and superficial languages. At the very beginning of their conversation about the arts, Corinna contends that poetry is to painting as the soul is to the body. “Painting,” she argues, “is like a body the soul has left, while verse is like a soul without a body; and so just as the soul is far nobler than the body, so composition in words is far nobler than one in colors.”
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Of course, it is Corinna who, throughout this second day of conversation, has quoted various lines of poetry, some of which the women suspect to be her own. By contrast, the women consistently associate men with the body, with makeup
and adornment. Men will spend “a thousand years combing and setting the few paltry hairs they have on their head,” and when they are not wearing ludicrously long ties, more like napkins than clothing, tied so tightly around their necks they look like puppets, they will surrender hours each day to selecting from among any number of tight breeches with long doublets that make them look like frogs.
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Unlike Tertullian, who condemned adornment outright as altering the holy word of God’s creation, a trespass and lie against God’s truth, the ladies in Leonora’s garden place a positive valence on style and fashion. Style, Corinna says, should not simply be tolerated, “but accepted and praised, just as much as any other feminine adornment. Because this is nothing more than a fashion, a custom, and a pastime of ours.”
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But adornment can be more than mere fashion as well. Surfaces can, sometimes, reveal hidden truth, and the “refinement and neatness of our appearance is a sign of nobility of soul.” In her treatise
On the Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Vices and Defects of Men
, Lucrezia Marinella extends this conception of adornment beyond fashion. All the great handbooks on courtly life, she argues, such as the works of della Casa and Castiglione, advise the courtier to be “elegant and polished,” and if this applies to men why shouldn’t it apply to women, “since beauty shines brighter among the rich and elegantly dressed than among the poor and rude”?
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Beauty is like a gift from God that must be cherished, protected, enhanced. Men are no different. If a man is naturally strong, a gladiator or solider, for example, doesn’t he do everything he can to maintain his strength? Don’t courageous men learn the arts of war in order to take advantage of their fearlessness? If men adorn and improve their natural gifts and talents, why shouldn’t women? Invoking Augustine’s authority, however dubiously rendered, Marinella even contends that the Church fathers recognized the importance of feminine adornment.
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No one can deny that men always and in every way adorn themselves, Marinella asserts. How many men dress themselves in fine clothes to distract attention from their unattractive faces, dye
their beards “when the dread arrival of old age causes them to turn white?” Men spend hours before mirrors primping their hair, powdering their face, scenting their body, while wearing shoes many sizes too small in order to make their feet seem more petite. Hortensius, “the famous orator,” spent whole days gazing at himself in the mirror, adjusting the folds of his clothing. Demosthenes, “the glory of Greek eloquence,” was no better, and Marinella’s list rolls onward with a litany of famous men who painted their faces, bleached their skin, and spent all their wealth on clothes and jewelry, extravagances that left them and their families destitute. If these sorts of examples seem to link adornment to feminine vanity, critiquing men when they become more like women, Marinella stresses that manliness itself is nothing but a kind of adornment. Try to find a man, she asks her readers, “who does not swagger and play the daredevil. If there is such a one people call him effeminate.” Men dress themselves up in uniforms and swords, with medals and boots, making sure everyone knows they are armed and dangerous. “What are these things,” Marinella concludes, “but artifice and tinsel? Under these trappings of courage and valor hide the cowardly souls of rabbits or hunted hares, and it is the same with all their other artifices.”
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As Fonte puts it, there are many types of languages: spoken languages and the language of sighs and of the eyes, the language of emblems, and the language of fashion. Men speak of their courage when they dress like soldiers and pace through the streets with a determined pounding gait no less than women speak of the beauty, refinement, and nobility of their souls when they color their hair or dress in clothes dyed in rich purples and gold. Of course, both Marinella and Fonte agree that each sex uses these languages differently. The languages that men use are almost always false and illusory facades to strike fear in other men and to seduce their next would-be and unsuspecting female conquest, whereas the language of women strives for truth, revealing their simple honest natures, even as they attempt to calm their husbands’ unruly tempers. However men and women put these languages to use, they are all forms of adornment, no longer
understood as pertaining essentially to women but to both men and women, equally and essentially. If a popular Renaissance proverb asserted that “women are words, men are deeds,” then both Marinella and Fonte suggest that deeds are simply visible words and that men, no less than women, depend on them.

A threatening reduction for men, no doubt, and no men experienced that threat to their alleged superiority over women more intensely than rhetoricians and orators, that is, men who made their living plying that most feminine of things, language. In 1458, Pico della Mirandola famously contrasted the philosopher with the rhetorician, demanding that philosophy remain free from the feminine poison of rhetorical adornments. “Who will not condemn synthetic beauty, or rouge, in a reputable maiden? Who would not curse it in a Vestal?” he asks. “For what else is the task of the rhetor than to lie, to entrap, to circumvent, to practice sleight of hand.”
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Rhetoricians, like women, it would seem, are garrulous and decorative, wordy and deceitful. Faced with this dilemma, rhetoricians attempted to distinguish within rhetoric itself between a masculine and feminine style. The first-century Roman rhetorical theorist Quintilian had already contributed to this project when he contrasted a virile, “natural and unaffected” style of speech, like the body of a healthy man “enjoying a good circulation and strengthened by exercise,” with an emasculated style, more akin to “the man who attempts to enhance these physical graces by the effeminate use of depilatories and cosmetics.” Renaissance writers would pick up on these distinctions, contrasting a virile style of speech with a soft feminine style.
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Borrowing from Cicero, for example, the English rhetorician Henry Peacham invoked military metaphors to guarantee the masculinity of at least some forms of eloquence. Figures of speech, he explains, “are as martial instruments both of defense and invasion; and being so, what may be either more necessary, or more profitable for us, than to hold those weapons always ready in our hands.”
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Countering style with style as a means of demarcating the allegedly absolute differences between male and female seems a losing proposition even before begun, as if certain kinds of style are
not styles at all. Peacham merely gives added credence to Marinella’s sarcastic description of all those men, carefully decked out in soldier’s uniforms, attempting to fool the world into thinking they are as brave as they pretend to be. Male rhetoricians may have tried to cordon off an effeminate style, but their efforts simply revealed that rhetoric was style all the way down or, in their language, inescapably feminine.
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If this troubled men who were worried about their masculinity, it troubled women too, though for a different reason. This final problem is less clear in Marinella’s treatise than in Fonte’s dialogue.
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So confident is she in her argumentation, Marinella offers no room for doubt, uncertainty, or second thoughts in her encomium for women, her deprecation of men. Women are prudent, intelligent, temperate, and strong. Men overflow with anger and envy. They are obstinate and ungrateful liars and deceivers. Certainly the women in Leonora’s garden would agree with all this, but where Marinella’s evisceration of male pretension operates entirely at the level of argument and assertion, confident in its proofs and exempla, seemingly freed from the tyranny of male deception, Fonte’s characters are not nearly as secluded in Leonora’s courtyard garden as they would like to be. Like the snake that slipped its way into Eden, the outside world constantly makes itself felt, intruding into the conversation often unrecognized, leaving the women confused, uncertain, and always already ensnared in a world of masculine lies.

Fonte signals this condition from the very start of her treatise when Helena voices concern about her husband’s sudden and unforeseen insistence that she remain at home, and then with the need for the other women to remind her repeatedly of this potentially dread development.
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But it appears in other places as well. During the second day in the garden, a discussion about lawyers and judges suddenly transforms into praise of Venice’s leaders who, “like loving fathers, work unceasingly, unstintingly, and unwaveringly for the benefit of all, without any thoughts of the cost to themselves, in money and energy, of their labors for the common good.”
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Only after quite a while does Leonora free her friends from this propaganda that they have long accepted at face
value. “Good Lord!” she exclaims, “I can’t believe what I am hearing…. Are not all these official functions exercised by men, against our interests?” But even Leonora finds herself deluded, if only momentarily, when, recalling a popular
canzone
, she accepts its platitudes about the truth of lovers’ sighs. Everything in society, it would seem, conspires to fool women, to make them act against their own interests, to accept second-class status and culturally sanctioned domestic violence. Perhaps this is most obvious in the lies men tell to seduce women, but these lies are everywhere, in institutions that limit a woman’s choices in life and in the love and devotion they are made to feel for their state, in well-known songs and poems, in sayings, maxims, and learned treatises. “For if we are their inferior in status,” Leonora explains, “but not in worth, this is an abuse that has been introduced into the world and that men have then, over time, gradually translated into law and custom; and it has become so entrenched that they claim (and even actually believe) that the status they have gained through their bullying is theirs by right.”
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And the power and ubiquity of these institutionally sanctioned lies are enough to fool women explicitly engaged in conversation to critique, unmask, and condemn them.

Nowhere does male duplicity create greater uncertainty and fear than in marriage. Near the end of conversation on the second day, Virginia, now convinced of the dangers men pose to women, claims she no longer wishes to marry. Her mother, Adriana, responds that her uncles claim she must in order to keep the family fortunes safe.
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But what if her husband proves violent, boorish, prone to anger or jealousy? If this is the case, Adriana responds, her daughter will have to work to change his nature with compassion, constancy, and humility. Leonora repeatedly counters that none of these strategies work—men don’t change but if they do, they only change from bad to worse. In that case, the women agree that Virginia will have to choose carefully and make sure she finds one of the few decent men that exist. Sadly, masculine nature undercuts even the value of this seemingly sound advice. Male duplicity runs deep and long, unperceived for years, carefully and purposefully hidden until it is too late for the deceived
woman to escape. Men who have no good qualities, certainly none of the qualities a woman would want in a lover and husband, Cornelia explains, “often succeed very well (much to our harm and peril), in concealing their falsity and ill intentions beneath an appearance of decency. So even if a man does seem, over a long period, to display that loyalty and true love that we have talked about, I should advise any woman who is sensible, well-respected, and virtuous to proceed cautiously, if she values her virtue and reputation.”
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