‘Che son la Pia’: Liminal Female Figures of Intercession in Blake’s illustrations of the Commedia

Abstract

While female icons are neither scant nor marginal in Dante’s Divine Comedy, with Francesca and Beatrice at the centre of the story, other women in the Commedia justify their presence as figures that enact and enable transitions, but not necessarily change: Pia in Purgatorio, Canto V, and her plea to Dante to be remembered among the living; Lucia carrying Dante in his sleep up to the threshold of purgatory (Canto IX); or Matilda waiting for Dante on the banks of the river Lethe in Purgatorio (Canto XXIX). Liminality, conceived not only as a space-between, physically and emotionally, is also a state of intercession, of anagnorisis and of renouncing the lower for the higher: a space for religious intervention, salvation and resurrection. By looking at key women characters in the Commedia, particularly in Purgatorio, the following pages will survey the significance of intercession as a point of arrival in Dante’s Commedia and Blake’s depiction of it, in which female figures, endowed with roles that often imply transition and mediation, coalesce the joint vision of both artist and poet: the transmutation of Pagan into Christian values that can only happen in the realms of the self upon overcoming duality.

Keywords

• Blake
• Commedia
• Women
• Intercession
• Liminality
• Salvation.