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The Honored Courtesan 19

work of women prose writers, if not poets, in the late 1500s. But her decla-ration that she represents what all women are potentially able to do broad-ens the field of combat, shifting her response to Maffio from a one-on-one duel to a display of feminine competence in generał: “I will show you how much the female sex / excels your own” (94-95).

In other capitoh, too, Franco looks sympathetically at the situation of women, although she is never again as fierce in her confrontation with a małe interlocutor. In one of her elegiac poems— Capiłolo 22, a lament on her absence from Yenice and the miseries of love—she seems again to be conceding the truth of misogynist cliche: women suffer morę in love than men because they are less rational: “the slightest breeze disturbs the female mind, / and our simple souls are set ablaze / ... by even a tepid fire’' (76-78). But she explains this surface phenomenon as the result of social oppression, not female naturę, echoing arguments (for example, Boccaccio s in the opening of TheDecameron)²³ that confining women against their will makes them morę, not less, susceptible to passion: “The less free-dom we possess, / the morę blind desire . . . / will find a way to penetrate our hearts” (79-81). Limited autonomy, “our shared constraint,” she sug-gests, rather than morał frailty, leads women to two equally grim alterna-tives: dying of love or going “astray because of a slight mistake” (82-84).

Francos longest and most inventive defense of women—of a fellow courtesan and of the female sex in generał—occurs toward the end of her Poems, in Capitolo 24. She speaks with elaborate courtesy to a man who has not only insulted a woman verbally but threatened to scar her permanently by slashing her face (35)—a form of violence through which angry clients attempted to end the careers of courtesans of whom they were jealous. Franco s intention here is gently persuasive rather than openly polemical: she wants to bring the man back into an orbit of gentlemanly chivalry so that he will make peace with the woman. But in the course of her tactful suggestions to him, she fills nearly sixty lines with a variety of claims in defense of the female sex.

Some of her arguments are playful and lighthearted, as when she argues from observable social facts to their underlying cause: mens gratitude for women s courtesy and admiration ot their wisdom is proved by the fact that they dress women richly, give them the right of way indoors and out, and 23. Giovanni Boccaccio, Tutte leopere di Giovanm Boccaccio, vol. *4 (II Dccamcrone), ed. Vit-torc Branca (Milan: Mondadori, 1976). Boccaccio writes in his prcface that women are morę prone to uncontrollable passions because they are sheltered from the public, social world and cannot free themsclves, as do men, of the intense feelings of love: “ It is women who timorously and bashfully conceal Loves flame within their tender breasts; and those who have had ex-perience of it know well enough how much harder it is to control the suppressed than the open flame. Moreover, circumscribed as women are,.. . they brood on all manner of things” (trans. Guido Waldman [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19931,4).