Inwardness in Dante's Vita Nuova: The Body of Beatrice

Abstract: This essay investigates the historical, cultural, and literary genealogy of inwardness, challenging the Bloomian perspective that William Shakespeare invented the subjectivity. Instead, it posits that inwardness emerged as an ongoing process beginning in the Middle Ages or earlier, with Shakespeare’s achievement lying in the deepening of its mimesis within the dramatic genre. By synthesizing the historical analyses of Ariès and Duby regarding the rise of privacy and individuality, the study traces the evolution of the subjectivity of allurement and the Christian ascetic rejection of the body as foundational moments of inner space. The core of the discussion centers on Robert Pogue Harrison’s reading of Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nuova. It explores the blind spot in Dante’s ‘marvellous vision,’ arguing that the presence of the nuda (naked) Beatrice, partially veiled by a crimson cloth, represents the first instance in Western literature where sexual desire is projected into literary creation. Through this poetic potentiality, Dante transforms repressed corporeal desire into an aesthetic order. Furthermore, drawing on Erich Auerbach’s theories, the essay demonstrates how Dante and later authors like Augustine and Montaigne reshaped language and genre, utilizing silences, syntactic ruptures, and self-analysis, to represent the ‘homo interior.’ Ultimately, the work situates Shakespeare not as a solitary innovator, but as a peak in a long literary tradition of representing the complexities of the human psyche, from Dante’s work to the projected anxieties of characters in Shakespeare.