The central characters in Torquato Tasso’s Renaissance epic, Jerusalem Delivered (1581), are unique individuals with distinct stories, struggles, sacrifices, and outcomes. The principal Christian knights — Rinaldo and Tancred — carry the bulk of the plot, along with Godfrey of Bouillon, leader of the various geographical armies of the Christians. On the pagan side, Argante and Soliman are two major protagonists, strong-willed characters who, like the Christian knights, grapple with the swirling emotions of honor, envy, and self-control, as the two armies clash in the First Crusade. All of these characters are well developed and capable of affecting the reader in a variety of ways.
But Tasso’s female protagonists — principally on the pagan side — often feel even more capable of stirring one’s emotions. The diversity and drama found in the stories of Clorinda, Armida, and Erminia are incredibly gripping. In part, this seems due to the way Tasso adeptly weaves their histories and transformations around their present circumstances, giving them considerable psychological depth, and giving us (the reader) a more panoramic view of who they are.
Tasso’s male protagonists, to be sure, are no bland or psychologically uninteresting specimens. Their stories are compelling, their emotions universal; and many of them undergo a process of inner maturation during the external, physical side of battle. But whereas their dilemmas seem situated primarily in the immediate present — the here and now, as it were — the backstories of the female protagonists seem to play a larger, more relevant, and more interesting role. All of this makes for some fascinating, multi-dimensional female characters in Tasso’s epic.
Consider Clorinda, the maiden warrior par excellence. A fighter through and through, she’s eager to use her long-developed prowess in the defense of the besieged Jerusalem. Uninterested in deceit or sorcery (unlike Armida), she seeks only to embody courage and martial honor. Indeed when we first meet her, her many masculine traits are sharply contrasted with traditional feminine ones, which she does not value: “She from her greenest years had scorned the ways of women, / and the skills which these demand” (2.39). Clorinda, then, is a rugged and wild warrior, a polar opposite of a domestic woman.
This remains our general perception of her for the bulk of her narrative. And yet, prior to the reader (and Clorinda herself) learning the details of her earliest years, there are nuances to this image of her. One such instance is her intervention in the plight of Sophronia and Olindo, two young Christians who live in Mulism ruled Jerusalem, and who are about to be put to death for their (supposed) theft.
Both lives end up being spared due to the pagan Clorinda’s intervention. There is the slightest foreshadowing here, in that she herself will be saved (i.e., baptized), just moments before her death. But more interesting, is the reason why she becomes interested in Sophronia and Olindo’s plight in the first place. Clorinda observes the woman behaving more stoically and courageously than the man, noting to herself that “the weaker sex shows more tenacity” (2.42). At the risk of extrapolating too much meaning from this scene, it seems as if she’s learned something new, something very unexpected — and in a way that subtly hints there’s a part of her of which she’s ignorant.
She eventually learns of this aspect just before she and Argante embark on a night mission to burn down the Christian siege engine. Arsete (a eunuch who raised her as a baby and beyond), is deeply worried for her safety, and realizes that now is the time, if ever, to tell her. And so the story is conveyed how she’s the daughter of the Christian Prester John and his wife. The latter, fearing her husband’s suspicions and jealousy upon the birth of the “fair-skin” baby (12.24), decides to put her in the care of the Areste, who takes her to a different land. The eunuch has taken care of Clorinda all this time, but the one thing he hasn’t done is baptize her, which apparently he was instructed to do.
One of the most powerful scenes in the entire poem, then, is when Tancred rushes to a nearby source of water and hurriedly comes back in order to baptize the badly wounded Clorinda (an act which she asked for him to do), just moments before her death. This scene is made all the more powerful since her wounds are from the sword of Tancred, who was unaware that he was fighting the woman who has entranced him ever since glimpsing her long ago, in a prior battle. Clorinda is a figure that remains essentially the same through the 12 cantos she appears in; but the revelations of her upbringing along with her last minute baptism alter her identity in incredible ways.
Turning now to Armida, the reader encounters a very different type of woman. Her strengths are not of physical combat, but rather of sorcery, beauty, and the ability to entice the Christian troops in all sorts of deceptive ways. Indeed she seems almost naturally imbued with a kind of capacity to allure others onto a false track. Perhaps it’s somewhat surprising then, that Armida is an immensely empathetic character, even though she causes as much chaos for the Christian troops as anyone.
Possessing the traits of both a Calypso and a Circe, Armida turns into more of a Dido like figure by the end of the epic: someone for whom we feel much sympathy for, and who’s been placed in incredibly unfair circumstances (though, fortunately, unlike Virgil’s Carthaginian queen, she avoids destruction by her own hands, thanks to Rinaldo’s forgiveness of her acts).
In contrast with Clorinda, the details of her background are not concealed but instead revealed at the outset. Her uncle, Hydrotes, ruler of Damascus and a man fully acquainted with the arts of sorcery, essentially exploits his niece, using her good looks and adept powers of sorcery and deception to sow dissension in the Christian camps. She does so for as long as she can, then turns to the pagan forces. She utilizes her beauty once again, this time dangling the prospect of marriage over the lusty men’s heads: whoever kills Rinaldo and avenges her, wins her hand.
It’s as if Clorinda doesn’t know how else to act or exist; this is her sole mode of being. And when her efforts to bring about the death of Rinaldo fail, feelings of utter defeat overwhelm her. She asks, “What new art can I use? What’s left for me? How can I change my form to some avail?” (20.67). Stripped bare of all her once powerful faculties, she’s now impotent, empty, and on the verge of suicide. But Rinaldo, the man whom she once successfully lured into a state of lust as she held him on her island, talks her out of it. She’s loses the her deeply held anger and self-violence, but seems to retain her prior feelings of attaction to Rinaldo: “Her wrath which seemed unshakable, / it melts; none of her other longings die” (20.136). In a state of psychological surrender, she says “I am your handmaid.”
Finally, there’s the female protagonist of Erminia. Her appearances in the epic are relatively few (and spread out), yet in nearly every one of them she’s either the source of a unique perspective or making an attempt to reach Tancred in order to heal his wounds. She also serves as an interesting contrast to both Clorinda and Armida, in that she’s neither a fighter nor a sorceress, and she shows no combativeness against the Christian side as a whole, and certainly not towards Tancred, in particular.
The underlying reasons for this are presented early on. Her father’s kingdom of Antioch was overtaken by the Christians, but she herself was treated humanely by the conqueror Tancred. Her time spent under his domain was pleasant, and the reason she left (after the death of her mother), was only to return to her ancestral land. She never lost the strong, almost overwhelming, feelings for Tancred and his gentle treatment.
Erminia is characterized, in part, by her acts of concealment, especially as they concern her feelings towards Tancred. As she stands next to King Aladine in Canto 2, overlooking the Christan troops and describing their best warriors to Aladine, she pretends to utterly despise the Christian knight. She’s convincing enough, but can’t quite manage to control her passion completely: “…there came a sigh she could not quite suppress” (3.20).
Later in the poem, Erminia risks her life by disguising herself in Clorinda’s armor in order to make her way to the injured Tancred’s tent. Midway on her journey, she realizes how ill-conceived her plan was, and ends up having to flee, eventually finding shelter among shepherds. Deciding to stay there for the time being, she clothes herself in the appropriate clothes, yet “Never could it be hid in simple garb / that sublime light of her nobility (7.18). While there, she also scrawls Tancred’s name into a tree, but still does not divulge her feelings about him to anyone. It’s not until later in the poem, that she can hold them no longer and confides to Vafrine, a Christian spy who’s mixed himself in with the enemy camp.
Her eventual interaction with Tancred — delayed for the whole of the epic — is one of the most poignant scenes of the poem. As she kneels by his side, tending to his severely wounded body, she cuts some of her hair as a substitute tourniquet (19.112). It’s a supremely loving act, performed by someone who’s had pure and unchanging feelings for Tancred for years. Tancred is brought to the city, where Erminia also goes, although to a separate tent. This is the last appearance of these two in the poem, and Tasso gives us no obvious indication of what might transpire between them. Nor, for that matter, is it clear whether Tancred has known — at any point — of Erminia’s passionate feelings for him (it seems more likely that he was not aware). And, interestingly enough, as Ermina kneels beside him and expresses her passion and love, Tancred is scarcely conscious, having only brief moments of awareness.
Clorinda, Armida, and Erminia are certainly some of the most powerful characters in Tasso’s epic. The Christian knights and their Saracen adversaries are complex in their own right, but these three women provide — and bring out — so much of the rich tapestry of emotions, tensions, frailties, and longings to be found in Jerusalem Delivered, as well as in each of individual lives.
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Tasso, Torquato, and Anthony M. Esolen. 2000. Jerusalem Delivered. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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