ABSTRACT
Nancy Vickers applies a feminist approach to Petrarch's lyrics by arguing that the representation of gender in literature has consequences for women readers. Using a psychoanalytic perspective, Vickers finds that Petrarch's use of the myth of Diana and Actaeon expresses a fear of dismemberment associated with incest prohibitions and the castration complex. As a primary canonical text, the Rime sparse consolidated and disseminated a Renaissance mode. Petrarch's account of Actaeon's story closely follows the subtext that obviously subtends the entire canzone Ovid's Metamorphoses. Giuseppe Mazzotta, in an analysis centered on Petrarch's 'language of the self', reads it in relation to a reversibility of 'subject and object'. The Actaeon-Diana story is one of identification and reversal: Actaeon hunts; Diana hunts; and their encounter reduces him to the status of the hunted. Petrarch's Actaeon, having read his Ovid, realizes what will ensue: his response to the threat of imminent dismemberment is the neutralization, through descriptive dismemberment, of the threat.
