has recourse to deception and the manipulation of desire in the pursuit of power (even if
that power is restricted to the domain of the household). She does not, if she is to
maintain the appearance of her virtue (and, given certain disadvantages of womanhood,
even if she has no concerns about the appearance of virtue), have access to the full
arsenal of arms that is available to men. She has, in other words, no (or limited) recourse
to the leonine beast that Machiavelli tells us lurks in all human beings; she only has
recourse to the fox. What we begin to see in the Mandragola, I think, is that woman (or a
certain kind of woman) is perhaps the best example of the ‘foxy’ side of Machiavellian
virtù; that the virtùous woman is both deceptive and manipulative in the ‘foxiest’ way.
Under the guise of her femininity, she seems harmless and predictable, and perhaps an
object of conquest. But her virtù lies in the skilful manipulation of this guise: skilfully
wielded, it enables her to both seduce and disarm.
Her virtù consists precisely in
knowing how to appear to be good, and in using the appearance of goodness (qua
feminine virtues) to more effectively manipulate the passions of men.
It may be, then, that in Mandragola and in Lucrezia we see not only the revision of
conventional virtue to masculine virtù, but also a revision of feminine virtue (the quality
of character understood in the ancient Roman world as pudicitia) to feminine virtù, and a
suggestion that the latter may be implicated in the former. Woman – or, rather, the rare
woman who reaches beyond the bounds of her sex and her station – is arguably a nearly
perfect model of Machiavellian virtuosity: she demonstrates the utmost self-reliance,
arming herself, by herself, to overcome the constraints of her circumstances (her
‘malignity of fortune’ – can there be any greater malignity of fortune from a
Machiavellian point of view than to be born a woman?) and does so by subverting virtue
in the service of the above.
Machiavelli’s armed Prince must, of course, have recourse to both beastly sides of his
nature: to be fully virtù-ous, fully manly, he must know how to emulate both the fox and
the lion. If I am correct in my argument above – that the effectiveness of the deceptive
44 Again, Caterina Sforza – who, according to Machiavelli, duped the conspirators seeking to overtake her
husband’s fortress by exploiting her femininity – is another worthy example of such a woman. As I have
noted above, I think that Caterina and Lucrezia and their circumstances should be compared in order to
fully develop the argument that is being broached here, but such a comparison is beyond the scope of this
paper.
25
Convention