What Does The She-Wolf Symbolize In Dante's Inferno

In Dante’s The Inferno, Dante creates the seven layers of hell categorized by sin and ordered by which sin Dante feels is the most virtuous (closest to the top) to the most sinful (at the bottom where it is the coldest). The Circles of Hell are: Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Avarice and Prodigality, Wrath and Sullenness, Heresy, Violence (murder, suicide, blasphemy, sodomy, and usury), Fraud, and Treachery. He puts well know characters from epic poems such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid in the circles of hell that he feels is most suited for the sin committed while alive. Two characters that Dante mentions in hell is Dido, from The Aeneid, and Helen from the Iliad.

At the most fundamental level, Dante associates the setting of darkness with sin and sin’s deceiving nature through contrasting the darkness of Hell with the light of Heaven. In the first Canto, Dante sees that his escape from the wilderness is the pursuit of the sun; although Virgil, his guide, offers a better path to achieve his goal, the sun nonetheless represents a lack of sin. Immediately from the start, the darkness represents animalistic sin, such as incontinence or violence. However, Dante’s incorporation of sins against reason with darkness do not become clear until later in his journey. In Hell, darkness, like the degree of sin,

In Dante’s Inferno, part of The Divine Comedy, Canto V introduces the torments of Hell in the Second Circle. Here Minos tells the damned where they will spend eternity by wrapping his tail around himself. The Second Circle of Hell holds the lustful; those who sinned with the flesh. They are punished in the darkness by an unending tempest, which batters them with winds and rain. Hell is not only a geographical place, but also a representation of the potential for sin and evil within every individual human soul. As Dante travels through Hell, he sees sinners in increasingly more hideous and disgusting situations. For Dante, each situation is an image of the quality of any soul that is determined to sin in

In verse 25, Dante describes the choir of anguish to be "like a wound" with a simile. Next, by using a metaphor, he describes the fate of the adulterous sinners and their punishment as being battered eternally by the winds and storms of hell, as they were figuratively battered by the winds of passion in their lives on earth. He describes with a simile how "as cranes go over sounding their harsh cry, / leaving the long streak of their flight in air, / so come spirits, wailing as they fly" (v 46-48). Finally, he makes use of another simile to iterate how after Francesca tells of her tale of love, Dante faints and falls, "as a corpse might fall, to the dead floor of hell" (v 140).

Dante’s The Inferno is his own interpretation of the circles of hell. The people that Dante places in hell tried to validate their offenses and have never seen the injustice of their crime or crimes. They were each placed in a specific circle in Hell, Dante has nine circles in his hell. Each circle holds those accountable for that specific crime. Each circle has its own unique and fitting punishment for the crime committed. There are three different main types of offenses; they are incontinence, violence, and fraud. These offenses are divided into Dante’s nine rings of Hell. Each of these rings has a progressively worse punishment, starting with crimes of passion and

The people in Dante's second circle of hell all committed crimes regarding sexual desires. Whether it was falling in love for one, when being promised to another or simply cheating. These were all against the code of conduct and looked at as offences that landed them in hell. Another transgression was people who act out of sexual desire rather than doing what's right.

Dante’s four-fold method is a way to interpret the allegorical meaning behind a certain text. The method interprets a story through four layers of allegory: literal or historical, political, moral or psychological, and spiritual. “The Lay of the Were-Wolf” is a story originally written by Marie de France and later translated by Eugene Mason. This text is a tale of love, friendship, secrecy, and betrayal. “The Lay of the Were-Wolf” can be portrayed in at least three of the four layers of allegory in Dante’s four-fold method: literal or historical, moral or psychological, and spiritual.

While every person has a different depiction of Hell, Dante provides fascinating imagery of his portrayal, so the reader can truly experience the

Inferno, the first part of Divina Commedia, or the Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, is the story of a man's journey through Hell and the observance of punishments incurred as a result of the committance of sin. In all cases the severity of the punishment, and the punishment itself, has a direct correlation to the sin committed. The punishments are fitting in that they are symbolic of the actual sin; in other words, "They got what they wanted." (Literature of the Western World, p.1409) According to Dante, Hell has two divisions: Upper Hell, devoted to those who perpetrated sins of incontinence, and Lower Hell, devoted to those who perpetrated sins of malice. The

They spend eternity being swept away by an eternal storm in all directions. This area of hell is described to be an area where no light is shone and no comfort is given (5,31-43). Lust comes in many different forms, people lust for power, money and love. The second circle of the inferno focuses on the lust for love. Dante speaks to Francesca who basically cheated on her current husband with Paolo (5,129-132).

<br>There is a woman at the bottom right of the painting that is being held by a kangaroo type creature. This creature may represent the invisible force that Dante believes is inside a sinner that makes him do the things he does, whether it be caused by mental or physical suffering. One of the sinners in the Inferno, an Impersonator, kept craving water. He said, "O you who bear no punishment at all (I can't think why) within this world of sorrow, he said to us, pause here and look upon the misery of one Master Adamo: in life I had all that I could desire, and now, alas, I crave a drop of water." (XXX: 58-63) There is a man pictured near the woman and he is throwing up. This could also be representative of the evil inborn in sinners.

Dante’s Inferno informs the audience that Hell reserves an icy habitat to the world’s most odious offenders aside from it's fiery doom. The “Foulest of all beings,” (Dante 49) Lucifer, is described as a massive beast with 3 faces, 6 eyes, and bat-like wings that the fallen angel uses to punish his prisoners. Dante uses this description of Satan to emphasize the brutal, violent, and excruciating pain the punished will endure, and to stress the evil that is Lucifer. He also does this to perfect his contrapasso.

“My Guide and I crossed over and began to mount that little known and lightless road to ascend into the shinning world again.” The Inferno, by Dante Alighieri, is an epic poem, divine comedy, which was written in the 1500’s in Italian. Dante Alighieri lost his mother at a very young age and was exiled from his hometown, Florence when his group, the White Guelphs got into a disagreement with the Black Guelphs. Dante was a writer and greatly involved in politics which influenced him to write this epic poem. The story starts at with him meeting the ghost of Virgil, his idol, who becomes his guide for the remainder of the book and tries to escort Dante to heaven to be with his love, Beatrice.

The inferno by Dante is a story of faith, religious and moral beliefs with various elements, symbols and themes. Through this journey Dante is guided through hell and back by Virgil a symbolism of his teacher and a comrade philosopher like him. The three elements through out this story that seemed to stand out the most are the perfection of God's justice, evil as a contradiction to God's will, and the style of language.

What causes trouble in this world simply comes down to human nature, really, who’s on top. In this eternal fight to the pinnacle of the societal pyramid, there are bound to be those that suffer more than others. Dante Divine Comedy brings into question: “Which life should I care about more, the one on Earth or the one in the afterlife?” For those who may not believe in Heaven or Hell (an ever increasing number today) the choice is quite easy. In effect, Dante condemns anyone that he feels violates this “divine” order of sanctity (those that prefer the Earth life) by putting them in different circles of Hell. The different sins in Inferno are divided into those of pleasure/ambition, and those of intention to harm. Both are evident in the corruption of society with the former focusing on “improving” oneself at the expense of the individual and the latter “improving” oneself at the expense of others. Take the gluttons for example. People such as Ciacco indulged too much in lively pleasures such as