Dante’s ‘Blind Prison’: Confinement and Carcerality in the 'Inferno' (original) (raw)

While verses detailing hellish suffering are plentiful in Dante’s Purgatory, the poet unambiguously represents Hell as an eternal prison which he strikingly carves out in Inferno 10 dedicated to the heretics where we discover Farinata and Cavalcante in one of the most poignant cantos of the 'Inferno.' In this essay, I will focus on Dante and Virgil’s entrance into lower Hell (the city of Dis) and particularly Circle 6 dedicated to the heretics with the objective of exploring how the poet constructs and amplifies the metaphor of Hell as a prison which echoes the characterization delineated in the widely read apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus where Christ’s Descent into Hell is described as a liberation of pre-Christian souls from Satan’s infernal prison-house. My reading of Dante’s poem aims to enhance our understanding of Inferno 10 by revealing another layer of meaning in this very complex canto through the notion of Hell as a place of eternal confinement.