Beatrice, as anyone who has read The Divine Comedy knows, is the object of affection for Dante the protagonist. There is no other topic which creates such heated discussion as the role of Beatrice in Dante's life both within the text and in externally in his living world. The problem is so little is known about Dante the man with respect to his personal life that so much conjecture and emotive pontification leads scholars and enthusiasts to make incredible leaps of logic for the sake of creating their own narratives about the role of a muse in an artist's life. Dante is important to a great number of people, and as happens too often with figures held in high regard, there are huge emotional stakes for the individual interesting in exploring the man alongside the "artist." Look, from what little i know about Dante the man, he was kind of an ass. He was incredibly arrogant and confident in his talents at the expense of other aspects of his life. He was married, and yet he does not expend a single line of poetry in any of his works to his wife. And yet, he creates a three volume epic (as well as his first long form poem Vita Nuova in which the source of all inspiration and his final guide through paradise is a woman named Beatrice. He saw her once as a 8 year old girl, supposedly at a May Day party. He became fixated upon her for the rest of her brief life (She died at the age of twenty-four). He claims in the Vita Nuova to have seen her only twice, but was so enraptured by her presence that he remain in may ways devoted to her throughout his life. This is kind of creepy by today's standards. There are folks out there whose inner world has transformed a human to an object of affection. This can be harmless, or it can grow to Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver levels of obsession and scariness. To have a muse is a curious thing. Being an artist myself, there have been people who have come into my world that I have claimed were muses. Technically speaking, a muse is an entity to be admired from afar. It is, in the greek myth sense of the word, a non-sexual relationship, but usually with a supernatural being that takes the form of the opposite sex. They are the source of knowledge, the resevoir from which an artist taps for his or her inspiration. They are the personification of the arts in human form.
The question for Dante enthusiasts becomes murky because modernity has great difficulty grasping non-sexual relationships between men and women, especially when one has been very affectionately described. Dante may or may not have desired Beatrice. He was married, sure, but chose not to use his wife as a source of inspiration for his art. Modernity views this as Dante never married his "true love." He was stuck with another and chose to use his art to express his true feelings. This very well may have been true. But what if Dante really did find Beatrice to be his Platonic idealized female aspect of humanity. What if she was the source of unattainablilty, to be admired from afar as one admires a great painting or piece of music? Could Beatrice just be a symbol of feminity, one that left such a profound impact upon him as a youngster that she unknowingly became his muse? Dante may have been a very happily married man who just so happened to devote his life to writing about another. One wonders what Mrs. Alighierri thought about her husband's work.
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