“Seeing the angel wings on Marianne’s bare back, the burn victim starts to melt. He also likes Marianne’s captivating conversational style. (‘For now, may I tell you a story about a dragon?’) He wonders if, how and why she is crazy. He finds a reassuring internal consistency to the string of lovelorn fairy tales she tells him, and to the 14th-century biography she claims is her own. He finds it fitting that she wants to take a badly burned man on a guided tour of Dante’s circles of hell. . . Although The Gargoyle is defiantly uncategorizable, Doubleday is hard at work taming it. (Suggested question for book club group discussions: ‘What sort of tailor-made suffering might Dante have invented for you?’).” –Janet Maslin, The New York Times, July 31, 2008
Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (2007)
From Chapter One:
“Lucifer’s sin is what thinkers in the Middle Ages called ‘cupiditas.’ For Dante, the sins that spring from that root are the most extreme ‘sins of the wolf,’ the spiritual condition of having an inner black hole so deep within oneself that no amount of power or money can ever fill it. For those suffering the mortal malady called cupiditas, whatever exists outside of one’s self has worth only as it can be exploited by, or taken into one’s self. In Dante’s Hell those guilty of that sin are in the ninth circle, frozen in the Lake of Ice. Having cared for nothing but self in life, they are encased in icy Self for eternity. By making people focus only on oneself in this way, Satan and his followers turn their eyes away from the harmony of love that unites all living creatures.
The sins of the wolf cause a human being to turn away from grace and to make self his only good–and also his prison. In the ninth circle of the Inferno, the sinners, possessed of the spirit of the insatiable wolf, are frozen in a self-imposed prison where prisoner and guard are fused in an egocentric reality.” –Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect (2007)
Contributed by Aisha Woodward (Bowdoin, ’08)
The 10th Circle
Martin Scorsese, “Cape Fear” (1991)
In the film, Robert De Niro’s character utters the line:
“‘I’m Virgil and I’m guidin’ you through the gates of Hell. We are now in the Ninth Circle, the Circle of Traitors. Traitors to country! Traitors to fellow man! Traitors to GOD! You, sir, are charged with betrayin’ the principles of all three! Quote for me the American Bar Association’s Rules of Professional Conduct, Canon Seven.'” –IMDb
Contributed by Joe Henderson (Bowdoin, ’10)
Jodi Picoult, “The Tenth Circle” (2006)
“Bestselling author Jodi Picoult’s The Tenth Circle is a metaphorical journey through Dante’s Inferno, told through the eyes of a small Maine family whose hidden demons haunt every aspect of their seemingly peaceful existence.” [. . .] –Gisele Tuoeg, Amazon
See also: the film “The Tenth Circle” (2008)
Contributed by Charlie Russell-Schlesinger (Bowdoin, ’08)
