SOURCE: Finucci, Valeria. “(Dis)Orderly Death, or How to Be In by Being Out: The Case of Isabella.” In The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto, pp. 169-97. Stanford, Calif. Stanford University Press, 1992.

In the essay that follows, Finucci compares Isabella to Medusa and posits that Isabella's self-willed death in Orlando furioso reaffirms gender roles and social power relations.

In Orlando furioso, Ariosto reserves the highest praise and the longest eulogy for Isabella. Not coincidentally, she is the only major female character to die. Isabella stages her own death in Canto 29 when she asks the Saracen hero Rodomonte to strike at her neck in order to test her newly invented herbal salve. As a result, she masochistically delivers herself from a threatened rape and circumvents her beloved Zerbino's deathbed injunction not to commit suicide for his sake. Like Ariosto, critics have praised this character and...