Dante Alighieri was a famous Italian poet and philosopher who lived from 1265-1321 C.E. He was revered for his wealth of knowledge across numerous fields of study, including philosophy, literature, and theology, making Dante "one of the most learned Italian laymen of his day" ("Dante Alighieri"). While Dante’s work as an author and poet is extensive, he is best known for the long narrative poem The Divine Comedy.

The Divine Comedy is divided into three separate books: the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and finally the Paradiso. The Inferno is the most famous of these three books. It tells the story of Dante’s journey through the circles of Hell accompanied by the Latin poet Virgil. Scholar Owen Barfield explains that, instead of portraying Hell as an unrelenting lake of fire, as is conveyed by the Book of Revelation in the Bible, Dante’s circles showcase increasingly horrifying levels of the grotesque, where "only some parts of [the circles] are involved in flames, the inmost circle (where Judas and Satan are found) being a place of freezing cold" (50).

Two of O’Connor’s stories, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” and “The Partridge Festival,” refer to Dante’s The Divine Comedy, both specifically alluding to the Inferno. Interestingly, O’Connor directly quotes the Inferno in “The Partridge Festival.” As Calhoun and Mary Elizabeth enter through the gates of Quincy State Hospital, Mary Elizabeth says, “‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’” (O’Connor 439), which is the final line of the long inscription over the entrance to Hell in Dante’s Inferno (Alighieri, Canto III, line 9).

Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. 1472. Translated by H. F. Cary, e-book ed., Project Gutenberg, 2005. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1008/pg1008.html.

Barfield, Owen. "The Inspiration of the 'Divine Comedy.'" Journal of Inklings Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, Oct. 2012, pp. 47-65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/45345249.

"Dante Alighieri." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 13 July 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dante/.

O'Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.