The story of Ghismonda unfolds on the fourth day, when the brigata tells tales that end tragically. And although Filippa’s outcome is, in many ways, more desirable (she is, after all, not dead) than Ghismonda’s tragic end, both ask us to reimagine a world in which all humans, or any human, is seen as worthy of society’s compassion. In these stories, women’s perceived sexual transgressions (and the responses to them) reveal societies characterized by imbalanced political power and hierarchies of gender and class. However, the outcomes of the tales differ drastically: Ghismonda takes her own life, while Filippa emerges unscathed.
The two novellas ( Decameron IV.1 and VI.7) recount how their female protagonists-Ghismonda and Filippa-engage in sex outside the bounds of traditional marriage. Thinking about that first sentence, I find myself drawn to two specific stories-one tragic, one comic-that make us confront and critique society’s hierarchies, that ask us how we might imagine a more equitable and compassionate community. But, as my friend and colleague Alyssa Falcone recently reminded me, there is one piece of the Decameron that we can hold onto throughout its multi-layered, multi-valent tales-the work’s opening line: “It is a human trait to have compassion for the afflicted”. I could hardly summarize, let alone intervene in, the numerous debates here. For centuries, critics have disputed which stories are serious and which are parodic, which characters deserve our sympathy and which our censure, and what, if any, is its overarching message. The Decameron’s trick is that it does not offer a simple answer. Although Boccaccio laments the dissolution of social bonds in his Introduction, the hundred stories recounted by the brigata raise different questions: Which bonds are worth saving? How should we live? For whom should we have compassion? And how should we structure society once the plague has passed? Safely in the countryside, they do not ruminate on the conditions of the plague.
After the Introduction, Boccaccio’s brigata-the group of seven young women and three young men who narrate the Decameron’s tales-escapes ravaged Florence. Reading these recent pieces, one might believe that the Decameron is mostly about the Black Death of 1348, but the plague takes up a relatively tiny fraction of the work. Commentators have astutely recognized the similarities between Giovanni Boccaccio’s description of plague-stricken Italy and our new normal as COVID-19 wreaks havoc across the globe. The fourteenth-century Italian masterpiece is “on Everyone’s Coronavirus Reading List” and “shows us how to survive coronavirus.” Decameron-inspired book clubs and collections of Coronavirus tales are popping up all over the Internet. This is part of a series on the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
0 kommentar(er)
