Decameron 4

Story 5.8: Discuss the confliction between pain and pleasure throughout the story, as well as the theme of wealth and happiness being wrought from death.

Though the theme of this day’s seems to be stories with a happy ending, this is a very twisted, macabre tale. From beginning to end there are constant references to death and pain resulting in happiness, happiness resulting from pain, or the ironic combination of beauty with horrible sights:

- Nastagio is left incredibly rich because of the deaths of his father and uncle.

- The more that Nastagio adores the girl that he loves, the more she distains him; the more that Nastagio tries to hate her in return, the more he loves her.

- The love Nastagio feels compels him to consider suicide.

- The horrible event that Nastagio witnesses happens on a beautiful May day.

- The women that is being chased is beautiful, yet she is naked and bleeding from ugly cuts all over her body.

- The sight of the woman “filled his soul with both wonder and fear” (421).

- The women rejoiced at the death of Guido; she must suffer in pain because she enjoyed his suffering, and he must hunt her like his mortal enemy because his love for her caused him to kill himself.

- In spite of Nastagio’s compassion and fear, he realizes that he can make use of this horrible weekly event.

- The girl Nastagio loves changes her hatred to love because of her fear of eternal punishment.

There is even an ironic confliction between horror and humor in some of the scene, such as when Nastagio hears the terrifying cry and suddenly realizes that he is in a forest.

The narrator also seems to be stating that the emotional pain women inflict on men is equivalent to physical torture, for the woman’s punishment is to be tortured for the same number of years and months that she tortured her admirer.

Obviously, the divinely punished pair in the woods represents Nastagio and the girl he loves. I think it also commentates on the notion of women ‘playing hard to get.’ The narrator of this story is clearly frustrated with the difficulties in pursuing women; the end of the story sees and entire town of women becoming much ‘easier’ to pursue. The moral of this story seems to be that if a woman doesn’t accept a man’s love she will suffer in hell for her ‘cruelty.’ Despite this, this was one of my favorite stories because it was so interesting, twisted, and macabre.

Story 6.7: Discuss Madonna Filippa’s case for herself and its context within medieval society.

I was actually very surprised by Filippa’s argument in this story; it seemed t me that the points she made greatly transcended medieval tradition. In fact she brings up points about the law that won’t come into effect until the 20^th century: she states, in the opening of her argument, “the laws should be equal for all an should be passed with the consent of the consent of the people they affect” (464). She goes on to say that women should have and equal day in matter such as this, and that because they did not give their consent this “may quite rightly be called a bad law” (464).

I was equally surprised by Filostrato’s introduction to the story, in which he states quite clearly that men should be treated with the same punishment was women, and criticizes the law that states a woman should burn at the stake for committing adulatory. (This law has been around at least since Hammurabi’s code, and it wasn’t uncommon in medieval times for a women to be treated with a harsher punishment for adulatory than a man.) ““In the city of Prato, there was once a statute – in truth, no less harsh than it was worthy of criticism – which, without any extenuating circumstances whatsoever, required that any woman caught by her husband committing adultery with a lover should be burned alive” (462).

Filostrato ends the story on a note that Filippa has been absolved from her sin due to her cleverness in her speech: “The lady, now free and happy, and resurrected from the flames, so to speak, returned to her home in triumph” (465).

This story is, in a great way, quite the opposite of the story of Nastagio: while the latter seems to convey the idea that women should consent to the demands of the men lest they burn in hell, this story supports the idea of women being free from such bondage.