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Day 5: Seventh Tale
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Decameron, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Love and Sex
Men and Women
Moderation and Excess
Intelligence
Class and Character
Faith vs. Religion
Summary
Analysis
Filomena begins her tale with its intended lesson: just as women’s pity is praised, so too will their cruelty be subject to divine punishment. To illustrate this, she tells the story of Nastagio degli Onesti, an incredibly wealthy young gentleman from Ravenna. He falls in love with the daughter of Paolo Traversari, whose lineage is more noble than his own. Nastagio woos Paolo’s Daughter with “considerable, and splendid, and laudable” deeds, but she is “persistently cruel, harsh, and unfriendly towards him.” Nastagio’s friends and relatives, concerned about his fruitless and expensive courtship, beg him to leave Ravenna. Pretending to agree, Nastagio makes a great show of leaving, only to camp out in the woods about three miles away.
Filomena’s tale revisits the misogynistic idea of female “cruelty,” which is the way a woman’s refusal to have sex with a particular man (for whatever reason) is characterized in the tales. (Compare this to Restituta’s initial treatment of Gianni in the day’s sixth tale.) The dictates of fin’amors (refined loving), which emphasize lovers demonstrating their personal worth and valor, in combination with gendered expectations of female subjection to male authority and rule intersect here. The idea of feminine cruelty illustrates the dilemma posed to women in a patriarchal culture that also idealized fin’amors: extramarital sex was generally condemned, and women caught in the act were liable to punishment at the hands of either husbands and male relatives or civil authorities. Yet, the tales also condemn “cruel” women, occasionally punishing or tricking them for their refusal (for example, Catella, who in III, 6 was tricked and then blackmailed into sex with Ricciardo Minutolo). In this context, Nastagio participates in a common antifeminist line of thought in assuming that his love and valorous deeds require Paolo’s daughter to love him in return. In terms of the narrators, this sentiment is particularly rich coming from Filomena, who is generally understood to be Filostrato’s “cruel” love interest.
Active
Themes
One May morning, Nastagio degli Onesti wanders the woods, lost in thought about Paolo’s Daughter’s cruelty. Suddenly, he hears screams; soon he sees a naked woman running through the woods, pursued by a pair of fierce dogs and a wrathful knight on a black horse. She begs for mercy while the knight threatens to kill her. To protect her, Nastagio grabs the only available weapon—a tree branch—but the knight addresses him by name and tells him to mind his own business. As the dogs seize the woman and the knight dismounts, Nastagio expresses outrage over hunting a woman like an animal.
In medieval literature, May is strongly associated with both lovers and with visions, making the time doubly appropriate for Nastagio’s otherworldly experience in the woods. What he sees is a vision on the theme of the cruel woman’s punishment, which is a common theme in antifeminist writings but which can also be found in fin’amors literature and theory. In the vision, begging for mercy, is the mirror image of Nastagio, who wanted Paolo’s daughter to take pity on his love-longing. But just as she cruelly rejected him, so too the angry knight ignores the woman’s pleas. Nastagio’s initial outrage seems to stem from the knight’s excessive violence, and his willingness to protect her even though he hasn’t got an appropriate weapon demonstrates his personal courage and courteousness.
Active
Themes
The knight identifies himself as Guido degli Anastagi, a fellow man from Ravenna who fell in love with his lady when Nastagio degli Onesti was just a child. The pride and cruelty of Guido’s lady ultimately led him to suicide, for which he was sent to Hell. Later, when she died, his lady was also damned because of her pride, cruelty, and the pleasure she felt in his death. In Hell, their punishments are intertwined: she flees, he must catch and kill her, cut her open, tear her cold, hard heart from her breast, and throw it to the dogs. They repeat this drama daily, at various locations where she was cruel towards him in thought and deed; on Fridays they are always in this wood.
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Themes
This account horrifies Nastagio degli Onesti, as does watching Guido degli Anastagi butcher the woman. But after a few minutes, she gets to her feet and runs away again, pursued by the hounds. After a while, he realizes how useful this apparition can be. He has friends invite Paolo Traversari and his family—including Paolo’s Daughter—to breakfast in the woods with him on the following Friday. The tables are arranged around the clearing where he witnessed the drama, and the food is splendid. As the meal is ending, the guests begin to hear agonized screams and soon the lady, dogs, and knight burst into the clearing.
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Themes
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Guido degli Anastagi repeats his story to the guests. Many are related to him or to the lady, and most remember his great love and pitiable death. But Paolo’s Daughter is the most alarmed of all, since she realizes that the show was for her; she can already feel dogs nipping at her heels. Out of fear, she quickly “convert[s] her enmity into love,” and that same day she sends Nastagio degli Onesti a message telling him that she’s “ready to do anything he desire[s].” He offers to combine his pleasure with the “preservation of her good name” by proposing a marriage to which she consents, to the great joy of Nastagio and her own parents.
Active
Themes
Nor is this marriage the only happy result of the “horrible apparition”: the ladies in the town are so terrified by it that, in general, they become far more cooperative with men than they ever had been before.
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