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Day 7: Fourth 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
Fiammetta picks up on Lauretta’s theme and offers another example of marital jealousy. In Rimini a Jealous Merchant loves the Jealous Merchant’s Wife so much that he imagines everyone else must love her, too. And because she tries to please him, he worries she wants to please other men as well. He is so protective that he won’t even let her stand near a window. To amuse herself and pay her husband back, she wants to give him a “just and proper motive” for his jealousy.
The Jealous Merchant illustrates the dangers of excess and demonstrates the paradox of jealousy in husbands (especially of honorable wives): perversely, he becomes suspicious that his wife will cheat on him because she is initially such a loving and obedient wife to him. His wife is trapped by gendered expectations and is driven to make good on his irrational fears only after she is punished for her obedience by being completely trapped inside her home.
Active
Themes
Fortune favors the Jealous Merchant’s Wife, who finds and enlarges a crack that communicates between her house and the bedroom of their neighbor, a young man named Filippo. They can talk and touch each other’s hands through the crack, but nothing else. As Christmas approaches, she seeks permission from the Jealous Merchant to go to confession and attend mass. He wants to know what sins she’s confessing, but she refuses to confess to anyone but a priest.
The medieval church required all Christians to attend confession at least once a year, so the merchant’s wife is only asking to be able to meet the minimum requirements of her faith. Her need to ask for permission reminds readers that she is subject to her husband’s authority and doesn’t have full autonomy over her life, even in matters as private as her faith and her conscience. In answer to her extremely modest request, her husband’s immediate desire to know her sins (suggesting that he fears they are sexual in nature) betrays the excessive nature of his jealousy. Like the story of Tofano (VII, 4), the tale sets up a scenario where the jealous husband’s excessive behavior will provide the means of his downfall.
Active
Themes
Because his wife’s desire to go to confession has made the Jealous Merchant suspicious, he disguises himself as a priest and waits for her in the chapel. The Jealous Merchant’s Wife recognizes him and vows to let him “get what he’s looking for.” She “confesses” that she is in love with a priest who can unlock every door in her house and who sleeps beside her every night. These words hit the Jealous Merchant like a stab through the heart, and he tries to get the name of the “priest.” She refuses, and, saying he will offer prayers to soften her unrepentant heart, he warns that he will send a seminarian to check on her soon.
Active
Themes
Fuming with rage, the Jealous Merchant returns home and tries (unsuccessfully) to conceal his feelings from the Jealous Merchant’s Wife. Telling her he is going out for supper and reminding her to lock the doors, he plans to lie in wait for her alleged lover that night. But because she is certain that he will be watching the front door, she tells Filippo to access her house via the roof. After dark, while the Jealous Merchant hides near the front door, Filippo climbs over the roof and enjoys his night with the Jealous Merchant’s Wife. In the morning, the Jealous Merchant sends his servant, poorly disguised as a seminarian, to ask about his wife’s lover, and she reports that he failed to come the previous night.
Active
Themes
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The Jealous Merchant lies in wait (while the Jealous Merchant’s Wife and Filippo enjoy themselves) night after night until he can’t contain himself any longer. When she once again refuses to say what she confessed at Christmastime, he tells her that he knows about her lover and demands the priest’s name. Noting that his jealousy has overpowered his intelligence, she says that she recognized him through his disguise; the priest she said she loved was, in fact, him. Who else can unlock all the doors in the house? Only someone blinded by jealousy would have been “witless enough not to understand.”
Active
Themes
The Jealous Merchant begins to understand that his jealousy made him act ridiculously, and he starts to look at the Jealous Merchant’s Wife as the model of virtue and intelligence, coming to trust her implicitly. So, although she continued to be discreet, she now had a much easier time of it, letting Filippo in, as it were, through the front door.
