Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture

13. Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi: Toward a Sexual Poetics of the Decameron (Decameron 2.9, 2.10, 5.10)

c h a p t e r 1 3 Le parole son femmine e i fatti sono maschi: Toward a Sexual Poetics of the Decameron (Decameron 2.9, 2.10, 5.10) I will begin with a proverb, one that the Dizionario comparato di proverbi e modi proverbiali gives in Latin, French, Spanish, German, and English, as well as Italian. It is ‘‘Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi’’ (or, in Florio’s 1598 translation from the Italian, ‘‘Wordes they are women, and deeds they are men’’), and I will be using it as a rubric and point of departure for conceptualizing a pervasive Decameronian thematic regarding the relation of words to deeds and of both to gender. Indeed, the proverb is particularly apt for investigating such concerns since it addresses issues of gender both biologically and, at least in Italian, where words have genders, also grammatically, suggesting that the grammatical genders of parola and fatto are rooted in nature, in a kind of universal natural gendering that encompasses the sexes and their not asexual offspring, words. This intersection of the grammatical/poetical with the biological/sexual is especially suggestive with regard to an author whose commitment to linking the two is such that he reminds us that ‘‘Le Muse son donne’’ (The Muses are ladies) (4.Intr.35) in a programmatic assertion of what I am calling his ‘‘sexual poetics.’’1 ‘‘Le parole son femmine e i fatti son maschi’’ succinctly captures Boccaccio’s sexual poetics by suggesting both a mutual exclusion between the sexes and their proper spheres, and an inevitable contamination between these same spheres, since fatti are masculine, but the word ‘‘fatti’’ is a parola, and thus feminine. In other words, the boundary that the proverb at first glance so emphatically delineates, between women and words, on the one hand, and men and deeds, on the other, is much less rigid than it first appears. The proverb’s ambiguity makes it all the more applicable to Boccaccio, who both invokes two separate and gendered domains, one connoted by words and one by Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture 282 deeds, and then effects a conflation that culminates in the ladies’ return from the Valle delle donne, when Dioneo asks—using precisely the terms of the proverb—‘‘cominciate voi prima a far de’ fatti che a dir delle parole?’’ (Do you mean to say you have begun to do these deeds even before you talk about them?) (6.Concl.34). The idea that the world of deeds belongs to men and the world of words to women is encountered immediately, in the Decameron’s Proem. The pains of love are alleviated for men, who have access to a host of distracting activities, fatti: ‘‘per ciò che a loro, volendo essi, non manca l’andare a torno, udire e veder molte cose, uccellare, cacciare , pescare, cavalcare, giucare o mercatare’’ (For if they wish, they can always walk abroad, see and hear many things, go fowling, hunting, fishing, riding and gambling, or attend to their buisness affairs) (Proemio , 12). Women who are in love have no such resources, and so Boccaccio offers them his novelle, his parole; men have deeds, women have words. And in fact Boccaccio’s verbal offerings to the ladies— ‘‘cento novelle, o favole o parabole o istorie che dire le vogliamo’’ (a hundred stories or fables or parables or histories or whatever you choose to call them) (Proemio, 13)—are listed in a series of nouns (parole, so to speak) that precisely parallels the previous listing of masculine pursuits in a series of verbs (fatti, so to speak): ‘‘l’andare a torno, udire e veder molte cose, uccellare, cacciare, pescare, cavalcare, giucare o mercatare.’’ Dioneo’s resonant query, ‘‘cominciate voi prima a far de’ fatti che a dir delle parole?’’, is found in the Conclusion to Day 6, more elaborate than most of the Conclusioni to the Decameron’s giornate. Once Dioneo has finished recounting the story of Frate Cipolla, Elissa puts the crown on his head, announcing that it is time for him to experience the burden of having ladies to govern and guide: ‘‘che carico sia l’aver donne a reggere e guidare’’ (what a burden it is to have ladies under your control and guidance) (6.Concl.2). This remark grows in interest when we consider that the ladies are about to go, alone and unescorted, to a place that is identified only as theirs, ‘‘La...