A Rhetoric of the Decameron (review)

Vittore Branca's discovery that Boccaccio's gripping account of the plague of 1348 is actually modeled on a passage in Paul the Deacon's History of the Lombards could not help making critics somewhat uneasy. What, after all, could possibly have induced a creative artist of Boccaccio's stature to crib so much from an eighth-century literary account of a phenomenon that he had presumably witnessed in the flesh?

In the first chapter of her new study, A Rhetoric of the Decameron, Marilyn Migiel offers a compelling solution that allays critics' concern that Boccaccio's introduction is derivative even as it introduces the more disturbing possibility that imitation is here enlisted for a subtly misogynist end. Whereas Paul the Deacon describes social dissolution — most poignantly the disbanding of families — without attaching particular blame to any one group or gender, Boccaccio, through a subtle reshuffling of relational terms, insinuates that it is women who betray their social duty by perversely severing natural bonds; brothers do not abandon sisters, but sisters, brothers, and so forth. It is not, Migiel discovers, history, but Boccaccio's manipulation of language that appears to have constructed the social "realities" of this fictional Florence.

This acute analysis of the Decameron introduction epitomizes Migiel's method. Like Montaigne, Migiel operates on the premise that resemblance does not make things as much alike as difference makes them dissimilar — and it is in this fertile realm of dissimilarity that she makes her most valuable discoveries. In particular, Migiel is concerned with disclosing the subtle ways that rhetoric in the Decameron tends to fracture along lines of gender. Beneath the playful polyphony of the narrators' voices, Migiel distinguishes a simpler, more polemical dialectic: one enunciated in identifiably "male" and "female" voices or, as she calls them, "rhetorics."

Boccaccio's tendency to deploy such gendered rhetoric is particularly evident in the novellas of Fiammetta and Dioneo, both of whom, Migiel argues, "rewrite" (45–61) or "mutate" (49) the sources of their respective novellas in ways that reveal their distinct agendas. The agonistic nature of Dioneo's and Fiammetta's literary skirmish foregrounds, with particular clarity, the gendered perspectives and underlying tensions that wield a shaping influence on all the novellas. Observing that male narrators tend to represent women as lustful, fickle, and secretive whereas female narrators paint a fuller portrait of women, situating them in a social context and emphasizing their role as mothers, wives, and nurturers, Migiel concludes that "human experience — especially in the realm of sexuality — is articulated very differently by the Decameron's male and female narrators" (71). The largely persuasive arguments offered in support of this thesis are undercut by a sometimes tendentious trimming of the evidence to fit the case; to clinch her argument, Migiel tends to concentrate almost exclusively on the negative traits of the female characters described by male narrators, sometimes transforming what had been highly nuanced, if (at times) unflattering, portraits into outright caricatures of female folly. Nonetheless, Migiel does present a convincing case; male and female narrators do indeed appear to articulate their experience differently.

Should this surprise us? To have established that female narrators produce a recognizably "female" perspective and male narrators, a "male" perspective, may seem, on the face of it, a bit of gratuitous pedantry. Migiel defuses any such objection by demonstrating that it is only by acknowledging and becoming sensitized to this too-easily-overlooked pattern of gendered discourse that the discerning reader is able to start distinguishing the significant countertrends and anomalies in this general pattern. Migiel's careful analysis of these subtler significations of the Decameron's gendered rhetoric indicates that female narrators not only espouse values very different from those of male narrators, but that women's words (even the rhetorically brilliant declamations and defenses) and women's actions (even the apparently liberating participation in traditionally "male" activities) are, like women's...