85 pages • 2 hours read
Giovanni BoccaccioThe Decameron
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1353A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Love, Sex, and Honor
Almost every story in The Decameron features love and sex. With characters frequently engaging in sexual acts, their honor and their respectability are key issues. The characters accept that they and others will seek affairs and that they will be falling in and out of love. However, they must do so in a manner which is congruent with the contemporary religious and societal expectations. Affairs are to be kept secret, wives and husbands are to be tricked, and—above all else—a person must preserve their honor, at least in the eyes of those around them. As such, the stories feature examples of men and women who destroy their lives and marriages in pursuit of love, and yet who strive above all else to ensure that their social peers believe them to be honorable people anyway. Love, sex, and honor are so entwined that to be in love is to feel a yearning for sex, while to crave sex is to fear a threat to personal honor. Characters find themselves in a tricky social situation, in which they must navigate their own personal feelings and desires alongside the expectations of honor and virtue which society places upon them.
The Decameron is 100 stories told by people who exist in a similar social context to the characters they discuss. As such, the morals and ideals of the storytellers filter into the characters in their stories. The members of the brigata infuse The Decameron with their own perspectives. Men such as Dioneo and Panfilo, for example, tell lewd and bawdy stories in which they frequently challenge the audience’s expectations surrounding traditional virtues (often involving love and sex). The women are expected to be more conservative, as they are disempowered in society. As such, the characters in their stories are often similarly disempowered and marginalized, especially when seeking to satisfy their desires for love and sex. After each story, the female members of the brigata often hide their delight and amusement at the transgressions and dishonorable behavior of the characters, while their male equivalents delight in transgressing in new and unexpected ways. Love and sex are important themes in the stories but since the traditional concepts of honor and respectability are equally as common, often creating the source of conflict.
The way in which the members of the brigata defy social expectations of love, sex, and honor are informed by the social context of their storytelling. As Boccaccio discusses in the opening passages of The Decameron, the Black Death is sweeping through Florence. The sheer extent of the death and suffering in the city make traditional social ideas such as respectability, honor, and virtue seem absurd. The characters exist in the context of a societal collapse. While certain concepts such as love and sex remain as vital as ever, the collapse of social institutions means that more abstract ideas have also begun to collapse. The volume of sex and love in the stories and the willingness of the storytellers to transgress traditional social boundaries is an illustration of the extent to which the Black Death has fundamentally altered the society in which the characters live. Love and sex endure but concepts such as honor have become almost absurd in the wake of such suffering. The characters have begun to recognize that honor, virtue, respectability, and other abstract social constructions are as susceptible to the plague as the people who invented them. The members of the brigata crave love and desire sex, just like the characters in their stories. Surrounded by social collapse, however, traditional concepts like honor have become storytelling devices and comic asides; these ideas struggle to withstand the onslaught of suffering brought about by the Black Death.
Social Class
Social class appears frequently in The Decameron, in both direct and indirect ways. Many of the stories feature characters who fall in love with people of a different social class and must then deal with the difficulties of the rigid class system. As the same time, the framing narrative of the brigata is fraught with indirect examples of the privileges of social class. The members of the brigata are nobles; as Florence veers on the brink of plague-induced collapse, they have the money and power to isolate themselves away from the suffering. Because they are wealthy, they have the chance to ignore reality and they are able to escape into their own fake world, where they exist by telling stories to one another while ignoring the social collapse around them.
During this time, they bring their servants to the villas they visit, where they are waited on all day and night. Only once does the plight of the poor, lower social classes penetrate their veil of numb isolation, when they chuckle at a dispute between two servants. At all other times, the poor are either characters in the stories or mere background features which are barely deserving of narrative attention. In a literal and a structural fashion, the upper-class members of the brigata use their wealth and privilege to isolate and insulate themselves from reality in a way that their poor counterparts cannot.
A frequent theme which runs through the stories of The Decameron is that social class is immutable. When a character falls in love with someone from a higher or lower social class, they are caught in a tragic situation. For all the sincerity and authenticity of their feelings, they can do nothing to change their social status. They must either defy society’s expectations and marry above (or below) themselves, engendering pressure and criticism in the process, or they must forsake their love. Though characters occasionally defy the social class system, none of them seek to change it. The social class system is permanent and unchangeable—so much so that no character even entertains the idea that they may be able to alter the institution itself. Even wealth is not able to change social status. A nobleman can be poor and a person of low social status can be rich, but they will remain members of their social class in perpetuity. The only challenge to this system is the Black Death, the extent of which has shaken the fundamental social institutions of the world and brought about massive social upheaval. Given that The Decameron is set in the midst of the plague, however, the ramifications of this upheaval are yet to be felt and social class remains an immutable force in society.
Social class is also a gendered issue. In most stories, women lack power and are forced to behave at the behest of their male counterparts. They are beaten, raped, tricked, and marginalized as a fact of life, with few women able to seize power on their own. In the contemporary framing narrative, however, the women of the brigata are empowered. Pampinea is the leader. She sets the tone of the brigata, a group which is dominated by women and to which the men must be invited. In some respects, The Decameron empowers women and offers them the chance to set the tone and theme of the stories which are told. However, in others—and far more frequently—the stories adhere to and reinforce established power dynamics which marginalize women and maintain the dominant social structures and classes which the characters cannot imagine in any other way.
Religion and Corruption
The characters in The Decameron exist in a religious (and, more specifically, a Catholic) world. Christianity is not just a frequent part of life but a key foundation on which the entire society is built. The characters almost entirely accept Christianity as the clear and obvious truth, though there are those who either predate Christianity, exist outside its sphere of influence, or who may not believe in any religion at all. For the most part, Christianity is as accepted and as expected as gravity and other forces of nature. The storytelling of the brigata, for example, is twice interrupted so that the characters can observe religious practices. When this subject is raised, everyone accepts the essential need to observe the sabbath, even though they are locked inside their own world in which the traditional rules of society seem not to apply. Even as a plague ravages the traditional social order and collapses the institutions and organizations that the characters understand, they continue to observe their religious practices. In a world seemingly abandoned by God, the characters cannot comprehend the idea of breaking social norms and telling stories on the sabbath. Religion is as fundamental to the characters as the air they breathe.
While the abstract idea of religion persists, the characters understand that the institutions and organizations which represent religion have become corrupted. Many of the stories in The Decameron devolve into extended, stinging critiques of the corruption of the clergy. Organized religion—and, in particular, the Catholic Church—are decadent, immoral, and occasionally simply evil. Priests, friars, and even Popes are ripe for mockery and disdain, as they embody the corruption and decadence which has turned a pure religion into a parody of itself. To the members of the brigata, every priest and friar is a corrupt liar. These liars are not only deserving of their mockery, but the mockery itself is an important social rebuke. As the world collapses, the members of the brigata look around and understand that the people who were meant to embody the grace of God have become the most corrupt of all. In this fashion, Boccaccio subtly blames the corruption of the clergy for bringing about the plague. The suffering and death are punishment for humanity’s inability to maintain a pure, dedicated, moral institution of religious practice.
As a result of the corruption of the clergy, Boccaccio searches for a more fundamental expression of religious goodness. The clergy and the church cannot provide a satisfying link to the divine, so Boccaccio’s characters (and the characters in his characters’ stories) must forge their own relationship with God. These attempts are often misguided and informed by more base pleasures (such as love and sex) but most characters strive toward an ideal of religiosity which they have created for themselves. Members of society have an idea of what is good and how they will gain entry to heaven. Even without the corrupt clergy to guide them, they are able to forge their own path. In The Decameron, religion is taken away from the corrupt priests and passed directly to the individuals themselves. People make their own relationships with God and, while these relationships may not always be rewarding or informed, they are more sincere and authentic than anything practiced by the clergy.
