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The Language of Gardens: Boccaccio's ‘Valle delle Donne’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2016

Thomas C. Stillinger
Thomas C. Stillinger*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Extract

‘Non solamente pe’ piani ma ancora per le profondissime valli mi sono ingegnato d'andare.’ Boccaccio defends the Decameron from envious critics, in the Introduction to the Fourth Day, by denying ambition. He is writing, he says, in the humblest style, in the vernacular, in prose; his little stories have no titles; his readers are idle women: in short, far from attempting any literary heights, as he writes the Decameron he walks through valleys. Some valleys, though, are gardens. At the end of the Sixth Day, the seven women of the story-telling brigata seem to act out Boccaccio's metaphor for his own project. They slip away from their male companions and walk to a secluded spot which Elissa knows about, the Valle delle Donne. Before returning to the rule of king Dioneo, the ladies amuse themselves in the circular valley, admiring its natural beauty and swimming naked in the pool at its center. The excursion is, like the very different Introduction to the Fourth Day, a brief digression from the sequence of one hundred stories, yet it provides a unique point of entrance into the poetics of the Decameron.

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Articles
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Traditio , Volume 39 , 1983 , pp. 301 - 321
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Copyright © Fordham University Press 

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References

1 Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron (ed. Vittore Branca; Milan 1976) 4 intr. 3. Further citations, by Branca's sentence-numbers, will appear in the text. In working on the Decameron I have also consulted the English translation by G. H. McWilliam (Middlesex 1972).Google Scholar

2 In my understanding of the literary mode of the Decameron I am indebted to many critics, but especially to Giuseppe Mazzotta, whose three papers to date provide the most searching analysis of Boccaccio's strategies: ‘The Decameron: The Marginality of Literature,’ University of Toronto Quarterly 42 (1972) 64–81; ‘The Decameron: The Literal and the Allegorical,’ Italian Quarterly 18, No. 72 (1975) 53–73; ‘Games of Laughter in the Decameron,’ Romanic Review 69 (1978) 115–31.Google Scholar

3 Brown, Marshall, ‘In the Valley of the Ladies,’ Italian Quarterly 18, No. 72 (1975) 33–52. Other critics provide insights in passing. For instance, Mazzotta describes the Valley as ‘an idyllic landscape where on the seventh day, ironically, [the story-tellers] discuss the deceits within the structure of marriage; the ordered idyllic background is a mockery of marriage, because marriage, ever since St Paul and the patristic interpretation of the Song of Songs, is the sacramental figure of an immanent experience of edenic unity’ (‘Marginality of Literature’ 67).Google Scholar

4 Giovanni Getto (‘ La cornice e le componenti espressive del Decameron’ in Vita di forme e forme di vita nel Decameron [Turin 1958] 1–33) argues that the cornice demonstrates an ‘arte di vita’ — a term to which Getto gives complex definition in the course of his discussion — and that the two ‘punti focali’ of the cornice are the garden of the Introduction to the Third Day and the Valle delle Donne (20). For Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti (‘La “cornice” del Decameron o il mito di Robinson’ in Da Dante al Novecento: Studi critici offerti dagli scolari a Giovanni Getto [Milan 1970] 111–58), the cornice shows society in an ideal state; the settings of the cornice become ideal spots only through the presence of the brigata, and the Valle delle Donne is the most powerful example of this principle. For a summary of the many critical views on the cornice, by a critic who himself believes that the cornice is merely decorative, see Pier Luigi Cerisola, ‘La questione della cornice del Decameron,’ Aevum 49 (1975) 137–56; for a briefer and more recent summary, Joy Hambuechen Potter, Five Frames for the Decameron: Communication and Social Systems in the Cornice (Princeton 1982) 158–61.Google Scholar

5 Kern, Edith G., ‘The Gardens in the Decameron Cornice,’ PMLA 66 (1951) 522–23.Google Scholar

6 Marino, Lucia, The Decameron ‘Cornice’: Allusion, Allegory, and Iconology (Ravenna 1979) 87.Google Scholar

7 Ibid. 106.Google Scholar

8 Ibid. 112; Squarotti, op. cit. 150; Potter, op. cit. 26.Google Scholar

9 Brown (n. 3 supra) is, I believe, the only critic to recognize the importance of the ladies' visit as an independent action. Beyond this initial recognition, however, his approach and conclusions are quite different from mine. Brown views the excursion as a dangerous attack on the order of the story-telling community, an attack which Dioneo, as a benign ruler, counters through his choice of topic for the Seventh Day.Google Scholar

10 In the Introduction to the First Day, Boccaccio describes the plague and its consequences from his own experience, but as he describes the meeting of the ladies in the church of Santa Maria Novella, he says that he writes ‘ sì come io poi da persona degna di fede sentii’ (1 intr. 49). Again, in Concl. 16, ‘io non pote’ né doveva scrivere se non le raccontate, e per ciò esse che le dissero le dovevan dir belle e io l'avrei scritte belle.’Google Scholar

11 Elsewhere in the Decameron, Boccaccio consistently describes his readers as oziose donne who are in love; the direct address of the author to these readers is the outermost frame in the fiction. The ‘anyone’ here is idle and contemplative, but is not said to be female or lovesick. The implied reader in the Valley is not, I think, the fictional audience of ladies, but rather the actual reader of the passage, at the moment of reading. The absence of this ‘ anyone’ reminds the reader that he or she is in the same position that the author finds himself in: present in the page but not in the scene which the page describes.Google Scholar

12 Mazzotta, ‘Literal and Allegorical,’ especially 61–63.Google Scholar

13 For Andreas Capellanus, see Kern, op. cit. 509. For Boccaccio's earlier writings, see Branca's notes.Google Scholar

14 My texts are: Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio and Paradiso (ed. and trans. Charles S. Singleton; Princeton 1973 and 1975); Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose (ed. Ernest Langlois; Paris 1914–1924); Ovid, Metamorphoses (ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold; Cambridge, Mass. 1977). All references to these works, by line numbers, will appear in the text.Google Scholar

15 The Celestial Rose is ‘questo giardino’ in Paradiso 32.39.Google Scholar

16 Boccaccio's allusion to the Celestial Rose has not been pointed out elsewhere, to my knowledge.Google Scholar

17 In discussing the Valle delle Donne I venture occasionally into the interpretation of the Commedia, the Roman de la Rose, the Metamorphoses — for, indeed, some such interpretation is necessary for understanding the literary dynamics of the Valley — but obviously this discussion is not meant to do justice to the significance of these texts in their own terms. If the Valley represents a powerful reading of earlier texts, as I am arguing, this reading is also powerfully reductive, flattening each poetic structure into a single emblematic presence. Dante's Earthly Paradise, for example, placed in its own context and allowed its own universe of meaning, is ‘a place of radical ambiguity’ (Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy [Princeton 1979] 114–15) — but Boccaccio's ambivalent text, it seems to me, strips the Earthly Paradise of its own ambivalence.Google Scholar

18 Boccaccio's allusive horticulture is both complex and precise. The Garden of Deduit is already well-established as the model for the second garden of the Decameron frame — the garden which the brigata occupies from the Third Day on, excluding the visits to the Valley. Kern (op. cit. 512–13) and Mazzotta (‘Literal and Allegorical’ 55–56) separately tabulate the verbal similarities between the Introduction to the Third Day and the Roman de la Rose. It is possible to describe the relationship between the two Decameron settings with respect to the Garden of Deduit. The garden of the Third Day persistently echoes the brief phase of the Roman de la Rose in which Amant, having been admitted to the Garden of Deduit, wanders around admiring its beauty (1375–1438). The story-tellers roam contentedly like Amant, and they dance and sing carols like the court of the God of Love. Amant's first entrance is not echoed in the Introduction to the Third Day: there is no path beside a stream, no mixed forest inside the walls. There is a fountain in the garden of the Third Day which looks from the outside something like the Fountain of Narcissus — both are enclosed in marble — but no one peers into it; the story-tellers sit around it and tell stories. In the Introduction to the Third Day, then, one hortus deliciarum echoes another; both are static set-pieces, landscapes of aimless pleasure. In contrast, the Conclusion of the Sixth Day — although it is not in itself more narrative than the Introduction to the Third Day — points to Amant's journey from its beginning to the discovery of the Fountain and the rose; the Valle delle Donne evokes the linear narrative which traverses the Garden of Deduit, and carries this narrative forward to its focus.Google Scholar

19 See, for instance, Louise George Clubb, ‘Boccaccio and the Boundaries of Love,’ Italica 37 (1960) 188–96.Google Scholar

20 Op. cit. 514. Kern argues, then, that the second and third gardens of the Decameron cornice are essentially patterned after, respectively, the Garden of Deduit (see n. 18 supra) and Genius’ Park, so that the Decameron repeats the movement from garden to garden found in the Roman de la Rose. This satisfying formulation is, as we have seen, too simple to fit the evidence.Google Scholar

21 There is a strain of deliberate self-contradiction in Genius’ description. The fountain in the Park has no source, but flows from itself; it has a source, higher than any tree could grow; above all the waters a marvelous tree grows (20465–508).Google Scholar

22 John V. Fleming argues that Genius ‘peddles shoddy goods,’ but that his sermon contains valid moral truth nonetheless. ‘There is nothing surprising or artistically disturbing in the fact that Genius, the fake pardoner, can offer valuable commentary to profound Christian truths’ (The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography [Princeton 1969] 220). On the other hand, Charles Dahlberg (citing Rosamund Tuve) prints a manuscript illustration in which Genius’ Park is blasphemous in itself: the three streams of the triune fountain proceed from the penis and two breasts of a hermaphroditic figure (The Romance of the Rose [Princeton 1971] 23 and Illustration 43).Google Scholar

23 Mazzotta finds the same sort of ‘twofold mockery’ in the Introduction to the Third Day; he cites allusions to the Garden of Deduit and to Purgatorio 2 (‘Literal and Allegorical’ 56–57).Google Scholar

24 Matelda's words — ‘Quelli ch'anticamente poetaro / l'età de l'oro e suo stato felice, / forse in Parnaso esto loco sognaro’ (28.139–41) — recall the concerns of Purgatorio 22. There Statius explains that Virgil's Fourth Eclogue led him first ‘verso Parnaso’ and then (because it harmonized with the ‘new preachers’) to salvation. But a voice from a tree, at the end of that canto, sharply corrects the pagan myth of the Golden Age. Matelda's statement collapses the vital connection between Statius and Virgil — they, and others, are simply quelli — and situates Dante in a newly harmonized relationship to all the old poets. These two passages on the Golden Age frame a complex, sustained exploration of the dynamics of literary filiation; for a detailed discussion of cantos 21–26, see Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert 192–226.Google Scholar

25 Marshall Brown notes the allusion (op. cit. 50). Lucia Marino refers to ‘the emblematic episode in which the author spies the seven ladies bathing in the Valle delle Donne. This is a variant of the Acteon-spies-on-Diana motif that Boccaccio favors throughout his writing career’ (op. cit. 40). But she does not support or develop this insight.Google Scholar

26 In Ovid's probable sources for the tale, Actaeon ‘was inspired by direct or indirect lust’ (Brooks Otis, Ovid as Epic Poet 2nd ed. [Cambridge 1970] 397). By stressing a total lack of volition on Actaeon's part, Ovid completes the picture of the voyeur, who paradoxically wishes to be on the scene without a body, without identity, without even personal will.Google Scholar

27 Thomas D. Hill writes, ‘even critics who disagree quite radically about the meaning of the poem as a whole agree in seeing the fountain of Narcissus as an emblem of destructive self-love’ (‘Narcissus, Pygmalion, and the Castration of Saturn: Two Mythographical Themes in the Roman de la Rose,’ Studies in Philology 71 [1974] 407).Google Scholar

28 Branca notes this allusion.Google Scholar

29 Almansi, Guido, The Writer as Liar: Narrative Technique in the Decameron (London 1975), ch. 3 ‘Bawdry and Ars Combinatoria’; Cesare Segre, ‘Functions, Oppositions, and Symmetries in Day VII of the Decameron’ in Structures and Time: Narration, Poetry, Models (trans. John Meddemmen; Chicago 1979).Google Scholar

30 Ovid critics generally agree that the Metamorphoses responds, in one way or another, to Virgil's Augustan masterpiece. Brooks Otis describes Ovid's treatment of epic in general and the Aeneid in particular, a treatment which moves beyond satiric deflation to radical reshaping; his third chapter, ‘The Plan of Ovid's Epic,’ discussess the unique form of Ovid's work. In the first chapter of Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven 1979), John Fyler analyzes Ovid's approach to Virgil in some detail — without, however, considering the form of the Metamorphoses — and argues that Chaucer subverts Dante in the same way that Ovid subverts Virgil. An important recent discussion of Boccaccio's reading of Dante within the Decameron is Franco Fido, ‘Dante, personnaggio mancato del Decameron’ in Boccaccio: Secoli di vita (edd. Marga Cottino-Jones and Edward F. Tuttle; Ravenna 1975) 177–89.Google Scholar

31 Marino, op. cit. 111 and passim.Google Scholar

32 Critics have long felt that the Decameron shows women in a new, humane light — this is usually associated with a naturalistic treatment of love and a realistic presentation of bourgeois life. In a recent statement of this theme, ‘The Griselda Tale and the Portrayal of Women in the Decameron’ (Philological Quarterly 56 [1977] 1–13), Shirley S. Allen writes, ‘Interpreting the hundredth tale as an ironic argument for women's liberation suggests a new unity of theme and structure in the Decameron’ (6–7). In contrast to his friend Petrarch, ‘Boccaccio asserts that women are neither angels nor devils but human beings, like men’ (6). Though I do not dispute the general critical assessment, my claim is that Boccaccio is more interested in deconstructing the codes of his society than in making assertions about humanity, and that he insists on women's alienation from culture. This could be called a different form of covert feminism, but I am not convinced that Boccaccio takes any political stand on the subject.Google Scholar

33 Millicent Joy Marcus, An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the Decameron (Saratoga, Calif. 1979); Almansi, The Writer as Liar; Mazzotta, the essays cited in n. 2 supra.Google Scholar

34 Marcus, op. cit. 78.Google Scholar

35 Ibid. 104.Google Scholar

36 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (trans. H. M. Parshley; New York 1952) xix–xxxiv, is the classic statement. The idea of the woman as Other has received surprising development in the recent work of feminist theorists; see, for instance, New French Feminisms: An Anthology (edd. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron; New York 1981). One theoretical essay which I believe especially relevant to the Valle delle Donne is Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen 16, No. 1 (1975) 6–18.Google Scholar