What is the third day of Boccaccio’s Decameron about? Schematic summary of the stories, the themes covered and the narrators.
Decameron, third day
The queen of the third day of Boccaccio ‘s Decameron is Neifile .The day is Sunday afternoon, after the break of Friday and Saturday, days dedicated to prayer and penance.
The day is about those who obtain or find something they have wanted for a long time. It is mostly about men who obtain love or sexual satisfaction from women thanks to their ingenuity.
The Day begins with the group moving from the villa to the garden of a beautiful palace , where the children praise both the architecture and the plants, the harmless and wild animals that populate it and the fountain. It is here that the group will spend the following days, with the exception of the VII, set in the Valley of Women .
Theme of the short stories
The theme is who with industry acquires something much desired by him or recovers what has been lost , where industry refers to the perseverance with which one pursues one’s goals, but also to the readiness to react in difficult cases. Industry is applied exclusively to the sexual sphere, as is made explicit by Dioneo . The majority of stories appear to be those centered on the extramarital triangle, with the exception of the first, the ninth and the last story which, although remaining within the sphere of love, present a completely different tone. Adulterous love is divided into two series:
- The controversy against the husband’s naivety or social small-mindedness (3,4,8);
- The ingenuity or perseverance of the lover (2,6,7).
The fifth contains both elements. Another way to group narrative texts is to highlight the setting or the religious reference.
Characteristics of the short stories
As regards social extraction, it is noted that the most comical stories, or those set in the past or in a very remote space, allow the representation of the erotic success of humble characters .
With the exception of the second and tenth novella, which are exotic in terms of their temporal and spatial location, the other novellas are all set in a period more or less contemporary with the time of the story. The chrono-topic proximity is sometimes such as to recommend the narrators to keep the protagonists anonymous, thus contravening one of the implicit rules of the Decameron storytelling.
It is especially from the second half of the day that the narrators show a connection, more or less explicitly, to what has been told previously. These are structural references (Elissa who takes up the bird-hunting of Panfilo’s story) or elements linked to the setting (perhaps by contrast, as happens in both the sixth and seventh story).
Novella I
Narrator: Filostrato.
Moral: Sexual appetite also concerns nuns and peasants, whose hard work, however, does not prevent them from using their intelligence appropriately.
A monastery in Florence was inhabited by eight young nuns, an abbess and a farmer who took care of their beautiful garden. Nuto, this was the name of the farmer, because of his low salary and the wickedness with which the young nuns treated him, decided to return to Lamporecchio, his hometown, where he vented his anger with a young and handsome farmer, Masetto.
Masetto, hearing Nuto’s words, wanted to stay among those young nuns, but he feared that because of his youth and his striking appearance he would not be welcomed, so he decided to pretend to be deaf and dumb . As expected, the abbess and the steward welcomed him into the monastery and allowed him to take Nuto’s place, thinking that he could not bother the young women.
One day, after hard work, Masetto was resting in the garden when two nuns joined him and started talking about what it would be like to give in to the pleasures of the flesh. One of them suggested that they try it with Masetto, because they thought he was foolish and above all mute, and that is what they both did. In the long run, all eight nuns began to take advantage of Masetto’s “services”.
One day, while Masetto was sleeping in the shade under an almond tree – because the energy wasted during the night was too much to be able to do even the slightest work during the day – the abbess was walking in the garden and the wind lifted the peasant’s clothes, thus showing his private parts, and so it was that the abbess – like her “nuns” – began to enjoy the graces of the young peasant.
Masetto, now tired of having to satisfy all nine nuns, asks the abbess to be freed and, to her amazement at hearing his voice, says that he has just been healed. The nuns, to save the good name of the convent, spread the word that Masetto has been healed thanks to their prayers and appoint him castaldo , since the latter had recently died, distributing all nine of the man’s services equally. It is when the abbess dies that Masetto, old, rich and a father, can finally retire.
Comment
The novella spans three different lengths:
- The short time of cunning to enter the convent;
- The average time of the progressive meeting with the nuns and the abbess;
- The allusion to the long life of Masetto.
Beyond the revival of popular motifs, it is clear that the setting serves the purpose of making the representation more lively, without any intention of realism. After all, the cohesive force of the story lies not so much in the narrative device, however perfect, but rather in the network of sexual allusions and obscene double meanings. The main semantic basis concerns “the beautiful ortolan garden”. The explicitness of the theme and the veiled obscenity of the expressions used by the Narrator strike the women of the party, who follow the story suspended between shame and laughter. It is not unlikely, however, that the overall comic effect is due to the comparison between the convent garden and the paradisiacal garden to which the party has just moved.
