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Day 3 - Neifile (Charity)

#91: Dec. 2010 - Jan. 2011 (Fiction)
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Day 3 - Neifile (Charity)

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Here begins the Third Day, wherein, under the rule of Neifile, the discussion turns upon people who by dint of their own efforts have achieved an object they greatly desired, or recovered a thing previously lost.
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Re: Day 3 - Neifile (Charity)

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While the third day had some creative stories, I'm glad to have finally put them behind me so I can proceed with an eager eye to the fourth day. The third day's stories began with the man who worked as a gardener at a convent and then spent more time working over the nuns than he did tending the flowers. And if that wasn't bad enough, the succeeding stories went downhill from there.

The last one centered on a man who spent inordinate amounts of time returning the devil to hell, with the devil being something unique to his male anatomy as compared to a lady's, and hell being something unique to a member of the female persuasion.

When I say the stories went downhill, I just mean that the 'raunchiness' factor kept getting worse with each successive story. Again, they were creative and imaginative - and therefore entertaining.
Last edited by DickZ on Tue Nov 30, 2010 10:16 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Day 3 - Neifile (Charity)

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B. has a regular habit of innuendo. They're scattered throughout the book quite regularly. Anything that a male swings over his shoulder or handles with gusto is sure to represent the male sexual member. I haven't read beyond the fifth story but I'm liking this day!

The first story is easily one of my favorites so far. Masetto gets to have sex with nuns and then retires with a good pension and plenty of kids. How is that not a good story!!!

"I tended a fine big garden of theirs." I'd like to tend that garden, too! :D

There's plenty of sexual innuendo in this story such as the 'garden' and the 'axe' which Masetto wields. This story is obviously pure erotica but for me it was highly enjoyable. You've never thought of being deserted on an island filled with virgin nymphos? I think every man has had this fantasy. Masetto lived it! This story was obviously told by a male, Filostrato.

The second story you've already described in an earlier post. This story was cute but I could have done without it. The man was a rapist and it makes this story a bit distasteful. The trick may have seemed quite humorous to some even today but rape isn't amusing to me.

The Third story was another sexual escapade by a cheating wife. It seems these stories, although they can be about any object gained that's desirable, centers on sexual conquests achieved through effort. Great wealth, fame, a possession... any of these could have been the object but instead the stories have centered on the flesh.

I still though the third story was amusing and very creative - how she used a third party without their knowing it. That was rather imaginative. I thought for sure something bad was going to happen to the man or he was going to get caught. Everything worked out as planned and they had their fun.


The fourth story is absolutely hysterical and I can't believe you didn't enjoy it. What did you find wrong with this story? I loved it!!! It's a lesson that B. has already taught his audience and he is doing it again in this story - to pay attention to the physical needs of your wife! To neglect your spouse's physical desires comes with unwanted consequences. I appreciate these stories. I appreciate them because I see the message rather than just a cheating spouse. Of course she was wrong but the lesson is what's important!

The fifth story has an underdog of less than noble birth who has become highly successful due to his own abilities. He's pitted against a wealthy but wretched noble man and is able to best him - losing a horse but gaining a sexual partner. He has traded a ride for a ride - to put it in lingo B. would appreciate.

B. is establishing himself more in the realm of sexual fantasy with this day more than the others. I'm curious to see what's next... what direction he'll take.
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Re: Day 3 - Neifile (Charity)

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The seventh story is told by Emilia. B. again uses names that were actual families and happened to among the oldest established in the city. Tedaldo decides to run away because "...he had no wish to allow her the satisfaction of seeing him suffer on her account..." I know that we do this a lot. We hide how much people hurt us in order not to give them the joy of seeing us in pain. I know when I broke up with my girlfriend not too long ago, she posted a picture of her on her wall with another guy and wrote 'loving life'. It was less than a week after having split. We weren't together for too long but I thought this was in bad taste. I did the same thing Tedaldo did and in a knee jerk reaction I canceled my FB account - which I got back later that night.

To hate someone is to have feeling for them. To not care about anyone is to show exactly that - they mean nothing. This was impossible for Tedaldo. He didn't want to hurt her but he didn't want to be target practice, either. He left. He really should not have been messing around with a married lady to begin with.

B. really uses this story to rail once more on organized religion and "how easy it was for people to cram their heads with totally erroneous notions." B. goes further and attacks law, saying, "This in turn led him to reflect upon the blind severity of the law and its administrators, who in order to convey the impression that they are zealously seeking the truth, often have recourse to cruelty and cause falsehood to be accepted as proven fact, hence demonstrating, for all their proud claim to be the ministers of god's justice, that their true allegiance is to the devil and his iniquities." WOW! No doubt law was as corrupt as religion...

Tedaldo, although he is able to get Aldobrandino (the husband), completely out of his way he chooses not to. I thought about this. This says that Tedaldo was a kind adulterer. He wanted some sex but not at the expense of his lady being unhappy. He also didn't want the responsibility of having her exclusively. He was happy with the arrangement. He could have watched this man die, returned home and explained that it was not him who was dead, and then consoled the widow and possibly married her or at the very least she would have become that much more available to him. He liked being an adulterer.

We see more trickery as Tedaldo plays the part of a prophet and then the part of a friar in order to win his favor back with the lady and to really put a hurting on the church. In the notes, Tedaldo's tirade was later to become a model for writers engaging in anti-clerical invective.

Tedaldo's tirade also has some parts to it that kind of got my attention. Like when he was saying "...you belonged to (me), it was quite improper of you, indeed it was robbery on your part, to remove yourself from (me) against (my) will." Or "...is it not far worse to steal? IS it not far worse to murder a man or send him wandering through the world in exile? Everyone will agree because after all, for a women to have intimate relations with a man is a natural sin, but to rob him or to kill him or expel him is to act from evil intention."

Now this whole argument to me seems bunk. He's laying claim to her vagina as property and then totally neglecting the fact that she belongs by her own promise to another man, calls on nature as his justification for his and her crime, and then denounces her as a thief and murderer of hearts. Ridiculous.

I wonder what Tedaldo would say if she agreed with "...if they would only consider their own natures, and stop to thinkl of how much more nobility god has conceded to man than to any of the other animals, they would undoubtedly be proud of a man's love and hold him in the highest esteem, and do everything in their power to please him, so that he would never grow tired of loving them."

3 things might happen if she agreed with this... and they are:

1) "You're right Tedaldo! I'm going to refrain from having sex with the livestock."
2) "You're right Tedaldo! What was I thinking? From now on I'm going to have sex with them all."
3) "You're right Tedaldo, and that's why I can't have an affair with you any more. I have a husband."

Instead she just wants her husband and her lover back. This story, as the rest of the stories of the 3rd Day are, isn't very morally uplifting at all.

The 8th story is everything Tedaldo warns us about.

Despite the fact that they're well written, are entertaining, and amusing... this day just doesn't fulfill that little thing we need... that little thing that makes us read a story and feel better about ourselves. These stories kind of have the opposite effect - as though they are a victory for evil. They make us feel guilty for having witnessed these events. Our conscience gnaws at us a little for having read them...


Well, that isn't the case with the 9th story of the 3rd Day at all, thank goodness!!!

By far the most uplifting story of the day! A fight for good where good wins! It is the story of a lady of not so noble birth but of noble spirit, brains, and a strong work ethic who gets what she wants - a husband and a family. In keeping with the rest of the day, sex is achieved through deceit and/or rape, but this time it is the lady doing the raping!!! YES!!! And for good reasons, too. After all it isn't really rape because she is married to the man and she is just trying to keep him as a husband - nothing at all wrong with that! You'll notice that B. likes to attack nobility of birth and promote the inner nobility of each person, teaching us that we should judge people on the quality of their character. This, I think, is the only story without adultery in it - just attempted adultery.

I don't know... I liked this story a lot. It reminds us that behind every great man is a great woman. You can tell that this man will be successful because of his faithful and loving wife who would do anything for him. She's smart, loving, and wants her family to be the best it can. You can't ask for a better wife than this woman. Well, I didn't get a look at her... beauty is in the eye of the beholder and no one wants an ugly wife.
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Re: Day 3 - Neifile (Charity)

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After reading not so very many of the stories, I'm seeing that there are formulas made up of certain conventional elements that the storyteller chooses as a framework for the original details he puts in. This takes some of the burden off the storyteller, gets him/her started along, by making improvisation easier. The conventions are various; some of them don't strain credibility, but some of them do. For example, there's the ninth story, in which the device is the woman having sex with a man over a period of months without the man knowing the true identity of the woman. Now, granted in this case the guy hasn't ever had sex with the Countess even though married to her, but wouldn't he recognize her? This device has already been used once or twice before. I think it does at least work both ways--that sometimes it's the woman who doesn't know the identity of the man having sex with her.

Anyway, I haven't yet seen a woman have equal status with a man, in the tales. This makes sense in B.'s world, since it was simply a given that women didn't have the intellectual chops that men had. Remember in the introduction, when one of the ladies propose the whole idea, another says that they'll need men along because women are too weak to stand on their own. But in actuality, the 7 women show themselves to be more than capable of managing things, so B. might not really believe in the truth of this cultural attitude. In the tales, though, the women don't get equal treatment. Even the countess, as clever and take-charge as she is, needs to abase herself to her husband, who thinks he's having his way with a different woman. I'll admit, though, that the Countess comes closest so far to being the equal of a man. She has a talent (medicine) for something other than
"riding the bucking stallion" or however B. puts it. Probably the most frequently used device is the gullible woman, who doesn't have the strength of intellect to see that the arguments the man is making are specious. But the reader can clearly see that they are.

It's still a bit weird to picture these tales being told by the chaste lads and ladies who have assembled to escape the plague. There's no question that they are living in a different world from that of either the author or the people in the tales. In both those settings, you know what would happen if a bunch of guys & gals got together to tell tales of soft-core porn--there'd be mixin' it up right there pretty fast! But not for our narrators. B. does occasionally throw in a remark at the end of the tale, spoken by the teller to indicate why he/she was motivated to tell the story. But it's always a pious reason, such as in the sixth story: "And by proceeding with the greatest discretion, they enjoyed their love on many a later occasion. May God grant that we enjoy ours likewise." I found it really surprising that the story that comes closest to pornography (the tenth) was told by a woman. I suppose that was partly due to B.s selecting fewer males in order to arrive at symbolic numbers of 7 and 3.

There is relatively little morality in the tales if you think that sex and morality have some connection (which I do). But from a storytelling point of view, how many ways can you tell about people acting with sexual propriety, vs. impropriety? There are more storylines to pursue when the characters give way to their appetites.
Last edited by DWill on Mon Dec 06, 2010 5:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Day 3 - Neifile (Charity)

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I don't understand 'certain conventional elements'. Maybe I haven't read enough fiction to spot these yet. The stories do have similarities, common themes, and besides Dioneo's must follow rules set by the ruler of the day.

I still don't know what the conventions are but I do agree that a lot of his stories strain credibility. In order to make each story more credible, it seems like he does his best to include in it real or highly plausible events that may have occurred during the time of the story and popular names of real families. The effect of printed word back then must have been much different than it is today, also. Today, most everyone is literate and is taught not to believe everything they read. Back then the printed word was probably more readily believed or taken for granted to be true. This would have helped B. in creating his worlds within worlds. The further he managed to inch a person from reality - the closer he was to making them believe his wall of shadows.

The story you're referring to does strain credibility today. Although they had sex more than once - it doesn't say how many times they had sex. A more fantastic tale would be that of the young lady who went on her 'sexual odyssey' and had sex with 9 different males before finally getting married as a 'virgin'. That was unbelievable. The most outrageous of the tales - the very first one - is totally believable, though.

You know, you bring up a good point about the ladies. B. clearly doesn't have a high regard for them. As you said, he has our 7 ladies admitting their faults throughout the book. He also has them admitting to their sexual prowess or strong/nearly insatiable appetite which is also a slight against them. Today we see this as women's lib - they are sexually liberated. Back then I feel that this would have just been interpreted as another reason women were inherently wicked. They're given the status of children which includes every irresponsible inclination and reputation that children have.

How do men reconcile Eve and Madonna? It seems a constant battle throughout history to at the same time elevate the status of women and then debase them as fickle, untrustworthy, dumb, sex crazed, and generally wicked.

You mentioned the 9th story of the day - a great, great, morally uplifting tale. Yes, this woman has talent. But this really isn't about her gender. Ultimately, this story is about the nobility of character vs. nobility of birth. The noble man is noble only in name while the lady IS noble and proves it by her deeds. B. was of the merchant class and not noble by blood. He's challenging the feudal system's idea of 'worth' with the popular opinions of the rapidly up and coming bourgeoisie.

Women did not have equal status with men back then and they still really don't have it today. Women are different - physically and emotionally. Their role in procreation is so different from men that that alone sets them at a disadvantage. I say this because 'equal status' is a luxury that needs to be fought for. Women, today, take it for granted that society will protect them - as do men. If the world was anarchy, everyone fending for themselves... which is closer to 1350 than 1350 is to 2010 in my unqualified opinion... I think you'd find women to be largely at a competitive disadvantage. Women don't have physical strength to match that of men - don't post any pictures of any she-hulks (we're talking averages here). It's my opinion that they've developed cunning and other psychological means of social warfare to effect control. That's why if you want to see a woman getting her way in the Decameron - she's doing it with deception and trickery. Deception and trickery, although they take intelligence, are morally reprehensible and make women wicked creatures (think Superman vs. Lex Luther). I really hope you didn't find this paragraph too distasteful or grossly inaccurate.

Love. I'm surprised no one is talking about love. How many times has B. used the word and you've thought - that isn't love.

This group isn't that chaste but you're right about them not mixing it up yet. There is sexual tension between some of the members but it hasn't developed into anything physical that we know of.

The 10th story was told by Dioneo, a male.

Yeah. I like the last paragraph in your post. The connection between sex and morality is huge and it is definitely lacking in these stories. That's why I mention Love. The idea of love is different here. It's just the desire to extinguish primal passion. If you love someone you respect them and you want to make them yours exclusively. You don't want to share that person with anyone else and you certainly don't want that person to do anything that would make them unworthy of your love. The idea of love is definitely missing something in these stories. There are a couple stories, however, where my idea of true love is present in the story. I consider the 9th story of this day to be one of those stories (although it isn't my perfect idea of love it shows self sacrifice and it's reasonable to assume that the king will realize the worthiness of his lady and develop a love for her that would get perpetually stronger over time).

I don't know too many stories where the characters weren't acting with sexual impropriety. Adultery is almost passed off with a shoulder shrug. Every married man in B.'s 1350 is wearing horns.
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Re: Day 3 - Neifile (Charity)

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Thanks, Comacho, I'm enjoying your comments on the book. Thanks also for pointing out my gross error about the tenth story. I need to start taking notes. The memory neurons aren't what they should be. What I meant about the conventions of the stories has to do with motifs that are common to tales like these, in the same way that folk tales have some stock elements. Like you, I didn't go into the intro very far, but it talks some about the sources for B.'s stories. I did see that the intro mentioned the french fabliaux, Latin exempla, and contemporary Italian chronicles that served B. as source material. We probably can't tell even approximately how much he changed his sources, but it's a safe bet that he threw in original wrinkles. The distinction of B.'s book seems to be that it was the first time that prose in the vernacular language was presented as literature and that B. was a master stylist (even though in the intro to Day Four he says the style is as plain as it could be). Originality as we see it wasn't thought of in B.'s day. This was still true through the time of Shakespeare. Borrowing and stealing was what they did; why reinvent the wheel as far as storylines go. B. does try to particularize the tales, as you say, by using actual names and places

The whole tradition of courtly love gives B. a large stock of elements for the love stories, clearly. You can see this in the idealized way the lovers are pictured and in the way the guy, especially, "burns" for the lady. The lady is always not just pretty but dazzling, the rarest beauty in the world, and the same superlatives apply to the guy. For the audience, the aristocratic origins of most of the characters provided a big helping of lifestyles of the rich and famous. We imagine the average life to be about a million miles away from the lives of the lovers. And of course B. isn't trying to be realistic in showing us these privileged lives. I thought it was interesting, by the way, that it seemed to be okay for a highborn girl to fall for a lower class (but naturally noble) boy, but it didn't seem to happen the other way around.

The reason it didn't might have to do with the status of women again. I don't mean to come down on this point, but we agree that women were thought of as not intellectual, more as a victims of their passions (as if the men weren't too!). In the first Day Four story, the lady was said to be "more clever than it is good for a woman to be." But that wasn't necessarily B.'s feeling, it was the teller's, and it's sometimes hard to tell how B. himself may look at women. Even the narrator who starts off the book telling us that he is a recovering love-aholic probably is a fiction, not B. himself. Some of the women in Day Four act with resolve, even though it's done for a bad cause, that is for love. So B. might be creating women characters that belie in some ways the conventional view of them.

One thing I wondered about in your post: do the narrator ladies talk about their sexual prowess? I missed that. It seemed to me that they all just giggled a bit embarassedly at the tales and occasionally said, "I hope that happens to us someday!"

Well sorry this is so general. I do need to jot down a a few notes as I read.
Last edited by DWill on Thu Dec 09, 2010 10:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Day 3 - Neifile (Charity)

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I tend to agree completely with what you say in your first paragraph about borrowing and originality. It seems, as far as structure goes, being original meant running the risk of having your work ridiculed as something less than divine art - something that would cause one to lose re$pect, patron$, and lasting fame. Also, borrowing stories for a 101 story book seems perfectly normal.

Structure is where artists probably borrow the most. See, I'm really not qualified to talk about this because I have no idea what these people did back then. I do know that this narrative style was not regarded highly. I know that Italian noblemen kept/hired poets to compose epic tales which included their lineage - comparable to what Virgil did for Caesar - for reasons too obvious to explain. These poets kept, mainly, to a poetic and not a narrative style. You see this all the way down to the 16th century at least.

B. knew the rules to compose poetry that conformed to works already made famous but he had much more talent for the style and content we see here in the D. His narrative style that he mocks in the first pages of his work was probably done because of popular opinion of art back then. Was his work original in that its style was narrative rather than conforming to some poetic rule? No... people have been telling stories around camp fires for what I assume to be for as long as we had the ability to talk and had fire. B.'s originality is seen, in my opinion, by the complete package of the book. It has borrowed elements which include the framing, the narrative style, content, ideals, popular opinion, superstition, probably the stories themselves, influences from various artists .... but he is the one who mixes these colors and applies them to his canvas. His work is unique in that aspect. I've never read another Decameron type book from this period. He has to add a lot of himself into these stories as well. The satire is too thick for him not to.

I don't think the names, dates, places are used to particularize the tale so much as lend them believability. He could have used any name to set them apart from one another or tie them into each other. Instead, he uses names which people know and then weaves a plausible story around them. People believe what they read and because they can say, "I've hear about him!" - well then it must be true.

Courtly love - I totally forgot about this until you brought it up and I'm really glad that you did. Courtly love makes everything ok and that's something that we, today, have chosen to regard as a wicked philosophy. This meant that adulterous love was more than acceptable. The translator of the book said it received an exalted status - it was something romantic, chivalrous, and true. It was a heavenly ideal to love so strongly that you did anything to be with your lady love no matter if she really wanted to be with you, you tricked her into bed, or she had a husband.

You're also right about the ladies. There aren't too many comely wenches in these tales - just super models. The more you read the more you'll see nobles falling for common men and women. Love is too powerful a force for the old feudal ways!!! ...noble men and women alike are powerless when they see a commoner they want to have a go with.

... ... ... ... ... ...

I'd retype the whole convo between the men and the women but it's a bit too long - page 280.

On telling the 7 ladies that the men would have showed them how well they could make love to them...

Neifile (the youngest of the 7 ladies) : "if you men had tried to teach us anything of the sort, you might have learned some sense from us, as Masetto did from the nuns, and retrieved the use of your tongues when your bones were rattling of exhaustion."

WOWOW!!!! I'd make her prove it! :D
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