Ambiguity and Illusion in Boccaccio's "Filocolo."

Boccaccio studies are well served by the two recent books under review, both of which, while concentrating on one text or portion of a text, use macrotextual approaches to demonstrate its integration into Boccaccio's opera. Both also have chosen to focus on the conservative strand in Boccaccio's philosophy, furthering the trend prevalent in the last generation in the works of such eminent scholars as Robert Hollander, Victoria Kirkham and Janet Smarr.

Forni's purpose is to "dare ragione critica |complessiva' della novella di Tancredi e Ghismonda" (7). His vision of the Decameron is not one of an anthology of disparate tales but of "un organismo complesso o un complesso di organismi piu o meno complessi" (17). He cautions the reader against stopping at the surface, for the principal treasures are hidden within (17-18). To perceive them, the reader must "prendere coscienze del bisogno del Boccaccio di saturare diverse valenze in uno stesso campo immaginativo" (19), evaluating the ordering of novelle and becoming sensitized to the tensions and harmonies among them. The significance that a reader may assign to falsehoods after reading I.I, for example, is likely to be challenged by the different roles they assume in II.II and III.I (19).

Forni also examines Boccaccio's conflicted attitude toward love and women, sources both of pleasure and of pain intense enough to cause death (27-28). In Forni's view, Boccaccio does not find the negative effects so great as to induce misogyny; rather, in the tradition of Ovid's Remedia amoris, Boccaccio is inspired to maximize the benefits his friends receive from love by teaching them how to avoid its ill effects (29-31), particularly in the tales of the fourth day. The principal danger lies not in love that is in and of itself destructive but in the obstacles that authority figures place in the way of marriage, the natural fulfillment of amorous desires (32). "[A]bbastanza chiara e ... l'ammonizione a chi detiene authorita perche una Ghismonda non si trovi costretta da natura a un tale [clandestine] amore" (32). Here, apparently without realizing it, Forni demonstrates an awareness that Boccaccio's focus has undergone a distinct shift: his readerly targets are no longer just lovers but also authority figures, while the crucial interpersonal dynamic is not so much love but the power struggle between the generations, in which love is made to play a pivotal role.

It is in Boccaccio's evocation of that struggle and in his sympathy for the less-powerful character (which admittedly does not go so far as to provoke the dethronement of the authority figure) that he demonstrates the rebellious, innovative side that constantly challenges his conservative tendencies. In the tales of the first day, as Forni notes, characters of lower social status and women use a witty and "pertinente impertinenza" to rise above socially-imposed limitations (35). By contrast, upper-class characters display shortcomings that require their inferiors to teach them "una lezione di comportamento e di civilta" (36). Forni then discusses a number of episodes in which a young woman takes a lover, often of inferior social status, of whom her parents or guardians disapprove, the principal example being Ghismonda. While his location of the roots of such stories in various Ovidian traditions of adulterous or tragic love and in the Boccaccian discourse on love as an ineluctable natural appetite is correct as far as it goes, the stories' social dynamic is largely neglected. A look at contemporary issues provides some illumination.

As David Herlihy and Christiane Klapische-Zuber demonstrated in Les Toscans et leurs familles (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1978), the fourteenth century was a time when Tuscan society was crystallizing around a limited number of patrilines. Diane Owen Hughes has provided evidence in her provocative essays that similar developments unfolded in Liguria. As I demonstrated in "Who's on Top? Gender as Societal Power Configuration in Italian Renaissance Drama" (Sixteenth Century Journal 20 [1989]: 531-58), patrilines, which vest complete authority in a single senior male, create various and painful pressures on their members; women, whose only useful function is to provide heirs, are strictly controlled; self-determination is suppressed in favor of the collective good; and members' marriages are often destroyed by the centrifugal pressures exerted by competing patrilineal loyalities. It seems not by accident, then, that it is in this context that an all-powerful notion of love, which first became popular in southern France during similar social developments, gains many adherents in Italy. What may be discerned in the stories cited by Forni are portraits of individuals and couples using the unassailable defense of love to assert themselves and the bond between them against the atomizing power of the patriline. Of interest too is the fact that, by choosing lovers of inferior social status, the daughters and wives of the tales invert the abstract social rules that define males as their masters and superiors.

Here I concur with Forni (47) that Boccaccio valorizes the image of the active character who does not allow society to impose itself upon her or him but uses drive and perspicacity to forge a personal destiny. While Boccaccio's deference to authority prevents him from allowing such characters definitively to free themselves from established social rules, their challenges lay the groundwork for the breakthroughs to be achieved in the Renaissance.

An interesting foreshadowing of the Decameron's conflicts is found in the Filocolo, the subject of Steven Grossvogel's detailed study, which does an admirable job of locating the text in its philosophical, literary and legal contexts. Grossvogel, too, accepts the recent view that Boccaccio employed the more worldly and sensual aspects of his works to achieve the higher goal of promoting Christian virtue and matrimonial love (e. g., 23-24, 51). Like Forni, he also notes that Boccaccio does not invariably present authority figures as blameless; indeed, even in this early work, Boccaccio sets social inferiors to giving lessons in nobility of soul to their betters (48). Yet while Grossvogel's argument that Florio and Biancifiore's ultimate conversion to Christianity and dethronement of the old Spanish king may be seen as a triumph of Christian virtue fits the facts, other, bolder explanations do as well. For example, it strikes the present reader that Florio resembles Ghismonda in more than passing ways. As an unemancipated male, he occupies a status little better than that of a woman; by choosing a lover believed to be of very humble birth, he rebels against his imperious father and seeks to impose his own stamp upon both his life and his presumed future kingship. One could make much, too, of the fact that the couple convert only at the very end of the book, and after having been married by the pagan goddess Venus. But the most telling fact is that Christianity, then not at all a symbol of an established order but a new religion, serves Florio not only as a system of morality but as a war machine to overthrow the father who has stood so long in his way. The old king's subsequent conversion is a sign of his total subjugation.

Small wonder that Boccaccio was lionized by the comediographers of the Renaissance, who made great strides in the endorsing of self-determination, passionate involvement, and the worth of all human beings.