Our Fascist Queen: The Ninth Day
Now reading: The Decameron.
Following up on my place on the eighth day and of importance to the ninth is the assay of the characters of the “brigata” (the ten storytellers) on Decameron Web, the egghead website maintained by Brown University. Sometimes it’s convincing on the loony revealed by the introductions and conclusions of days, the choices of tales, the songs sung, etc. Other times it seems like the gentle of selective magnification of some evidence and ignoring of others that people (okay, me) hate academics for.
Nevertheless, it’s important on this day for its breakdown of Emilia, the day’s queen, who chooses to suffer each of the ten to discourse on whatever topic they want. Way back on the first day, Emilia sang that narcissistic prevarication about gazing in the mirror. She also told, on the sixth day, a anecdote about an unpleasantly vain young old lady who gazes at herself in the mirror all day but is too stupid to gather a put-down about this very fact. Emilia introduces that contention by saying she was “absorbed for unequivocally a while in distant reverie”; after forceful her very short tale, the day’s queen, Elissa, perceives that she had “dashed off her gag.” (I learn from Decameron Web that Elissa is mental activity to be a Ghibelline, a noble supporting the Godlike Roman Empire.) Emilia’s one whose dancing at the end of days is often piercing out, and she’s apparently one of the hotter ladies.
Again, it’s methodical from this evidence to tell if Emilia is to be seen as a narcissist abstracted to her own narcissism, or as a beautiful young helpmeet interested in combatting the narcissism she sees as a clich vice of beautiful young women, or as Boccaccio’s linguistic device representing narcissism and not not imbued with any psychological depth at all.
Whatever the box, her story on her own day, when she can choose any theme she wants, is dulcet freaking troubling. It is, quite frankly, a fascistic, misogynistic life story, by far the most cruel in the whole work. Her introduction to the scenario is long, and she states that her theme will be that wives must be unassertive to their husbands, and she cites the proverb “For a sizeable horse and bad, spurs are required; for a gain woman and a bad, the rod is required.” She points out the ribald wordplay accessible here — perhaps opening the door for a dirty undercurrent to her story — but in a jiffy says that these words are valuable “even in their slogan behaviour sense.” Emilia seems to be the biggest goody-goody in the group.
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